Morgan Le Fay And Raor

Three Hearts And Three Lions, CHAPTER ELEVEN.

Queen Morgan le Fay tries to win Holger for Chaos:

"'What is there about dull Law that drives you to defend it?...

"'...the mirth and thunder and blazing stars of Chaos would be yours...

"'You could hurl suns and shape worlds if you chose!'" (p. 68)

She sounds like Raor of the Exaltationists:

"'We would have made [the universe] what we chose, and unmade it and remade it, and stormed the stars as we warred for possession, with an entire reality the funeral pyre of each who fell and entire histories the funeral games, until the last god reigned alone.'"

-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, July 1991), PART TWO, 209 B. C., p. 118.

The former reminded me of the latter.

It is time to eat and drink something and to say good night until tomorrow.

Holger Philosophizes

Three Hearts And Three Lions, CHAPTER ELEVEN.

"The symmetry was suggestive. In Holger's home world, physical forces were strong and well understood, mental-magical forces weak and unmanageable. In this universe the opposite held true. Both worlds were, in some obscure way, one; the endless struggle between Law and Chaos had reached a simultaneous climax in them. As for the force which made them so parallel, the ultimate oneness itself, he supposed he would have to break down and call it God. But he lacked a theological bent of mind. He'd rather stick to what he had directly observed, and to immediate practical problems. Such as his own reason for being here." (pp. 66-67)

No, he does not have to call ultimate oneness "God." 

See:

Words And The Word II

The One

Metaphor And Myth

Two propositions seem intuitively valid: first, that all is one; secondly, that change occurs because opposed forces interact. However, I suggest that energy and inertia are more fundamental than Law and Chaos - and they are definitely preconscious. 

See:

Energy And Inertia

Energy And Inertia

Ultimate Social And Cosmic Developments

Philosophy

Philosophy II

How to deal with a dragon: throw water in its mouth. (CHAPTER TEN.)

Inspired By MAGIC, INC.

(i) In the introduction to his collection, Operation Chaos, Poul Anderson writes that Robert Heinlein's Magic, Inc. is set in a world where magic not only works but also is treated matter-of-factly as a set of technologies but that Heinlein did not develop all the possibilities of this idea so Anderson himself developed some further possibilities in his Operation... series.

(ii) Anderson adds that Harry Turtledove has also presented a treatment of the same idea.

(iii) "The double-page spread on pages 12 and 13, by the way, is a direct steal from Robert Heinlein's novel Magic Incorporated."

-Neil Gaiman discussing The Sandman, issue 4, in Hy Bender, The Sandman Companion (London, 2000), 3, p. 35.

That double-page spread depicts a gathering of all the demons in Hell.

We keep finding Anderson-Gaiman parallels: two great imaginative writers in different media: verbal and visual-verbal.

Again The Two Inns

In Poul Anderson's "Losers' Night," people from different historical periods converse in the Old Phoenix.

In Anderson's "House Rule" and A Midsummer Tempest, people from different histories converse in the Old Phoenix.

In Neil Gaiman's The Sandman: Worlds' End, people from different histories tell stories in the Inn of the Worlds' End. Thus, the Worlds' End sequences are both a framing device and an additional story.

In A Midsummer Tempest, the Old Phoenix is almost a framing device although it appears in the middle and at the end instead of at the beginning and the end.

Both series could have been extended indefinitely, the Old Phoenix as short stories, Worlds' End as very high quality monthly comic books, with some of the same historical characters visiting both.

Happy June.

Poets And Hack Writers

Three Hearts And Three Lions, CHAPTER TEN.

When enough evidence has accumulated, Holger deduces that he is in a universe where the myths of Charlemagne are literally true just as later, in A Midsummer Tempest, Valeria Matuchek deduces that Prince Rupert is from a universe where the plays of Shakespeare are literally true. 

"'...that what was myth in one world might always be fact in some other.' PERELANDRA"

-CS Lewis, "Forms of Things Unknown" IN Lewis, The Dark Tower and other stories (London, 1983), pp. 124-132 AT p. 124.

(Lewis based a short story on a quotation from his own novel, Perelandra.)

Holger goes further:

"The mystics, dreamers, poets, and hack writers of home had in some unconscious way been in tune with whatever force linked the two universes; the corpus of stories which they gradually evolved had been a better job of reporting than they knew." (ibid.)

- which is precisely how DC Comics explained the differences between the Golden Age and Silver Age versions of their superheroes.

This idea covers a lot of territory and can unite a lot of literature.

Place Names

With names alone, we connect places in our minds -

York in England, New York (formerly New Amsterdam) in the US, New New York (I think) in Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles;

New England and Nova Scotia;

Lancaster City District includes the seaside town of Morecambe - while based in Lancaster but spending three nights each week in Liverpool, I found myself walking past a Lancaster Street and a Morecambe Street;

in Three Hearts And Three Lions, Hugi tells Holger:

"'Avalon lies far, far in the western ocean, a part of the world wha' we've nobbut auld wives' tales aboot here.'" (CHAPTER EIGHT, p. 51)

Poul Anderson's readers have become more familiar with Avalon as a biracial extrasolar colonized planet in his Technic History. The planet is named from the legend so that the entire story of Arthur etc is implicit even though never articulated.

Unpredictability

Three Hearts And Three Lions, CHAPTER SEVEN.

Hugin advises Holger:

"'Ye canna guess wha' the Faerie folk will think or do. They know not themselves, nor care.'" (p. 45)

One fairy, Menton, to another, the Cluracan:

"But Cluracan: we are creatures of anarchy and madness. We are the wild. How can you possibly describe us as creatures of custom?"

-Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: The Kindly Ones (New York, 1996), Part 10, p. 9, panel 3.

The Cluracan's point is that the fairies have been anarchic, mad and wild for so long that that has become their custom and "...dull routine." (panel 4)

In any case, Hugin's and Menton's accounts agree and their "anarchy" explains why the fairies, at least in the Carolingian universe, take the side of Chaos against Law.

It is good to find some order in disorder.

How Many Multiverses?

Three Hearts And Three Lions, CHAPTER SEVEN.

Holger speculates that maybe many Earths and entire stellar universes:

"...occupy the same space at the same time without interacting with each other." (p. 42)

But how could they not interact? Maybe they vibrate at different rates such that Earth 1 exists at time t1 but not a microsecond later at t2 whereas Earth 2 exists at t2 but not at t1 and so on? See Phase, also blog search result for "space jumps."

Does this hypothesis sufficiently explain the multiverse of Poul Anderson's Old Phoenix stories? Or might some of the four-dimensional spatiotemporal continua exist in parallel with each other but separated by a fifth dimension?

As the Rig Veda says:

"That god who sees in highest heaven, he alone knows, or perhaps he knows not."

Entering Faerie

Three Hearts And Three Lions, CHAPTER SIX. 

deepening twilight

prickling scalp

warming air

incense-like odours

unknown blossoms

rolling valley

no identifiable light source

deep blue sky

blueness pervading the air

shadowless light

changeless luminance

long, soft, silver-hued, pale green grass

white Ashphodels and roses

tall, slim, milky-barked trees

a musical brook

white, green and blue phosphorescence

Holger thinks that he has seen it before. Does it seem as if it should be familiar to us? Holger is attacked by an animated empty suit of armour.

Holger, Hugi and Alianora proceed through a wilderness of hills, woods and uncultivated valleys. Hugi explains that the inhabitants acquire food and drink by magic and from tributary realms and also hunt weird beasts. They are warriors and sorcerers who enslave goblins, kobolds etc. They neither age nor grow ill but are soulless. (That last sentence also describes some sf characters.)

Alianora Or So

Three Hearts And Three Lions. 

(Following up on recent posts, Lancaster has a Golden Lion pub, a Duke of Lancaster pub and a Duke's Playhouse.)

Alianora is a swan may. She wears a magical tunic of white feathers that enables her to change between human and swan forms. When making the latter transformation, the body lengthens, the neck shrinks, the wings narrow and a woman appears. Sometimes, she transforms to human in midair and falls nearly to the ground before changing back.

Maybe Alianora warrants a post unto herself but I mention her here for the sake of yet another Anderson-Gaiman parallel:

"Even Dream's former lover Alianora is hard to pin down - in chapter 2 of Brief Lives she's referred to as Eleanora, and in part 12 of The Kindly Ones as Alianore; i.e., her name is spelled a little differently every time it appears."

-Hy Bender, The Sandman Companion (London, 2000), 7, p. 116.

For previous blog references to Alianora, see here. (Scroll down.)