Framing Devices

When an author tells us a fantastic story, he can also tell us how the story came to him. He can add that it is not necessarily true or that he has changed details like the protagonist's name. Framing devices are an art form. In a series, they can either become an ongoing story in their own right or can be abandoned as the reader becomes familiar with the scenario.

Poul Anderson's fantasy novel, Three Hearts And Three Lions (1953), and his science fiction novel, There Will Be Time (1973), have essentially the same framing device although in the latter it has become more complicated. The former begins as it ends with a "Note" by an unnamed first person narrator, an engineer who had been a colleague of the protagonist Holger Carlsen over twenty years previously in the period 1938-'41. Between the Notes, in Chapters One to Twenty-Four, Holger's story is narrated in the third person.

The first Note had told us that there was no proof that the story was true. In the concluding Note, Holger tells his colleague the story, then searches through grimoires for a way to return to the Carolingian world where he had adventured and from which, it seems, he had originally come - he was found on a doorstep in our world. Finally, he disappears, the perfect lead in to a sequel. Anderson deploys classic ingredients but does it well. In fact, regular Anderson readers do meet Holger once more not in a continuation of his own story but lost between worlds in another alternative reality novel.

The first person narrator of the Foreword in There Will Be Time (New York, 1973), assuring us of course that he does not pretend that the story is true and even referring to such a claim as a "...literary convention..." (p. 5), is none other than the author, Poul Anderson. But he received the story from the fictitious but plausible Dr Robert Anderson, first person narrator of the Chapters I-XVI, and that second Anderson tells us the story of the time traveller Jack Havig in the third person. Dr Anderson interacts with the main protagonist throughout the novel, unlike Holger's engineering colleague.

Thus, twenty years after Three Hearts And Three Lions, Poul Anderson uses the same kind of framing device but with increased subtlety.