Realizing The Past

Poul Anderson, Time Patrol (New York, 2006).

It makes sense, when writing about travel to the past, to realize the relevant past periods as concretely as possible. Poul  Anderson does this throughout his Time Patrol series and increasingly as the series progresses. After Everard and Janne meet in Amsterdam in 1986, we read an eight page chapter of pure historical fiction. Everything that we have learned about the Patrol and the temporal crisis is temporarily forgotten as we are immersed in a Germanic barbarian perspective:

a Northern winter with rain, snow, wind, floods and want;
a tribal meeting at the halidom with the goddess seeming alive in the balefire glow;
Veleda preaching and prophesying the fall of Rome.

(It is acknowledged later that "'Pagans don't preach...'" (p. 566) but Veleda is different and that is the problem.)

Tacitus' Histories survived incomplete but, when the Patrol retrieved the full text, it found that his account of the Northern revolt was trustworthy. (Anderson could have made things different at this point.)

"'In the Germanic tribe of the Bructeri, a prophetess called Veleda predicted the fall of Rome. It inspired the natives further, and their aim became an independent confederation.'" (p. 489)

Later, Veleda helped to arrange the armistice and her subsequent career is unknown although Janne "'...would like to find out...'" (p. 490)

Like Shakespeare working with already existing stories of Macbeth, Hamlet etc, Anderson creates an entirely new fictitious character out of the historical material concerning Veleda.

We see the potential for a "church-state" conflict when the prophetess converses with her military organizer, Heidhin. She realizes that "'...this talk of bringing [Rome] down in wreck...is not truly what the goddess bade me say, it is what I have told myself she wants me to say.'" (p. 500) When he urges continued warfare, she asks, "'...is it your hopes of power and fame that we may have to forgo?'" (ibid.)

If this were The King Of Ys by Poul and Karen Anderson, the goddess would be real.

We see hints of what is to be revealed. When Heidhin claims to know the Romans better than her, he must rephrase his remark and she later says, "'You know I am foe to Rome and why...'" (ibid.)