All things fall and are built again
And those that build them again are gay.-copied from here.
I was about to begin this post, "When a civilization falls...," then I remembered those relevant lines by WB Yeats.
When a civilization falls, some people survive and some of the survivors rebuild.
When the Roman Empire withdraws from Northern Europe, Poul and Karen Anderson's Gratillonius organizes defensive measures that will become medieval feudalism.
"Later ages wove a myth about Roan Tom. He became their archetype of those star rovers who fared forth while the Long Night prevailed."
-Poul Anderson, "A Tragedy of Errors" IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 455-540 AT p. 457.
Tom is mythologized either as a bandit and murderer skulking through the Imperial ruins or as a hero and leader building something better.
SM Stirling's Fifi and her friends were:
"...the most successful salvagers and smugglers and all-around fortune-and-glory rogues afloat in the chaos of the years after the Blackout."
SM Stirling, Prince Of Outcasts (New York, 2017), Chapter Ten, p. 203.
Whereas, the omniscient narrator of "A Tragedy of Errors" invites his readers to imagine Roan Tom addressing us from a Valhalla where Earth grown tobacco is available, Stirling's Emberverse Wiccans literally enter their Summerland and his Catholics enter Heaven - but do his Asatruer enter the Eddaic Valhalla?
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
I would have added that for the survivors and their leaders who tried to rebuild a civilization in the ruins of a fallen culture probably often felt, anxiety, despair, and despondency. To say nothing of the sheer hard work involved in restoring some kind of order and finding ways and means for people to work and survive.
And I recall that the hypothetical Roan Tom we see at the beginning of "A Tragedy Of Error" said that he was trying to do, really, was to survive, him, his family, their friends, and the planet he settled on. He had no grand plans of founding a new civilization. I get the strong impression Roan Tom would far rather the Terran Empire had NOT fallen.
Sean
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