"The sky was an aching blue, save for a band where the setting sun made crimson streaks westward across the little clearing and turned the great perfect cone of Mount Hood to gold and copper southward. A bald eagle went by in majesty not far overhead, and a pair of ravens larger than any she'd ever seen kept watch from a nearby branch."
-SM Stirling, The Sky-Blue Wolves (New York, 2018), CHAPTER ELEVEN, p. 178.
(In the attached image, one of the ravens has hopped to another branch.)
We recognize colors of a setting sun worthy of Anderson. Gaiman would have instructed his art team which colors to show. Ostensibly, the passage describes natural beauty with no supernatural element. However, we know whose the ravens are and even know their names.
We would not be who or what we are without certain mythological and fictional characters. The existent and the non-existent are interdependent. No wonder our ancestors believed that Odin and his ravens really did exist.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
I too thought Stirling's of the sky and landscape very Andersonian and worthy of comparison to that author's work. And of course anyone who has read Anderson's Scandinavian stories or read the ELDER EDDA would know what those ravens meant and who they belonged to, Odin.
One thing I recalled from Anderson's treatment of Odin in his works was that his depiction of that pagan god was not as favorable, by and large, as Stirling seems to show Odin in his own stories. More than once Anderson warns us that Odin was tricky, devious, and could be a bad enemy if offended (as we see happens in THE BROKEN SWORD and HROLF KRAKI'S SAGA).
Sean
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