His Richest Text?

Is the Time Patrol series Poul Anderson's richest text? It is certainly an endless source of quotations for this blog.

"By day Niaerdh roamed among the seals and whales and fish she had made."
-Poul Anderson, "Star of the Sea" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 467-640 AT I, p. 467.

"Out of the east, the morning behind them, rode the Anses into the world."
-op. cit., II, p. 557.

"Gutherius was the name of a hunter who often went hunting in the wildwood, for he was poor and his acres meager. One blustery day in autumn he set forth, armed with bow and spear."
- op. cit, III, p. 624.

"Mary, mother of God, mother of sorrows, mother of salvation, be with us now and at the hour of our death."
-op. cit., IV, p. 639.

None of these statements is true. What do I mean by that? That they are passages in a fictional text? They are but there is more to it than that. In the Time Patrol timeline, the goddess whose name Anderson here spells "Niaerdh" and the pantheon called the Anses do not exist literally as they would in a work of fantasy. Nevertheless, they have been powerful presences in human minds. Gutherius is not a historical figure and many of us do not believe that Mary is the mother of God although some of us do.

Anderson imagines an earlier stage of Northern European mythology, when the god Nerthus was still female and called "Niaerdh." Within this imaginatively reconstructed mythological framework, he then tells a story of Niaerdh's betrothal to the god Frae and narrates that story from Niaerdh's pov. Thus, this narrative, although not set within the Time Patrol timeline, is a story that would be understood and accepted by people living in a prehistorical period of that timeline. When we nowadays read a retelling of Norse mythology, we ask not "Did Odin really think this?" but "Is it plausible and authentic that Odin would have thought this?" Such is Anderson's story of Niaerdh.