A hero created by Rider Haggard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, PC Wren, John Buchan or Dornford Yates would have remained true to his fiancee while he was away on an adventure whereas James Bond has a different woman on every adventure. Poul Anderson's Ivar Frederiksen has a fiancee but also gets involved with Fraina while he is among her people, the tinerans. Ivar even wants to abandon his responsibilities and to remain among the tinerans but that is not to be.
He hopes that he has enough honor not to seduce Fraina, then leave her crying when he goes. No fear of that! She persuades him to give her his money for safekeeping, then has him expelled from the train without it. It was not his destiny to stay there but an earlier kind of hero would never have "strayed" with Fraina in the first place. How much can heroes change?
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
The writers you listed, such as H. Rider Haggard, ERB, etc., all wrote in the late 19th/early 20th centuries, when many people believed in courteous, gentlemanly, even chivalrous treatment of women. A real world example from that time period being "women and children first" (on lifeboats) as the TITANIC was sinking in 1912. Compared to our coarse and debased times, some of that gentlemanliness would be good to have!
And the point to remember about Fraina was that she was not in the least a LADY, in the best senses of that word. Here I was thinking of Sir Nigel Loring's Edwardian grandmother, from Stirling's Emberverse books. Or Prosser Tatiana Thane, from Anderson's THE DAY OF THEIR RETURN.
Ad astra! Sean
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