I missed one:
"...Skafloc was dead in her arms."
-Poul Anderson, The Broken Sword (London, 1973), XXVIII, p. 207.
"...Mananaan Mac Lir took away Freda and the body of Skafloc, that he might himself see to the welfare of the one and the honoring of the other."
-ibid., pp. 207-208.
Mananaan is a god of the sea whose name tells us that he is a son of Lir, one of the Three of Ys.
"Here ends the saga of Skafloc Elven-Fosterling." (p. 208)
Like Hamlet, Skafloc dies but only at the end of the narrative so he remains on stage till then.
Thus, we have reviewed deaths in Andersonian works of heroic fantasy, historical fiction and science fiction.
(What is wrong with that cover?)
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
I think I remember seeing somewhere another character describing Mananaan Mac Lir as no longe being quite a god, that he was a fading "god."
Altho not one of the Andersonian heroes or even the main POV character, we see the crippled Ostrogothic King Ermanaric dying in "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth," killing himself to get out of the way of his eldest surviving son.
Ad astra! Sean
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