A stag leads hunters on a tiring chase, then disappears. An attendant protests:
"'Sir, this is no place for Christians. Old heathen things are abroad. That was no buck we hunted, it was the very wind, and now it has vanished to wherever the wind goes. Why?'" (p. 3)
The wind often intervenes in Poul Anderson's texts, sometimes as explicitly as this. When the chase ends, the lake gleams, timber glooms, the sun sinks, the sky darkens, a star trembles, mist streams, bats flit, there is cold and silence. The Christians cling to their faith. Then they encounter a vilja.
2 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Rather nice, to be reminded of how Anderson took a look at Slavic legends and myths in THE MERMAN'S CHILDREN, besides that of the Scandinavians.
Anderson also thought it necessary to remind readers that the faith of many ordinary Christians in the early 1300's was not like that of a culture, educated man like Thomas Aquinas, but was naive and mixed in with superstitions.
Ad astra! Sean
That "following the stag to beyond the world of common day" thing was a staple of old European myth-stories.
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