This chapter is an Andersonian battle-scene, historical fiction with one element of sf. The Wanderer arrives on "...his eldritch steed..." (p. 394) but only when the Goths are pursuing the fleeing Huns and their leader, Dagobert, lies dying.
Before that:
Gothic infantry withstand repeated Hunnish cavalry assaults;
arrows darken the sky;
lances lower;
banners stream;
earth shakes;
pikes slant;
swords, axes and bills gleam;
bows twang;
slingstones fly;
Goths shout;
Huns yip;
horses shriek;
feet and hoofs crush ribs and trample flesh;
iron dins, rattles and bangs;
the sun sinks, blood-red;
carrion fowl wheel;
wind whistles as if calling forth the corpses;
drums thutter;
a trumpet shrills;
Dagobert has united the Teurings with other Goths and trapped the Huns.
He dies. His father, the Wanderer, holds him.
1933, p. 395.
Farness laments that Jorith's descendants are doomed to die. Well, of course they are. He does not yet seem to realize that some of them are the characters in one of the stories that he has come to research.
337-344, pp. 395-399.
Tharasmund succeeds his father, Dagobert, as leader of the Teurings at the age of thirteen.
2 comments:
They're doubly doomed; they're stuck in linear time, and he isn't; and they're going to age and die, and he doesn't have to.
From the viewpoint of the Goths, that makes the Wanderer both awe-inspiring and terrifying -- remember when he mentions that Swanhild looks so much like her great-grandmother Jorith to Swanhild's father and how he shivers as he hears it?
"Once he sighed to her father, 'she is like her great-grandmother.'
"The hardy warrior shivered a little in his coat. How long had that woman lain dead." (348-366, p. 413)
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