Planha And Eriau

Fantasy and science fiction feature characters speaking languages that are unknown to us:

Tolkien has Elvish, Orcish etc;

CS Lewis tells us a few words of Solar, e.g., hnau and eldil;

some Star Trek fans have invented Klingon;

the kzinti "Hero's Tongue" has unusual consonant combinations like "Kdapt," "kzin" and "sthondat";

Poul Anderson does not tell us any Temporal or Anglic but does impart a few words of Planha and Eriau;

Planha-speaking Ythrians live in choths whose Wyvans can call Oherran;

Olaf Magnusson knows Eriau and two other major Merseian languages;

Max Abrams, introduced to Brechdan Ironrede, responds in fluent, accented Eriau, "'The Hand of the Vach Ynvory is my shield...'" (Young Flandry, p. 94);

when Flandry and Tachwyr meet, Flandry inquires about Tachwyr's wives and children in polite Eriau and Tachwyr must ask whether Flandry is still a bachelor in Anglic because the Eriau equivalent would be an insult.

More On American Future Histories

I listed four Campbell-edited future historians (Heinlein, Asimov, Blish and Anderson) but maybe should have included a fifth:

"H. Beam Piper was first and last a John W. Campbell writer, his first SF story, "Time and Time Again," appeared in Astounding in April 1946, and his last, "Down Styphon!," in Analog in November 1965."
-John F. Carr, "The Terrohuman Future History of H. Beam Piper" IN Bulletin of the Science Fiction Writers of America, Fall 1979.

However, returning to the authors that I do know something about, Poul Anderson not only wrote hard science fiction in the tradition of Robert Heinlein  but also, and completely independently of JRR Tolkien, wrote heroic fantasies derived from Norse mythology. These two literary traditions converged when Heinleinian sf writer Jerry Pournelle included "Sauron supermen" in his CoDominium future history.

In The Mote In God's Eye (London, 1979), Niven's and Pournelle's characters speculate as to whether isolated extrasolar colonists might not only regress sociologically but also evolve biologically. The concluding installments of Poul Anderson's Technic History address this question.

Mote presents its own distinctive version of hyperspace: instantaneous transit along "tramlines" (p. 32) between certain stars, with the usual restriction that this kind of travel is impossible from too deep within a gravity well. Travel time is necessary to and from tramline end points. By contrast, I think that the version of hyperspace in Anderson's Technic History is unique because it involves many instantaneous quantum jumps through normal, familiar, 3D space, not through any other kind of space.

We recognize Anderson-type world-building in the description of the New Caledonia star system on pp. 32-34 of Mote. I do not think that Heinlein did this? Direct Imperial rule of New Chicago after the defeat of its rebellion recalls the comparable situation on Aeneas in Anderson's The Day Of Their Return.

For the nationality of a space warship's Chief Engineer, Niven and Pournelle follow neither Heinlein nor Anderson but Star Trek:

"Like many engineering officers, Sinclair was from New Scotland. His heavy accent was common among Scots throughout space." (p.15)

How can a handful of writers create such fascinating texts? It continues to be a blast.

The Language Question

Fantasy and science fiction necessarily refer to imaginary languages but often do not divulge a single word of those languages:

uniquely, JRR Tolkien invented languages, then imagined their speakers, then wrote stories about the speakers;

in CS Lewis' Ransom Trilogy, Solar is spoken throughout the Solar System except on Thulcandra, the Silent Planet, Earth;

in Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization, the dominant languages of Terra, Ythri and Merseia are Anglic, Planha and Eriau, respectively;

Anderson's Time Patrollers speak Temporal among themselves;

his time traveling Wardens and Rangers use diaglossas;

ERB's Martians all speak the same Barsoomian, however isolated or hidden their communities;

his Tarzan learns the simian language (?);

SM Stirling's Martians speak dialects of Demotic (popular) Modern which has an "...Imperative-Condescentative tense..." (In The Courts Of The Crimson Kings, p. 65), although, in Terrestrial languages, the imperative is a mood, not a tense.

One dialect of Demotic is so ancient that it is "...almost the High Tongue..." (p. 39). Thus, we are told of the Martian language that it is ancient or modern, popular or high, but not (yet) what it is called.

Fictional Cosmologies II

See here.

I argued that Olaf Stapledon and JRR Tolkien are polar opposites whereas Poul Anderson is bipolar - although I did not phrase it like that. I could have added that he is also tropical and equatorial. His works stretch along a line of longitude between the poles of heroic fantasy and cosmological sf:

heroic fantasy
historical fantasy
historical fiction
historical fiction with elements of fantasy
historical science fiction
one long historical/contemporary/futuristic novel
alternative history fiction
a contemporary fantasy novel
a contemporary detective trilogy
near future sf
future histories
cosmological sf

A novel with gods as characters is fantasy whereas a historical novel in which gods are invoked and magic sometimes works involves "elements of fantasy." Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings Trilogy is one narrative in three volumes. Poul and Karen Anderson's King Of Ys Tetralogy is one narrative in four volumes. These works are comparable. Tolkien describes the end of the Third Age of Middle-earth leading to the Age of Men and eventually to the Anglo-Saxon period and the present day. The Andersons describe the end of the city of Ys, then of the Roman Empire, and the beginning of the Dark Ages which lead, as we know, to the Middle Ages, then to the modern period and hopefully to a future on and off Earth.

On top of all that, alternative histories literally broaden the temporal perspective.

Fictional Cosmologies

Compare and contrast Olaf Stapledon's and JRR Tolkien's fictional cosmologies:

Tolkien has an initially flat Earth, Elves, Dwarfs, gods and a heaven to the West whereas Stapledon has galaxies, Martians, Venerians and extrasolar civilizations;

Tolkien reworks ancient mythologies whereas Stapledon constructs a modern myth out of the scientific world view.

Tolkien's friend and colleague, CS Lewis, had to acknowledge the existence of the Solar System but theologized it as "the field of Arbol," ruled by planetary angels. James Blish, a hard sf writer, followed Lewis by writing about sinless aliens but placed them in the astronomical universe and a secular milieu.

What has this to do with Poul Anderson? Quite a lot. He alone (I think) wrote with equal facility both about Norse mythology and about scientific cosmology. He is equally familiar both with Odin and with supernovae. One of his characters visits the roots of the World Ash Tree, Yggdrasil, whereas others accelerate at relativistic speeds between galaxies and into the next universe. In The Avatar, human characters travel to different galaxies and cosmic periods and eventually encounter the superior civilization that had constructed the space-time gates as it intervenes in the creation of a new universe. This is more than Wellsian; it is Stapledonian.

Moreover, Anderson's time traveling characters move between ancient myths and future cosmologies. Readers of Stapledon and of Tolkien need to know about Anderson.

Three Parallels With Tolkien

(i) JRR Tolkien translated Beowulf.
Poul Anderson retold Hrolf Kraki's Saga and, as part of this, summarized the story of Beowulf. See here.

(ii) Tolkien wrote "Sellic Spell" -

"...an attempt to reconstruct the Anglo-Saxon tale that lies behind the folk-tale element in Beowulf -"
-JRR Tolkien, Beowulf A Translation And Commentary together with Sellic Spell Edited by Christopher Tolkien (London, 2014), p. 355.

Thus, he removed the link to "...the Historical Legend..." (p. 356)

Anderson, writing time travel historical fiction in "Star of the Sea," imaginatively reconstructed earlier stages of Northern European mythology. See here, here and here.

(iii) Both authors are significant successors to the Eddas, the sagas and William Morris.

Fantasy And Science Fiction

I used to read a lot of science fiction (sf) but have not kept up with more recent writers. I have read far less fantasy:

The Hobbit, The Lord Of The Rings and some of The Silmarillion because of the hype;

Narnia because, for a while, I read everything by Lewis;

James Blish's Black Easter and The Day After Judgement because I read everything by Blish and, in any case, these "hard fantasies" together with his historical novel are integral to his mainly sfnal output;

Poul Anderson's fantasies mainly because of their high quality.

While rereading Anderson's Harvest of Stars tetralogy, I wanted to follow it with something else that was more than one volume of hard sf about interstellar travel so I planned to reread The Star Fox and its sequel, Fire Time. Instead, I was diverted onto the fantasy novel A Midsummer Tempest. From that, I have reread the other fantasy novels set in alternative timelines and have started to reread the several fantasies set in our timeline.

While it is evident to the reader that Anderson's intellect and imagination are equally engaged in both kinds of writing, it is difficult, while absorbed in one kind of fiction, to contemplate the transition back to the other. However, I still expect to reread The Star Fox etc when I have worked my way through War Of The Gods, Hrolf Kraki's Saga and The Demon Of Scattery.

Addendum, 19/9/12: This post refers only to prose fantasies. In graphic fiction, I recommend Swamp Thing by Alan Moore, John Constantine: Hellblazer by Jamie Delano and others, The Sandman by Neil Gaiman and Lucifer by Mike Carey. This vast body of work has high quality writing and art and occupies a single fictional universe where Hellblazer spins off from Swamp Thing, Lucifer spins off from The Sandman and these natural and supernatural beings coexist and can interact with iconic characters who have been published continuously since, in the earliest case, 1938.

Returning to the main subject of this blog, Anderson's works would bear graphic adaptation.

Tolkien, Asimov Etc

The Broken Sword, based on Icelandic sagas and both contemporary with and independent of Tolkien, established Poul Anderson as a writer of fantasy in the same year that Brain Wave established him as a writer of science fiction (sf). The Broken Sword was followed by several other fantasy novels by Anderson and influenced Michael Moorcock's Elric series.

Despite all this, Tolkien and Moorcock remain better known names in fantasy than Anderson, just as Heinlein and Asimov are better known in sf. Heinlein's Future History is a major work. Anderson's History of Technic Civilisation is a major, larger scale successor, superior in every way to Asimov's Foundation Series. Like many sf writers, Anderson is a successor of Wells and Heinlein. Like Tolkien, he is a successor of the Edda and saga writers.

Some people reread The Lord Of The Rings repeatedly. I have read it twice, once way back and a second time after seeing the first film. I notice that Tolkien offers no explanation for the origin of the various races. They awoke. That is it. At one stage, the characters fight what sounds like a winged dinosaur, described as left over from an earlier age, as if to make a single concession to Darwin. A former acquaintance who was a critical reader told me that he stopped reading The Fellowship Of The Ring after about 100 pages because it seemed to be a uni-dimensional narrative without any deeper layers of meaning.

I find Anderson endlessly re-readable, also that the more often his texts are read, the more there is to be found in them.