"There is always war among Them"

Gratillonius gives Mithras a bull on Lir's cliff under Taranis' sky during a thunderstorm and laughs at the Ysan Gods. One of his followers knows that:

"'Other Gods are angry.'"
-Poul and Karen Anderson, Dahut, Chapter VIII, section 3, p. 165.

-but another replies:

"'There is always war among Them.'" (ibid.)

"'...the common folk are with Grallon...is he not their wonderful King, on whose reign fortune has always smiled?'" (VII, section 4, p. 171)

For a politician, it is often enough to have the common people on his side, although not in the long run if his policies are economically or ecologically ruinous. Defiance of a literally existent Sea God is ecologically ruinous. James Blish's black magician says:

"'...the sciences don't accept that some of the forces of nature are Persons. Well, but some of them are. And without dealing with those Persons I shall never know any of the things I want to know.'"
-James Blish, After Such Knowledge (London, 1991), p. 365.

I find parallels between The King Of Ys and After Such Knowledge.

I wanted to find that statement by Theron Ware but had to reread a chunk of the book to find it but did so with pleasure.

Patriarchs And Patricians

In Latin:

pater, father;
patres, forefathers;
patricius, of the forefathers;
patricii, patricians, aristocrats.

Patres is plural of pater and patricii of patricius.

In Poul and Karen Anderson's King of Ys Tetralogy, St Martin says that his cousin, Sucat, will become Christ's patrician. Sucat is renamed "Patricius," in English "Patrick," and canonized, thus St Patrick.

In Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization, a star is named "Patricius." Thus, the star and its planets are the Patrician System.

In Larry Niven's Known Space future history, the kzinti are ruled by a Patriarch. In Poul Anderson's Man-Kzin Wars stories, Ulf Markham admires the kzinti and has a hereditary vote in the Wunderlander House of Patricians although only on federal matters. Election as a consul of his state would give him a say in who attends the House of Delegates. This sounds to me like Anderson's political thinking enriching the Wunderlander constitution in Niven's future history.

Markham leaks the hyperdrive to the kzinti. His excuse:

"'They would inevitably have gotten it. Only by taking part in events can we hope to exercise any influence.'" (The Man-Kzin Wars, p. 125)

A familiar argument: we can influence Apartheid by supporting it instead of sabotaging and ending it.

Slave Owners

Slave Owners In Fiction
Poul and Karen Anderson's Romans
Poul Anderson's Terrans and Merseians
SM Stirling's human and New Race Draka

(There are many others, of course, but I am just considering these examples.)

Is slavery wrong? It is certainly wrong to enslave prisoners instead of merely detaining them. However, there were past periods when slavery was the stage of development of the means and relations of production. A good Roman citizen could not overthrow slave-owning society but could treat his slaves well and arrange for their eventual manumission.

Legally limited "slavery" in Anderson's Terran Empire is more like a form of community service by offenders. See here. However, women can be sold to be used against their will as concubines, which cannot be right.

The Merseians are racial supremacists and we cannot regard their enslavement of other races as in any sense right. Human Draka enjoy imposing their will on others and should be resisted in every way. A Draka woman believes that it is right that serfs serve the Race and that she herself lives rightly if she treats obedient serfs kindly - whereas any who resist should be impaled. Aristocratic arrogance. But what would convince her that she was wrong? If:

(i) the Draka were to be overthrown by a slave rebellion;
(ii) it could be shown that the rebellion had arisen inevitably from the conditions of servitude -

- then she would have to accept that the Draka way of life had failed. But SM Stirling does not show this happening. Thus, for the Draka, Might continues to be Right. In the Final Society, the New Race is a different species, which changes the situation to some extent. The scent of Homo servus brings Gwen "...a warm pleasurable feeling, a desire to protect and guide." (Drakon, p. 9)

Thus, she no longer has the human Draka pride of Race, derived from imposing the Will on other human beings against theirs. I will have to think more about the New Race.

Ysan Inns

The murderous inter-dynastic deceit in Poul Anderson's Mother Of Kings approaches a crescendo. Haakon Jarl plans to kill Gold-Harald Knutson who plans to kill Harald Eiriksson who is sailing into a trap of the kind devised for Tryggvi Olafsson by Gudrod Eiriksson: the consequences of their own actions.

I seek temporary respite in the intriguing inns of Poul and Karen Anderson's uncanny city of Ys. See:

In An Ysan Inn
Time Passes
Inns In Ys
More Details About Ys
Epona's Horse
Appreciating Details

There may be more about Ysan inns and, of course, there is a lot about Ys, sadly inundated centuries before the events of Mother Of Kings.

"A Wonderful World"

Gunnhild's daughter, brought up to want greatness, becomes a murderess like her.

Poul Anderson's Mother Of Kings, like Poul and Karen Anderson's The King Of Ys, is historical fiction with elements of fantasy. Thus, in both, witchcraft works and so does a Christian miracle. It is acknowledged that Christ is a god. By remaining unharmed while holding a white-hot iron bar, a Bishop demonstrates that Christ is also a powerful god.

King Haakon commands all to be baptized. A spokesman replies:

"'If...you mean to drive this undertaking of yours through with might and threat, then we yeomen have agreed we'll be done with you, and find another lord, who'll allow us freedom to keep whatever faith we ourselves want.'"
-Poul Anderson, Mother Of Kings (New York, 2003), Book Four, Chapter VI, p.313.

I am bound to agree with the spokesman.

The King's close adviser asks:

"'...is not the world of the gods a wonderful world?'" (p. 314)

He lists "Green Yggdrasil...," Odin winning wisdom and Thor repelling trolls until the last winter. His final point is that these are ours, not anything from Romaborg or the Empire, and he asks how long we can remain ourselves without them. The answer is that we still have them, alongside every other worldview, and they are well expressed through modern media like Poul Anderson's novels.

The First War And Later Events

"The gods themselves fought the first war that ever was."
-Poul Anderson, War of The Gods (New York, 1999), Chapter I, p. 9.`

There is a beginning.

"Saxo places Hadding three generations before Hrolf Kraki."
-War Of The Gods, Afterword, p. 301.

Thus, War Of The Gods, about Hadding, precedes Anderson's Hrolf Kraki's Saga.

"Great and rich was the Thraandlaw, a home for heroes. Hither had come Hadding from the South, to fell a giant, and win a king's daughter. Hence had gone Bjarki to the South, he who became the right hand of Hrolf Kraki."
-Poul Anderson, Mother Of Kings (New York, 2003), Book Two, Chapter XXII, p. 184.

Thus, Mother Of Kings, about Gunnhild, comes third.

"'It's said he fathered Gunnhild, the queen of King Eirik Blood-ax -'
"Skafloc gripped the tiller hard. 'The witch-queen?'
"Mananaan nodded. 'Yes...'"
-Poul Anderson & Mildred Downey Broxon, The Demon Of Scattery (New York, 1980), p. 193.

Skafloc and Mananaan converse in the untitled Prologue and Epilogue of The Demon Of Scattery during their voyage to Jotunheim described in The Broken Sword. Thus, The Broken Sword and The Demon Of Scattery are, chronologically, the fourth and fifth volumes of this sequence although everything in ...Scattery between Prologue and Epilogue is an extended flashback.

Mananaan's father, Lir, was a God of the City of Ys and Skafloc sees:

"...the drowned tower of Ys..."
-Poul Anderson, The Broken Sword (London, 1977), Chapter V, p. 31.

Thus, Poul and Karen Anderson's four-volume The King Of Ys precedes The Broken Sword and, indeed, since it features the decline of the Roman Empire, is set several centuries before Mother Of Kings and about a century before Hrolf Kraki's Saga.

The title character of Anderson's The Last Viking Trilogy is Eirik Blood-Ax's father's great-great-grandson, Harald Hardrada, who refers somewhere in the Trilogy to Gunnhild and falls in battle in 1066.

Skafloc also saw:

"...the sea maidens tumbling in the sea and singing..." (ibid.)

Christian priests drive the last merpeople from Europe in the fourteenth century in Anderson's The Merman's Children.

One long literary sequence alternating between historical fiction, historical fantasy and heroic fantasy.

In Norwich

Visiting Norwich, we heard of Puritan iconoclastic vandalism in the Cathedral. For Poul Anderson's humorous treatment of the Puritans, see here. For the benefit of any blog readers interested in mysticism, may I add that we also visited a chapel built on the site of the cell of Dame Julian of Norwich, the first woman to write a book in English.

We are also close to Walsingham, where the Virgin Mary was seen. Poul and Karen Anderson have Gratillonius, the last King of Ys, addressing Mary in prayer shortly after his conversion from Mithraism to Roman Christianity. In Poul Anderson's "Star of the Sea," Mary incorporates symbols of star and sea previously associated with a goddess.

The theme of this post and of a previous one is that fiction and literature resonate as we tour historical sites.

Britannia

Yet again, our Latin class reads Julius Caesar's account of his invasion of Britannia. When the soldiers hesitate to jump from the ships into deep water while weighed down by heavy armor, the standard bearer gives a lead. Shouting that he at least will do his duty to the republic and to his commander (imperator, later to mean "Emperor"), he jumps down and runs among the enemy. The men have no choice but to follow since loss of their standard is the greatest disgrace for any legion. Here is a hero worthy of later works of fiction.

Caesar's account prefigures:

Poul and Karen Anderson's Gratillonius, a British Roman Centurion;
Time Patrolman Manse Everard's mission to post-Roman Britain;
the immortal Hanno's encounter with the post-Roman warlord Artorius, who resisted English invaders;
the history of Britain with its later imperial role;
Manuel Argos' founding of the Terran Empire, based on the Roman Empire.

Caesar came before all this so it is a worthwhile exercise to try to decipher his text!

An Eerie And Chilling Text

Poul and Karen Anderson's Gratillonius and Poul Anderson's Dominic Flandry defend civilization because it enables populations and generations to live in peace. Anderson's Nicholas van Rijn defends civilization because it is profitable but also shows that he wants peace not only because it is profitable. He has a conscience as well as a profit motive.

However, there are antithetical reasons to value an ordered society. In SM Stirling's Marching Through Georgia (New York, 1991), the American journalist, William Dreiser, refers to:

"...the eerie and chilling Meditations of Elvira Naldorssen." (p. 64)

Later, we are able to judge for ourselves because p. 230 comprises a three paragraph quotation from Meditations: Colder than the Moon by Evira Naldorssen. (I do not yet know which is the correct spelling of Naldorssen's first name.)

Having promised us an eerie and chilling text, Stirling delivers. The Draka do not violate the Golden Rule or utilitarianism. They reject them. They conquer to conquer and dominate in order to dominate. "The purpose of Power is Power." (p. 230)

(James Blish once said that sf has to be about something and that 1984 worked because it was about the proposition that the purpose of power is power.)

"...power is the ability to compel others to do your will, against theirs. It is end, not means." (ibid.)

I most disrespectfully disagree. Naldorssen goes on to present a chilling vision of "...the Final Society, a new humanity without weakness or mercy, hard and pure." (ibid.)

An inhumanity.... Remembering Count Ignatieff, we must commend Stirling for creating villains who are not just our heroes' honorable enemies but thoroughly evil.

What does Naldorssen need? An extended period in a society where every new acquaintance treats her as an equal and a friend, where no one imposes their will on her and where she has no means of imposing her will on anyone else. After a while, she would either be unexpectedly happy or deeply depressed. If the latter, then all we would be able to offer her would be an island hermitage!

Question

And this is a question, not a statement. Poul Anderson's output is immense. Does any of it count as horror? And what is horror fiction? It is a genre unto itself. At the same time, it can be fantasy, sf or neither. Horror can be generated by a ghost or a demon, by an alien or a robot or by a serial killer. But demons can also be treated routinely or even humorously without horror. Poul Anderson does this once or twice.

Being able to overlap with either fantasy or sf connects horror to superheroes, which has also spun off as a separate genre. Whenever sf characters exercise a power like telepathy or teleportation, they approach superheroes territory. And they are always potentially close to horror although sf usually does not go there.

Any episode of The X-Files could be fantasy, sf or neither which is quite an achievement for a TV series. TV is usually genre-specific. But what of Poul Anderson? This blog has often listed his genres but has not included horror. There is a horror element in Volume IV of Poul and Karen Anderson's The Last King Of Ys (Later: Title slightly wrong. See first comment.) when a character who has died returns to kill others and has to be exorcised.

Regular readers might suspect that this question has been prompted by rereading some graphic fantasy horror by Alan Moore. Most questions can be related back to Poul Anderson in one way or another although sometimes the question might seem peripheral.

The Trygve Yamamura Series

Anthony Boucher persuaded sf authors to write mysteries. Poul Anderson writes:

"The result for me was three novels and several short stories. The hero of most was Trygve Yamamura..."
-Poul Anderson, Going For Infinity (New York, 2002), p. 296.

I had thought that Anderson wrote the three Yamamura novels and co-wrote with Karen Anderson just one Yamamura short story. However, Anderson's phrase "The hero of most..." seems to imply that Yamamura was the hero of more than one of the short stories? See the comment on this recent post.

So is the Trygve Yamamura series longer than some of us thought? Someone out there must know. Googling discloses this list which however confirms my earlier idea of the extent of the series.

Gratillonius' Beloved Aeneid

Poul and Karen Anderson's character, Gratillonius, the last King of Ys, loved Virgil's Aeneid - and I also think that he disliked studying the Homeric epics because they were not Latin but incomprehensible Greek? Regular blog readers might remember that I attend a Latin class which sometimes tackles Virgil. We have just started to read excerpts from the Aeneid Chapter VI, in which Aeneas visits Orcus, the Underworld.

In Poul Anderson's The Day Of Their Return, Orcus is a region on the colonized planet, Aeneas, in the Virgilian system. The next planet towards Virgil is Dido which, of course, is another important name in the Aeneid. Dido was the first queen of Carthage, the city that was:

Rome's rival in the Punic Wars, consequently pivotal in Anderson's Time Patrol story, "Delenda Est;"
the power of which Ys was a colony;
an example cited both by Robert Heinlein and by Anderson's immortal character, Hanno, of an issue that had been resolved by force.

It is idle to wish that Anderson had written about Aeneas - the man, not the planet. We might as well include the Homeric epics and the Arthurian cycle as well. Everyone cannot write about everything (although why did Shakespeare not write a Robin Hood play?). I would like to be able to share some information about the Virgilian hereafter but like Aeneas himself, I am obscurus, in the darkness, and will have to decipher the opaque text before I am much wiser.

Mountebanks And Bacaudae

Poul Anderson, The Boat Of A Million Years (London, 1991).

Poul Anderson's extensive vocabulary includes many words that I have never seen before or since but also some that I had encountered although I am hard put to explain them, like "...mountebanks..." (p. 59). Bacaudae (ibid.) I have encountered before but only in Poul and Karen Anderson's King of Ys tetralogy where one such brigand or insurgent becomes the King's right hand man after unsuccessfully challenging him for the crown.

In Boat..., many flee social degradation to become serfs, slaves, itinerants, mountebanks, Bacaudae or barbarians. However, Lugo the immortal is better equipped to deal with changing times:

"Lugo had made better arrangements for himself, well in advance of need. He was accustomed to looking ahead." (p. 59)

Lugo has had to look ahead as an individual but humanity now needs to look ahead as a species.

History In Parallel Works

"The marriage brought [Lugo] certain useful connections, her father being a curial, though no dowry worth mentioning, the curial class being crushed between taxes and civic duties."
-Poul Anderson, The Boat Of A Million Years (London, 1991), p. 5.

I thought that Anderson had described the plight of the curials before, or indeed that both of the Andersons had alluded to this issue in their King of Ys tetralogy, so I googled "Poul Anderson curials" and was referred to this blog. See here. Thus, both Gratillonius' father and Lugo's grandfather were impoverished curials. Lugo/Hanno was born in Tyre when Hiram was king there. Manson Everard of the Time Patrol visited Tyre in that period and even met Hiram.

These are three works of two kinds:

Ys is historical fiction with the fantasy elements of gods and magic;
Boat... is historical science fiction with the sf elements of immortality and a high tech future;
the Time Patrol is historical science fiction with the sf element of time travel from the future.

Ys, published as a tetralogy of novels, is a single long narrative;
Boat..., published as a single long novel, could have been serialized or its concluding futuristic section (145 pages) published as a sequel to the historical and contemporary sections;
the Time Patrol is a series. 

Arthur

I am reading a "Grail" history with Jesus as the ancestor of the Merovingians and lots of esoteric information about Pendragons and Merlins. Why did Poul Anderson not write an Arthurian novel? Because he wrote other historical fictions and fantasies. Also, he and Karen Anderson wrote The King Of Ys. We have all heard of Arthur but I had not heard of Ys.

One of the immortals in Anderson's The Boat Of A Million Years did visit a possible original of Camelot but he did this between chapters. And he disclosed it to Cardinal Richelieu, yet another historical figure in a novel by Anderson.

An Arthurian novel by Anderson could have been historical fiction about the original of Arthur or historical fantasy in which Merlin's magic worked or even historical science fiction involving psychics powers, extraterrestrial incursions or time travel. But, given the quantity of Arthurian volumes out there, I am grateful that instead the Andersons gave us the four volume King Of Ys.

Two Series

Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series is complete in two volumes, Time Patrol and The Shield Of Time. The former collects ten stories of different lengths, including one short novel, "Star of the Sea," which was originally published not as a separate volume but in the first edition of this collection, then entitled The Time Patrol (see image). That edition included only nine works but Time Patrol also includes the later short story, "Death and the Knight."

However, since the events of "Death and the Knight" occur immediately after the events of The Shield Of Time, I think that "Death..." should, in future editions, be republished at the end of The Shield..., not of Time Patrol. Then, since The Shield... is a tripartite novel, the complete series would comprise nine installments in the first volume and four in the second.

This makes for an interesting comparison with Anderson's Technic History series, which has been collected in seven volumes by Baen Books. Volume I is The Van Rijn Method although I suggest that a more appropriate title would be Rise Of The Polesotechnic League. This Volume collects eleven works although I think that the last two would be better placed in Volume II. In that case, Volume I would collect nine works, including one novel.

Differences Between The Proposed Time Patrol And The Proposed Rise Of The Polesotechnic League

(i) Manson Everard is in every Time Patrol story whereas Nicholas van Rijn is in only two of the nine works to be collected in Rise... (Despite Everard's ubiquity, his series also features in greater or lesser roles many other Time Patrollers.)

(ii) Time Patrol would be followed by four installments in one further volume whereas Rise... would be followed by thirty four installments in six further volumes.

Length is the most obvious difference. The Time Patrol is long but the Technic History is longer. But both are important. Two other substantial series are the Harvest of Stars tetralogy and the King of Ys tetralogy, the latter co-written with Karen Anderson. Any one of these series would have made Poul Anderson significant but, of course, his total output is vaster than the four combined.

Interstellar Feudalism

Dominic Flandry reflects that the slowness of interstellar communication:

"...made a slow growth of feudalism, within the Imperial structure itself, inevitable. Of course, that would give civilization something to fall back on when the Long Night finally came."
-Poul Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (New York, 2010).

These are the two themes of the Flandry series:

the Empire will fall;
there will be systems in place enabling at least some planetary systems to cope with the "Long Night."

In this story, Flandry hopes that Nyanza will "'carry on...[w]hen the Long Night comes for Terra...'" (p. 339) but we do not read about this planet in the Long Night, Allied Planets or Commonalty periods.

Poul and Karen Anderson's character, Gratillonius, starts to build feudalism after the Fall of the Roman Empire. See here. And, in another of Poul Anderson's imaginary worlds, Time Patrolmen must visit post-Roman Britain to prevent a divergent timeline.

These are three fictional universes with common themes: history and heroism.

Gods And Stars

James Blish's starfaring Okies swear by the gods of all stars as if an interstellar frontier has revived polytheism.

In Poul and Karen Anderson's King of Ys Tetralogy, Niall of the Nine Hostages, after an ill-advised attack on the city of Ys, promises unblemished animal sacrifices to the gods in return for a safe voyage home.

In Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization:

Nicholas van Rijn continually offers candles and altar cloths to St Dismas;

Dagny, Od's Daughter in the House of Brenning on the ocean planet of Kraken, vows to "'...the gods a hundred Blue Giant seabeasts...'" (Flandry's Legacy, p. 489), if she can rescue her husband unhurt.

Dagny has received, not as a scientific education but as an oral tradition, an understanding of how stars and planets condense from the interstellar medium and even of why younger planetary systems contain more metal than older systems. Nevertheless, she remains part of a society whose lowest strata have lost technological control of their environment and have resumed the ancient practice of offering beasts to the gods.

Dagny's Krakener dowry to Roan Tom was their home, Skerrygarth, towers above surfs and reefs - like a smaller Ys.

"No Boundary In Space Or Time"

Poul and Karen Anderson's character, Gratillonius, the last King of Ys, loves the Roman epic, the Aeneid, but dislikes Greek poetry because he does not understand the latter.

I suggest that Homer and the poets are the Classical parallels of Moses and the prophets while the Aeneid parallels the New Testament. The Bible is Hebrew and Greek; the Classics are Greek and Latin.

 In the Aeneid, Jupiter promises:

"'To Romans I set no boundary in space or time. I have granted them dominion, and it has no end.'"
-Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. WF Jackson Knight, (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1982), p. 36.

Well, it is a national epic. Mussolini might have thought that he was regaining the endless dominion. Manuel Argos bases his Terran Empire on the Roman Empire. Combining Classics and scriptures, someone else might argue that the Roman Catholic Church fulfills both the promise to Abraham and Jupiter's prophecy of endless Roman dominion?

Some Fictitious Histories

Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization presents a detailed history of the future. We can contrast it with:

a fictitious past history (see here);
the same author's earlier future history (see here);
an alternative future timeline (see here and here);
a timeline for all time (see here).

Finally, relationships between future histories are discussed here.