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.

The Fourteenth and Twenty Fourth Centuries

As far as I can see without having reread it yet, Poul Anderson's historical novel Rogue Sword is set in about 1306. His historical fantasy novel, The Merman's Children, ends in 1322 but its main action had been set decades earlier. His science fiction (sf) novel The High Crusade describes a sequence of events that began in 1345 but its framing passages are set more than a thousand years later. Although these three works do not form a series, I think that an appropriate reading order for them would be:

first, The Merman's Children because it describes the end of Faerie which features in other Anderson novels;
secondly, Rogue Sword because its background is simply historical with no fantasy or sf;
thirdly, The High Crusade not only because its framing passages are set in the future but also because its main action features faster than light (FTL) interstellar travel and alien contact which are major themes of Anderson's futuristic sf.

In The High Crusade, the alien imperialists are like blue Merseians but not quite. Their FTL involves quasi-velocity with gravity control and no FTL equivalent of radio so it sounds like the FTL in Anderson's Technic History. There is a reference to St Dismas, van Rijn's patron saint. The collapse of the interstellar empire is followed by feudalism as happened on Earth after the Roman Empire in The King Of Ys.

The passages set in the future mention an Israeli Empire which does not exist in any of Anderson's other fictitious futures but also mention a sociotechnician which is a kind of scientific advance that he does envisage in other works.

Armageddon

Armageddon, with an unexpected outcome, occurs at the midpoint of James Blish's contemporary fantasy diptych, Black Easter/The Day After Judgement. (See here.) A contrastingly understated version of Armageddon, with a different unexpected outcome, is presented in the Epilogue of Poul Anderson's historical fantasy novel, The Merman's Children (London, 1981).

(i) Anderson's Armageddon is a fiction within the fiction because it is not an event in the novel but a hypothesis presented in a sermon by the character Father Tomislav.

(ii) Tomislav envisages the post-Armageddon repentance of Satan.

(iii) He also envisages the resurrection not only of the Christian dead but also of "...all that ever was, ever lived..." (p. 258) This would include the soulless merpeople who feature in the novel.

Tomislav's rationale for his vision is that Satanic repentance and universal resurrection would mean that nothing had been created in vain but he warns that what he has said "...could be heresy." (p. 258)

Immortality of the soul and resurrection of the body were two contrasting views of survival that merged in Christianity. Aristotle said that the soul was the form of the body but Plato had each soul transmigrating through many bodies. Greek philosophers laughed at St Paul for preaching bodily resurrection. Jehovah's Witnesses stand by the Biblical account of bodily resurrection, therefore rejecting the Pagan philosophical idea of immortal souls.

Some modern speculation, reflected in science fiction by Anderson and others, has artificial intelligence surviving and remembering the cosmos.

In the concluding Chapter XI, Tauno, a merman-human halfling, and his leman, a woman possessed by a ghost, do not (yet) experience Tomislav's hypothetical resurrection but they do achieve an acceptable apotheosis by sailing:

" 'Westward, maybe to Vinland or beyond. Whole vast realms of nature, Faerie, and man must be there, untouched by Christendom, open for our adventuring...we might become gods...Anything might happen, which is why we are going...' 'To know as much wonder as we can reach in whatever our spans may be...' " (p. 256)

- the kind of freedom that other Anderson characters gain by crossing interstellar space.

Seasons And The Mermen

In The Merman's Children (London, 1981), as in The King Of Ys (co-written by Karen Anderson), Poul Anderson shows the passage of time by marking the seasons.

"Summer had passed, fall come back." (p. 185)

"...it was necessary to wait until snow had fallen and igloos could be built. That time soon came." (p. 191)

"...winter had become...a time of aloneness..." (p. 206)

"Earlier in spring than skippers liked to fare - before the very equinox - a ship left Copenhagen..." (p. 209)

"Rain sluiced from heaven, brawled across roofs, made rivers of city streets." (p. 217)

"Spring ran wild with blossoms and birdsong..." (p. 219)

"...toward midsummer, the cog reached Dalmatia..." (p. 220)

"In summer, when trees gave shade against the sun..." (p. 233)

"Summer descended toward autumn." (p. 235)

"On the feast of St Matthew the Apostle..." (p. 239)

"Snowflakes drifted thinly out of a sky already dusking." (p. 244)

"Early one spring..." (p. 246)

"Time passed. Raw winds and lashing rains gave way to blossoms..." (p. 246)

"...this was the feast of St Hans, when the sun is not long nor far below Danish horizons." (p. 254)

"In May of the year of Our Lord 1312 died Pavle Subitj..." (p. 257)

As in The King Of Ys, I find more such passages than expected when scrolling to find them. We accompany the characters through the cycles of the year, through many such years and into old age. In 1322, Father Tomislav, white and gnarled, preaches to a congregation including widowed, graying Captain Andrei, an appropriate conclusion. (p. 257)

Mythological Beings

Like The Broken Sword, The Merman's Children assumes that each national mythology accurately describes non-human intelligences that once existed in that country. Thus, in the fourteenth century:

merfolk had colonised various coastal waters;
a were-seal dwelt at sea but alone;
Leshy tricked people in the wildwood;
polevik kept blight from crops;
domovoi embodied a household and its well-being;
Kikimora sometimes helped housewives;
a vodianoi, growing old or young with the lunar phases, was a water monster shaped like a bulky man but covered in moss and weeds, tailed, webbed and taloned;
a vilja was a young woman barred from Heaven because she had drowned herself, now embodied in mist, wind and dreams, pulling men underwater if they embraced her;
Rousalka, further north, were similar to but more fearsome than vilja;
a tupilak was a stuffed walrus hide with sewn on fangs and claws, animated to move, seek the water and prey on its maker's enemies. (There was an animated creature in Oz: the Gumph?)

I had previously heard of only three of these ten and had encountered the term Leshy only because Larry Niven used it in the title of one of his series.

Anti-Magic

If Poul Anderson had written his sequel to The Broken Sword, then one of the issues that it would have addressed was going to be the end of Faerie. This issue at least did get to be addressed in his The Merman's Children. John Keats wrote a similar passage in Lamia about science measuring the mystery out of the rainbow etc and Neil Gaiman has the mysterious places retreating before cartography. I disagree (another English poet wrote, "The angels keep their ancient places...") but let us first consider Anderson's account.

On page 148 of The Merman's Children (London, 1981), the magical is associated with the natural which is contrasted with both the supernatural and the artificial. Christianity exorcises magic; technology excludes it.

On the side of nature are:

time ordered by sun, moon or stars;

beauty, wonder, mystery, wilderness, awe, magic, hob-sprites, the halfworld, Faerie;

knighthood, a social convention, not a natural phenomenon, but one that had ever linked warriors to that mysterious "Otherworld" as against this measurable empirical world;

ships guided by "...birdflight, landmarks, a mariners sense of oneness with the billows."

Against this are:

time ordered by clocks - hard, artificial, "...devoid of mystery";

bombard, rocket, sapper, "...the doom of knighthood";

ax, plow, cities, artificial environments;

ships in yearly greater numbers guided by compass and astrolabe;

such ships rounding the earth so that Christian steeples rise above the last Faerie refuges;

learned men measuring the tracks of the stars more closely than the ancients, calculating the architecture of the universe;

spectacles, telescopes and microscopes;

men questioning God's ways and questioning Faerie out of the world.

There are three stages in this advance against magic:

Christianity (church bells and steeples);
Deism (Masonry, "...architecture of the universe...");
atheism (questioning God's ways).

It is a false dichotomy. Beauty, wonder, mystery and awe are with us still and expressed by writers of fantasy. The beauty of a rainbow is neither diminished nor devalued but enhanced by scientific explanation.

Someone said, in the light of modern science, that "clocks are clouds", i.e., that what looks mechanical is ultimately chaotic.

Thomism And Mythology

"The background here is Catholic, but the religion does not conform to the theology of St Thomas Aquinas. Rather, it is the naive, half-pagan mythology of peasants and seafarers in the early fourteenth century..." (Poul Anderson, The Merman's Children, London, 1981), p. viii).

Right. In the Thomist religious instruction/indoctrination that I received, we were taught, in accordance with Platonic-Cartesian mind-body dualism, that intellect and will were faculties of an immaterial soul and were impossible for a merely material brain.

If we met a Martian or merman and found that such a being was capable of thought, speech and volition, then we would infer from this alone that he possessed a soul. A merman with intellect and will but without a soul would have been regarded as contradictory yet such as these are characters in The Merman's Children where a soul is necessary neither for humanity nor for rationality but is merely a supernatural extra. The mermen who, lacking a soul, cease to exist at death are in no worse a condition than a secularist human being believes himself to be.

Ys And The Merman's Children

The Merman's Children (London, 1981) is set about a thousand years later than The King Of Ys. Rereading the former immediately after the latter, we notice:

(i) merpeople in both (not only does an Ysan princess become a mermaid but merfolk plural had been mentioned earlier in connection with the Irish sea god);

(ii) a sea god called Lir in Ys and a merpeople town called Liri in The Merman's Children;

(iii) that Ys ends with the exorcism of the mermaid whereas Children begins with the exorcism of Liri;

(iv) in the later work, not Ys but another submerged city whose inhabitants had worshipped a kraken;

(v) characters in both works hoping to cross the Atlantic to colonise a "new world";

(vi) in Ys, Pagan gods retreating before Christianity and, in Children, Pagan supernatural beings almost extinct;

(vii) the Kings of Ys and Liri converting to Christianity but the merman's son sailing "Westward, maybe to Vinland or beyond..." in order to retain his heathen freedom (p. 256).

(viii) St Martin, a character in Ys, referred to in Children - also appropriate references in the latter to Arthur and Ogier.

The Three BC

I have reread The Dancer From Atlantis, am rereading Conan The Rebel and will reread The Golden Slave. These are Poul Anderson's three novels set BC:

Conan The Rebel (heroic fantasy), past events and supernatural beings;
The Dancer From Atlantis (science fiction), past events and future technology;
The Golden Slave (historical fiction), past events and the origins of myths.

Next to be reread might be the three novels set in the fourteenth century:

The Merman's Children (historical fantasy), past events and supernatural beings;
The High Crusade (science fiction), past events and extraterrestrial technology;
Rogue Sword (historical fiction), past events.

A single long novel covering these themes, except the supernatural, is:

The Boat Of A Million Years (historical fiction and science fiction): past, present and future events and a mutation.

Anderson smuggles science fiction into the past via time travel, an early alien invasion and immortality. His works give the impression of systematically covering every possible implication of an idea as if they had been preplanned with this purpose in mind.