Pagan Communion

I attended a Wiccan handfast where we sipped mead from a horn and shared freshly baked bread.

In Poul Anderson's "The Peat Bog," Philon, the narrator, kneels to receive bread and mixed milk and blood from a Jutish king. Kneeling, Philon knew that the king

"...was Fro (and Apollo of the Sun) and through him She entered me and I Her. Can the Orphic mysteries give more?" (Anderson, Homeward And Beyond, New York, 1976, p. 223)

Philon, a philosophical Greek skeptical of Roman identifications of their gods with others, does not hesitate to identify Fro with Apollo.

Yes, Philon is shocked that the king kills women as the king is shocked by Philon's homosexuality. Philon becomes reconciled to the facts, as he sees it, by reflecting on the Goddess' many aspects:

Aphrodite is the foam-born Virgin, the Mother of Eros, Our Lady of the Weddings, a slut mocked by Homer;
Artemis is the maiden huntress, the fecund Ephesian, Cybele who inspires madness, Hecate the terrible, Hera, Ceres, Athene, Persephone, Nerthus;
the Jutes still worship the Goddess whereas Greeks and Romans turn to Oriental gods or to no god...

Their successors became Christians or atheists.

Despite Philon's professed reconciliation, what looks as if it will be a promising alliance, in this case between Romans and Jutes, does not come to fruition because the differences are too great, as had happened between the People and the child-sacrificing Folk in "The Forest."

Gods And Forces II

We learn how Philon feels the Goddess. When invited to watch ritual sex:

"I myself had been gripped by Her, oh, if only there had been a girl for me!" (Anderson, Homeward And Beyond, New York, 1976, 203)

Coming into conflict with the Danes, some Jutes offer also to the main Danish gods, "...the warlike three called by the Romans Mars, Jupiter, and Mercury." (p. 205)

We know from other works Who these three are. Their names are rendered here as Tiwu, Thunarr and Wothen.

We have been told that only the king can see the image of the Goddess yet three women slaves who have been given a lot to drink are tied to the wagon and sent with him to wash the image. We can deduce what will happen to them if we do not remember it from Anderson's Time Patrol story, "Star of the Sea," although Philon does not understand yet.

I am still rereading "The Peat Bog." I suspect that, as in "The Forest," our hero will be horrified to learn of human sacrifice in this less advanced society.

Gods And Forces

Should we say "gods and forces" or "forces, sometimes personified"? In Poul Anderson's "The Peat Bog," the narrator's patron, Gnaeus Valerius Memmius, offers to Neptune and Mercury:

"...though I knew he believed in no gods - merely in that dance of blind atoms which Lucretius has written of - and acted pious lest he raise superstitious fears." (Anderson, Homeward And Beyond, New York, 1976, p. 195)

Lucretius denied not the gods' existence but their control of nature and intervention in human affairs. Composed of finer atoms than animals or human beings, they are sometimes perceived in dreams. Thus, they fit into his materialist philosophy but not as popularly conceived.

A single atom is not "blind," like an animal without eyes, but pre- or sub-organic. Animal, human and divine combinations of atoms see because their eyes register images transmitted by atoms of light.

The narrator, Philon, a Greek freedman, calls on Aphrodite. He thinks that Memmius:

"... is doubtless right about the absurdity of the myths, very possibly most of the world arises from a play of forces and nothing else; but She is. I have felt Her too often to imagine otherwise." (pp. 195-196)

Again, Anderson recognizes the strength of Pagan religious experience although he does not in this passage tell us how Philon has felt the Goddess.

The Peat Bog

Continuing to reread Poul Anderson's short stories set in the past, we pass from the prehistorical to the historical; from "The Forest" in the Old Stone Age to "The Peat Bog" during the Roman Empire in the first century AD.

From other Anderson works, we recognize:

place names, Colonia Agrippina, Frisia, Gesoriacum, the Suebian Sea;
the barbarian Longobards;
the Cimbrian horde that had almost overwhelmed Rome a century and a half before;
the Roman middle name Valerius;
the goddess Nerthus;
the Romans' "...naive identifications..." of their gods with other peoples' gods (p. 205);
dolmen and standing stones on the Armorican coast.

We also recognise the names of important Romans, "...divine Julius...," Claudius, Nero (Anderson, Homeward And Beyond, New York, 1976, p. 190). Marius is not mentioned by name but it was he who had defeated the Cimbri.

Again, Anderson shows us the passage of time by describing the seasons:

"...trees were ablaze with autumn, stubble fields golden..." (p. 190)

"Spring-time...sunlight and greenness..." (p. 194)

"The midsummer festival lifted hearts..." (p. 222)

"...summer waned, days shrank before nights, hasty clouds and spilling rains warned of oncoming winter." (p. 228)

"...we watched the autumnal equinox being celebrated in a tiny fisher settlement..." (p. 228)

"This was at the end of September." (p. 229) 

"...day was turning to the shortest of glimmers in the middle of night." (p. 234)

"A day in late November or early December..." (p. 236)

"Now Midwinter Day was so near..." (p. 240)

"The day after was Midwinter." (p. 241)

"...the winter turned hard, winds whistled down from the Pole Star..." (p. 242)

As in Poul and Karen Anderson's King of Ys Tetralogy, harsh weather expresses the will of a god.

Not for the first time in Anderson's fiction, a man passing himself off as a trader is really an intelligence agent.

Thus, what had seemed to be an independent short story with an unappealing title turns out on closer inspection to be integral to Anderson's historical fiction.