Golin Palace And Treasure Notch

The Winter Of The World.

Chapter VI imparts more information about the Golin Palace. I focus on these details because Poul Anderson created them and because they are present as solid background information in the text even though we usually read right past them. Sidir again interviews Ponsario in the Moon Chamber but this time the room is bright with morning light, the open window lets in both mild air and traffic sounds that are described as "...cheery..." (p. 61) Inside the room, steaming coffee is described as "...delicious..." (ibid.) even before it has been drunk. Thus, the interview can be expected to go well and does despite some suspicion, then impatience, on Sidir's part toward Ponsario. 

Later, leaving the Moon Chamber, Sidir enters a long, vaulted, dimly gas-lit hallway of polished granite and malachite with an arch to a circular staircase at its end. He ascends a worn, stone, candle-lit staircase in the Crow Tower to the landing before a large, comfortable, well maintained apartment where the Rogaviki prisoner, Donya, is accommodated. From here, she watches "'...town and birds.'" (p. 68) 

"'This tower, clean sky everywhere around, is nearly like a hilltop far from any house. Already, I feel happier, prison though it be.'" (p. 70)

We remember a character in Ys who lived at the top of a tower and enjoyed the company of birds.

Near the beginning of Chapter VII, we learn that Casiru has hidden Josserek in a room with a screened balcony near Treasure Notch, a place name that we recognize from Josserek's journey in Chapter II.

Next, I suppose, we had better return to the narrative.

In The Lairs

The Winter Of The World, IV. 

Characters interact. Now Josserek is brought before Casiru. After Josserek has told his story:

"Casiru blew smoke and nodded anew. I'll bet he's already had my story pretty well checked out, Josserek thought." (p. 43)

Exactly. Casiru listens and blows smoke but Josserek thinks because he is the current viewpoint character. Frank Herbert would at this stage have switched from Josserek as viewpoint character and told us what Casiru was thinking.

They are in the Lairs of Arvanneth where the criminal Brotherhoods are too entrenched for even the Imperial conquerors to weed them out:

"'Didn't even close down Thieves' Market, only made it movable.'" (III, p. 40)

In a mean house in a filthy neighbourhood, Casiru interviews Josserek in a room with plush carpet, purple and red hangings, elaborately carved wooden furniture, ivory and nacre inlays and sandalwood burning in a censer. This and many similar details make us feel that we have been in Arvanneth.

"I remember Ys..."

Multiple Characters

The Dog And The Wolf, XI.

Multiple characters continue to interact, a potentially endless process:

the legendary Grallon or Gradlon, fictionalized as Gratillonius, and the fictional Runa find domesticity;

the names, "Grallon" and "Gradlon," both present in the legend of Ys, are explained as respectively the Ysan and Armorican versions of "Gratillonius";

the legendary Niall of the Nine Hostages and the historical Flavius Claudius Constantinus clash and negotiate;

two fictional characters, Governor Titus Scibona Glabrio and Procurator Quintus Domitius Bacca, continue to conspire against Gratillonius and will write to the historical Flavius Stilicho;

Gratillonius converses with Olath Cartagi, Apuleius, Maeloch, Vellano son of Drach and Riwal from Britannia and expects a grandchild from his daughter, Julia, all fictional;

Evirion Baltisi returns from Hivernia and visits Gratillonius' other surviving daughter, Nemeta.

"A cast of thousands" - not literally, but it feels like that.

This happens throughout literature, of course. I am about to return to reading a novel in which fictional characters converse with historical early heads of Special Branch, MI5 and MI6 and with Winston Churchill whom we remember as a guest in the Old Phoenix.

What Gratillonius Knows Of The Goths

 

The Dog And The Wolf, XI, 1.

"Their tribes were divided between  a western and an eastern branch.

"Wandering down from Germanic lands, they had settled in regions north of the Danuvius and the Euxinus.

"Later the thrust of a wholly wild and terrible breed, the Huns, caused them to seek refuge among the Romans.

"They proved to be formidable soldiers, especially as cavalrymen...

"...but untrustworthy subjects, apt to rebel.

"Most became Christian...

"...though of the Arian persuasion..." (p. 214)

I have rearranged this passage into discrete data, numbering seven. We can read about these Goths, Huns and Arians in Poul Anderson's Time Patrol story, "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth."

"It was the Birthday of Mithras. Gratillonius rarely saw a calendar, but everybody knew when solstice happened, and from that he could reckon this day." (p. 216)

He and we remember when he celebrated Birthday on the Wall. His entire career as King of Ys has come and gone since then, just as we remember long periods of time when we worked in a particular place.

How many Birthdays of Mithras are mentioned in The King of Ys?

Change, Resistance And Legend

Two processes continue to occur: first, change; secondly, individuals and groups continue to act as they did before. Thus, Rufinus and now also Maeloch spy and secretly negotiate on behalf of Gratillonius who tries to restore Armorican defences after the destruction of Ys. But Niall orders his men to dismantle and raze even the ruins of Ys while one of Gratillonius' daughters commits infanticide, thus terminating one line of descent from the last King of Ys.

A third process that is always with us is the transformation or metamorphosis of past events into enduring legends. Gratillonius' future wife, Verania, sings:

"'I remember Ys, though I have never seen her...'"

-The Dog And The Wolf, VIII, 3, p. 162.

And we remember Ys from Volumes I-III of this Tetralogy. Verania's song is a haunting echo of the legend and of its summation in this series. She, like the two co-authors, is a link between the fabulous city and present readers. 

Last Look

 

Dahut, XII, 3.

"They reached the heights. Gratillonius drew rein. 'Stop a moment,' he suggested. 'Take your last look at Ys.'

"Rufinus sat a long while gazing back at the city where it gleamed against heaven and Ocean." (p. 275)

When we read this passage, we suspect and, when we have read to the end of this volume, we know that this is indeed Rufinus' last look at Ys. When he returns to Armorica and stands at this point, he will see only heaven and Ocean. There will be no towers, spires or sea-wall. All of that is to pass into legend even in the life-times of those who remember it.

I have not reread Dahut entirely because I have skipped past the sections set in Hivernia. These passages should now be reread en bloc especially since they involve Rufinus.

Gratillonius is no longer King but is still centurion and prefect. The man of duty continues to work for his people.

Dahut In The Sea

Gallicenae, I, 1.

Rereading a novel, we realize the significance of its earlier passages. Infant Dahut sees the sea as:

"...the forever changing boundlessness that she had not known was within herself." (p. 22)

When she falls into it, she feels:

"neither chill nor fear, merely surprise, a sense of homecoming." (p. 24)

A seal holds her up, then her father rescues her. The seals are reincarnated Gallicenae (Witch-Queens of Ys). This one is probably Dahilis, Dahut's mother, Gratillonius' deceased wife. 

If we have read this Tetralogy before, then we remember first the later relationship between Dahut and her father and secondly how she wound up: in the sea - one of the last pagan presences to be exorcised...

(This week, I will be in London from Thursday afternoon to Sunday evening so there will be no new posts in that period.)

From The End Of Time To Roma Mater

I read Barrow's and Tipler's The Anthropic Cosmological Principle because Poul Anderson had discussed it but I wound up disappointed. I do not understand:

the mathematics;

why intelligence should be either necessary or immortal;

how a finite period of time can contain an infinity of experiences.

The Final Anthropic Principle requires the universe to collapse whereas it is now thought that it will expand indefinitely. I read somewhere on Wikipedia that Tipler has a reply to this but surely the main lesson to be learned is that we just do not know enough yet.

I return with some relief to Poul and Karen Anderson's The King of Ys, Volume I, Roma Mater, where we notice numerous details as if for the first time. Hadrian's Wall is seventy-seven miles long, the breadth of Britannia at that point. We also notice both similarities and differences between Mithraism and Christianity. Gratillonius addresses Mithras both as "Savior" and as "Lord" but also as "Warrior." Mithras was not slain but slew the Bull. He stands before "the Serpent" but also before "the Lion." And we remember the Lion of Judah.

Mithraism was mythological but not also historical and did not admit women so it lost out to Christianity. Eventually, Gratillonius will convert.

Quanta And Gods

I will have to read the entire 677-page The Anthropic Cosmological Principle because I want to try to get to the bottom of this issue and because it is relevant to Poul Anderson's "Requiem for a Universe," Harvest of Stars Tetralogy and Genesis. Unfortunately, quantum mechanical technicalities will intrude so I will not understand everything. Like Socrates, I am a conceptual philosopher, not a natural philosopher.

I might also reread The King of Ys by Poul and Karen Anderson although we have been all the way through that Tetralogy on this blog at least twice before. It is long and good and we are bound to find things to say about it that we do not remember having said before. The Tetralogy represents an earlier conceptual stage when people responded to ultimate realities by personifying them as the Three of Ys, the Olympians, Mithras and the new God born in the age of Augustus. The Nine Witch-Queens of Ys recognized that the heavens were changing.

Anderson's Time Patrol agents travel between eras:

"...a youth killed a bull, and the Bull was the Sun and the Man...

"...peasants readied sacrifice to an Earth Mother who was old in this land when the Aryans came, and that was in a dark predawn past. 

"...the mountains, haunted by wolf, lion, boar, and demon. It was too alien a place.

"...he wanted suddenly to run and hide, up to his own century and his own people and a forgetting."

-Poul Anderson, "Brave To Be A King" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 55-112 AT 7, p. 92.

"'They don't have our kind of Weltanschauung, remember. To them, the world isn't entirely governed by laws of nature; it's capricious, changeable, magical.'

"And they're fundamentally right, aren't they? The chill struck deeper into Everard."

-Poul Anderson, "Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks" IN Time Patrol, pp. 229-331 AT p. 254.

More to come but I am being cut off.

At Home

"Starfog."

"She'd spoken of Kirkasant so often that he felt he had almost been there himself." (p. 749)

See:

On Kirkasant 

I Remember Hermes 

Nostalgia For Ys 

 

Some people are familiar with Dublin from reading James Joyce's Ulysses.

 

"Doubtless [Kirkasant] had its glories, but by his standards it was a grim, dry, storm-scoured world where he would not care to stay for long at a time. Of course, to her it was beloved home..." (ibid.)

 

Exactly. Human beings have made themselves at home on every part of Earth so no doubt they can do it even on Kirkasant, especially after a lot of mortality, mutation and natural selection:

 

"Evolution galloped. Population exploded. In one or two millennia, man was at home on Kirkasant." (p. 730)

 

Love those two-word sentences. So much summarized in so few words.

I Remember Hermes

Mirkheim, Prologue, Y minus 24.

"Both moons of Hermes were aloft, Caduceus rising small but nearly full, the broad sickle of Sandalion sinking westward. High in the dusk, a pair of wings caught light from the newly set sun and shone gold. A tilirra sang amidst the foliage of a millionleaf, which rustled to a low breeze. At the bottom of the canyon it had cut for itself, the Palomino River rang with its haste; but that sound reached the heights as a murmur." (p. 5)

I like the wings gold in the light of the already set sun. A tilirra, a millionleaf and the Palomino River are referred to as if we knew them. Several colonized planets in Poul Anderson's Technic History become concretely realized places. It is as if we had been there. I remember Ys - and also Hermes, Avalon, Dennitza, Merseia etc. 

Poul Anderson And James Blish

See:

Unsanitary Conditions And A Long List

Temples Of Stars 

Event Police II 

Bureau, Service And Patrol 

Moralities

Directives 

Time Travel Organizations And Superior Beings 

The Dark Side Of The Time Patrol? 

Time Travel And Poul Anderson

 "Engineers I Hire."

Time And The Hereafter II

What Next? 

Emergency Conference

 

I searched the blog for references to James Blish, then, more specifically, for a post comparing Blish's Black Easter with Poul and Karen Anderson's The King Of Ys. I was hampered by the fact that I could not remember the title of that specific post but eventually found it, "Emergency Conference." But there are too many Blish references for me to link to them all. 

Aliens As Allies

See:

The Alien As Threat
The Alien As Threat II

I grew up with heroes and villains as:

Cops and Robbers
Cowboys and Redskins
Cavaliers and Roundheads
Allies and Axis
Astronauts and Aliens
Capitalists (?) and Communists
superheroes and supervillains

Comments
(i) That should be "Cowboys and Indians" but I wrote "Redskins" to get three "C and R" antitheses.

(ii) In the 1950s, we said "spacemen," not "astronauts."

(iii) My upbringing had taught me that Communism was bad and that its opposite was Capitalism but I remember realizing that I did not know what "Capitalism" meant. Some real learning had to start.

(iv) Romans and Barbarians could have been presented as another antithesis and probably was in some juvenile fiction. (It is also relevant to Poul Anderson and particularly to Poul and Karen Anderson's The King Of Ys.)

(v) We become sophisticated enough to realize that, in human-alien conflicts, it is not necessarily the aliens that are the aggressors. We do not mind when Ythrians kill Terrans in Poul Anderson's The People of The Wind. In "The Hall of the Mountain King," Chapter Sixteen, a kzin nicknamed Spots rips out a man's throat. However, Spots is an ally of our human hero, Jonah, whereas the man with throat ripped out is a bandit. Again, another bandit, about to machine gun Spots, has his head blown off by "Tyra-human," i.e., the woman, Tyra Nordbo. We have gone way beyond human beings versus aliens but that is what life is like. Alien and human barbarians sack Earth during the Troubles in Anderson's Technic History. See Baldics, Gorzuni And The Commonwealth.

Ancient Cities

"Once there was an ancient town called Carthage, inhabited by emigrants from Tyre, and confronting Italy, opposite to the mouth of the Tiber but far away."
-Virgil, The Aeneid (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1982), BOOK ONE, p. 27.

"Ys was a colony of Carthage which had been a colony of Tyre."
-see The History of Ys.

Manson Everard of the Time Patrol must ensure the destruction of Carthage, "Delenda est Carthago," but must also save Tyre from destruction by the time traveling criminals called Exaltationists.

Also in Virgil's opening pages, we find "Destiny" and "desire" on p. 27 and "...the spinning Fates..." on p. 28. Destiny and Desire personified and the three Fates are characters in Neil Gaiman's The Sandman.

Rereading Virgil, I remember Anderson and Gaiman.

A Satire

I have completely forgotten some earlier posts about Poul Anderson's A Stone In Heaven. Finding the concept of "a satire" in Chapter VIII, I remember that this same concept also appeared in Poul and Karen Anderson's The King Of Ys, then, searching the blog, I find:

Voices Within And Beyond
Ramnu And Eriu

The first of these posts makes comparisons with Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series;

its combox makes a comparison with another part of the Technic History;

the second post makes the comparison with The King Of Ys.

Thus, there is very little left for me to say here and now!

The Blue Carbuncle

Near Christmas (scroll down), we remember and might reread:

"A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens;

"The Blue Carbuncle" by Arthur Conan Doyle;

The Shepherd by Frederick Forsyth;

"The Season of Forgiveness" by Poul Anderson -

- and I am currently reading about Christmas 2078, just sixty years from now, in Julian May's Magnificat. Also, Poul and Karen Anderson's The King Of Ys begins and ends with the Birthday of Mithras.

Because Poul Anderson fans should be interested in Sherlock Holmes, I will now recount that Aileen, our daughter, paid for Sheila and me to attend a dramatization, interrupted by Christmas carols, of "The Blue Carbuncle" in the Shire Hall court room of Lancaster Castle this evening. Watson stood in a witness box to narrate. While he read aloud The Times report of a court case, the witnesses entered the box and spoke.

When Holmes lets the culprit go, he says:

"'I suppose that I am commuting a felony, but it is just possible that I am saving a soul.'"
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Blue Carbuncle" IN Doyle, Sherlock Holmes Two Complete Adventures (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1994), pp. 96-188 AT p. 187

- thus linking with the theme of "A Christmas Carol."

He also says:

"'Besides, it is the season of forgiveness.'" (ibid.)

Thus, Poul Anderson's Christmas story takes its title from a phrase in Doyle's.

(Another local note: in recent years, Nygel performed an abridged reading of "A Christmas Carol," accompanied by mulled wine, in a nearby library. This year, he is making Father Christmas phone calls to children and hopefully will review a Poul Anderson novel for this blog.)

Old Nova Roma

In Nova Roma, Aeneas, Virgilian System, Sector Alpha Crucis, Terran Empire:

the ashlars are grey but with a veneer of marble, agate, chalcedony, jasper, nephrite and more exotic materials;

window shutters are ornamented with brass or iron arabesques;

there are carved friezes, armorial bearings and grotesques;

erosion has mellowed and subtly harmonized everything;

wealthier buildings surround vitryl-roofed cloister courts with statues, plants, fishponds and fountains;

there are twisting streets and alleys and small plazas;

people walk, drive cars or ride horses or stathas.

We feel that we have been there. I remember "I remember Ys..." See here.

More On POVs

See POV and Narrative Points Of View.

Is there a moment in The King Of Ys when a viewpoint character leaves a room but we continue to be told what is happening in the room, thus raising a question about the status of the point of view (pov)? I remember posting about something like this but can't remember volume, chapter, details etc.

Poul Anderson's povs are usually tightly controlled. If a passage is narrated from the point of view of a character, then the omniscient narrator does not in that passage impart any information that is unknown to that character - unless anyone can find an example to the contrary?

I can illustrate what I mean by quoting from another author. At the end of Chapter 2 of Stieg Larsson's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (London, 2008), Lisbeth Salander guesses that it was Blomkvist's infidelity with Berger that had ended his marriage to Abrahamsson. In Chapter 3, in a passage narrated from Blomkvist's pov, we read:

"...he was helplessly drawn to Berger. Just as Salander had guessed, it was his continual infidelity that drove his wife to leave." (p. 56)

The author and the reader know of Salander's guess but Blomkvist does not. In fact, we read:

"Blomkvist had never heard of Lisbeth Salander and was happily innocent of her report delivered earlier that day, but had he listened to it he would have nodded in agreement..." (p. 57)

Thus, the pov is now that of someone writing later with access to what Salander said and to what Blomkvist thought on that day.

In a later volume of Larsson's Trilogy, we are told that two characters each independently known to us are in the same cafe but unaware of each other. Thus, this information at least is not imparted from either of their povs. This might be regarded as corner cutting. Another approach, requiring more words, is two point of view passages such that we read of character x in the cafe at a certain time, then of character y in the cafe at that time and thus realize that both were there at the same time.

Does Poul Anderson ever cut across povs to impart information in the way that I have shown Larsson doing?

Nergal And Others

Nergal is a god worshiped in Babylon in SM Stirling's Against The Tide Of Time and a demon in DC horror comics. See image and here. John Milton's Paradise Lost explains polytheism by stating that, when demons came to Earth, they not only tempted mankind but also masqueraded as all the pagan gods so that they would be, inappropriately, worshiped. Thus, Nergal as a Babylonian god and as a contemporary demon could be two parts of a single story. (Greeks explained Egyptian zoomorphic deities by stating that, when Titans attacked Olympus, the gods fled to Egypt and hid in animal forms.)

Poul Anderson wrote fantasies about Norse gods but not much about demons. The Devil's Game has a literal Devil or a powerful Devil-like being or a mental condition of one of its human characters. Anderson wrote a humorous short story about a scientist tricking a literal demon but I remember neither the title nor the plot. In Poul and Karen Anderson's The King Of Ys, Corentinus/St Corentin, the Christian minister in Ys, regards the Gods of Ys not as delusions but as demons, thus agreeing with Milton. If these Gods did exist, then some of their actions could indeed be described as demonic. The Sea God, Lir, is feared and appeased, not loved or thanked, and winds up destroying the city. In the Biblical narrative, the sea is the primordial chaos driven back by God at the creation.

The Ysan Gods, Lir in particular, have a similar unsettling feel to the demons in James Blish's Black Easter, although there are three differences:

the Ysan deities threaten the city, not the world;

they remain off-stage;

they are a Triad whereas Blish's demons number seven million, four hundred and fifty thousand, nine hundred and twenty-six.

The Following Morning: This post was not meant to be exhaustive but to seek out odd details like Nergal's dual nature and Blish's precise number of demons. However, for completeness, we should mention the demonic hordes in Anderson's Operation Chaos.

The Veil Of Subitj

The historical Pavle Subitj tells the fictional fantasy character, Vanimen the merman:

"'...I've worked harder than you imagine, to contain the news of you.'" (The Merman's Children, p. 147)

This is like the Veil Of Brennilis in Poul and Karen Anderson's The King Of Ys. By working hard to contain the news of a group of merpeople, Subitj "saves the appearances" of our history which has no record of such beings in Europe - except as legends.

Subitj continues:

"'Outside the Skradin vicinage, there go naught but rumors...Even when you join us, I'll strive that that happen quietly. No public tidings, no dispatches to King or Pope.'" (ibid.)

He does this because:

"'Did your story spread wide, excitement might easily take a dangerous turn.'" (ibid.)

And such excitement would more likely have been recorded. As it is, public, King and Pope will be kept in ignorance - and so are their descendants. In fact, Vanimen initially refuses this invitation for his people to be quietly and peacefully integrated into Western Christendom so what does happen to them? I must continue to reread but I do remember that some of the merpeople will remain free and wild and go West. Yet again, we would like another sequel.