Into The Hyborian Age

 

SM Stirling, Conan: Blood Of The Serpent (London, 2023).

The Conan Chronology is complicated.

This Titan edition of Stirling's novel also includes Robert E. Howard's shorter novel, Red Nails, to which Stirling's novel is a prequel.

Blood Of The Serpent begins with non-stop action: two fights inside a tavern and another while walking away from it. After that, there is development of the characters and their setting. Some chapter sections are narrated from Valeria's point of view instead of from Conan's.

We have read to the end of Part One (of Four) of Blood... and will shortly break off first to eat, then to attend a meditation group.

Conan invokes:

"'Lir and Manannan mac Lir!'" (p. 105)

- two deities that we know from Poul Anderson's works. Names of gods, countries and peoples in the Hyborian Age are an arbitrary mix of names that we know from later history.

We apologize for our abruptness.

In Bowness

Dahut, I, 2.

I am backtracking to the Hivernian narrative although, in this section, Niall is in Britannia, at Maia, Bowness on the Solway Firth as opposed to Bowness on Windermere with which I am more familiar but which did not exist that far back. It is mentioned that weather is the domain of Mandanan maqq Leri. The Andersons' note explains that this sea god was later called Manannan mac Lir. This same Manannan is a character in Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword which also mentions the sunken city of Ys. "mac" means "son of." Lir, of course, is one of the Three of Ys. Poul Anderson's five Norse fantasies, starting with The Broken Sword, should be read after the The King of Ys Tetralogy; after them, Anderson's Norse historical fiction trilogy, The Last Viking, then his three novels of different genres set in the fourteenth century. Before Ys, there are three novels of different genres set BC. That makes a total of eighteen volumes set in historical or prehistorical pasts, plus enough short stories to fill a further volume. This is comparable to the seventeen or so volumes of his Technic Civilization future history series. There is nothing here that I have not said before. The subject recurs occasionally when we cite cross-references in Poul Anderson's works. I will follow Niall's narrative forward through Dahut and might also have to hark back to Volumes I and II.

Kinds Of Crossovers

(i) The Tarzan and Earth's Core series intersect in Tarzan At The Earth's Core and the She and Allan Quartermain series intersect in She And Allan.

(ii) Characters from Poul Anderson's Carolingian, goetic and Shakespearean timelines meet in the Old Phoenix.

(iii) Death from The Seventh Seal emerges from a cinema screen in Last Action Hero.

(iv) British and Irish mythologies intersect because Arthur invades Ireland and Fionn fights Arthur.

(v) Irish Pagan and Christian legends intersect because Oisin, married to a daughter of Manannan (scroll down) mac Lir, returns to Ireland after three centuries in the Land of the Young and meets St Patrick.

(Manannan, Lir and Patrick feature in works by Poul Anderson.) 

Connections

I like to immerse myself in Poul Anderson's Technic History. Any detail, e.g., roof gardens on Earth, Aeneas, Avalon and Daedalus, suffices. There is also a continual interplay between the works of Anderson and of SM Stirling, e.g., it was a roof garden in the Emberverse that reminded me of several in the Technic History.

I often google historical or mythological references in either of these authors' works but do not always link from the blog to the search results. Presumably, other readers of either author can also google the references if they want to know more. However, here is one such link. Stirling's Orlaith reflects on:

"...Cliodhna's three sweet-songed birds..."
-SM Stirling, The Desert And The Blade (New York, 2016), Chapter Eighteen, p. 396.

The Wiki article connects Cliodhna with Manannan Mac Lir. Both Lir and his son, Manannan, play major roles in other works by Anderson. Thus, here is yet another connection, this time involving not Anderson's hard sf but his heroic fantasy and historical fiction.

Lugh

King Artos is compared to Lugh here.
Lugh is an aspect of the Wiccan God here.
Lugh is the king of a pre-Christian Irish pantheon here.
Lugh calls a divine council here.
Lugh is the foster-father of Manannan mac Lir and the father of Cu Chulainn. See here.
Lugh is an extragalactic alien in Julian May's Saga of Pliocene Exile. See Mythology here.
The Feast of Lug is explained in "Notes" on p. 468 of Poul and Karen Anderson, The King Of Ys: Dahut (London, 1989).

Two Gods And One Being

Manannan is humanoid (see image here) whereas Lir, never anthropomorphized, is sometimes described as three-legged and single-eyed but only to evoke "...something strange and terrible." (p. 122)
-copied from here.

Thus, Lir is a shapeless god of the chaotic sea. For more on Him, see here. He seems to have met His match in a Bronze Age sea god imagined by SM Stirling:

"The enemy ships were gliding closer. On each stern was a small platform with a statue on it, a grotesque juju with three legs, six arms, and a single staring eye - Arucuttag of the Sea, Lord of Waves, Master of the Storm, to whom the captains gave gold and man's-blood."
-SM Stirling, Against The Tide Of Years (New York, 1999), Chapter Eighteen, p. 282.

The captains throw gold into the sea? And practice human sacrifice? Some gods need to be reminded that we imagine/create them, not the other way around.

Apart from the arms, the physical descriptions of Lir and Arucuttag are identical: one eye and three legs. One eye means focus. Three legs mean mobility. It would be an easy matter for the Ysans to recognize these two deities as different Gods representing one Being. See here.

Divine Interventions

Imagine a world in which the gods directly intervened, in which a prayer to Neptune, Lir, Manannan or Aegir might sink an invasion fleet. Imagine that our world was like that in ancient times but that the gods have since withdrawn. Poul Anderson wrote some works of fiction in which that was literally true and others in which it was believed to be true. I have catalogued his volumes set in the past before and it is an impressive list:

BC
Ys
Vikings
The Last Viking
The Fourteenth Century
Many Times
Many Timelines
The Time Patrol

In haste. The weather has improved and we are at last going out for the afternoon.

In The Beginning...

The Irish god Manannan (see image) is the Son of the Ysan god Lir Who is the Son of Chaos which preceded cosmos. The idea of something before everything is mythologically powerful if logically contradictory:

in Norse mythology, there was a Void but then there were forces and entities in the Void;

the Rig Veda asks whether there was water there;

Genesis says that there was water there;

Milton's Satan flew through Chaos which was the "dark materials" for new creations;

in Narnia, there is Deep Magic from the Dawn of Time and Deeper Magic from Before the Dawn of Time;

in Alan Moore's Swamp Thing, magicians conjur the Original Darkness that was before the Creation, hoping that it will destroy Heaven;

in Mike Carey's Lucifer, some demonic alliances go back to the Original Darkness;

in Starfarers, Poul Anderson summarizes scientific cosmogony that does seem to account for the emergence of being from nothing. See here and here.

Lir

Roma Mater (London, 1989) by Poul and Karen Anderson confirms on page 271 that, as their names suggest, the Ysan sea god, Lir, is indeed the father of the Irish sea god, Manannan mac Lir. This gives an even greater unity to Poul Anderson's historical fantasies. There are two generations of gods:

the father is active in the Ys tetralogy;

the son is a character in two of the five "Viking" novels, The Broken Sword and The Demon Of Scattery.

What is Lir's parentage? The vestals sing:

" 'Lir of Ocean, dawn-begotten...' " (p. 124).

A summary of the origins of Ys suggests that Lir as a deity might have pre-existed his association with the sea:

"Lir, whose cult was more ancient than colony or tribe, took unto Himself the awe and dread of the sea." (p. 212)

Manannan is humanoid (see image) whereas Lir, never anthropomorphized, is sometimes described as three-legged and single-eyed but only to evoke "...something strange and terrible." (p. 122)

Of the Ysan Triad, Belisama, "the Brightest One," incorporating Ishtar-Isis, is the most comprehensive. She:

leads Taranis back from the dead to reconciliation with Lir;
is present at the act of generation;
ts the triple goddess;
leads the dead in the Wild Hunt.

These are most of the functions of a deity?

The Approach To Ys

In Roma Mater, (London, 1989) Poul and Karen Anderson carefully over several chapters establish the uncanniness of Ys. A nearby military commander agrees that it is odd that curiosity has never made him visit the city. But then he mentions damnable strangeness, grisliness, witch-queens and black magic and concludes, " '...I don't want to talk about it.' " (p. 86)

By contrast, Gratillonius is drawn towards the city without knowing quite what its "...marvels..." are. (pp. 82-83) It gives him an "...eerie thrill..." when, traveling through Gallia, he realizes that some unfamiliar local words must be Ysan in origin:

"They resembled none he had heard before, but stirred vague memories in him of names he had met when studying the history of the Punic Wars." (p. 97)

The Punic Wars are relevant because he has been told that the city was a Carthaginian colony. Before this, and shortly after Gratillonius has been told that Ys has "...nine witch-queens...," we read the short Chapter V in which the Nine are active on their "...desert island..." and we learn their names - Forsquilis, Vindilis, Bodilis, Quinipilis, Fennalis, Lanarvilis, Innilis, Maldunilis and Dahilis. (pp. 86, 89)

The Ysan boundary is marked by two ten foot granite pillars, the southern column inscribed in the Ysan alphabet, which Gratillonius cannot read, the northern in Latin, which he can. The latter invokes Venus, Jupiter and Neptunus. One of Gratillonius' men asks whether those old Roman gods still have power in this place but the Centurion explains that the Latin names are merely the nearest Roman equivalents to the Three of Ys, whose real names we read in Chapter V: Belisama (see image); Taranis; Lir.

Belisama is equated to Ishtar, Isis, Ashtoreth, Aphrodite, Venus and Nerthus and called "the Star of the Sea." This title, like the name "Nerthus" and the references to the Punic Wars, resonate for readers of Anderson's Time Patrol Series.

Chapter II, set in Hivernia, mentions the Irish sea god Manandan and the Notes give his full name, Manandan maqq Leri, later Manannan mac Lir. Under the latter name, this god is a character in Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword. "Mac Lir" means "son of the sea." The Ysan sea god is simply "Lir" - father of Manandan? Unlike Manandan, Lir is "...never given human shape..." and the description of "...three legs and a single eye, in the middle of His head...was only a way of bespeaking something strange and terrible." (p. 122)

Here we see at least two stages of religious development:

first, the worship of terrifying, uncontrollable natural forces (in the Bible, the sea represents pre-cosmic chaos, controllable only by divine power);

secondly, the deification of female and male humanity.

The stages are shown in the relative ages of the divine images. Belisama and Taranis are Roman-commissioned Greek sculptures whereas:

"The emblem of Lir was immensely older, a rough granite slab engraved with Celtic spirals." (ibid.)

When Gratillonius first sees Ys, he reflects that it is strange that he and his father had traded so close yet he had never glimpsed the city till now. These continual references to people not visiting Ys when they could have done turn out to be significant because the city is supernaturally "Veiled."

When he first sees the high, narrow, brightly mosaiced towers shining in gold, glass and copper, made dream-like by an oceanic haze:

"He could scarcely believe that human beings dwelt yonder, not elves or Gods." (p. 104)

- a fitting culmination to all the mysterious hints in previous chapters.

In Ys, Gratillonius, a Mithraist, can do what a Christian could not, marry nine women simultaneously and become the Incarnation of Taranis. However, there are tensions between Mithras and the Three and eventually an irreconcilable conflict.

Where do the Three, or other pantheons, go when they have withdrawn? Alan Moore gives us a joke realm, the Bide A Wee Dimension for Retired Deities, but Neil Gaiman's The Sandman series presents a more serious answer, involving the realms of Dream and Death. See here.

Gods Of Sun And Sea

If we read through Poul Anderson's historical novels and historical fantasy novels in chronological order of fictitious events, which I do think is a good way to read them, then we find that:

Mitra of the Sun was a powerful deity in the prehistoric period of Conan;

about 100 BC, Mithradates the Great had intended to initiate Eodan into the Mystery of the solar deity Mithras but Eodan left Mithradates' service first;

however, several centuries later, the British Roman Centurion Gratillonius had been initiated to the level of Persian;

Gratillonius married the Nine Witch-Queens of Ys, thus becoming King of that fabulous city which, however, was submerged when an enemy opened its sea gates;

meanwhile, Gratillonius' Irish contemporaries referred to merfolk, to the sea god Manandan maqq Leri (later Manannan mac Lir) and to the goddess Brigit;

a few centuries later, Skafloc Elven Fostering saw sea maidens and sunken Ys and Manannan mac Lir told him a story featuring a guest appearance by Brigit to the grandmother of a later witch-queen;

Odin (Eodan deified) at one point masqueraded as the Devil and in different periods interacted with Skafloc, Hrolf Kraki and Hadding;

in the fourteenth century, the last merfolk were exorcised from Europe;

the Devil made deals in the twentieth century;

in works set later than the twentieth century, environments are controlled technologically, not magically - supernatural beings and magical forces have withdrawn or never existed.

This level of interconnection, if we notice it, generates the impression of reading a single long series. I have referred to thirteen volumes, not counting the futuristic sf. The list grew while being written. In fact, the man Eodan in a historical novel and the god Odin in historical fantasy novels do not really belong in the same timeline.