Sound Effects

"The Sorrow of Odin the Goth."

The carved gods, beasts and heroes seem to move in the shifting shadows while:

"Whoo-oo said the wind, a noise as cold as itself." (p. 334)

As often in Poul Anderson's works, the wind comments on the action. I do not seem to have noted this example before. However, we have heard the sound "Whoo-oo" twice before (see here) (scroll down), once as a sound in battle and once yet again as the wind become almost a protagonist. It is said to whip Dahut as she runs through the streets of Ys.

Maybe some mentions of the wind are just mentions of the wind! When the Wanderer enters the hall:

"Wind flapped the edges of his blue cloak, flung a few dead leaves in past him, whistled and chilled along the room." (p. 339)

Maybe just the wind but also appropriate for the advent of Odin.

The Twin Horsemen

Anderson, "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 333-465, 372, pp. 333-341.

The gods carved on pillars are:

one-handed Father Tiwaz

Donar of the Ax

the Twin Horsemen

Odin displaced Tiwaz as Allfather. Tiwaz became Tyr, the god of war, the equivalent of Mars.

Donar was Thor.

Who were the Twin Horsemen? I do not seem to have asked this before. Are they to be identified with two Hindu figures? I do not know. Good Night.

Annals

At present, we are focusing just on Annals Of The Time Patrol because, for a while, it was the entire Time Patrol series. Later additions not only extended but also complicated the series.

Within Annals...:

The Guardians Of Time

"Time Patrol," Everard and Whitcomb

"Brave To Be A King," Everard and Denison

"The Only Game in Town," Everard and Sandoval

"Delenda Est," Everard and Van Sarawak

"Gibraltar Falls," Nomura, with Everard in a supporting role

A pattern, "Everard and -," is established, then broken. "Gibraltar Falls," although collected as Part III, was written a decade and a half later.

Time Patrolman

"Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks," Everard and Pum

"The Sorrow of Odin the Goth," Farness, with Everard in a supporting role

Both the pattern and its alternative return. "Ivory..." seems to feature Everard on his own but the supporting character, Pum, grows in importance, becomes Everard's partner and joins the Patrol.

Anderson's Technic History covers several thousand years of future history. The Time Patrol series covers a much longer period of time but is able to present only brief visits to a few periods.

Everard In Tyre

"Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks." 

In case any Exaltationists lurking in Tyre had the means to detect the arrival in the city of a timecycle, Everard took several days to travel there by ship in an appropriate disguise. On arrival, he would probably have immediately been killed by an Exaltationist assassin if not for the intervention of Pum. Would the Patrol have sent an Unattached agent to Tyre, knowing that he was going to be killed on arrival? I think that the following would have happened:

Everard sets out to depart from New York to 950 BC;

the Middle Command tells him not to go;

this does not prevent Everard from arriving in 950 BC, travelling to Tyre and being killed;

But it does free the Everard who has not departed from New York to pursue the Exaltationists by other means.

We know that the Patrol breaks its own rules in controlled conditions to achieve specific ends.

Pum And Gisgo

"Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks."

Gisgo survives the attack on the ship because Time Patrol intervention prevents the Exaltationists from shooting him in the water while he clings to his oar. But the Patrol knew when and where to intervene because Gisgo had survived to tell his story to Everard. The action of this story fits entirely inside circular causation within a single timeline.

Pum saved Everard's life when the latter was attacked by an Exaltationist assassin. Pum advised Everard to make contact with Sarai of the palace staff. Everard enquired about any exotic visitors to the court of Hiram's father, Abibaal. Sarai remembered that the under-groom, Jantin-hamu's, father, Bomilcar, had worked in the palace then. Bomilcar described the Sinim, who sound like Exaltationists, but said that they had died in a storm at sea. Pum tracked down Gisgo, who had survived the shipwreck, then volunteered to join the Patrol - although he did not know about the Patrol yet. Pum, placed in the doomed ship twenty six years earlier, informed a waiting Patrol squadron of the Exaltationist attack by radio. Thus, forty Patrol cycles were able to enclose seven Exaltationist cycles at the moment of the attack.

Captain Pummairam

"Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks."

Pum will become a Time Patrol agent in place and will marry both Sarai and Bronwen: all loose ends tied up neatly and together. When Everard/Eborix gives Hiram a gold ingot, he will ask for the slave Bronwen and her children, will free Bronwen and will give her a dowry. Pum will spend years at the Academy but will return to this same month as the sailor, soon to be Captain, Pummairam. If Sarai and Bronwen notice any similarity between Eborix's former assistant and their new husband, they will keep quiet. This is a very neatly ended time travel story that leads directly into the opening chapter of The Shield Of Time. When we read on p. 326 that the escaped Exaltationists would be hunted, this could just have meant that the work of the Patrol would continue but in fact there is a direct sequel in PARTs ONE and TWO of The Shield...

Pum And Adiyaton

"

"Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks."

When I had seen either a Back To The Future or a Star Trek film about time travel, I wanted to read something good about time travel so I reread "Ivory..." Poul Anderson knows the tricks of the trade. The mariner, Gisgo, tells Eborix/Everard and Pum about "'...an eldritch journey...'" (p. 314) One of the crew, Adiyaton, looked like Pum. Maybe it was his grandfather? No, that was Pum, as an alert reader might anticipate. Things in heaven like winged bulls with men on them swooped down. Timecycles. Flame raged between these dragons or flying chariots. Time Patrolmen fighting Exaltationists. Everard has just heard an account of the climax of the story when he and his squadron will defeat their enemies. After that, all the loose ends - Sarai, Bronwen and Pum - will be tied together and the reader will turn to "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth," a completely different kind of time travel narrative.

Gisgo's Souvenirs

"Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks," pp. 313-314.

a Babylonian cherub

a Greek syrinx

a faience hippopotamus from the Nile

an Iberian juju

a Northern bronze dagger 

An impressive list, especially since I had to google most of it. Of course we have heard of cherubim and jujus but what are they in detail?

The syrinx recalls a poem quoted by Aycharaych in Poul Anderson's A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows. The Time Patrol and the Technic History are Anderson's two greatest bodies of work so it is always good to bring them together.

A Tall Tale

"Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks."

"Over the years [Gisgo's] cronies had tired of hearing about his remarkable experience. They took it for just another tall tale, anyway." (p. 313)

This raises a moral question. Children learn to distinguish between true statements, lies and fictions but is there a fourth category: the yarn or tall tale?

Someone told me of an experience in India. I relayed it to a third party. The third party responded, "Jim tells a good story!" or "You didn't believe him, did you?" My response was annoyance not at Jim for lying to me but at myself for being taken in. In other words, I seemed to accept the legitimacy of the "yarn." Its characteristics are:

it is presented as a true story;

it is meant to be enjoyed but not believed;

even if believed, it does not deceive the hearer in any way that matters;

the hearer plays along, maybe by laughing or by expressing surprise, but does not contradict.

Is the yarn a legitimate narrative form intermediate between a lie and a fiction? 

Hiram And Solomon

"Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks."

To paraphrase Epsilon Korten:

Without Hiram's support and second-hand prestige, Solomon will be unable to hold his tribes together. The Philistines will take revenge. Monotheism will not survive. The Hebrew god will sink back into the pantheon.

Everard chips in:

That would eliminate much of Classical civilization. Judaism influenced philosophy and Greek and Roman historical events. No Christianity would mean no Western or Byzantine civilizations or their successors.

"'No telling what will arise instead.'" (p. 308)

Korten responds impatiently:

"'Yes, of course...'" (ibid.)

Impatience is warranted. Everard has no need to spell this out to Patrol colleagues but Korten cannot realize that Everard really speaks as he does for the benefit of Poul Anderson's readers.