The Ballad Of Brandobar

I envisage at least three passages by Poul Anderson adapted to screen:

the opening section of "The Game of Glory" (see an earlier post);

the introduction and conclusion of The Earthbook Of Stormgate;

The Battle of Brandobar from After Doomsday (St Albans, Herts, 1975, pp. 127-135).

James Blish commended how, having built up to a major space battle, Anderson then described that battle in a ballad written after the event.

The ballad comprises thirty five quatrains, rhyming abcb. Thus, the opening quatrain reads:

"Three kings rode out on the way of war
"(The stars burn bitterly clear):
"Three in league against Tarkamat
"Master of Kandemir." (p. 127)

(The ballad of John Barleycorn begins with "Three kings...")

The second line of each quatrain in the Ballad of Brandobar is:

"(The stars burn bitterly clear):",
"(The stormwinds clamour their grief)",
"(A bugle: the gods defied!)",
"(New centuries scream in birth)"

- or, in the concluding quatrain:

"(New centuries sing in birth)" (p. 133)

Anderson gives us the "Annotated English version" since the original was in Uru. The annotations are explanatory prose passages inserted between some of the quatrains, e.g.:

"Militechnicians can see from the phrasing alone..." (p. 129)

"The reference here is, of course, to the highly developed interferometric paragravity detectors..." (p. 130) etc.

Thus, I think there should be three voices:

one chanting the first, third and fourth line of each quatrain;
a second interrupting with each second line;
a third solemnly intoning the annotations.

We need sound effects for stormwinds, bugle, screaming and singing, visuals for "stars" and for the narrative, I think static graphics or brief animations to illustrate the story which includes:

"For the world called Earth was horribly slain..." (p. 128)

- and ends with:

" 'Have done, have done; make an end of war
" (New centuries sing in birth)
"And an end of woe and of tyrant rule -
"In the name of living Earth!' " (p. 133)

How dramatic is that?

The first quatrain is preceded by two paragraphs explaining that the ballad is "...the first important work of art...composed in Uru." (p. 127) Previously, this interstellar language had been use only for "...factual records, scientific treaties, or translations from planetary languages..." (p. 127) Should that have read, "...factual records, scientific treatises, political treaties, or translations..."? (I have noticed quite a few typos in my edition of After Doomsday.)

God And Dog

Back to the ballad of the battle of Brandobar: I said earlier that any screen adaptation would require one voice for the narrative lines, one for the repeating lines and one for the annotations. However, the narrative includes four speakers (Vorlak, Monwaing wisemen, Tarkamat and the wanderer chief) as well as a narrator so there should be seven voices in total.

Two of the repeating lines change.

"(New centuries scream in birth)" (pp. 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133)

- becomes at the end:

"(New centuries sing in birth)" (p. 133).

"(A bugle: the gods defied!)" (pp. 127, 128, 129, 131, 132, 133)

- becomes in the middle:

"(A bugle: the dogs defied!)" (p. 130),

but I imagine that this second change was a mistake?

There is one slight possibility that it makes some sense (but I don't think so). I characterised the alien races in After Doomsday as respectively avian, wolverine, arachnid, humanoid and centauroid. The Vorlakka, whom I called "wolverine" "...were supposed to be humanoid..." (p. 55). They are bipedal but covered in fur and their faces are "...bluntly dog-like, black-nosed, with carnivore teeth." (p. 55) So maybe "canine" would have been a more accurate description? - though not as implying quadrupedalism. So they might conceivably be the "dogs" that are being defied by Kandemir on p. 130?

A god-dog appears at least twice in European literature. Socrates, not wanting to take any god's name in vain, swore instead "by the dog" and was accused of introducing strange gods! He thus unwittingly introduced an anagram in English though not, of course, in Greek. (I remember a school acquaintance who would say, "I swear to God!", when all that he meant by this was, "I want you to believe what I am saying!" I prefer Socrates' caution against misusing divine names.)

I do not have this reference to hand but the hero of Aldous Huxley's Eyeless In Gaza, sunbathing on a flat roof with his girl friend, remarks, when a small private plane flies overhead, "They'll have a God's eye view of us," just before a dog falls from the plane. Spattered with blood, the character screams spontaneously, then, quickly recovering his customary ironic detachment, drawls, "Yet another reason to dislike dogs," thus souring his relationship with the girl friend.

When this novel was televised, my mother, who knew that I had read and liked the book, asked me, "What was the significance of the dog?" God's judgement on a shallow relationship? In any case, an ironic inversion of the hero's casual reference to God. The reader, or viewer, is never shown what had happened in that plane so that could be an incident in another novel.

But this has been a long digression from a probable typing error in Poul Anderson's novel so I will end it there.

Singing In Birth, Living Earth

After Doomsday, 13.

For each repeated line in "The Battle of Brandobar," we should see an appropriate image or hear a corresponding sound-effect. Thus:

"(The stars burn bitterly clear)" (pp. 103, 104, 104, 105, 105, 106, 107, 108, 108)

- the Milky Way seen from space.

"(The stormwinds clamor their grief)" (pp. 103, 104, 104, 105, 105, 106, 107, 108, 108)

- a very loud wind.

"(A bugle: the gods defied!)" (pp. 103, 104, 104, 105, 106, 107, 107, 108)

- a very loud bugle.

"(New centuries scream in birth)" (pp. 104, 104, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 108)

- the cry of a new-born baby.

And then, in the concluding quatrain:

"(New centuries sing in birth)" (p. 109)

- a beautiful voice singing;

- which should also accompany the concluding line:

"In the name of living Earth!" (p. 109)

The ballad could be effective on screen.

(Other reading: starting the eleventh Inspector Morse novel.)

1930

One advantage of blogging is that, if we forget to include a quote in a particular post, then we can include it in a later one. Yesterday, in a completely different context, I had read a passage that I had thought was highly relevant both to the twentieth century (in which it was written) and to future histories (written in that century). However, the context was so different that I had forgotten the passage when I wrote:

1930, 1950, 1990, 2000

In Italy in 1930, Antonio Gramsci wrote in one of his Prison Notebooks:

"The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born - now is the time of monsters..."

1930 was also the year of publication of Olaf Stapledon's Last And First Men. (See the first link above.)

We remember Poul Anderson's "New centuries scream in birth."

Future histories do not have villains as such. However, we remember political "monsters" in Poul Anderson's "Un-Man" and "The Sensitive Man" and in the real twentieth century! (Anderson's Technic History incorporated his Captain Flandry series in which the Merseians appeared as well-written although stereotypical green-skinned space opera villains but Anderson later transformed them into a more well-rounded and plausible alien species.)

In "1930, 1950, 1990, 2000," we mentioned that Jerry Pournelle's CoDominium future history chronology starts with Neil Armstrong in 1969 and that the CoDominium is formed in 1990. It follows from these data alone that, when this chronology was written, 1969 was past and 1990 was future. Future histories reflect their times.

Where To Next?

Blog-wise, we have passed from Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History to other future histories to what I call "future historical writing" and this has brought us back to Anderson's After Doomsday which will be our next blog rereading title although, here at Blog Central, other activities intervene such as gym this afternoon, Zen this evening and the monthly visit to Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop for a long afternoon tomorrow.

Also, in other reading, Somerset Maugham's World War I secret agent, Avenden, has just been sent to:

"X...the capital of an important belligerent state; but a state divided against itself; there was a large party antagonistic to the war and revolution was possible if not imminent. Ashenden was instructed to see what under the circumstances could be done..."

-Ashenden, 11, p. 214.

Appreciating the distance afforded by fiction, we pretend not to know exactly where X might be.

The problems of Avenden and of X are nothing compared to those of the returned spaceship crew at the beginning of After Doomsday. Sf writers know where we all have been - of course - and take us further.

"(New centuries scream in birth)"

-Poul Anderson, After Doomsday (New York, 1962), 13, p. 104.

Adversity and resistance.