Stonehenge

"Swindapa's lineage, the Kurlelo, lived by the Great Wisdom - Stonehenge - far south of here in Wiltshire on the open upland downs. By Fiernan reckoning, that made them the center of the world; the Kurlelo Grandmothers were the high priestesses of Moon Woman and students of the stars that revealed Her will. Those dry and sunny hills were thickly peopled and closely farmed as well..."
-SM Stirling, On The Oceans Of Eternity (New York, 2000), Chapter One, p. 16.

"The world" can mean the universe, the planet or society. In the third sense, where is the center? Rome? London? New York? The Great Wisdom? It depends when we are.

Stonehenge is:

built by a time traveler in Poul Anderson's The Corridors Of Time;
the center of the world to one section of ancient society, as Babylon is to another, in Stirling's Nantucket Trilogy;
visited by an immortal in Anderson's The Boat Of A Million Years;
duplicated by a playful protector in Larry Niven's Protector.

For some Anderson references, see here.

Stonehenge And China

I have just reread Poul Anderson's The Boat Of A Million Years, Chapter I, and posted about it but not mentioned Stonehenge because we have covered this before. See here. We hover on the brink of Chapter II which is set in China. The Chinese New Year takes a long time to start. We had a concert in the Grand Theatre last Sunday and there will be street performances, including the dragon, today. This will always be associated in our minds with Poul Anderson because of his character, Adzel.

There is no doubt about the setting of II, The Peaches of Forever, because, in its opening sentence, the Emperor sends an inspector from Ch'ang-an:

"To Yen Ting-kuo, subprefect of the Tumbling Brook district..." (p. 33)

- where it is early summer. Nowhere could be further removed from the northern climes where Pytheas and Hanno voyaged in Chapter I. Clearly from the start, Boat is a novel about mankind throughout the world and its history.

Local History

I propose to summarize a few details of British history that are shown in Poul Anderson's works, then to insert a few more details that I experienced today:

Malcolm Lockridge, time traveler, leads a tribal confederation that builds Stonehenge;

Lockridge also visits England during the reign of Henry VIII;

Hanno, an immortal, visits Stonehenge, in 310 BC and the court of the warlord Artorius in post-Roman Britain;

Poul and Karen Anderson's The King Of Ys shows us Britons, Britannia and Brittany (still called Armorica) in the fourth century;

Gunnhild spends time in York in the tenth century;

Manse Everard of the Time Patrol visits London in 1885, 1894 and 1944;

Everard had also been in London in 1943 before joining the Patrol;

"It turned out that even the Patrol knew little about the dark period when the Romans had left Britain, the Romano-British civilization was crumbling, and the English were moving in. It had never seemed an important one." (Time Patrol, p. 29)

What does "never" mean to the Time Patrol? If post-Roman Britain seems important to the London office in 1894, then they record its importance in archives that are accessible to the organization as a whole. In any case, Everard and Whitcomb must travel to Kent in 464 AD:

"Among the jostling Jutes, [Everard] spotted an occasional Romano-Briton, disdainfully picking a way through the muck and pulling his shabby tunic clear of contact with these savages." (p. 35)

What I learned today:

in the Lake District village of Grasmere, the church is dedicated to Oswald of Northumbria, King and champion of Christianity, who preached on the site and died in battle in 642;

the graves of the English poet, William Wordsworth (and see here), and other members of his family are in the church graveyard;

directly beside the church is a shop selling gingerbread made to a secret recipe;

the shop is in a building that, for 220 years, housed a village school founded in 1630;

Wordsworth and his wife and sister taught in the school.

As I have said before, we live history.

Late Evening Post

There is a time of the evening when you want to add one more post to the blog but do not want to have to do any more reading to do it. 

On BBC TV, Alice Roberts has just summarized theories about Stonehenge, including both the idea that the stones celebrate summer and life and also the opposite idea that they celebrate winter and death, the latter recently propounded by yet another TV presenter, Neil Oliver.

Poul Anderson's works cover many periods of history and also include two references to Stonehenge. Thus, TV viewing, like other reading, can be blog-relevant.

Domestics: laid up with a cold, although not too incapacitated to blog, I will have to miss a day-trip to London this Saturday.

"Thule" II

Poul Anderson, The Boat Of A Million Years (London, 1991).

I missed one example of experiential knowledge:

"'...that long hull would never survive the North Atlantic. My friend, you haven't seen waves or storms till you've been yonder.'" (p. 12)

Of course Pytheas has seen waves and storms, or he would not understand the words, but we also understand what Hanno means, that Atlantic weather must be experienced to be appreciated.

One of Pytheas' ships has a "...cutwater." (p. 13) The meaning is clear enough although I had not encountered the word before - except in previous readings when I did not notice it. Hanno wears a "...chlamys..." (p. 13). Pytheas tries to locate the north celestial pole with a "...goniometer..." (ibid.) Hanno, without access to ancient records, knows that the heavens change over the centuries.

Pytheas' expedition is threatened by Keltoi (p. 16). His soldiers include hoplites and peltasts (ibid.). The Keltoi turn out to be Pictones (p. 19). In narratives set on Earth in the past, Anderson always remembers seasonal weather:

"Autumn was in the wind, chill and loud. Leaves were turning yellow, brown, russet and beginning to fly away...Cloud shadows and pale sunlight sickled across immensities of sallow grass." (p. 20)

Pytheas and Hanno are shown Stonehenge. Pytheas knows that it is ignorance to say that "'...giants built it in the morning of the world.'" (p. 21) By sighting from the center of the complex, he deduces that the Sun will rise above an outer stone on Midsummer's Day but they cannot wait to verify this. Pytheas concludes:

"'I've learned as much as I can...It isn't enough! It never will be. Our lives are a million years too short.'" (p. 22)

He echoes James Blish's philosopher at the end of the universe pronouncing the epitaph for man: "We did not have time to learn everything that we wanted to know." (See the concluding section, here.)

When Anderson writes about autumn, we need no Internet but when he writes about a goniometer or a peltast, we wonder how we managed without it.

Via Lactea

Orion Shall Rise, CHAPTER SEVENTEEN, 4.

"...crowding constellations and the icy Via Lactea." (p. 307)

Yet another description of you know what. See The Milky Way Thread.

The women stand by the megaliths. Meanwhile, in other reading, John Constantine is driven past Stonehenge. Iern's foster-mother, Rosenn, reflects that:

"...the planet spun toward Northern winter and soon Orion would rise." (p. 308)

This passage parallels an earlier passage set in North America. See Wind And Waves. However, ironically, Rosenn knows Orion only as a constellation, not as a top secret Northwestern project. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN will at last disclose the nature of that project.

The Realms Of Lynx And Flower Feather

(Image of a flower feather.)

Poul Anderson, The Corridors Of Time (London, 1968).

Malcolm Lockridge/Lynx's contributions are more than human:

he is responsible for the capture of the Ranger Director Brann by the Wardens and of the Warden Koriach Storm by his own people;

thus, he is indirectly responsible for the deaths of both Director and Koriach and also, we think, for the loss of momentum in the Warden-Ranger conflict;

in twenty five years, Auri/Flower Feather and he have nine children of whom eight survive and four of the five boys become old enough to fight;

he founds "...a powerful, progressive confederation in the southwest [of England], which had even started a little tin mining to draw merchants from the civilized lands..." (p. 122), had persuaded southern farmers to stop "...those grim rites which formerly made them shunned..." (p. 121) and will erect "...a great temple on Salisbury Plain, as the sign and seal of their confederation" (p. 213);

he will spend twenty or thirty years building "...the same kind of league in Denmark." (p. 221);

he and Auri might even influence "...America, where the Indians were to tell of a wise kindly god and of a goddess named Flower Feather." (p. 222)

Comments:

We always wondered what Stonehenge was for.

On p. 122, Lynx knows of the "powerful, progressive confederation." p. 213 summarizes how he built it.

On p. 122, leaving England, he thinks "...with a pang here was where he belonged." It is where he belongs. His older self is already there.

On p. 210, he thinks of what he is losing and gaining:

"...he surrendered his country and his people, his whole civilization - the Parthenon and the Golden Gate bridge, music, books, cuisine, medicine, the scientific vision, every good thing that four thousand years were to bring forth - to become, at most, a chieftain in the Stone Age. He would always be alone here.
"But that, he thought, would mark him out for awe and power. Knowing what he did, he could work mightily, not as conqueror but as uniter, teacher, healer, and lawgiver." (p. 210)

Poul Anderson's Multiverse

The History of Technic Civilization
The Time Patrol series
The King of Ys tetralogy (with Karen Anderson)
The Corridors Of Time
The Boat Of A Million Years
Mother Of Kings
The Broken Sword

I list these works by Poul Anderson because I have had occasion to compare them in recent posts. These novels and series do not form a linear sequence because they are not even of a single genre. Nevertheless, they present a multidimensional set of interconnections:

two different versions of Ys;
a time traveler who builds Stonehenge and an immortal who visits it;
various periods of British history;
barbarians, slavers and Empires in the past and future;
characters who approach the origin of the Arthurian legend;
a secret agent in the Terran Empire and another in fourth century Europe;
villainous characters engaging our sympathy as they die in combat;
Witch-Queens and their Sendings;
the Time Patrol and Ys each have a "Nine," although these two groups differ in every respect!

Connections And Corridors

(What is wrong in the blurb reproduced in the image?)

Another connection: Stonehenge is built in The Corridors Of Time and visited in The Boat Of A Million Years. However, Corridors features time travelers waging war throughout history whereas Boat features immortals too few to do the same.

Chapter VIII of Boat introduces yet another immortal as she becomes a Buddhist nun and permanent pilgrim whereas Chapter IX reintroduces Svoboda as she ceases to be a Christian nun and convent-dweller!

Over the centuries, Aliyat has spent time in a harem, then in a brothel, whereas Svoboda has been in a convent - three ways for women to survive. They will live into a future when such means are no longer necessary.

Svoboda sees St Sophia in Kiev:

"...rising white and pale green in walls and bays, arched doorways and high glass windows, up and up to, yes, ten domes in all, six bearing crosses and four spangled with stars." (Boat, p. 141) (see image here)

"After that...she drifted like a rusalka beneath the water." (ibid.)

Two more connections: "...rusalka..." connects Boat to Anderson's The Merman's Children and Operation Luna, the latter the sequel to his Operation Chaos.

The Time Machine And The Corridors Of Time

Time is a direction of motion and a future society is based on an extreme pastoral-industrial antithesis.

The Time Machine by HG Wells
Late nineteenth century London;
Morlocks and Eloi;
beyond them, the Further Vision;
speculation about which period the Time Traveler went to.

The Corridors Of Time by Poul Anderson
The United States, 1965;
Wardens and Rangers;
beyond them, the time wardens;
Malcolm Lockridge leads the tribal confederation that builds Stonehenge and discourages human sacrifice during the transition from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age.

Did I mention before that Poul Anderson is Wellsian and is also a superb successor of both Wells and Stapledon?

Circularity in The Corridors of Time

We appreciate the ingenuity of circular causality paradoxes in time travel fiction but usually forget the details. Here, I summarise the paradoxes in a 1965 novel by Poul Anderson. I have omitted some details because they do not bear directly on the paradoxes.

Rival regimes called "Wardens" and "Rangers" from two thousand years in our future wage war through time and are the real cause behind historical conflicts like Catholics and Protestants or Cavaliers and Roundheads. They cannot change their past but hope, by manipulating social trends and subtly altering the balance of forces, to influence their future from which they are barred by their successors.

The Warden, Storm, tries to lead an attack into the Ranger homeland by driving a new time corridor through from the twentieth century. However, the Ranger, Brann, already informed about the new corridor, leads a counterattack down the corridor. Storm escapes alone and hires a twentieth century man, Lockridge, to accompany her to 1827 BC and the Danish village of Avildaro where they can await a ship to Iberia and thence to the Warden base in Crete. When an Aryan war party approaches Avildaro, Lockridge persuades Storm to stay and defend the village with futuristic weapons. He and she become prisoners of Brann who leads the war party with superior weapons and captures the village.

Brann predicts that Lockridge will change sides because it was he who had informed Brann of the new corridor and the flight to Avildaro. Lockridge escapes and brings Wardens who capture Brann and free Storm. Lockridge must then travel to the era of Wardens and Rangers and pretend to defect to the Rangers in order to tell Brann about the new corridor and Avildaro. Threatened with painful interrogation to confirm his story, he escapes and returns to Avildaro where Storm plans to build a Warden base in Stone Age Northern Europe by supervising the intermarriage of Sea People, from villages like Avildaro, with the Aryans.

Lockridge cooperates despite the unhappiness of his friends among the Sea People. Wardens Storm and Hu fly on gravity belts to investigate a large fleet approaching from England. In their absence, Lockridge finds that Brann is still alive but being painfully interrogated by the Wardens. On their return, he confronts them and is held under guard but he and a group of villagers escape when the English fleet attacks. Before leaving, Lockridge frees Brann from the interrogation machine so that he will die quickly. Lockridge leads his people to England twenty five years earlier, builds a progressive federation that he already knew of and leads the fleet that attacks Avildaro. Lockridge's wife from Avildaro, who returns with him, sees their younger selves fleeing from the village. Storm, captured, is bound and confined in the house from which she had ruled where she is strangled by the dying Brann who has just been freed by the younger Lockridge. Lockridge's confederation builds Stonehenge of which, of course, Lockridge had known in the twentieth century.

Comments

How easy is it to "escape" when held captive? Lockridge does it three times. The third time makes sense because his captors are under attack. If he had not escaped from Brann in Avildaro, then Brann would not have known to attack Avildaro. If Lockridge had not escaped from the Rangers in their own era, then their "psychic probe" would have extracted the truth from him. In that case, the Brann who had counterattacked in the time corridor and who had captured Avildaro would have known that he was to be captured and would have ordered other Rangers to recapture Avildaro as soon as Lockridge had departed for the Wardens' and Rangers' era.