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.)

The First Uru Work Of Art

After Doomsday, 13.

"The Battle of Brandobar," is an Uru ballad translated, with notes, into English. The Brandobar Cluster is between Vorlak and Mayast. The two sides in the battle were:

an alliance of Vorlak, Monwaing and lesser races;

the Kandemirian Grand Fleet, comprising clan units and non-Kandemirian subjects recruited as auxiliaries. (Numerically stronger than the alliance.)

Uru, one of the interstellar lingua francas, had previously been used for records, scientific treatises and translations from planetary languages but not for original literature.

Will the survivors of Earth be able to preserve the Bible and Shakespeare for translation into Uru? I understand that many people would be able to reproduce these works from memory alone but, in After Doomsday, the human population has been drastically reduced! However, one of the surviving ships will contain at least one Bible.

What can we say about "Brandobar" that we have not said before? Maybe not much but we should certainly reread it. Because the ballad comes immediately after Chapter 12, we understand very clearly what is meant by its second stanza:

"And the proudest king, the Vorlak lord,

"(The stormwinds clamor their grief)

"Had been made the servant in all but name

"Of a planetless wanderer chief." (p. 103)

And, of course, in an Andersonian work, the wind must make itself heard.

James Blish On Poul Anderson

Comparing Poul Anderson's works with those of his contemporary and fellow Campbell future historian, James Blish, has refocused my attention on Blish and I will shortly add to the James Blish Appreciation blog.

Blish commended Anderson's Tau Zero and After Doomsday. In particular, he appreciated the passage of the relativistic spaceship through the period of inter-destruction in Tau Zero and also the recounting of the Battle of Brandobar not in the narrative present but in a later-sung ballad in After Doomsday.

Although Blish understood that Anderson particularly liked his flamboyant merchant prince character, Nicholas van Rijn, he also thought that that character was about played out. However, I think that the van Rijn sub-series of Anderson's Technic History had just about come to an end by the time that Blish expressed that opinion. Because I had been a Blish fan long before I became an Anderson fan, I asked Blish's advice on reading Anderson and, as part of this, asked whether I should disregard Dominic Flandry. Blish agreed with this suggestion at the time! I now realize that it was entirely mistaken, of course. The Flandry series became much more than its earliest-written segment, the "Captain Flandry" series, which continues to be worth anyone's attention in any case.

Blish appreciated and made multiple references to CS Lewis. He valued the moral and psychological insights in That Hideous Strength and The Great Divorce and the chilling account of Weston's possession and damnation in Perelandra and, for these reasons, wished that Lewis had written more fiction. 

He also preferred ER Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros and Zimiamvia Trilogy to Tolkien's Middle Earth History. It seems that some readers like Eddison or Tolkien but not both. I could not get into Eddison and have read little Tolkien - The Lord Of The Rings only twice.

All of this is relevant to Poul Anderson. I regard CS Lewis' Ransom Trilogy as a Christian response to twentieth century science fiction falling, both chronologically and conceptually, between Wells and Stapledon earlier in the century and Blish and Anderson in later decades. And Anderson was transforming Norse mythology into modern fantasy at the same time as Lewis' friend and colleague, Tolkien - although more people know about The Lord Of The Rings than about The Broken Sword.

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.

The Plowman And The Parrot

"The stars burn bitterly clear."
-see The Battle Of Brandobar.

"The sky was utterly clear; men were indeed safe in this place. The constellations glittered in unfamiliar patterns. He could barely recognize the one they called The Plowman on Lochlann: its distortion made him feel cold and alone. The Nebula, dimming some parts of the sky and blotting out others, was somehow less alien."
-Poul Anderson, The Night Face IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 541-660 AT V, p. 594.

No Milky Way here. From Avalon, Sol is in the Maukh (see here).

"I had a notion that if I stayed here long enough to become light-adapted, I might even be able to make out a few of the simpler and more banal constellations. From here, for instance, you  ought to be able to make out Orion, and begin to catch distorted hints of the constellation the Sun belongs to from far away, called the Parrot. Only a computer can analyze our constellations in space; the eye can see nothing but the always visible stars, clouds and clouds of them, glaring and motionless..."
-James Blish, "And Some Were Savages" IN Blish, Anywhen (New York, 1970), pp. 75-103 AT p. 87.

Clouds of stars are an Andersonian image in a James Blish story.

Gods In The Galaxies

Chee Lan at Beta Crucis:

"'What a time to arrive!' she snarled. 'It couldn't be when the planet's decently far off from that bloated fire balloon. Oh, no! That'd be too easy. It'd put the gods to the trouble of finding somebody else to dump their garbage on. We get to go in while the radiation peaks.'"

-Satan's World, XI, p. 436.

 

THE BATTLE OF BRANDOBAR Annotated English version:

 

"(A bugle: the gods defied!)"

-Poul Anderson, After Doomsday (Frogmore, St Albans, Herts, 1975), p. 127.

 

Captain Gorbel of the R.S.S. Indefeasible:

 

"Gods of all stars, how he talked!"

-James Blish, The Seedling Stars (London, 1972), Book Four, p. 182.

 

Mayor John Amalfi and Miramon of the dirigible planet, He, in the Greater Magellanic Cloud:

 

Miramon: "'Surely the gods must have arranged such an accident, which otherwise is impossibly unlikely...'"

Amalfi: "'You were not once such a believer in the gods, as I recall...'"

Miramon: "'Opinions change with age; otherwise what is age for?'"

-James Blish, The Triumph Of Time IN Blish, Cities In Flight (London, 1981), pp. 467-596 AT CHAPTER THREE, p. 504.

 

Maybe if many races have pre-interstellar beliefs in particular pantheons, then a generalized reference to "the gods" will become part of galactic or even inter-galactic communication?

Yotl's Nest And The Wind

If there are intelligent beings on extra-solar planets, are they similar enough to humanity to drink in bars? Sometimes, although not always, Poul Anderson assumes so.

On Avalon, the Nest is a tavern for ornithoids.

"...the bluefaced skipper had growled to Flandry in the tavern on Orma." (Scroll down.)

-"The Plague of Masters," II, p. 8.

 

"'The day Yael Blum came back from Yotl's Nest and told v'at she had heard, a song being sung by a spaceman from another cluster...'"

-Poul Anderson, After Doomsday (Frogmore, St Albans, Herts, 1975), CHAPTER FOURTEEN, p. 140.

 

Anderson describes the ornithoids, the Nest and the blue-skinned Alfzarians but not the tavern on Orma or Yotl's Nest. Film-makers would have to invent. The singing space-hand in Yotl's Nest would have to be able to pronounce "Kandemir" and "Earth" correctly in order to sing the ballad, The Battle of Brandobar, the first important work of art composed in the inter-cluster language, Uru.

Yet again in a work by Anderson, the wind punctuates or comments on the dialogue. After mentioning Yotl's Nest, Sigrid Holmen refers to two special days in her life. The first was when she knew from the ballad that other human beings were alive. The second will be:

"'V'en my first-born is laid in my arms.'

"For a while only the wind blew, loud in the trees." (ibid.)

Quotations

Apart from Chapter Thirteen: The Battle of Brandobar, Annotated English version, every chapter in Poul Anderson's After Doomsday (St Albans, Herts, 1975) starts with an italicized quotation. Some are memorable.

One: "For man also knoweth not his time..." etc, Ecclesiastes, ix, 12.
Two: "It is the business of the future to be dangerous." Whitehead.
Three: "The horror of the human condition - any human condition - is that one soon grows used to it." Sanders.
Seven: "Then endure for a while, and live for a happier day." Virgil.
Ten: "A nation, to be successful, must change its tactics every ten years." Napoleon.
Eleven: "Kine die, kinfolk die..." etc. Elder Edda.
Fourteen: "Then I saw there was a way to Hell, even from the gates of Heaven." Bunyan.

Does anyone out there know whether the Sanders of Chapter Three is a real person? Or is he Poul Anderson using his occasional pen name of Winston P Sanders?

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.)

The Future Of Music II

See here the Atomic Rockets website, addressing space travel issues relevant to Poul Anderson's works. David Birr informed me of this website in the combox here.

In The Future Of Music here, I mentioned Spock's musical instrument. For an image of the Vulcan lyre, see "Future Music" on Atomic Rockets here.

For a quote of my post on Anderson's "The Battle Of Brandobar," scroll down "Future Music."

One or two coincidences there, I think.

Three Years

After Doomsday.

The text is very condensed. Three years pass between two chapters. In that time, human beings have led their allies to victory in the war against Kandemir. Grateful freed beings have let Donnan make his base on their planet. There has been time for the "The Battle of Brandobar" ballad to be composed and to be sung in another civilization-cluster where it is heard by the women of Terran Traders. 

Several TV series could be set in those three years (a "three year mission"):

the War against Kamdemir

Terran Traders

Songs sung and tales told in Yotl's Nest

What happened to the Russian ship

What happened to the Chinese ship with its sexually mixed crew

the British Commonwealth ship

Other human ships

Very like the way Star Trek developed.

Brandobar Revisited

I have reread Poul Anderson's After Doomsday as far its very dramatic:

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE BATTLE OF BRANDOBAR
Annotated English version

However, I find that this climactic chapter has already received extensive treatment. See here. 

Since it is nearly midnight on this part of the Earth's surface, I will sleep on this matter and add new thoughts, if any, tomorrow. 

Good night. Glory to the Emperor. Fair winds forever. High is heaven and holy.