"I will succeed to your throne — but what good is that? What good is anything?"
— Valgard
Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword is a rarity in popular speculative fiction in that it is one of the few works not influenced by Tolkien. Published in 1954, it hit the market around the same time as The Fellowship of the Ring and offers a very alternate lens through-which to view its genre.
While Tolkien dealt heavily in establishing an English mythology fashioned after its Norse counter-parts, Anderson deals heavily in Norse mythology; grimly so. The Broken Sword is soaked with blood and loss and tragedy and all the while lays under the shadow of the great doom which so perpetually hangs over the Norse cosmos.
I'll admit I wasn't exactly bucking at the fence to read this book; my perception of Tolkien and pre-Tolkien fantasy is of that rather Victorian, academic prose which stutters across the page with an almost audible clattering of type-keys. It's an unfair generalization; Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammet both came out of that era, but hey, Tolkien's prose doesn't exactly leap off the page - at least not to me. The novel opens with a weighty nod to the great Scandinavian Eddas - "There was a man called Orm the Strong, a son of Ketil Asmundsson who was a great landsman in the north of Jutland. The folk of Ketil had dwelt in Himmerland as long as men remembered, and were mighty landowners. The wife of Ketil was Asgerd, who was a leman child of Ragnar Hairybreeks. Thus Orm came of good stock, but as he was the fifth living son of his father there could be no large inheritance for him..." And from there it quickly blisters the page and finger as the plot picks up.
Poul Anderson writes with that same frantic energy that Robert E. Howard and Jack London and Fritz Lieber and the pulp authors seem to embody. The Broken Sword is stripped of superfluous materials, energetic and economic. Clocking in and just around 300 pages it takes the reader from the iron-aired coasts of Jutland to deep, English forests, to the wintry wastes of Trollheim and the fae beauty of Alfheim and faery and finally on a doomed quest deep into the icy hell of Jotunheim, Giant Land at the end of the world, and back. Anderson strikes from this sorcerous tapestry larger-than-life heroes and villains and damsels and everything in between. The two pivotal characters are Skafloc Elf-Foster and Valgard Berserker. The former is the son of Orm the Strong, stolen from home at birth by Imric, earl of England's elfs to be fostered and raised as a weapon; the latter the hybrid changeling left in his wake. Both characters develop deeply over the course of the narrative and both are suitably deformed by Fate and forces far greater than the mortal and immortal powers operating on earth.
Valgard is born with Skafloc's likeness, but bereft of empathic reflex and human sensibilities. He is cast adrift from his heritage; soulless and doomed to a death without afterlife. His descent into villainy is merely a reflex action, vengeance in accordance with Norse conceptualizations of honour upon the forces which brought him into the world so twisted. Skafloc seems at first blessed but quickly is cast in a similar light. Both are manipulated by witches, elfs, trolls, Aesir and Jotun. Like the mythic heroic figures of the actual Sagas they struggle fruitlessly against their destinies, often their principles sink them even deeper to their doom.
I absolutely devoured this book - occasionally without chewing, as I am wont to do - I will have to re-read at some point and savour some of Anderson's spectacular prose a little more deliberately. There are so many brilliantly pioneered concepts here it's difficult for me to begin talking about them. The concept of faery - that it co-exists almost inter-dimensionally with Earth, invisible save to those with witch-sight - that the bluffs and knolls, mountain faces, or crag-ridden fells of the European countryside could reveal themselves to be prismatic Aelfheim kingdoms in just the right light... the elves, similar and yet drastically different from Tolkien's, more like their mythological counter-parts, lithe and alien - trolls are here splendidly horrific.
I'm going to digress momentarily here by stating that the female characters are handled with excellence unexpected from a work written in the 1950s, and when love is introduced into the narrative it is as believable and tragic as can be expected. The Broken Sword can be seen as a kind of fractured bildungsroman in its own way, with its human characters becoming adult and less vulnerable than their childhood selves through layered tragedies and missteps until they are barely recognizable from those to which we were introduced in the early chapters.
Great heroes perform great deeds, exalt in victories and suffer defeat; there is a frantic war between all beings of faerie, from Chinese demons who can only move in straight lines to more Euro-familiar dryads and Greco-Roman fauns. Neil Gaiman's American Gods must have picked up aspects of this, and Moorcock's doomed hero Elric seems far less unique and interesting in the shadow of the novel which influenced him. There is also high adventure of a thrilling sort - I don't want this appraisal of the book to come as a doomy, gloomy, ponderous shamble into unearthly tombs. When Skafloc sets out in a long-boat alongside the Irish sea-god Mananan to seek out the frozen bluffs of Jotunheim beyond world's end and find the blinded Giant who can re-forge the broken blade with spells and fire, my hair was standing on end. Poul Anderson is at his best when he's writing no holds barred Heroic fantasy and this is probably one of the better examples I've picked up and put down.
It takes a certain amount of skill to write such dismal subject matter but move the plot along so fantastically as to have your reader grin broadly the whole way. It's a testament to the fact that stories need not be morally uplifting to be uplifting at all. Stories need to be true to their characters. If things don't or do work out in the end, it should be because the characters' flaws are taken into account. It's what allows a reader to sympathize and emotionally invest in the narrative.
I now interrupt this review to explain to you how the ending of Predators (2010) is a perfect example of how to fail in this regard.
Spoiler alert.
As the movie (which wasn't at all that bad) came to a close, I expected it (contentedly) to end like so: Adrian Brody's asshole character takes off on his own in an attempt to escape the planet, while leaving the more noble IDF-chick to defend the wounded Topher Grace. Brody's character has been an amoral, selfish mercenary throughout, and in terms of his character arc this really should have been the last straw pushing him past the moral event horizon. At this point, Brody should have been killed horribly (either shot out of the sky while taking off, or caught, or eaten by some loose plot thread; or whatever). The IDF-chick should either have then died defending Topher Grace, or survived and as the credits rolled looked up at the falling parachutes signifying another hunting season and another trial.
Why?
Because it is not enough to make moral choices under the pretext that everything will turn out alright; moral choices are made because they are morally right. By refusing to abandon Topher Grace, the IDF-chick deviates from the course of self-preservation and becomes heroic. Brody cements himself as a irredeemable coward and his future ceases to matter. What kind of guidance do young audiences get out of a plot-line like this? That you can be as much of a selfish scumbag as you want your whole life so long as you perform one good act at its curtain call? In the theatric ending, Topher Grace is revealed to be a serial killer and in true soppy, pedantic Hollywood fashion Adrian Brody comes back guns-blazing in a fit of out-of-character guilt directed by a moral compass that never existed to save her. I'm not going to delve much deeper into my discomfort with Christian notions of redemption and morality. After Phillip Zimbardo conducted the Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971 he began studying the psychological roots of 'evil' and heroism and concluded true heroism as a deviation, the moral equivalent of swimming against the current, sort of echoing the old 'men who do nothing' adage. The video can be found here. In Greek mythology heroes are punished for their crimes - Heracles must seek penance for the murder of his wife and son; he is not redeemed on any other account. I think it is a far nobler concept.
But what matters here is characterization, I'll stop digressing. In any case, I really should be writing a paper right now. Ta!
Valgard is born with Skafloc's likeness, but bereft of empathic reflex and human sensibilities. He is cast adrift from his heritage; soulless and doomed to a death without afterlife. His descent into villainy is merely a reflex action, vengeance in accordance with Norse conceptualizations of honour upon the forces which brought him into the world so twisted. Skafloc seems at first blessed but quickly is cast in a similar light. Both are manipulated by witches, elfs, trolls, Aesir and Jotun. Like the mythic heroic figures of the actual Sagas they struggle fruitlessly against their destinies, often their principles sink them even deeper to their doom.
I absolutely devoured this book - occasionally without chewing, as I am wont to do - I will have to re-read at some point and savour some of Anderson's spectacular prose a little more deliberately. There are so many brilliantly pioneered concepts here it's difficult for me to begin talking about them. The concept of faery - that it co-exists almost inter-dimensionally with Earth, invisible save to those with witch-sight - that the bluffs and knolls, mountain faces, or crag-ridden fells of the European countryside could reveal themselves to be prismatic Aelfheim kingdoms in just the right light... the elves, similar and yet drastically different from Tolkien's, more like their mythological counter-parts, lithe and alien - trolls are here splendidly horrific.
I'm going to digress momentarily here by stating that the female characters are handled with excellence unexpected from a work written in the 1950s, and when love is introduced into the narrative it is as believable and tragic as can be expected. The Broken Sword can be seen as a kind of fractured bildungsroman in its own way, with its human characters becoming adult and less vulnerable than their childhood selves through layered tragedies and missteps until they are barely recognizable from those to which we were introduced in the early chapters.
Great heroes perform great deeds, exalt in victories and suffer defeat; there is a frantic war between all beings of faerie, from Chinese demons who can only move in straight lines to more Euro-familiar dryads and Greco-Roman fauns. Neil Gaiman's American Gods must have picked up aspects of this, and Moorcock's doomed hero Elric seems far less unique and interesting in the shadow of the novel which influenced him. There is also high adventure of a thrilling sort - I don't want this appraisal of the book to come as a doomy, gloomy, ponderous shamble into unearthly tombs. When Skafloc sets out in a long-boat alongside the Irish sea-god Mananan to seek out the frozen bluffs of Jotunheim beyond world's end and find the blinded Giant who can re-forge the broken blade with spells and fire, my hair was standing on end. Poul Anderson is at his best when he's writing no holds barred Heroic fantasy and this is probably one of the better examples I've picked up and put down.
It takes a certain amount of skill to write such dismal subject matter but move the plot along so fantastically as to have your reader grin broadly the whole way. It's a testament to the fact that stories need not be morally uplifting to be uplifting at all. Stories need to be true to their characters. If things don't or do work out in the end, it should be because the characters' flaws are taken into account. It's what allows a reader to sympathize and emotionally invest in the narrative.
I now interrupt this review to explain to you how the ending of Predators (2010) is a perfect example of how to fail in this regard.
Spoiler alert.
As the movie (which wasn't at all that bad) came to a close, I expected it (contentedly) to end like so: Adrian Brody's asshole character takes off on his own in an attempt to escape the planet, while leaving the more noble IDF-chick to defend the wounded Topher Grace. Brody's character has been an amoral, selfish mercenary throughout, and in terms of his character arc this really should have been the last straw pushing him past the moral event horizon. At this point, Brody should have been killed horribly (either shot out of the sky while taking off, or caught, or eaten by some loose plot thread; or whatever). The IDF-chick should either have then died defending Topher Grace, or survived and as the credits rolled looked up at the falling parachutes signifying another hunting season and another trial.
Why?
Because it is not enough to make moral choices under the pretext that everything will turn out alright; moral choices are made because they are morally right. By refusing to abandon Topher Grace, the IDF-chick deviates from the course of self-preservation and becomes heroic. Brody cements himself as a irredeemable coward and his future ceases to matter. What kind of guidance do young audiences get out of a plot-line like this? That you can be as much of a selfish scumbag as you want your whole life so long as you perform one good act at its curtain call? In the theatric ending, Topher Grace is revealed to be a serial killer and in true soppy, pedantic Hollywood fashion Adrian Brody comes back guns-blazing in a fit of out-of-character guilt directed by a moral compass that never existed to save her. I'm not going to delve much deeper into my discomfort with Christian notions of redemption and morality. After Phillip Zimbardo conducted the Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971 he began studying the psychological roots of 'evil' and heroism and concluded true heroism as a deviation, the moral equivalent of swimming against the current, sort of echoing the old 'men who do nothing' adage. The video can be found here. In Greek mythology heroes are punished for their crimes - Heracles must seek penance for the murder of his wife and son; he is not redeemed on any other account. I think it is a far nobler concept.
But what matters here is characterization, I'll stop digressing. In any case, I really should be writing a paper right now. Ta!
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