THE DAWN OF THE MAGICAL ERA

 To be more specific, it's the dawn of my term "magical-era stories," which takes the place of the former term "magical fantasy stories." I introduced that term in the essay-series MIND OUT OF TIME, which wrapped up here. In that essay I provided this rationale for reworking the term "fantasy" so that its dominant exemplars, like CONAN and LORD OF THE RINGS, fall into a more specific category of fantasies that take place in an era that validates magic over science:

Thus I am saying that magical fantasy stories recapitulate the sense of a space and time far from our own profane world, where all wonders spring from the loins of magic. This world can be entirely divorced from our own, as with Middle-Earth, or it may also be a very abstracted version of some distant historical era, like the unspecified Arabian setting of ALI BABA AND THE FORTY THIEVES. The world may display an author's scrupulous intent to center all the fictional events within a specific historical period, as Marion Zimmer Bradley does in THE MISTS OF AVALON, or it may utilize a hodgepodge of historical eras, like the teleseries XENA WARRIOR PRINCESS. The fidelity to history is only important according to the creative priorities of any given author, and often the religious sources of magical fantasy stories may also be a hodgepodge of material from different historical periods, as is said to be the case with both the Arthurian corpus and the Thousand and One Nights. 

  The more I thought about in the ensuing months, calling something a "magical fantasy" didn't speak specifically to my formulation: that certain fantasies are categorically different than others in that the former evoke an archaic era in which magic supervenes science. Thus, "magical-era stories" at least specifically references my main concept.  

The two types described above also broadly describe the way magical-era fantasies were structured. The narratives we commonly call "myths" tend to emphasize large-scale events, some of which take place largely in the worlds of the gods, of the heights of Olympus or the depths of Hades. In contrast, many folktales tend to be more limited in scope and deal with ordinary humans encountering supernatural presences. However, in keeping with today's review of Jack Vance's DYING EARTH, I should mention one other form of archaic fantasy that indirectly influenced many pop-cultural descendants: the apocalyptic fantasy that describes the final fate of the profane world, seen in both the Norse Ragnarok and the Christian Book of Revelations. To the best of my knowledge there were no archaic apocalypses that involved the concepts of science, because such concepts had yet to become systematized. Modern "futuristic" magical-era stories can't avoid being influenced by science-fiction tropes, which is the case with both DYING EARTH and its literary ancestor, Clark Ashton Smith's ZOTHIQUE. More on these matters later, perhaps.

CROSSING GODS PT. 4

 As a quick coda to CROSSING GODS PT. 3, it occurs to me that. although I may find uses for the terms I introduced there, there's a simpler line I might draw in the sands of shifting alignment, at least with respect to modern usages of all types of traditional narratives, be they myths, folktales, or legends. 

If a given modern narrative attempts to substantially represent a traditional story's plot action-- that is, making some attempt to be "canonical"-- but alters the scenario by bringing in extraneous elements, or rearranging elements within the actual canon, then that is a crossover. Thus, of the earlier examples cited, the 1952 QUEEN OF SHEBA would be a "re-arrangement" type, in which the (probably political) marital alliance of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba is reworked so that Sheba never marries Solomon but rather hooks up with the king's son Rehoboam, who's in the Solomon narrative but not with that role. The examples with extraneous elements would include the movie NOAH, which imports Tubal Cain from a different Biblical story to serve as the story's villain, and the 1980s CLASH OF THE TITANS, which the story of Perseus is merged with elements from the narratives of Achilles and Bellerophon.

However, if there is no substantial attempt to be canonical, then what one has is an "open canon" created of whatever elements appear in an aligned set of traditional stories. Thus Marvel-Thor can meet any character from Norse mythology or folktales, and there is no crossover-tension. Even though the Thor of Myth may never have encountered the Surtur of Myth (so far as we know from surviving texts), Marvel-Thor can meet any Nordic traditional figure, from any time period, and it won't be a crossover. However, when he meets Hercules or Shiva, traditional figures from other myth-cosmoses, that's a crossover.

The "open canon" principle would also hold for my example of THE IRON DRUID CHRONICLES from the first CROSSING GODS. The entirely fictional hero of this series, Atticus, is a master of Celtic magic, so any purely Celtic myth-figure he encounters is a null-crossover. But when he meets the pale horseman of Christian Revelation, that's a crossover of the innominate kind. Ditto Marvel's Daimon Hellstrom meeting any entity purely native to the Judeo-Christian tradition. Null-crossovers would include Satan and all traditional figures from that cosmos, probably including even icons from other pantheons who were demonized by early Jews and Christians (Baal, Astarte), but would NOT include icons from completely different traditions, such as the Egyptian Anubis and the Celtic Morgaine LeFay.         

         

THE LARGE AND THE SMALL PT. 2

 Neologism Neurosis time again-- 

In Part 1, I discussed the way "scale," with respect to the number of pivotal icons in a narrative, affected the tenor of different literary genres. I was talking specifically about the disparate ways readers and critics react to the polarized fantasy-subgenres of J.R.R. Tolkien's "epic fantasy" and Robert E. Howard's "sword-and-sorcery." Some poking around revealed that there are actually jargonistic ways of talking about scale in the sciences, where "macroscale" means "large scale" and "microscale" means "small scale." But coinages like "macroscale-icons" and the opposing neologism are both cumbersome.

I'll note in passing that Tolkienian "epic fantasy" has sometimes been marketed as "high fantasy," though I'll bet nothing has ever been marketed as "low fantasy" even though critics have bent their brains about what the "high/low" distinction ought to connote. I won't endorse the dichotomy here in any way. "Low" carries irrelevant negative connotations, just as I mentioned in Part 1 that antonyms for words like "epic" and "expansive" usually have negative connotations. But going back to the contrasted examples of THE ILIAD and THE ODYSSEY, there's nothing intrinsically negative about the latter narrative following the destinies of one main character and a couple of pivotal support-characters, rather than charting a huge panoply of pivotal characters as does the former. The humbler "microscale" endeavors of Sir Gawain in GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT possess what I'll call an "intensive" quality, a quality not possible for any single story in the macroscale world of Malory's MORTE D'ARTHUR-- "intensive" being more or less opposed in my mind to "expansive."

I may as well mention that these distinctions about "large scale/expansive" vs. "small scale/intensive" certainly don't apply only to magical fantasy stories. The first literary opposition that occurred to me was that of the "expansive" MOBY DICK of Melville and the "intensive" LIGHT IN AUGUST of Faulkner, and I'm sure that there are thousands of other potential examples. 

So "expansive/intensive" is a possible jargonistic application, which I may or may not keep exploring. I will note that when I was looking at other words that carried the tonality of "epic," I was very attracted to both the words "panoramic" and "panoptic." Both certainly characterize Tolkien and his emulators, and "panoptic" is likeable because the essence of expansive narratives is that they give the reader the sense of participating in a huge number of viewpoints, i.e., lots of "eyes" with their own interpretations. By comparison, Howard and his emulators offer readers a more circumscribed number of eyes-- but here too, there's no good antonym for "panoptic." If I wanted to bring that word into my jargon-verse, I'd have to make up another neologism, such as "oligoptic," based on the Greek word-element "oligo" for "a few." So for the time being, if I use any terms at all, I'll describe "macroscale iconicity" as "expansive" and "microscale iconicity" as "intensive."

Of course the actual readership of fantasies will inevitably keep using the familiar terms of "epic fantasy" and "sword-and-sorcery." Yet even while I admit that fact, I'll still maintain that sword-and-sorcery holds "intensive narrative tendencies" with other subgenres that focus on small casts of characters, like PINOCCHIO, GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT, and the majority of both rural "folktales" and citified "literary fairy tales."        

Yet if I wanted to change all the marketing terms to suit me, what would I choose? It would have to be something straightforward, and the first thing that comes to mind is the way 20th-century pop fiction was given shorthand terms based on elements widely common to the genres involved: "horse operas" for westerns, "space operas" for science fiction. So what would be the dominant elements that I would use, not only to distinguish expansive fantasy from the intensive type, but also to bring together all those subgenres I thought fell under the aegis of the intensive type?

Two words, sometimes used to mean the same thing, occur to me: "quest" and "journey." But in my view, a "quest" is intrinsically an organized endeavor, often by several people as in MORTE D'ARTHUR and LORD OF THE RINGS, to accomplish a specific end. In contrast, a "journey" need not have a specific end. It can have such, as when Gawain wanders about trying to figure out how to avoid falling victim to the Green Knight's ax. But the prose versions of both Conan and Pinocchio travel from adventure to adventure, often giving their readers a sort of guided tour of a particular world's weird wonders. A "journey" can also be performed by an ensemble-- the two heroes of Fritz Leiber's, the four kids of Lewis's first Narnia book-- but I'd generalize that if an author goes over six pivotal characters in his ensemble, he loses his ability to "intensely" focus on the fortunes of a handful of characters.    

So "quest operas" would be my preferred term for both LORD OF THE RINGS and THE ILIAD, though in the latter, the quest is for the Greeks to find a way to conquer Troy, which is possible through both the reclamation of Achilles (in Homer) and the invention of the Trojan Horse (in other works of the so-called "Epic Cycle").     

And "journey operas" take in CONAN THE CONQUEROR, THE ODYSSEY, PINOCCHIO and "Jack the Giant Killer."    

THE LARGE AND THE SMALL

 Responding to an online comment to my reprinting CUTTING REMARKS ON SWORD-AND-SORCERY on a forum:

_______________

 I'd agree that there's no way to know what subgenre has intrinsically greater variety-- one can always imagine infinite variations on any theme-- so I might modify my statement to say that there was the *perception* of epic fantasy having greater variety, just because of the difference in *scale* between the oeuvre of Tolkien and that of Howard.  

"Scale" is a tough thing to define, but it might be more accurate overall. I did an antonym-check on both the word "epic" and the emotional tonality it usually carries for me, that of being "expansive," and almost all the antonyms to both make the thing opposite look rather crappy, with the most value-free ones being things like "humble" or "restrictive." 

We know, though, people started calling Tolkien "epic" simply because the RINGS story involves a ton of characters and moving parts in comparison with less "expansive" fare like Conan. But one has to be cautious about implying that there's nothing "epic" about Conan. The REH story "People of the Black Circle" sets up the Cimmerian to defeat a circle of evil mystics out to conquer the world. I'm re-reading DC's 1970s barbarian-comic CLAW, and after three or four episodic stories someone unleashes a destructive demon on the world, and it's up to hero Claw and his sidekick to find the mystic items that can expel the critter. So really the only thing "small-scale" about a S&S story is usually that it involves fewer starring and supporting characters than the "large-scale" kind. At the same time, being "small-scale" allows a hero, or pair of heroes, to get involved in comparatively small-scale conflicts, like Good Ol' Conan Brown trying to plunder a great tower and releasing an enslaved entity in "Tower of the Elephant." Is an "epic fantasy" short story even possible?

In FLAME Murphy quotes from the prologue of an S&S collection, SWORDS AND DARK MAGIC, in which the editors made a very limited comparison to the two famous epics of Homer, saying simply, "If high fantasy is a child of THE ILIAD, then sword-and-sorcery is the product of THE ODYSSEY." This is a fine insight because even though we call both Homeric poems "epic," clearly ODYSSEY is just dealing with the struggles of one man and some supporting characters (the family back on Ithaca) facing an epic array of entities, while in ILIAD one might call Achilles the central character but the story devotes almost equal space to twenty or so "support characters," including Odysseus. Murphy then takes the editors' insight in some untenable directions, but nothing that demolishes the validity of the original idea.

Of course, even calling S&S "small-scale" doesn't define that much. As you point out, Jack Vance's Cugel books, which I haven't read for many years and which Murphy also cites, don't contain much swordplay, focusing on a "hero" who often outwits enemies rather than outfighting them. For that matter, there are a lot of fantasies that no one would term "S&S" that are also "small-scale," like literary fairy tales: PINOCCHIO, BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. Yet a few folktales involve pitched combat, like the folkloric "Jack the Giant Killer." A lot of knights-in-armor fantasies of the medieval era have the same plot structure as barbarian stories-- solitary hero rides around getting into trouble-- and don't involve major "epic" actions like finding the Holy Grail, and I wondered which if any of these Howard might have read, even in bowdlerized forms. 

On top of all that, having lots of characters doesn't mean a story is more complex. I read the first three SHANNARA books over 20 years ago, and I remember nearly nothing about them, while by comparison I recall a lot more incidents even from simple "Clonan" books by writers like Jakes and Fox, not because those books were great but because this or that incident held visceral appeal.

I may amuse myself trying to think of neologisms for "stories with many pivotal characters" and stories with few pivotal characters," but there's probably no new term that will ever change the status quo.

 

          

 

LANGER AND EMULATION PT.2

In this 2022 post, I briefly described a few ways in which I differed from the statements Susanne Langer made in the section I quoted here. To sum up my main line of critique, I stated that I felt that the "unknown creators" of both archaic religious myths and folktales possessed the ability to allow "their imaginations to roam freely," but that both forms of narrative also channeled epistemological patterns, though myths tended to develop those patterns more "thoroughly." So I disagreed with Langer's essential claim: that tales were focused wholly upon "wish fulfillment" while myths encompassed "a world picture, an insight into life generally, not a personal imaginary biography." What I liked about her formulation is that she distinguished between the tales' supposed reliance upon "subjective symbols" and the myths' predilection for "observed folkways and nature-ways." Though I did not say so in the 2022 post, the subjectivity that Langer attributes to tales may be loosely comparable to my concept of a narrative's "lateral meaning," while her focus upon "folkways and nature-ways" parallels my criteria for "virtual meaning." That demonstration of an intersubjective pattern of thought between myself and a deceased scholar I never knew prompts me to indulge in this "compare-and-contrast" game.                                                                                          

But none of the above relates to the topic of emulation, which I've raised in my title. As it happens, 2022 was also the year I began writing a lot more about crossover, agency, and interordination, as in this August post. In that post, I used two iterations of Steve Ditko's originary character The Question to formulate the concepts of "trope emulation" and "icon emulation." To shorten the argument a bit, I said that when Alan Moore conceived Rorschach, his variation on The Question, he was in no way asserting any identity between his character and Ditko's character. Rather, what Moore did was to borrow tropes from Ditko's character and from other sources in order to create an independent icon. This, I asserted, was trope emulation. But when Denny O'Neil created his variation on the Ditko crusader, he attempted to assert an identity between his creation and that of Ditko, if only for the sake of impressing fans of the older creation. This, I asserted, was icon emulation.                                 

Since Langer was in no way attempting to form a general theory of literary narrative, naturally she started from a different place than I did. But I find it interesting that. rightly or wrongly, she characterizes all the figures of folktales as entities completely independent of one another, claiming that they are little more than the functions of various wish-fulfillment scenarios. This I regard as "trope emulation," though with the caveat that in my system characters like Cinderella are not just functions, but icons in their own right, no matter how much they fluctuate from one iteration to another. In the case of myth-figures, Langer regards that they are capable of merging with one another because "myth tends to become systematized; figures with the same poetic meaning are blended into one, and characters of quite separate origin enter into definite relations with one another." This I regard as "icon emulation," and there's even a loose parallel of purpose. Just as O'Neil promulgates his version of "a Question" but some but not all of the poetic tropes of the Ditko character, Irish Christians promoted a saint called Brigid in order to appeal to a laity familiar with a pagan goddess of the same name. There will probably be a few other points of comparison, because whatever my disagreements with Langer, I find her fertility of mind on matters mythopoeic to be equal to that of Jung and Campbell.

LANGER AND EMULATION PT.1

 I thought that I had gone into some detail regarding Susanne Langer's views of the distinctions between "myths" and "tales," but my previous posts on Langer don't seem to cover those distinctions in depth. In any case most of those earlier posts predate my formulation of the concept of "emulation," so that's as good a reason as any to start from scratch. Since the passage I'm reprinting from her 1941 book PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY is so long, I'll confine this post to preserving the passage as a resource from which I'll draw for Part 2.                                                                                                                          Here we have a literary product belonging to the civilized 

races of Europe just as much as to the savage cultures of darker 
continents. Aristocratic beings, chiefs or princes, now play the 
leading role; dragons and ogres and wicked kings, or beautiful 
witches of great power, replace the monkeys, crocodiles, angry 
dead men, or local cannibals of the older tradition. The wish- 
ful imagination of man has been disciplined, by public expo- 
sure and realistic reflection, into a genuine art-form, as far re- 
moved from personal dreaming as the ritual dance from self- 
expressive bouncing and shouting. 

Yet this high development of fantasy has brought us no- 
where in the direction of mythology. For although fairy-story 
is probably an older form than myth, the latter is not simply 
a higher development of the former. It, too, goes back to prim- 
itive fantasy, but the point of its origin from that source Ues 
far back in cultural history, long before the evolution of our 
modern fairytale — of Kunstmarchen, as the Germans say, or 
even Volksmarchen. It required not a higher stage of story- 
telling, but a thematic shift, to initiate what Miss Harrison  

called "the myth-making instinct."                                                              For the fairytale is irresponsible; it is franlily imaginary, and 

its purpose is to gratify wishes, "as a dream doth flatter." Its 
heroes and heroines, though of delightfully high station, 
wealth, beauty, etc., are simply individuals; "a certain prince," 
"a lovely princess." The end of the story is always satisfying, 
though by no means always moral ; the hero's heroism may be 
slyness or luck quite*as readily as integrity or valor. The theme 
is generally the triumph of an unfortunate one — an enchanted 
maiden, a youngest son, a poor Cinderella, an alleged fool — 
over his or her superiors, whether these be kings, bad fairies, 
strong animals (e.g. Red Riding Hood's wolf), stepmothers, 
or elder brothers. In short, the fairytale is a form of "wishful 
thinking," and the Freudian analysis of it fully explains why 
it is perennially attractive, yet never believed by adults even 
in the telling. 

Myth, on the other hand, whether literally received or not, 
is taken with religious seriousness, either as historic fact or as 
a "mystic" truth. Its typical theme is tragic, not Utopian; and 
its personages tend to fuse into stable personalities of super- 
natural character. Two divinities of somewhat similar type — 
perhaps miraculously born, prodif'ious in strength, heroically 
defeated and slain — become identified ; they are one god under 
two names. Even those names may become mere epithets link- 
ing the god to different cults.  

This sets the hero of myth strikingly apart from the fairy- 
tale hero. No matter how closely the Prince Charming of 
Snow White's story resembles the gentleman who wakens 
Sleeping Beauty, the two characters do not become identified. 
No one thinks that the trickster "Little Glaus" is the little 
tailor who slew "seven at a stroke," or that the giant whom 
Jack killed was in any way related to the ofjre defeated by 
Puss in Boots, or that he figured elsewhere as Bluebeard. Fairy 
stories bear no relation to each other. Myths, on the other 
hand, become more and more closely woven into one fabric, 
they form cycles, their dramatis personae tend to be intimately 
connected if not identified. Their stage is the actual world — 
the Vale of Tempe, Mount Olympus, the sea, or the sky — and  

not some ungeographical fairyland...And myth has, indeed, a more difficult and more 

serious purpose than fairytale. The elements of both are much 
alike, but they are put to quite different uses. Fairytale is a 
personal gratification, the expression of desires and of their 
imaginary fulfilment, a compensation for the shortcomings of 
real life, an escape from actual frustration and conflict. Be- 
cause its function is subjective, the hero is strictly individual 
and human; for, although he may have magic powers, he is 
never regarded as divine; though he may be an oddity like 
Tom Thumb, he is not considered supernatural. For the same 
reason — namely that his mission is merely to represent the 
"self in a day-dream — he is not a savior or helper of man- 
kind. If he is good, his goodness is a personal asset, for which 
he is richly rewarded. But his humanitarian role is not the 
point of the story; it is at best the setting for his complete so- 
cial triumph. The beneficiary of his clever acts, his prowess, or 
his virtue is he himself, not mankind forever after. And be- 
cause an individual history is what the fairytale fancies, its 
interest is exhausted with the "happy ending" of each finished 
story. There is no more mutual reference between the adven- 
tures of Cinderella and those of Rapunzel than between two  

separate dreams. Myth, on the other hand, at least at its best, is a recognition 

of natural conflicts, of human desire frustrated by non-human 
powers, hostile oppression, or contrary desires; it is a story 
of the birth, passion, and defeat by death which is man's com- 
mon fate. Its ultimate end is not wishful distortion of the 
world, but serious envisagement of its fundamental truths; 
moral orientation, not escape. That is why it does not exhaust 
its whole function in the telling, and why separate myths 
cannot be left entirely unrelated to any others. Because it pre- 
sents, however metaphorically, a world-picture, an insight into 
life generally, not a personal imaginary biography, myth tends 
to become systematized; figures with the same poetic meaning 
are blended into one, and characters of quite separate origin 
enter into definite relations with each other. Moreover, because 
the mythical hero is not the subject of an egocentric day-dream, 
but a subject greater than any individual, he is always felt to 
be superhuman, even if not quite divine. He is at least a de- 
scendant of the gods, something more than a man. His sphere 
of activity is the real world, because what he symbolizes belongs 
to the real world, no matter how fantastic its expression may 
be (this is exactly contrary to the fairytale technique, which  

transports a natural individual to a fairyland outside reality) .                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Hmm, guess that will teach me the formatting perils of copying from a PDF. More shortly.

PHASED AND INTERFUSED PT. 6

In Part 4 I discussed a couple of modern pop-fiction films that used phase shifts to re-arrange the position of Biblical figures so that a given superordinate character became subordinate, etc.

I found myself recently applying the same logic to the traditional story of Little Red Riding Hood, or, as the story is named by Charles Perrault in the first recorded written version, Le Petit Chaperon Rouge. Various authorities aver that Perrault built up the element of the red cape, for reasons one can only imagine. I suspect that when the story opens, he also provided a touch of verisimilitude that oral stories usually don't bother with:

As she was going through the wood, she met with a wolf, who had a very great mind to eat her up, but he dared not, because of some woodcutters working nearby in the forest.

This is probably an implicit answer to any skeptic who might wonder why the wolf didn't just eat Little Red on the spot. An oral taleteller probably would not have bothered to provide a reason for the wolf's motives but instead would have simply emphasized the ritual nature of the setup and the resolution. Such storytellers also might not have bothered with the moral Perrault applies to the story's conclusion, which ends with the wolf simply devouring Red after having eaten her grandma.

Moral: Children, especially attractive, well bred young ladies, should never talk to strangers, for if they should do so, they may well provide dinner for a wolf. I say "wolf," but there are various kinds of wolves. There are also those who are charming, quiet, polite, unassuming, complacent, and sweet, who pursue young women at home and in the streets. And unfortunately, it is these gentle wolves who are the most dangerous ones of all.

Moral or no moral, I think most of the traditional versions emphasize Little Red as the superordinate icon, while the Wolf is a subordinate one. Little Red is meant to be the sacrificial innocent, whether she's slain or saved, and the whole setup of the Wolf-in-Grandma's clothing argues against the story originally being very responsive to verisimilitude. If we were dealing with a tale where things made sense-- even allowing for a world where beasts can talk and put on clothes when they please-- then Little Red ought to run out of the door of Grandma's house the moment she sees the Wolf dressed as an old woman. But she doesn't run: she puts forth one question after another, and the Wolf responds with a repetitive litany. The litany is certainly meant to build suspense at the very least, but it also creates the sense of Red being an innocent who's powerless against the forces of evil-- possibly masculine evil, if one reads the story in those terms.

Popular retellings, many of which are comedies, can go either way. In one of the Jay Ward FRACTURED FAIRY TALES, Red is still the star, but she's a conniving jezebel who's seeking to skin an innocent wolf. 

However, the 1947 Terrytoons short "The Wolf's Pardon" focuses purely on the Wolf. He gets out of prison for his persecutions of both the Three Little Pigs and Little Red. He quickly finds that things have changed, for the Pigs kick the Wolf's ass and he learns that Red, though mature now, is a man-hungry "uggo."

An ever weirder phase shift appears in both of the HOODWINKED animated comedies. The original Riding Hood narrative gets tossed out the window, and in both films Red, Grandma and the Wolf all end up as allies against a common foe.

 

MYTHCOMICS: "MARY MARVEL GOES OVER THE RAINBOW" (WOW COMICS #14, 1943)

This 1943 tale, written by Otto Binder and probably drawn by his brother Jack, is "metaphysical" in the sense of taking discriminate phenomena and attributing abstract aspects to them. I analyzed a story with a similar trope-- that of "light versus darkness"-- in THE PERIL OF PAINGLOSS. Here Mary Marvel encounters a war between "color" and "blackness," the latter to be understand in the visual sense, as the absence of all color perceptions.

In her civilian ID of Mary Batson, the heroine reads a newspaper story in which a reputable scientist claims that the legend of the "Pot of Gold at the Rainbow's End" is real. Mary, being patriotic, wonders if this treasure could be used for America's war effort. At the same time, a crook named Porky Snork talks his gang into seeking out the same golden horde. Meanwhile, Mary finds out that the person claiming to have seen the pot of gold is not reputable science-guy Tinkerman but his self-important son Creighton.

When Porky and his thugs show up, Mary changes into her heroic identity, but can't manage to stop the malcontents from stealing the balloon Creighton meant to use to track down the rainbow's end. Mary flies after the balloon, towing Creighton behind her, perhaps less for his guidance than for his potential for comedy relief. When both protagonists and antagonists arrive at rainbow's end, they learn that the rainbow actually creates the pot of gold, as all the colors of the spectrum "drip" off the rainbow and coalesce into the fabled treasure.

Mary contends with the petty thieves, and the balloon drifts to the top of the rainbow, where all see a colorful city dwelling. Mary rather rashly punctures the balloon, and the crooks fall from the basket. However, the greedy men are rescued by a "Batplane" piloted by Mister Night, a mysterious figure in black. Mary clouts the new villain, but he escapes with Porky's gang, so Mary and Creighton decide to investigate the city. It turns out to be inhabited by "sky spirits" whose purpose is to dispense color to the mortal world.

King Color informs Mary that Mister Night was exiled from Rainbow City, and that he's probably planning some fell scheme against his former brethren. Sure enough, Night has apparently been waiting around for some plug-uglies to fall into his lap, since his first gambit is to send the thugs after Jack Frost.

(Jack Frost, incidentally, comes into the matter because there was a tradition in which the frosty fellow was portrayed as being the entity who "painted" plants with autumnal colors.)

Mary thwarts the thugs but Mister Night rescues them, while revealing that his real purpose was to kidnap "Aurora, Spirit of Dawn." The dark villain's true plot is to eliminate all colors from the mortal world, so that he can become Earth's ruler. Mary flies to "Night Land" to rescue Aurora, without whom dawn can't transpire on Earth. However, for all her myriad powers, Mary can't see in absolute darkness. She changes to her human self so that the magic lightning will illuminate the landscape. The same light allows Night to see and capture the intruder. However, because the story's running out of space, the fiend doesn't take the time to either clobber or gag Mortal Mary. She easily "shazams" her way back to her super-powered ID and slugs Night, though he escapes into the darkness of his domain. 

With Aurora returned to her celestial duties, all that's left is the wrapup, as Porky's gang once again tries to acquire the pot of gold (with the use of a toboggan, yet), only to be captured by Mary. She also returns Creighton Tinkerman to his home, though one can wonder how much approbation he received for the discovery of Rainbow City, whether Mary donated the pot of gold to the war effort or not. I haven't found evidence that Mister Night ever returned, though Binder helpfully equates the shadowy evildoer with real-life world-beaters like "Hitler and his henchmen."

The inventiveness of Otto Binder's story is underscored by the writer's clear avoidance of the standard association of "pots of gold" with "leprechauns." How this association came to pass has received some online speculation, and I rather like (without necessarily advocating) the idea that rainbows became associated with wealth because at times heavy rainfall might uncover buried gold. Of course that's probably too reductive by half, and the real correlation is probably all sorts of supernatural spirits have been tied to underground stores of wealth, whether of natural or man-made provenance. Binder makes a strong association between "wealth" and the pleasures humans feel at the variety of natural colors, and extrapolates those pleasures into a race of color-bestowing spirits. Of course, the title suggests that Binder was aware of the use of the phrase "Over the Rainbow" in a famous song for the 1939 WIZARD OF OZ. There aren't any strong similarities between this story and the OZ film, though of course the latter also foregrounds the experience of prismatic beauty. It's interesting, though, that he includes Jack Frost as one of these dispensers of color-beauty, because when Frost paints plants with autumnal hues, that presages the "temporary death" of such plants worldwide, when Winter, the time of darkness, holds sway. I suppose Binder could have had Mary capture Mister Night like she would any common troublemaker. But it's fitting that he did not do so, since the darkness symbolizing Death is inextricably intertwined with the forces that bring forth light and Life.   

THE READING RHEUM: THE WINTER OF THE WITCH (2019)

In my reviews of the first two books in Katherine Arden's fantasy-trilogy set in medieval Russia, I registered some minor complaints about the thoroughness of Arden's conception of her villains, in contrast to the rich detail she provided for main heroine Vasya Petrovna, her supporting characters, and the mysterious death-god Morozhko the Winter-King. While I maintain that Koschei, the main villain of the second book, could have used some improvement, the culminating book of the trilogy expands greatly on both "Medved the Bear," the evil spirit of the first book, and on his sibling-like relationship to Morozhko. I believe that Arden was doling out just enough information in the first book to establish that particular conflict, while the culminating novel provides greater context to the status of both deity-like beings, who seem to exist in a world in which gods spring forth from the beliefs of human beings.

A complaint I had about Book 2 was that I felt the character of Vasya's brother Sasha, who was given a detailed backstory in Book 1, was reduced to being a purely reactive presence when he once more encountered his sister. Since Sasha became a Christian monk at a young age while his sister allied herself to the pagan mysteries of her people, I thought Arden neglected to develop how each character represented different facets of the Russian experience of religion, with respect to both the early folkways and the more piety-based beliefs of Orthodox Christianity. Arden never does use Sasha and Vasya as opposed spokesmen for their belief-systems, though arguably another monk, the subordinate villain Konstantine, fills that role, at least partly. But in WINTER it's clear that though Arden wasn't interested in a philosophical comparison of belief-systems, forming a "detente" between the two conceptions may be the defining narrative trope of the entire trilogy. In fact, in Arden's "author note" at the end of WINTER, she makes clear that she grounds her theme in her interpretation of Russian culture.

There are some minor faults in WINTER as well: after raising the prospect that at some point the sorcerously-inclined Vasya may be obliged to induct her young niece into the mysteries of witchcraft, but this plot-point dwindles at novel's end because there's so much else going on. But Arden delivers on the more important plot-elements, not least the ambivalent romance between Vasya and the immortal, inhuman spirit called Father Frost. I confess I didn't foresee how Vasya would ultimately deal with her opponent Medved, and since I knew little about Russian history, I didn't anticipate that Arden was reworking certain real-world medieval events into a fantasy-tapestry. I don't know what if any reaction the trilogy may have received from actual Russian readers. But Arden's syncretic union of Russian history with famous myth-figures-- Father Frost, the Firebird, Baba Yaga-- might be viewed as parallel to J.R.R. Tolkien's desire to use magical fantasy to formulate a "myth of England."

THE READING RHEUM: THE GIRL IN THE TOWER (2017)

 

I was stoked enough by Katherine Arden's THE BEAR AND THE NIGHTINGALE to invest time in the second part of the trilogy. Though I've been a member of a couple of book groups for years, giving me exposure to various authors of the current century, it's been extremely rare that I've liked the first novel in any trilogy enough to follow up on its next chapters.

THE GIRL IN THE TOWER follows immediately on the events of NIGHTINGALE, focusing upon the exploits of protagonist Vasya Petrovna, a young woman seeking to chart her own destiny. Vasya is forced to depart from the township she's occupied with her family for her entire life, and to strike out on her own, in part because her talent for seeing the spirits of households and woodlands have caused her people to label her a witch. Of course, having consorted with Morozhko, the spirit of winter and death, also puts Vasya somewhat beyond the pale of ordinary experience. Her adventures implicitly have a modern feminist subtext, in that Vasya does not wish to be confined to the only two dispositions of young women in medieval Russia: lawful marriage or the convent. Yet, in marked contrast to the majority of feminist writers, Arden causes the reader to identify with Vasya's plight on a personal level, rather than using the heroine as a chess-piece to illustrate an ideology.

Unfortunately, other characters in TOWER have less organic substance than Vasya, and many of them exist largely to play limited roles in the "game" of the novel. Possibly I had this reaction because in NIGHTINGALE, Arden conjured forth a rich tapestry of Vasya's home life and her relations with all of her family members, even with the history of the mother who died birthing her. In addition, the woodlands around the township seemed alive with strange spirits, and dominated by an ongoing conflict between the demonic "Bear" of the title and his brother-deity Morozhko. 

In TOWER, though, Arden places her heroine in a position where her supernatural gifts are at a disadvantage. Because medieval Russia exercises Muslim-like restrictions on the freedoms of women-- which is what the metaphor of "the girl in the tower" references, rather than any particular event in the narrative-- Vasya can only seek her destiny by masquerading as a boy. In this guise, circumstances force her to visit Moscow, where she encounters two of her family members, a brother and sister, who have become highly placed in the court of the current Tsar. Though in NIGHTINGALE the brother was strongly sketched even though he only appeared in a few early chapters, this time he has no character-arc beyond reacting to Vasya's predicaments. Additionally, Konstantin, a secondary villain of the first novel, appears in TOWER as well, but his development is also superficial.

I complained in my first review that the principal opponent was not well defined, and this is even more so of TOWER's main villain, who unlike the Bear is fairly well-known in major Russian folktales: the sorcerer Koschei the Deathless. Arden accurately reproduces the primary story-tropes associated with the character, but he never comes alive, least when the author tries to tie him into the mysterious maternal side of Vasya's family. Yet once Arden finally gets all of her chess-pieces in the positions needed for the big climax, she does deliver a killer conclusion, with a "eucatastrophe" perfectly in line with Tolkien's theory about the purpose of fantasy.

At some point I will probably read the third book in the trilogy. I speculate that its strongest myth-trope will be the same as that of the first two books: that of the relationship between involving the impossible relationship of Vasya and the Spirit of Death, inhuman, and yet given a patina of humanity by his contact with the young woman. 

THE READING RHEUM: THE BEAR AND THE NIGHTINGALE (2017)

THE BEAR AND THE NIGHTINGALE is the first part in a trilogy by Katherine Arden, based upon Russian folklore and set in medieval times. In contrast to the majority of 21st-century fantasy and SF novels I've read in recent years, this one is distinguished by a strong interaction of both plot and characterization.

Most of the action takes place in a compound near a rural village, where the local boyar ("lord") Pyotr Vladimirovich ministers to the people under his beneficent rule. Arden devotes almost as much time to describing the members of Pytor's family as one would see in one of the classic Russian novels of the 19th century, but the one family member crucial to the story is Pyotr's daughter Vasya (loosely based on a character from Russian folklore, one Vasilisa). 

Though the village, like the rest of Russia, subscribed to the Orthodox Christian faith, old pagan ways are covertly observed by the peasants, and Vasya herself finds that she has a talent for seeing the miniscule sprites that inhabit the house and stable. She grows to womanhood while her sisters and brothers are maneuvered into marriages that are good for the family's betterment. In addition, circumstances force her widowed father to make a second marriage to a high-placed royal named Anna, who becomes something of an "evil stepmother" to Vasya. However, Vasya's main opponent is the "Bear" of the title, a malignant entity that feeds on fear and seeks to fill human hearts with terror. The Bear subverts an overly gullible Christian monk, thereby using Christian ethics to reduce the power of the house-spirits-- thus placing mortals within the Bear's control.

Though the Bear is Vasya's principal opponent-- she even summons the various spirits of house and forest against the evil force near the climax-- the Bear himself is not that well defined. Arden does much better in depicting the chancy relationship between the young proto-witch and Morozhko, the spirit of winter and death, and brother to the Bear-spirit. Arden certainly patterned the bulk of NIGHTINGALE after various Russian tales of "Father Frost," and some of her other conceptions seem more derivative of modern fantasy-tropes. Incidentally, the "nightingale" of the title is a bird whom Morozhko transforms into a horse that he gives to Vasya, though said bird-horse doesn't really play a big part in the novel. In all likelihood Arden wanted to foreground the horse for future stories, just like some of the details about Vasya's family aren't important here but may become important to the other two parts.

Vasya ends the novel in a non-fairy-tale manner, for she remains an independent woman at novel's end, rather than completing some romantic arc. In fact, though Arden probably did not intend to draw parallels with popular fiction about "girls and horses," it may be no coincidence that though Vasya can talk to many types of spirits, she communes only with one type of animal: horses. Maybe a better title for the novel would have been THE WILD GIRL AND HER STABLE OF STALLIONS.

MIND OUT OF TIME PT. 3

 At the end of MIND 2.5 I wrote:

But for now it's more important to move on to the matter of why the presence of the magic-accepting society is as important to the category as the magic itself-- as I shall convey in Part 3.

I started this essay-series with the question, "is there something that sets the genre we usually call 'fantasy' from all other genres with metaphenomenal content?" I established that I believed that the dominant colloquial usage of "fantasy" concerned a particular subgroup of metaphenomenal narratives I have now dubbed "magical fantasy stories." From this category I have excluded narratives which are complicated by the presence of competing forms of wonder-rationale (as discussed in Part 2.5), OR by the absence of the proper kind of magic-welcoming society. I also mentioned that my desire to set aside the unique appeal of "magical fantasy stories" due to my own personal response to the fantasy-genre. I do not automatically assume that my response is characteristic of all fantasy-readers. But I also do not automatically assume that there is no relevance even if no other person has ever made the correlation I will now make.

I have reviewed, in three linked essays, one of the earliest breakthrough works of religious historian Mircea Eliade, 1957's THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE. My second essay provides the most detailed look at what Eliade sought to say in that book, though I should stress that he wrote only of religion, and not, as I do, of literature and folklore.

The first chapter, "Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred," explores many of the ways that religious people around the world have sought to endow specific objects or locales-- trees, stones, temples, or entire cities-- with a sacred quality that transcends the everyday interactions of the profane world. Given the chapter's concern with space, it's logical enough that Eliade leads off with a quote from Exodus: "put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground." Eliade cites numerous other cultures-- Vedic Indian, Algonquin, Australian aborgine, Roman, Egyptian-- in order to support his claim: that "homo religiosus" shows a supervening tendency to formulate spaces in which the sacred can enter to banish the profane, which Eliade defines, albeit only briefly, as all those contingent factors involving "man's vital functions (food, sex, work and so on."

Now on this blog I've repeatedly discussed both the similarities and differences between the dynamics of religion and the dynamics of art. And I've always concluded that the differences are less significant than the similarities. The sense of constricting, "profane" ordinariness that religion banishes for the believer can also be banished by the "shadows of imagination" that audiences enjoy through art. The stories I deem "magical fantasies"are not any better or worse than any other stories in terms of potential ability to dispel dull care. But because magical fantasies create the feeling of a world imbued with magic, the worlds in those fantasies come closest to duplicating the dynamic Eliade describes:

...the desire to live in a pure and holy cosmos, as it was in the beginning, when it came fresh from the Creator's hands.

But such a cosmos is not defined only by space, but also by time. So quite logically, Eliade follows up his chapter on "sacred space" with one entitled "Sacred Time and Myths." Profane time, Eliade says, is "ordinary temporal duration, in which acts without religious meaning have their setting." In contrast, sacred time "represents the re-actualization of a sacred event that took place in a mythical past."

Now, I have not implied that magical fantasy stories, which belong to literature rather than religion, share religion's purpose of recapitulating the sacred stories of any particular culture-- though some stories do draw upon such established stories. Kelly Cipera, the essayist cited in Part 2.5, mentions that the Arthurian myths, which are not technically religious narratives, have their appeal in what *I* consider depicting events outside the scope of "profane time."

We recognize all of the ingredients of high fantasy is stories such as Le Morte d’Arthur, or the story of Arthur, Camelot and the search for the Holy Grail, a legend of Welsh origin. It is a hero’s tale — Arthur, who has no control over whether or not he can pull a sword from a stone or not, does, and suddenly kingship is thrust upon him. Matters beyond him and magic turn his life, which would have been otherwise dull and ordinary, into the stuff of legend.

Thus I am saying that magical fantasy stories recapitulate the sense of a space and time far from our own profane world, where all wonders spring from the loins of magic. This world can be entirely divorced from our own, as with Middle-Earth, or it may also be a very abstracted version of some distant historical era, like the unspecified Arabian setting of ALI BABA AND THE FORTY THIEVES. The world may display an author's scrupulous intent to center all the fictional events within a specific historical period, as Marion Zimmer Bradley does in THE MISTS OF AVALON, or it may utilize a hodgepodge of historical eras, like the teleseries XENA WARRIOR PRINCESS. The fidelity to history is only important according to the creative priorities of any given author, and often the religious sources of magical fantasy stories may also be a hodgepodge of material from different historical periods, as is said to be the case with both the Arthurian corpus and the Thousand and One Nights. 

And that, for now, is my conclusion as to the special appeal of what I term "magical fantasy stories." I imagine that in future weeks I might be able to write as much as I have over these two days on all of the stories that don't convey this Eliadean sense of sacred exoticism.

ADDENDA: I will note that what Eliade calls a "pure and holy cosmos" often includes, in many religious cosmologies, all sorts of significant transgressive actions-- Odin slaying Ymir to make the world out of the giant's bones, or Adam and Eve being expelled from Paradise. So the nature of religious purity and holiness does require some meditation to account for the significance of transgressive actions in molding a cosmos.

MIND OUT OF TIME PT. 2.5

Before proceeding to the conclusions suggested at the end of Part 2, I'll make some generalizations as to some types of narratives that belong in my category of "magical fantasy stories," always with the caveat that I may make additions or alterations in future.

While as I've said "fantasy" by itself has often been a rubric that can cover everything from Tolkien to Roger Rabbit, the great reputation of Tolkien has resulted in the popularization of the term "high fantasy" for the more Tolkienian forms of fantasy. Wikipedia cites this definition: 

High fantasy, or epic fantasy, is a subgenre of fantasy^[1] defined by the epic nature of its setting or by the epic stature of its characters, themes, or plot.^[2] High fantasy is set in an alternative, fictional ("secondary") world, rather than the "real" or "primary" world.^[2] This secondary world is usually internally consistent, but its rules differ from those of the primary world. By contrast, low fantasy is characterized by being set on Earth, the primary or real world, or a rational and familiar fictional world with the inclusion of magical elements.^[3][4][5][6]

The careless writing of this essay implies agreement between all the sources cited, but this is not the case. The first source, a 2011 article on the site Fandomania, not only does not use the high/low distinction-- attributed, with whatever accuracy, to a Brian Stableford book-- but cites two forms of high fantasy that the maybe-Stableford definition would term "low fantasies."

The settings for these quests are generally in one of three varieties: a world separate unto our world, one where our world for all intents and purposes doesn’t even exist; a secondary world that is reached from our world through a portal; or, lastly, a secondary world within our own world. Tolkien’s Lord of The Rings and Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series are examples of the first variety. They both exist in a completely developed secondary world that is not Earth — Earth doesn’t even exist in their minds. The Chronicles of Narnia is a classic example of a portal into another world variety and the Harry Potter series is a contemporary example of the “world within a world” type of high fantasy.

I'm glad, though, that the uncredited Wiki-writer linked to the Fandomania essay, because Cipera's broader definition is better than the very artificial high/low distinction. Cipera clearly feels that all three forms of fantasy can be associated because they are all drawing on the same wellsprings of myth and folktale to tell similar stories of high romance and adventure. 

So, all three of Cipera's categories would make it into my category of "magical fantasy stories." However, as Part 2 specified, my wider category also includes a folktale like ALI BABA AND THE FORTY THIEVES. This story includes an element of magic and does not use the competing rationales of either "science" or "just because" to justify the story's wonders. But it also qualifies as a "magical fantasy story" because it takes place in a pre-industrial society that considers magic more important than any other rationale.

In a separate essay I plan to address various examples of stories-- whether from literature or folktales-- that don't fall into my category because they meet only one of the two criteria cited, or explain their wonders with two or even three co-existing rationales. I've already cited one such exception in POPEYE MEETS ALI BABA, which is the latter type of "hybrid story," mixing "magic" with "just because." But for now it's more important to move on to the matter of why the presence of the magic-accepting society is as important to the category as the magic itself-- as I shall convey in Part 3.

MIND OUT OF TIME PT. 2

Here's the statement I made at the end of Part 1:

...despite the strong association of the colloquial use of the term "fantasy" and the "magic rationale," I think there's a more fundamental appeal to "magical fantasy" than the use of said rationale...

One reason I eliminated "the magic rationale" as the main attraction is that some extremely popular "magical fantasies" make only very minor usages of magic.

Case in point: the ARABIAN NIGHTS folktale of "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves." In the standardized version of the story-- which is the one most often adapted for modern narratives-- poor woodcutter Ali Baba witnesses a gang of thieves using a magical cave to conceal their ill-gotten treasures. The cave-door, which opens or closes in obedience to certain magic words, is the only magical item in the story. Everything else in the narrative, however improbable or melodramatic, would be deemed isophenomenal, governed by naturalistic laws. We don't know if the "open sesame" cave is the result of active or passive magic-- though I tend to favor the former, that some individual placed a spell on the cave-mouth to act as cave-mouths don't usually operate. But there's a sense of a regular magical procedure involved in the treasure-cave's makeup. The cave doesn't open "just because," say, it's funny for the purpose of a gag, a la my earlier example of ROGER RABBIT. That nonsense-rationale would imply the cave might open some times and not others.

The appeal of magical fantasies, whether they use a lot of magic or very little, inheres more in the fact that they reproduce a society that is fully or mostly "pre-industrial," in which it's possible for the characters to invest in magic because there is no competing rationale of "science." That does not mean that there is no science as such in the world, such as (say) the engineering principles needed for Ancient Egypt to build the pyramids. But in an archaic world, science simply is not as IMPORTANT as magic.

So, I'm admitting that "magical fantasies" have a vital appeal because they invest in the magic-rationale and not the other two rationales-- but there's also a greater, supervening appeal in that the contemporary reader/audience is transported back to a time when science had less influence than magic. And I'll look at some possible reasons for that appeal in Part 3.

Parenthetically, Ali Baba got the "just because" treatment in 1937's POPEYE MEETS ALI BABA, and in that cartoon short it's clear that gags like "Abu Hassan got 'em anymore" overshadow any investment in even the minor magic of the "open sesame" cave.