The Many Worlds of Poul Anderson

by Roger Elwood

  §

  Up to this point, most of our attention has been on the question of what Anderson is saying in ‘The Queen of Air and Darkness.” Now perhaps it is time to devote some thought to the way in which he says it.

  We quickly realize that we must deal with archetypes once again. We discussed above how, on the “plot level,” the concept is consciously employed by various characters and how it provides motivation and explanation. We can find another usage, a “technique-level” employment intended to have its impact not on a character but on the reader. Often, of course, the same archetype can serve both functions.

  Consider, for example, the lengths to which Anderson carries the resemblance between Eric Sherrinford and Sherlock Holmes. The first thing Barbro notices when she calls at Sherrinford’s apartment/office is the contrast between its “sane disorder” (p. 77) and the detective’s personal neatness. This is also characteristic of Holmes. Sherrinford smokes a pipe. He is tall, “high-cheeked, beak-nosed, black-haired, and gray-eyed” (p. 37). On their first meeting, he deduces Barbros occupation and personal history from her appearance.

  More than this, Sherrinford is a grandnephew several score times removed of Holmes himself. Or at least he says, “we also claimed collateral descent from one of the first private inquiry agents on record, back on Earth before spaceflight” (p. 57). Baring-Goulds pseudobiography gives “Sherrinford” as the maiden name of Holmes’s mother.19 “Sherrinford” was the Christian name of Holmes himself in the original draft of A Study in Scarlet.

  It seems clear that this identification between Holmes and Eric Sherrinford is more than could be required by exingencies of plot alone. We can, however, easily discern at least two other purposes which this evocation serves. First, as a close approximation to an archetypal Rational Detective, Holmes serves as a symbol of the rational-technological age to place in opposition to the Queen of Air and Darkness. Second, implicit allusion to Holmes allows Anderson to be compact in his characterization. He has only to say, “basically, this fellow is a lot like Holmes, but with the following modifications …” Compactness in character portrayal holds great importance in science fiction, where so much other information must be worked into the narrative, and this is doubly true in a short work. Anderson’s modifications, it must be added, are by no means insignificant. Sherrinford probably possesses a bit more kindness (a quality Anderson values highly), or at least sensitivity to the consequences of his actions, than did Conan Doyle’s character. Holmes, as Watson somewhere puts it, had become a bit case-hardened. It may also be significant of the difference between the two characters that when Holmes could not find enough of a challenge to his intellect he turned to drugs, while Sherrinford, similarly bored by his job on the police force in the city of Heorot on the planet Beowulf, took ship on a scientific expedition which eventually brought him to Roland.

  Other archetypes are added onto the Holmesian in the delineation of Sherrinford’s character. The detective is part Cherokee and has a family tradition which makes him aware of this fact. Again this datum functions on two levels. It helps to explain the detective’s sympathy for the Rolandic aborigines, and it invokes in the reader’s mind a picture of the Vanishing Redman with associated sympathies. Both levels come into play at once in an exchange such as the following one between Barbro and Sherrinford:

  “I suppose we can give them a reservation,” she said, and didn’t know why he grimaced and answered so roughly:

  “Let’s leave them the honor they’ve earned! They fought to save the world they’d always known from that—” he made a chopping gesture at the city— “and just possibly we’d be better off ourselves with less of it.” (p. 81)

  If we venture for a moment onto less certain ground, we may perceive a rather more oblique archetypal characterization of Sherrinford. All of the human-inhabited planets in this “future history” seem to be named after the heroes of national epics, and other celestial bodies and geographic places have related names. Thus Roland’s sun is called Charlemagne, and Roland’s moons are Oliver and Aide, after the hero’s comrade and his betrothed. Heorot, mentioned above, is the hall of King Hrothgar in Beowulf. On Rustum (Rustum is the Persian national hero), many of the place-names come from Persian history, and the moon Raksh takes its name from Rustum’s horse. This nomenclature—probably devised by the Astro-nautical Society of spaceship crewmen—bears no especial relation to the nationality of the eventual colonists. Rustum is settled mosdy by North Americans. French has never been spoken on Roland, but it is probably still a living language on Beowulf, since Sherrinford speaks it fluently (p. 64). If Anderson had any intention here beyond the provision of a plausible naming scheme, it may have been simply to emphasize the heroism implicit in the colonization of extrasolar planets. Still, if we bear in mind Sherrinfords planet of origin, we may find significance in the fact that, at least in the chanson de geste which bears his name, Roland has to deal only with human opponents, while Beowulf, like Sherrinford, is a slayer of monsters.

  Barbros “devoted widow” role—and the way she emerges from it by falling in love again—are of course also archetypal. However, again on this “technique” level, the only real competition to the Holmes archetype is that presented by the Queen of Air and Darkness and her realm.

  As was true of Sherrinford/Holmes, the Queen of Air and Darkness archetype exerts a fascination on the imagination of the reader similar to her effect on the characters of the novelette. It must be this reader-effect which has motivated so many modem writers to introduce “Queen” figures into their works. Besides the literal “Queens of Air and Darkness” such as Morgause in T. H. Whites The Once and Future King, or the otherwise unnamed lady in A. E. Housmans poem (III in Last Poems’), the archetype is manifested in most modem uses of Morgan le Fay, or in Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” or in the evil Namian witch-queens of C. S. Lewis. These examples could be easily multiplied,20 though, of course, every fairy queen is not Queen of Air and Darkness: consider the good Lady of the Lake, the traditional fairy godmother, etc.

  Archetypes pattern not only people and places. They also can shape action. The Outlings steal children (such as Jimmy) and mothers of young children (such as Barbro) because this is what fairies do. It is also simply of the nature of fairies that from time to time they invite humans to share their eldritch life.

  This much is “plot-level” archetype. The Outlings have “reasonably” conformed to fairy practice because it reinforces the pattern in human minds and because they have uses for kidnapped humans. Young children are particularly suitable because they can be raised in the “Outling” life style, and mothers may be won over by manipulations of their maternal emotions. But we also see “technique-level” archetype here. The identification between aborigines and fairies tells us other things about the extraterrestrials, things they should rationally wish not to disclose or suggest. For example, as J. R. R. Tolkien reminds us, “It is often reported of fairies … that they are workers of illusion, that they are cheaters of men by ‘fantasy/ ”21

  At least in the European tradition—this would not hold for, say, the Arabian Nights tales—one only rarely encounters stories which dwell on the marvels of Faerie without describing the price paid for them. Much more common—and more popular—are stories about people who have rejected the blandishments of Faerie, or first accepted them and later attempted escape, successfully or unsuccessfully. Sometimes simple homesickness motivates this rejection, but more often it is love for a wife or sweetheart left in the lands of men.22 And despite the aborigines’ plans, this latter drama is the one played out in “The Queen of Air and Darkness.”

  At the very least, this “double-leveled” archetype serves Anderson as a device for foreshadowing: the reader knows that the Outlings will prove to be deceitful and at least strongly suspects that their deceit will be successfully opposed.23 But more than this, the very story of Escape from Elfland (as an instance of, in Halpern’s terms, “breaking of Emanation”) form
s, in Sherrinford’s words, a crystallization of basic aspects of the human psyche, and when we meet such an archetypal plot in fiction, our reaction goes deeper than consciousness.

  §

  There is, of course, more to fiction than the invocation and modification of archetypes (or of Halpern’s basic relationships). Let us examine at least briefly the “surface” of Anderson’s work, his choice of scenes and of wording.

  Critics such as James Blish have long recognized that Anderson is a “poet,” both literally and in his poetic use of prose. ‘The Queen of Air and Darkness” contains five poems, including one eighteen-stanza ballad,24 a couplet in tetrameter which sounds almost Shakespearian, a song composed according to the rules of Scandinavian prosody, and a seventeen-syllable three-sentence poem which, Anderson insists, is not a haiku.25 The prose is filled with poetic devices ranging from alliteration through metaphor even to one hyper-compound sentence consisting of fifteen verbs in a row followed immediately by nine adjectives, all with the same noun as grammatical referent, (p. 44) One can find an excellent sample of his skill with prose in the opening paragraph of the novelette, where Anderson manages to establish an idyllic mood while at the same time conveying the alienness of the Rolandic setting. He coins names for extraterrestrial plants and animals which add to the pastoral spell instead of breaking it with unfamiliarity: fire-thorn, steel-flower, brok, rainplant, kiss-me-never, flittery, crownbuck.26

  A little later in the story (p. 41), Anderson achieves one of the most graceful transitions from dialog to a long exposition of background to be found in science fiction. As Barbro holds her first conversation with Sherrinford, night gradually closes in, mirroring her anxiety. The scene ends with the sentences,

  The woman drew closer to the man in this darkening room, surely not aware that she did, until he switched on a fluoro-panel. The same knowledge of Roland’s aloneness was in them both.

  The passage of exposition then begins,

  One light-year is not much as galactic distances go. You could walk it in about 270 million years, beginning at the middle of the Permian Era, when dinosaurs belonged to the remote future, and continuing to the present day when spaceships cross even greater reaches… .

  Unfortunately, such instances are not as common as one could wish. For the most part, Anderson has resorted to his usual technique of “lectures.” Anderson has considerably more conscience than some writers about having characters tell each other things they should already know; he invents excuses for such exercises, and even—on occasion—puts them to good dramatic use. However, after a while these cover-up attempts themselves become glaringly obvious:

  “He shrugged and fell into the lecturers manner for which he was notorious.” (p. 37)

  ‘To still the writhing of her fingers he asked skeptically …” (p. 39)

  “ ‘I didn’t want to raise your hopes or excite you unduly…. So I’m only now telling you how thoroughly I studied available material on the … Old Folk.’ ” (p. 55)

  “Sherrinford recognized that her query asked for comfort as much as it did for facts, and he spoke with deliberate dryness… .” (p. 63)

  This difficulty with the insertion of background material also relates to Anderson’s general awkwardness with dialogue. The fault becomes most glaring in the speech of the three-year-old Jimmy. Story dialogue is not transcription, and whether or not any child ever used such an expression, it does not read convincingly when Jimmy, asked whether he wants French bread or rye, replies, “‘I’ll have a slice of what we people call the F bread/ ” (p. 45), or when, as he and his mother are reunited at the Queen’s court, he says, “‘Stay. Here’s fun. I’ll show. But you stay/ ” (p. 76) Sometimes rather strange things happen to the plot so that a particular conversation can occur at a particular moment. Rolanders, for example, are unaware of the electromagnetic nature of telepathy, and Sherrinford has to explain it to Barbro—and to the reader. He adds, “ ‘I daresay the facts are available in the scientific microfiles at Christmas Landing. You Rolanders have simply had no occasion to seek them out/ ” (p. 63) “Scientific microfiles” indeed! Even the two-dollar paperback Columbia-Viking Desk Encyclopedia has an article on telepathy, though as of its date of publication (1964) it can report nothing very definite on the topic. Are we to believe that Rolanders are so lacking in curiosity that they do not even reprint general reference works brought from Earth? Or that a topic so fascinating as telepathy could be completely passed over even in recreational reading?27

  Again, the Rolandic government has imposed (or requested) temporary suspension of the story of the discovery of the aborigines in order to gain time to formulate policy. But no one has bothered to tell Barbro about this ban, so that only her own independent judgment keeps her from revealing the news. This gives Sherrinford, a week later, the chance to explain the reasons for the censorship, but it hardly adds to the story’s credibility.

  Neither of these cases presents an absolute impossibility. Before Sherrinford’s deductions, no one had reason to connect the Outling “spells” with parapsychology. It is not beyond imagination that an interesting but seemingly irrelevant fact might, in a pioneer society, remain buried in the files. Similarly, governments, especially when confronted with unfamiliar problems, can be remarkably slipshod in their operation. Perhaps the Rolandic authorities could have overlooked Barbro. But in any case, instances such as these needlessly weaken verisimilitude. Furthermore, they may contribute to that vaguely “pulpish” odor which somehow clings to Anderson despite what should be ample proof of the real merit of his production.

  §

  One can indeed hope that Anderson will learn better to burnish even the “surface” of his work. Despite a quarter century as a published writer, and despite the current level of success indicated by two Nebulas, four Hugo awards (both figures as of this writing!), and consistent sales, Anderson remains concerned with expanding the scope and improving the quality of his creation.

  In the meantime, however, the reader should not let superficial imperfections distract him. The stream of Anderson’s art runs much deeper. It is continually replenished by tributaries drawing on the most diverse aspects of human experience, until at last it exhausts itself in a limitless expanse of Space, Time, and Mind.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This article’s citations do not fully reflect its intellectual debt to Professor Manfred Halpern, both for his published and as-yet-unpublished writings, and for course work. Nor do they indicate my even greater obligation to Sandra Miesel, for her articles on Anderson (especially the original version of “Challenge and Response” in Riverside Quarterly 4:2) and for fruitful discussion over a period of years. Poul Anderson was kind enough to answer a few more-or-less concrete questions, and to disabuse me of a number of notions which consequently do not appear in this paper. Poul Anderson, Judy Cohen (now Judy Carrick), Susan Glicksohn, Manfred Halpern, John Miesel, Sandra Miesel, Frieda Murray, and Alexei Panshin read and commented on one or another draft of this essay. Any remaining errors are, of course, my responsibility.

  NOTES

  1. In-text page citations for “The Queen of Air and Darkness” are to pages in this anthology.

  2. Gertrude Jobes, Dictionary of Mythology, Folklore, and Symbols, (New York: Scarecrow Press, 1961), I, 545.

  3. W. Y. Evans Wentz, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries, (London: Oxford University Press, 1911), 283-4.

  4. See for instance the Danish ballad “The Elven Shaft” in Axel Orlik, ed., A Book of Danish Ballads, trans. E. M. Smith-Dampier, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1939), 103-106. There is also a translation, “Sir Oluf and the Elf-King’s Daughter,” in the first volume of Francis James Child’s English and Scottish Ballads.

  5. Lucy Allen Paton, Studies in the Fairy Mythology of Arthurian Romance, Radcliffe College Monograph No. 13 (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1903), 3-4.

  6. Fairyland often has in addition a time-rate different from that of the normal world. Anderson discards this fe
ature—though the Outlings are “indifferent to time” (p. 33)—and a few others in “The Queen of Air and Darkness.”

  7. Jobes, II, 1180. The North is also the abode of the evil witch-queens in C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series.

  8. The plotline of The Star Ways is strikingly similar to that of “The Queen of Air and Darkness,” though its development is altogether different.

  9. This is the etymology given by Kipling’s fairy in Puck of Pook’s Hill.

  10. Jobes, I, 545. Joseph Wright, ed., The English Dialect Dictionary, (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1903), IV, 264, 265.

  11. A Soviet study putting forward a theory for telepathy strikingly like that used in “The Queen of Air and Darkness” is I. M. Kogan, The Information Theory Aspect of Telepathy, (Rand Corporation P-4145, 1969). Kogan reports positive results over ranges much longer than those Anderson permits the aborigines, but the same atmospheric conditions that upset radio communication on Roland might well do the same to telepathic transmissions.

  12. Sherrinford’s speculation about innate territoriality may well be incorrect, even within the terms of the novelette. Anderson has expressed his doubts about applying such theories to intelligent beings in Is There Life on Other Worlds?, (New York: Collier Books, 1963), 132-5.