Microsoft Word - freedom_v13.doc

by David E. Schultz

  But Evagh was uneasy at heart, and rebelled in secret against his thralldom to

  Rlim Shaikorth; and he beheld with revulsion the doom that went forth from

  Yikilth upon lovely cities and fruitful ocean-shore. Ruthfully he saw the blasting of flower-girdled Cerngoth, and the boreal stillness that descended on the thronged streets of Leqquan, and the frost that seared with sudden whiteness the garths and orchards of the sea-fronting valley of Aquil. ( BH 116)

  Evagh, commended by Smith as “a man of much hardihood and resolution”

  ( BH 121), is a noteworthy figure in the Hyperborean cycle. There seems to be neither praying nor preying involved in his relationship with his fisher-folk neighbors; we might deem him a white magician save for the fact that white now becomes the color of death in Mhu Thulan. In a heart-freezing story, Evagh’s organ is fully functional: “And sorrow was in his heart for the fishing-coracles and the biremes of trade and warfare that floated manless after they had met Yikilith” ( BH 116). By his hero’s death, by his overriding of Rlim Shaikorth’s insistence on “the repudiation of all bonds that had linked [his servants] to mankind” ( BH 113), the warlock makes “The Coming of the White Worm” a rare Smithian example of heroic,

  rather than anti-heroic or heroism-precluding, fantasy.

  To tamper with a John McPhee title, “Ubbo-Sathla” is as close as we come to

  annals of this former world, to a sort of “Hyperborean Age” essay. Londoner Paul Tregardis impulsively buys a milky curio from the Miocene strata of Greenland

  (Mhu Thulan when the White Worm got through with it) and reverts or regresses

  to a previous life as the sorcerer Zon Mezzamalech—an identity which fails to

  break his fall. He plummets past even the promising reference in “The Testament of Athammaus” to “the mythic generations of the primal kings” ( BH 46):

  He fought as a warrior in half-legendary battles; he was a child playing in the ruins of some olden city of Mhu Thulan; he was the king who had reigned when

  the city was in its prime, the prophet who had foretold its building and its doom.

  Coming In from the Cold

  269

  A woman, he wept for the bygone dead in necropoli long-crumbled; an antique

  wizard, he muttered the rude spells of earlier sorcery; a priest of some pre-human god, he wielded the sacrificial knife in cave-temples of pillared basalt. Life by life, he retraced the long and groping cycles through which Hyperborea had risen from savagery to a high civilization. He became a barbarian of some troglodytic tribe, fleeing from the slow, turreted ice of a former ice age into lands illumed by the ruddy flare of perpetual volcanoes. Then, after incomparable years, he was no

  longer man but a man-like beast, roving in forests of giant fern and calamite, or building an uncouth nest in the boughs of mighty cycads. Through eons of anterior sensation, of crude lust and hunger, of aboriginal terror and madness, there was someone—or something—that went ever backward in time. ( BH 76)

  In “The Seven Geases” Smith’s serpent-men hiss not revanchist threats but

  “formulae” before spurning Ralibar Vooz because their “economy” holds no place

  for him. The ophidians of “Ubbo-Sathla” are less of a deliberate departure from the shapeshifting string-pullers of Howard’s “The Shadow Kingdom,” but preoccupying Hyperborea as they do, they have no reason to be preoccupied by arisen apes:

  At length, after eons of immemorial brutehood, it became one of the lost ser-

  pent-men who reared their cities of black gneiss and fought their venomous wars in the world’s first continent. It walked undulously in ante-human streets, in

  strange crooked vaults; it peered at primeval stars from high, Babelian towers; it bowed with hissing litanies to great serpent-idols. Through years and ages of the ophidian era it returned, and was a thing that crawled in the ooze, that had not yet learned to think and dream and build. And the time came when there was no

  longer a continent, but only a vast chaotic marsh, a sea of slime, without limit or horizon, that seethed with a blind writhing of amorphous vapors. ( BH 77) Reverse-ontogeny repeals phylogeny, and Ubbo-Sathla turns out to be “head-less, without organs or members,” but progenitive as it spawns “from its oozy

  sides, in a slow ceaseless wave, the amebic forms that were the archetypes of

  earthly life. Horrible it was, if there had been aught to apprehend the horror; and loathsome, if there had been any to feel loathing” ( BH 77). That horror was apprehended and that loathing was felt throughout the pulp era, as writers like Lovecraft, Howard, C. L. Moore in “Black Thirst,” and Leigh Brackett in “The Beast-

  Jewel of Mars,” gave way to the impulse to return to the womb of all biotica and shudder while splashing around in the amniotic fluid.

  “The Door to Saturn” offers not an incursion of outsideness but rather an ex-

  cursion into that outsideness, a Saturnian travelogue somewhere between Sir John Mandeville, to whom Smith once devoted a story, and Baron von Munchhausen. It

  features Smith’s reliably Rabelaisian respect for men of the cloth, who hotfoot it to the house of their prey toting “a formidable writ of arrest, with symbolic flame-etched runes on a scroll of human skin,” only to be crestfallen when Eibon’s escape leaves them “no early prospect of trying out the ingenious agonies, the intri-

  270 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS

  cately harrowing ordeals” they have brainstormed ( BH 28). At story’s end, too, the transplanted high-priest Morghi must make do with fungus-wine and faux-females:

  “Though the Ydheems were religious, they did not carry their devotional fervor to the point of bigotry or intolerance; and it was quite impossible to start an inquisition among them” ( BH 44).

  “The Door to Saturn” occurs during “the last century before the onset of the

  great Ice Age.” Smith first chronicled that Ice Age in July 1932 with “The Ice-Demon” before finishing “The Coming of the White Worm” in September 1933.

  He put effect on paper before cause, and as we read “The Ice-Demon” we must

  assume that what Rlim Shaikorth set in motion continued on without him. By this point “the glacier itself [is] a live, malignant entity with powers of unknown bale”: Men fled before the ever-advancing glaciations; and strange legends were told

  of how people had been overtaken or cut off in lonely valleys by sudden, diabolic shiftings of the ice, as if it had stretched out a living hand. And legends there were, of awful crevasses that yawned abruptly and closed like monstrous mouths upon

  them that dared the frozen waste; of winds like the breath of boreal demons, that blasted men’s flesh with instant, utter cold and turned them into statues hard as granite. ( BH 80)

  But the tomb-robbers of this story think they know better, think they know later: Ice—even though it had conquered half of a continent—was merely ice, and

  its workings conformed invariably to certain natural laws. Iluac had said that the ice-sheet was a great demon, cruel, greedy, and loath to give up that which it had taken. But such beliefs were crude and primitive superstitions, not to be entertained by enlightened minds of the Pleistocene age. ( BH 84)

  A Smith aphorism has it that “The commonest and gravest error of modernity lies in believing that antiquity is dead” ( DN 73), and said error gets one treasure hunter an icicle through the skull and another crunched between the frozen teeth of a

  cave-mouth. Quanga, whose name and “iron thews inured to protracted

  marches” suggest that he is a barbarian, lasts longer. En route to the plunder-

  site, his plans for the thawed swag had run along lines we might associate with a certain Cimmerian: “He could drink to his full content the costly wines, redder than the rubies, that came from far Uzuldaroum in the south. The tawny, slant-eyed girls of Iqqua would dance at his bidding; and he could gamble for high

  stakes” ( BH 85).

 
; His last stand is also Conan-esque: “With a mad momentary defiance, he

  unslung his bow and discharged arrow after arrow, emptying his quiver at the huge and bleak and formless shadow that seemed to impend before him on the sky”

  ( BH 92), but this is a Hyperborean age rather than the Hyborian Age.

  Conan’s creator confided to Lovecraft that, despite being a native of the

  American Southwest, the majority of his dreams were “laid in cold, giant lands of

  Coming In from the Cold

  271

  icy wastes and gloomy skies, and of wild, wind-swept fens and wilderness over

  which sweep great sea-winds, and which are inhabited by shock-headed savages

  with light fierce eyes.” To a remarkable extent modern fantasy as a whole is similarly Nord-centric or North-fixated, as the Australian fantasist Sara Douglass notes in her essay “Creating the Modern Romance Epic”:

  January and February are cold and snowy, and June and July are hot. Why? I am

  often asked. . . . Well, mostly because we’re forced to by the expectations of our readership. We might live in the great hot southern land, but our culture, and our mythic imaginations, are mostly European. And the northern European landscape

  (both geographic and mythological) is still where most fantasy writers choose to set their grand tale. (Douglass, “Creating”)

  Across that landscape Winter is the season that haunts and hunts the other seasons, and the North is Winter’s lair. If we all came from an African womb, then the cold and the dark of the Uttermost North symbolize some black negation of nativity, a

  realm suggestive of both the most pessimistic possibilities for an afterlife and the unimaginable aeons before life was kindled. As Michael Scott Rohan planned his

  Winter of the World trilogy, “The Ice seemed to be so much the enemy, vast and lowering and implacable, that I almost unconsciously began to cast it as an intelligence in itself, the intelligence”—an intellect even colder and more unsympathetic than those of Wells’s Martians:

  What kind of mind would prefer an Ice-world, beautiful but bleak and sterile? A mind that hearkened back to the world as it had been, perhaps, in the long aeons before life appeared, a mind, or minds, whose reason for existence had been that life-less world, and now felt it had been usurped. (Rohan, “Welcome to My Worlds”)

  Smith conjures up the “looming, crenelated wall of the realm-wide glaciation”

  in “The Ice-Demon,” but the frisson that wall affords us has become genre-wide

  ( BH 83). W. H. Auden, who devised the shorthand-concept “the Northern thing”

  and acquitted himself doughtily in early critical tourneys upholding the merit of The Lord of the Rings, discerned an especial northwardness or northerliness in Tolkien’s work. Which earned him this response in February 1967:

  Auden has asserted that for me ‘the North is a sacred direction.’ That is not

  true. The North-west of Europe, where I (and most of my ancestors) have lived,

  has my affection, as a man’s home should. I love its atmosphere, and know more

  of its histories and languages than I do of other parts; but it is not ‘sacred,’ nor does it exhaust my affections. . . . That it is untrue for my story, a mere reading of the synopses should show. The North was the seat of the fortresses of the Devil.

  (Tolkien, Letters 376)

  By “the Devil,” Tolkien meant his original Dark Lord, of whom Sauron was

  merely a lieutenant: Morgoth, whose ramparted strong place the North is in The

  272 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS

  Silmarillion and many of the Lost Tales. Paul H. Kocher argues that “Tolkien gives the realm of Morgoth an extra level of allusiveness by describing it as so bitterly cold that after its destruction ‘those colds linger still in that region, though they lie hardly more than a hundred leagues north of the Shire’ . . . Add the fact that the Witch-king of Angmar, Morgoth’s henchman, has powers that wane in summer

  and wax in winter and it becomes hard not to associate Morgoth in some way with a glacial epoch” (Kocher 48). Cold lingering with intent to injure, winter as a ghost that stalks the memory of entire landmasses, these are elements almost as crucial as the more narrowly Germanic “Northern thing” to modern fantasy. Even before

  Tolkien created Melko (the forerunner of Morgoth), in one of his earliest poems,

  “Kortirion among the Trees” (1915), he visualized “Winter and his blue-tipped

  spears / Marching unconquerable upon the sun” (Tolkien, “Kortirion” 109). In

  The Book of the Damned Tanith Lee’s Winter “[rides] through Paradys on a grey horse, a lord in mail and armour, with a vizored helm and his train behind him”

  (Lee 135).

  The genre lacks a countervailing Southern orientation to offset North-looking

  post-Tolkien heavyweights like Guy Gavriel Kay, Tad Williams, and George R. R.

  Martin; the golden grasslands in the Nyumbani stories of Charles R. Saunders not-withstanding. Like Morgoth, Rakoth Maugrim, the Dark Lord of Kay’s The

  Fionavar Tapestry, seeks out “the wind-blasted north” for his power base: “Here he had set his feet upon the Ice, and so made the northland the place of his power, and here he had raised up jagged Starkadh. And when it was full-wrought, a claw, a cancer in the north, he had risen to the topmost tower and screamed his name that the wind might bear it to the tamed gods whom he feared not, being stronger by

  far than any of them.” The reconstructed Starkadh is “a brutally superimposed

  black upon the white plateaus of the glaciers” (Kay 309).

  The doom of Smith’s Quanga—“Dimly he heard a sound as of clashing ici-

  cles, a grinding as of heavy floes, in the blue-green gloom that tightened and thickened around him. It was as if the soul of the glacier, malign and implacable, had overtaken him in his flight” ( BH 92)—is also that of “earlier civilizations of men, whose traces had largely been obliterated by time and the Ice” in Michael Scott Rohan’s The Winter of the World. Rohan’s glaciers are the chief beauty and the chief peril of a winter wonderland as sentient as Smith’s:

  Far out into the distance below him stretched the glacier, infinitely far along the widening valley between dwindling peaks and out onto a vast expanse of softly

  glowing gray-white. The eastern walls of the mountains sank into it as if into a sea, overwhelmed; here and there, as if in mockery of former majesties, a remote peak protruded, blunted and crumbling like a slighted fortress. Beyond these pathetic remnants it stretched out into an infinite distance so featureless that the eye strained to focus on it and blurred painfully, finding no hold or reference. . . .

  Whatever the truth of it, the sight filled Elof with the sudden chill feeling that he, that the whole warmly living world of earth and flowers and beasts and men and

  Coming In from the Cold

  273

  women were nothing but very thin crust of dirt upon an infinity of cool sterile whiteness, a smear of filth on the chill beauty of a gem, at the mercy of its slightest movement or disturbance, utterly insignificant. (Rohan, Anvil 177)

  In Tad Williams’s Memory, Sorrow and Thorn, blizzards and icestorms are the outriders of Ineluki the Storm King, undead heart of Faerie’s irredentist vendetta against mortal men. Ineluki’s ally the Norn Queen rules the subarctic portion of Osten Ard and commands the White Foxes of Sturmrspeik Mountain, around which

  “guttering, sickly flares” play. The North of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire is a cold mother who nurses only the strongest and strangest of her children—

  wildlings “from the northernmost reaches of the haunted forest, the hidden valleys of the Frostfangs, and even queerer places: the men of the Frozen Shore who rode in chariots made of walrus bones pulled along by packs of savage dogs, the terrible ice-river clans who were said to feast on human flesh, the cave dwellers with their faces dyed blue and purple and gre
en” (Martin, Storm 172). Beyond even the wildlings there begins the Land of Always Winter haunted by the Others, wights

  shaped by cold and darkness whose language is “like the cracking of ice on a winter lake” (Martin, Game 8).

  Even as Martin’s rival houses of Stark and Lannister (the resemblance to York

  and Lancaster is no coincidence) dance a murderous sarabande in the southlands, the North is poised overhead like a frost-forged Sword of Damocles. Against the Others there stands only a Wall, Hadrianesque in ambition but hewn from the ice itself and maintained not on behalf of the pax Romana but against forces that would extinguish all hearths and stop all hearts forever. That Wall is manned by the Night Watch, the brothers of which, mostly gallows-bait and gaol-sweepings, swear an

  oath that defines them by defying all prior feudal loyalties while also daring to defy the cold and the dark. The Night Watch’s green recruits are said to “smell of summer,” and after an era in which too many fantasy series smelled of summer shiftlessness and the sticky sentimentality of pseudo-Shires, Martin’s arrived with a wintry charisma.

  Even if Tolkien denied that the North was for him a sacred direction, modern

  fantasy has witnessed a snowblinded sacralization of the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions, a conviction that the North must somehow be propitiated. The Canadian

  poet Gwendolyn MacEwen captures something of this in her “Terror and Ere-

  bus,” which imagines a lost Arctic explorer not dead but rather “somewhere walking between / The icons of ice, pensively / Like a priest / Wrapped in the cold holiness of snow.” From Smith’s Hyperborean icecapping and “the Frost Giant’s

  Daughter” through Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, and recent work like George

  R. R. Martin’s, fantastic fiction has venerated its own icons of ice and attributed a deadly holiness to snow. It is depressing, if we quit fantasy for reality even briefly, to reflect that if the Ultimate North has been a threat to our species since before human history began, it is now human history’s turn to threaten the Ultimate