The Paradise War

by Stephen R. Lawhead

  I stood gazing at my friend, a welter of emotions swirling inside me. He looked so weak, so fragile, and so insignificant. Embarrassed by the visible poverty of his crabbed, miserable existence, I wanted to raise him up, to make him see what I had seen, to know what I knew. I wanted him to sleep under Albion’s undimmed stars and to feel the fresh wind of virginal green valleys on his face; I wanted him to hear the soul-stirring melody of a True Bard’s harp, to smell the salt sea air of Ynys Sci, and savor the exquisite sweetness of honey mead; I wanted him to feel the firm rock of Prydain’s matchless mountains under his feet, to see the bright fire-glint on a king’s golden torc, to exult in the glory of the good fight. I wanted to show him all these things and more. I wanted him to breathe deep of the higher, richer life of the Otherworld, to drink from the cup that I had tasted . . . to hear the incomparable Song.

  I longed to show him the paradise I had discovered in Albion, but I knew that I could not. Try as I might, I could never make him understand. The gulf between us was too great. Words alone could never span the distance, nor describe the cruel destruction yet threatening that fair world.

  But I was spared the need to answer, for Professor Nettleton laid his hand to my arm and leaned close. “Unfortunately, we do not have much time. The others”—he jerked his head in the direction of the tent, and I knew who he meant—“will return at any moment. They are very close to a breakthrough—they know about the portal here. I have contrived to join their excavations so that I can stay close at hand. But we cannot let them find you here like this.”

  “Where is Simon?” I asked, my tongue awkward and clumsy in my mouth.

  “Simon?” The professor seemed mystified. “But I have not seen Simon. Only you have returned.”

  Even as I stood there, struggling to understand, I noticed that the feeble light had dimmed yet further; it was darker now than just a few moments ago . . . odd.

  I glanced over my shoulder toward the cairn . . . the glen was sinking into darkness, shadows deepening. A crow circled slowly overhead, silently watching . . . Then I realized that it was not dawn at all—but dusk. In this world the day was rapidly approaching twilight and the time-between-times. Soon the portal inside Carnwood Cairn would open.

  And if Simon had not returned . . .

  I saw the signs and felt the elemental tidepull of the moment in my blood and in my bones. And I heard the Song—streaming across the blinding distance between the worlds. I heard the Song and knew that the war for paradise extended to this world and to this very moment. And I had, now, to choose.

  Nettles was watching me. I swung towards him and raised my hand in a simple farewell. Then I turned and walked to the ancient cairn. I heard Professor Nettleton call out behind me: “Good-bye, Lewis! God go with you!”

  And then another voice—Weston’s voice, excited, alarmed, shouting, “Wait! Stop! Stop him, quick!” I heard frantic footsteps on the frozen earth behind me. “No! Please! Turn back!”

  But I did not stop. I did not turn back. For I had heard the Song of Albion, and my life was no longer my own.

  ALBION FOREVER!

  BY STEPHEN R. LAWHEAD

  Sean Connery has a tattoo on his forearm that is rarely visible in any of his films: a small blue banner bearing the words Scotland Forever—a slogan that expresses the fierce pride and patriotism of so many of his countrymen. The meaning goes well beyond mere words. It is at once a defiant battle cry, a poignant expression of love for the auld country, and (as in that memorable scene from Braveheart), a flip-of-the-kilt to the hated English and all would-be foreign occupiers.

  Since the first volume in the Song of Albion series was published in 1991, I have received hundreds—thousands?—of letters and e-mails from readers who have found in these books some articulation of a related sentiment: Albion Forever. I cannot claim credit for those who have decided to engrave the words indelibly on their bodies’ canvasses, but I do take great pleasure in knowing that the story of Llew Silver Hand has resonated so strongly with Britons of all backgrounds, North Americans, Europeans, and readers in many far-flung lands. More than any other book or series I’ve written in the past twenty-five years, these volumes have the most stalwart following— including the publisher of this new edition, who read them in his twenties and was determined to publish them himself when he had the chance.

  If any author knew why certain books succeeded where others failed, he would apply the magic formula without deviation, and reap the benefits of a sure thing. But this is not the case, so I have had years to ponder the enduring appeal of these books, whose readers sometimes report reading them yearly, incorporating certain passages into marriage or funeral ceremonies, naming their children after characters in the story, and making pilgrimages to the real and imagined sites in the manifest and Otherworld of Albion.

  I have concluded that the potent emotional charge many readers experience derives from three interwoven factors, the first of which is the “story vehicle,” or the means by which the reader moves through the tale. Here we have a first-person narrative—which I enjoy writing— by an everyman named Lewis who is, at the outset, sufficiently ordinary to seem familiar to any reader, male or female. He is a person from our own here-and-now world with the sort of frustrations and problems most of us can relate to, and who inhabits a recognizable niche in modern society: an American graduate student in Oxford who should be getting on in life, but has yet to settle. Our viewpoint character, Lewis, hasn’t yet found his joy, his passion, his meaning and role in life.

  This vehicle allows Lewis’s thoughts and feelings to become our thoughts and feelings. We know him, because he is us. And, since the narrative is written in the first-person voice, we are inside his heart and head on every page. Instead of reading about a legendary hero doing heroic things in a legendary kingdom, Lewis’s exploits become our own.

  This strong identification proved to be a powerful conduit for the underlying substance of the story, and the second important factor: Celtic myth and legend.

  I—a Nebraskan, whose native myths revolved around cowboys and Indians—had virtually stumbled upon and into the whole grand universe of Celtic myth and legend while researching and writing my King Arthur series, The Pendragon Cycle. While writing the first three books in that series, I was picking up numerous references to various ancient tales peculiar to the British Isles which, while not specifically about Arthur or Merlin, nevertheless informed the spirit and background of the various tales and legends. Upon completion of Taliesin, Merlin, and Arthur, I was eager to turn my attention to what I considered the raw material of the Arthurian legend: its Celtic roots.

  Deeply impressed by the imagery of Celtic folklore and the ancients’ love of beauty and ostentation, as well as the solid sensibility of the voices I heard speaking to me across the centuries, still fresh and still potent after so many years . . . it was my ambition to write something that would honor this tradition.

  Of course there were problems—and opportunities. The myths themselves were broken: fragments only. Although it is almost miraculous that anything at all survives from a culture that stubbornly refused to write down anything (for most of their history, the Celts distrusted the written word), still I had to deal with the fact that there are but a handful of even partially complete stories surviving from the past fifteen or sixteen centuries. The rest are mere incidents, story segments, and shards of larger works now lost; nothing like a whole cycle of interconnected tales existed. However, there were some recurring characters and tantalizing clues to suggest tenuous connections to other stories, and even intriguing references to incidents in tales now forgotten but previously well-known.

  It would never work to patch together the diverse pieces in hopes of re-creating a plausible whole. Rather, it was obvious from the beginning that my approach would be to create a new myth out of the old—basically, to fashion a brand-new suit of clothes using those ancient scraps. Of necessity, I became something of a scavenger, picking up bits of this
and that with which to work: names, incidents, odd bits of lore. And I set about capturing the Celtic mythos in a contemporary story, but one that used the characters, settings, and culture the ancient Celts themselves would have recognized.

  I determined that the story would move through all the stations of a traditional heroic myth tale and complete the cycle, because I wanted it to be a whole myth, not a broken one. This meant that certain constraints would be present and certain elements needed to be present. I studied the way mythic stories moved and the various component parts to be acquired or supplied—either by myself or lifted from one or another of the various Celtic tales, building up a ready working knowledge of not only the necessary shape of the story, but the characters, devices, and objects that populated Celtic myth and legend.

  So The Song of Albion rests on a solid foundation of Celtic myth and is, in its construction, also a mythic story. A viewpoint character with whom we identify closely—the everyman, Lewis—creates resonance. And for the final factor, the language of the story touches the heart of the reader.

  By language, I refer not to the modern language in which it may be read—English, French, Greek—or even the Gaelic words and names that are found sprinkled throughout the books. Rather, I refer to the means that the story uses to express itself, and that language is fantasy.

  In fantasy, the author echoes the creation of this manifest world, in which we live, with the fashioning of a subcreated world, in which the story’s characters live. A common feature of such literature is a portal—C. S. Lewis’s wardrobe must surely be the most well-known— through which the reality-bound protagonist travels into a more stylized imaginary, yet somehow more true, world. Stripped of much of the clutter of the mundane world and its often trivial preoccupations, more important matters of life stand in higher relief—good and evil, loyalty and betrayal, hope and despair, love and hate—can be better appreciated as they are played out in the story and, consequently, better understood.

  J. R. R. Tolkien, undisputedly a most fluent speaker of this language, was criticized in his day for indulging his juvenile whim of writing fantasy, which was then considered—as it still is in many quarters— an inferior form of literature and disdained as mere “escapism.”

  “Of course it is escapist,” he cried. “That is its glory! When a soldier is a prisoner of war it is his duty to escape—and take as many with him as he can.” He went on to explain, “The moneylenders, the knownothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as possible.”

  It is a difficult thing—perhaps also a foolish thing—for an author to analyze his own work, attempting a rational explanation of what is essentially and necessarily intuitive and mysterious. If these words have diminished your sense of wonder in any way, I apologize. If they have helped you better appreciate what you have just read, I am glad.

  All told, I am pleased to have written a book that has struck a cord with so many readers, and happily join those who have escaped into the world of Llew Silver Hand, Goewyn, Cynan, Tegid, Scatha, and all the rest, and gladly proclaim: “Albion Forever!”

  INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR

  Publisher Allen Arnold read the Song of Albion books when they were first published fifteen years ago. He has re-read them a few times since, and recently was able to ask Stephen Lawhead some questions about this exceptional trilogy and the world of Albion.

  Arnold: What was the catalyst for this epic trilogy? Do you remember a moment in time when the concept first crystallized for you?

  Lawhead: The Song of Albion was gestating throughout the time that I was writing my Arthurian series—The Pendragon Cycle. I had discovered the Celtic foundations of the King Arthur tales—which was new to me, and fascinating to me. This was in the 1980s. So, while I was researching and writing about Taliesin, Merlin, and Arthur—I kept encountering this rich, complex and, to me, exotic material— tales and legends of the ancient Celts which, although they didn’t have anything directly to do with Arthur, were nevertheless influencing the Arthurian tradition in a profound way.

  I began scheming a way to use this wonderful material directly— in a story that reflected all the elements of Celtic myth, and that moved through the complete mythic cycle, beginning to end. The Song of Albion was the result.

  A: The Paradise War uses a cairn as a gate to the Otherworld. Why is this?

  L: In Celtic legend, almost anything can be a gateway. I simply chose cairns because they are ubiquitous in the Celtic lands. They’re everywhere, these curious heaps of stones. Whether simple or elaborate, they all mark significant places--yet we usually don't know what that significance is.

  Like most writers, I often ask myself, ‘What if . . . ?’ What if a particular cairn was raised to mark a gateway to the Otherworld? What if someone in the present day stumbled through?

  A: Nettles is such an eclectic, memorable character. Who served as your inspiration for him?

  L: I live in Oxford, remember! These guys are all over the place. Professor Nettleton is my idea of the ideal and archetypal academic: agreeable, approachable, enthusiastic about his area of expertise, and formidably knowledgeable.

  A: This trilogy works together so well as a whole—partially due to the intricate foreshadowing you plant in this first novel. Yet you have remarked that you allow each novel to flow organically as you write it. Can you describe how this balance works since it seems you have to have the end in mind—as well as a million connected details—from the start in order for the trilogy to build as it does.

  L: The story grew from the ideas carefully seeded throughout the book and, while it is true that I allowed it to grow as it would, its creation was not an open-ended process. I had a definite ending point in mind, a specific destination. As the story unfolded and moved through each section it always had to be checked against that final destination.

  This is not the same thing as knowing the end of the story; I didn’t know how the story would end. I only discovered the ending as I wrote. The balance, then, lies in allowing the story to develop as it would while making sure that what developed was moving toward the final destination.

  A: The spiritual quality of your books is distinctive, and something I resonate with very strongly. How does all that work?

  L: The way it works is, you write what you know.

  The world I live in is a spiritual world. I have certain beliefs that include a creative God; a ‘manifest’ or temporal and broken world that is bracketed by an ‘otherworld’ which is eternal and perfect; the need for, and existence of, redemptive possibilities. Basically, I believe in the life and teachings of Jesus Christ.

  Naturally, these beliefs inform my writing, just as a person with other beliefs—a naturalist, nihilist, humanist, or hedonist, for example—will write books that express his or her point of view . . . whether they intend to, or not! It’s unavoidable. And, the more subtle it is . . . the more compelling it is.

  I suppose there’s a parallel here with the book, eh? In the world of Albion, what happens in the Otherworld effects what happens in the manifest world . . . and my contention is that what is going on in any author’s own belief system effects what happens in his or her books.

  A: Each book in this series has thirty-nine chapters. Is that important?

  L: In Celtic numerology, thirty-nine is a highly symbolic number. To the ancient Celts, three was the sacred number, and what is nine but three times three—which is to say thrice sacred, which is three times more holy, and so on. Thus, in a series about divine kingship, I thought it might be interesting to keep each book to thirty-nine chapters as a way to reinforce this ancient holy concept.

  ROBIN HOOD

  The Legend Begins Anew

  EXCERPT FROM HOOD

  The pig was young and wary, a yearling boar timidly testing the wind for strange scents as it ventured out into the honey-coloured
light of a fast-fading day. Bran ap Brychan, Prince of Elfael, had spent the entire day stalking the greenwood for a suitable prize, and he meant to have this one.

  Eight years old and the king’s sole heir, he knew well enough that he would never be allowed to go out into the forest alone. So rather than seek permission, he had simply taken his bow and four arrows early that morning and stolen from the caer unnoticed. This hunt, like the young boar, was dedicated to his mother, the queen. She loved the hunt and gloried in the wild beauty and visceral excitement of the chase. Even when she did not ride herself, she would ready a welcome for the hunters with a saddle cup and music, leading the women in song. “Don’t be afraid,” she told Bran when, as a toddling boy, he had been dazzled and a little frightened by the noise and revelry.

  “We belong to the land. Look, Bran!” She lifted a slender hand toward the hills and the forest rising like a living rampart beyond. “All that you see is the work of our Lord’s hand. We rejoice in his provision.”

  Stricken with a wasting fever, Queen Rhian had been sick most of the summer, and in his childish imaginings, Bran had determined that if he could present her with a stag or a boar that he had brought down all by himself, she would laugh and sing as she always did, and she would feel better. She would be well again.

  All it would take was a little more patience and . . . Still as stone, he waited in the deepening shadow. The young boar stepped nearer, its small pointed ears erect and proud. It took another step and stopped to sample the tender shoots of a mallow plant. Bran, an arrow already nocked to the string, pressed the bow forward, feeling the tension in his shoulder and back just the way Iwan said he should. “Do not aim the arrow,” the older youth had instructed him. “Just think it to the mark. Send it on your thought, and if your thought is true, so, too, will fly the arrow.”