Dragonwriter

by Dragonwriter- A Tribute to Anne McCaffrey

  Like the bards Sands describes, Pern’s harpers are great storytellers and musicians who, as discussed, pass along histories from hold to hold and weyr to weyr. However, though they owe allegiance to no specific hold or weyr, they are not entirely independent agents, as the early bards were, because they are part of a guild structure that trains and educates them in their music studies and also in the duties the hall expects of them. No raggedy wayfarers, Pernese harpers often seem to have assignments, almost like government agents, and go from one place or another (sometimes by dragonback, a great privilege among nonriders) to suss out a situation.

  While Pernese music carries on the bardic tradition in many particulars, the ideas expressed in the songs of the planet are more sophisticated, less full of primitive beliefs, magic, or superstition than the Child Ballads, a comprehensive collection of 305 Scottish and English songs once sung by medieval minstrels, gypsies and travelers, pub singers, court performers, and ordinary people as they worked and played. (The “child” in “Child Ballads” was folklorist Frances James Child, who published the annotated songs as The Scottish and English Popular Ballads between 1882 and 1898.)

  Pernese harper ballads lack, for the most part, the Jerry Springer Show aspects of many of the older ballads and the body count of those Scottish and English ballads. Most of the deaths recounted in Pernese songs are those of riders and dragons who die during Threadfall, more akin to Arthurian knights than to the characters of murder ballads, such as sisters who kill each other over a man, brothers who kill (for various reasons) men their sisters love, or spouses slaying each other because of sexual betrayal. Pernese ballads offer no tales of unquiet graves or locking hearts “in a box of golden,” though there are laments for dragons or human friends who’ve gone between. While the songs do a terrific job of conveying emotional experiences such as the joy of riding a dragon or impressing one, the grief when a loved one disappears “between,” or the fear of Thread, we don’t see many examples of other emotional content. There are few more personally emotional tales of “passion, bloodshed, desire, and death . . . everything, in fact, that makes life worth living,” as the bartender in Irma La Duce put it.

  This strikes me as odd, when I think about it, since Anne has written romantic stories on Pern and her other worlds and was a passionate and earthy sort of person. Anne’s musical passion was first and foremost for opera. It and operetta, like the old ballads, are used to tell a story, but the songs within them are usually only one fragment of the story or are told from one viewpoint, using the music to display vocal pyrotechnics and convey the emotions of the characters involved in the story. Certainly Helva, the spaceship with a human brain, sang that way, often from sheer joy and once, at the loss of her friend and pilot, from overwhelming grief. (The story is one Anne could never read aloud without crying, especially when she got to the part where Helva sang at the burial of her beloved. Though it doesn’t say so in the story, the song was Taps, and the story was her way of expressing her grief over the loss of her father.)

  But while the harpers perform songs about personal experiences, and we have one or two about death, there are no more romantic love songs than there are songs about magic, and no tales of violence committed when love goes sour. These were stock-in-trade of the early Earth minstrels. Many of Pern’s songs are more akin to the American work song about John Henry than to the older songs. The stories the harpers tell through their music do not seem to be fictitious, in most instances, or even parables, but instead descriptions of real occurrences.

  Some Pernese songs do have themes and structures similar to medieval riddle songs and magic ballads. Unless the magical tasks in the latter are performed in a specific way, something unpleasant may happen to the person assigned them. For instance, they could be required to follow their dead lover back to the grave. In one version of the song now known as “Scarborough Fair,” the singer says, “Tell him to make me a cambric shirt without any thread or needlework.” Like the other verses in the song, the instructions are for impossible tasks. In the days when superstition ruled peoples’ lives, songs sometimes taught preventative lessons and incantations. The common elements among them all is that they are simple to sing (they have a lot of repetition and rhyme) to make them easy for the listener to learn. But while Pernese songs may contain directions for the listener to avert death and destruction, the similarity stops there. Harper songs drill into inhabitants the need for preventive measures of a pragmatic nature to protect all within the range of the Thread (or whatever) from a very material disaster.

  The rationality of Pernese song lyrics stems from the culture’s postmodern roots. The differences between the ballads of Pern’s Harper Halls and the ballads of old (and of many fantasy novels) make sense when you realize that the Pernese harpers are retrofitting their repertoire to suit a world whose original settlers had been scientific types who saw enough wonder in the universe as it is without embellishing it with further magical mysteries.

  There’s another kind of song in our world that instructional Pernese songs resemble even more closely, called teaching songs. Teaching songs set rules to rhyme and add a tune, making them easier for children to learn and remember. The “ABC” song is one of these. Similarly, “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” teaches children about animals and the sounds they make in an easy, repetitive musical rhyme. “This Old Man” is a counting song, rhyming each number with an object, as in “This old man, he played two. He played knick-knack on my shoe,” and so on. Another simple form builds from one object to its relationship in the world: “On this hill there was a tree/on the tree there were some branches/on the branches there were some twigs . . .”

  On Pern, a classic example of a teaching song is a good tool to teach kids about—what else? Dragons and dragonriders! This little round, which we first encounter in Dragonflight, contains information about the movement and color of dragons, what they do, who they do it with, and what their motivation is, all in a few lines:

  Wheel and turn

  Or bleed and burn

  Fly between,

  Blue and green.

  Soar, dive down,

  Bronze and brown.

  Dragonmen must fly

  When Threads are in the sky.

  This song about how to handle the dangers unique to Pern, which first appeared at the beginning of “Weyr Search” (later turned into the first chapter of Dragonflight), is another perfect example:

  Drummer, beat and piper, blow,

  Harper strike, and soldier, go.

  Free the flame and sear the grasses,

  Till the dawning Red Star passes.

  Anne had tunes in her head while she was writing the lyrics to Pern’s songs, she said, but like many tunes not written down, they more or less fled after the lyric was written. While Anne was a lyricist, she was not a songwriter and wasn’t all that interested in personally sitting down and composing repeatable tunes for her words. Nevertheless, they were songs, and she knew they had tunes—and should have tunes. She wanted people to be able to hear them.

  Anne knew that to fulfill their purpose in Pernese society, most of the songs would need to have fairly simple tunes, easy to sing in the context of the story and also easy for her fans to sing, as she knew they would. She felt her two young musician friends, Tania Opland and her husband, Mike Freeman, would understand what she wanted. And in fact, it made sense to Tania that such a musically inclined people had scientifically advanced ancestors. As she explains her understanding of the unusual relationship between Pern’s space-traveling legacy and its harpers: “Many studies in our own culture have demonstrated the close link between early musical training and aptitude in maths, sciences, and technology. It helps those parts of the brain develop. So (on Pern) we end up, centuries later, with a high percentage of vibrantly creative and intelligent people.” So Anne asked Tania and Mike to write the music and to arrange, perform, and coproduce with her two CDs full of Pernese harper songs: The Masterharper of Pern and Sunset’s G
old.

  Anne liked the CDs so much she originally hoped to add their first Pern CD, Masterharper, to the book when it was released, since music is such an integral part of Robinton’s story. This didn’t happen, despite Anne’s pleasure in it and her feeling that this was how the songs would sound. (The publisher apparently imagined something a little less medieval and a lot more rock ’n’ roll. But a teaching song can’t be overpowered by the music, and while “Oh baby, baby” might fit into a chorus instead of, for instance, “Hey nonny, nonny,” the words are the most critical element of the bardic ballads, both medieval and Pernese.)

  I asked Tania why the duo settled on the melodies they chose for their work with Anne.

  “Mike wrote the melody for ‘Red Star Passes’ in his sleep,” Tania wrote from Ireland.

  He says he went to sleep with the words in his head and woke up with the melody. His conscious thought beforehand was that we could use something with a more “contemporary” feel since, after all, the colonists arrived on Pern with all the musical traditions of Earth up to the time of their departure. There’s even a mention in one of the prequel novels of a group of musicians who would have been first or second generation on Pern playing an old favorite called “The Long and Winding Road.” Don’t know for sure if she meant the Beatles song, but why else use such a familiar title for a piece of incidental music?

  My approach to writing the music had been based mainly on inspirations from early and liturgical music, to match the very medieval feel of the culture as it was described in the books.

  A couple of the songs were heavily influenced by many childhood Sunday mornings, where singing together was, for me, the most meaningful expression of family and community that church had to offer. “The Duty Song” was meant to be very hymn-like. I also had Annie’s description in one of the books, which had the melody being handed off between the sopranos, altos, tenors, and baritones.

  Another hymn-inspired melody: “By the Golden Egg of Faranth. By the weyrwoman wise and true . . .” The rhythm of those first two lines reminded me so strongly of the song I know as “Of the Father’s Love begotten”—a 5th century Latin lyric set to an 11th century melody and translated to English in the 19th century—that I had to use that as the basis for my composition.

  In view of the fact that Pern has no religion, the use of liturgical music in some cases seems odd, perhaps. But much of medieval music (on which many bardic ballads are based) is closely intertwined with religious music, and it does indeed reflect the period of Pernese culture, which feels medieval but with significant differences in both the songs and the planet’s history and culture. And although Anne often said there was no religion on Pern, there is definitely spirituality. People are born and die and speculate about what lies “between” and beyond death, as expressed in the song sung by Robinton and Piemur in All the Weyrs of Pern:

  Get up, take heart—go, make a start,

  sing out the truth you came for.

  Then when you Me, your heart may fly

  to halls we have no name for.

  Likewise, it would be pretty hard not to be awed by something larger than yourself when your best friend, who can read your mind and whose mind you read, is a humongous dragon. And Thread! That alone is enough to send more primitive souls into paroxysms of genuflections to the Red Star and probably drive them to staking out a few maidens for sacrifice to Thread as well.

  But the unusual thing about Pern is that they don’t. Some Pernese are greedy or stupid or crooked, but they do not revert to magical beliefs and superstitions or try to use them to manipulate each other. These people were descended from those with the skill to morph a native beast into a telepathic dragon to protect them from Thread, which they recognized as a natural, if inconvenient, cosmic phenomenon. If their technology declined, their intellect remained sharp, if less informed of matters their ancestors comprehended.

  More than pretty songs that entertain by stirring the emotions, Pernese music stirs the intellect and inspires the soul.

  For Anne as a writer, the songs may have provided her a way to make shorthand references to past events in other books she’d written about this complicated society. Along with moving the story along, her use of music connects characters and places with a repetitive refrain, providing a Greek chorus that defines the scene at hand and even relates it to an earlier one where the same song was sung. For Pern natives, maybe the same connection occurs, and a song from another event brings to mind a former solution. Even if the new problem is unfamiliar and the lyrics don’t hold a solution, the song at least tells the listener that Pernese people before them have faced seemingly impossible troubles and, with great ingenuity and perseverance, overcome them, even if it took inventing a new species of dragon or moving a star from its orbit to do so. Like the stirring ballads of old, harper ballads inspire the people of Pern and give them hope and courage, for they come of a people beloved by dragons. What can possibly be beyond the ability of such people?

  In addition to writing twenty-two solo books, including 1989 Nebula Award-winning novel, The Healer’s War, ELIZABETH ANN SCARBOROUGH co-wrote sixteen books with Anne McCaffrey, including the Petaybee series (the Powers trilogy and the Twins of Petaybee trilogy) and the two Barque Cats books, Catalyst and Catacombs. She also joined Anne and Margaret Ball in creating eight of the books in the Acorna series. Scarborough lives in Washington state with two black cats and a lot of beads, and occasionally entertains wandering minstrels.

  Father, have ya got a blessing for a horse?” said Anne McCaffrey to Richard Woods, OP, sometime during their first meeting. Anne had shortly tried her hand at raising racehorses, and this was the occasion when Nickel Run was first due to run. Richard rose to the occasion and produced some good words, but sadly Divine Providence demanded otherwise for poor Nickel.

  Though the whole Dragonhold lot—a group of horse-mad girls who had attached themselves to Anne in the early ’70s and grown into women who remained her close friends—were wary of a Dominican priest, Richard wooed them all. He continued to woo them and me when I met him. Richard is the sort of person who gives religion and the Catholic Church a good name.

  Anne had given up on the Catholic Church in the midst of the Second World War when her father was missing somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, her little brother was getting ready to die of osteomyelitis, her older brother was in Hawaii awaiting possible invasion, and she herself was sent down South to a boarding school. Conversations with Richard seemed to have changed that, so much so that Anne came to write “Beyond Between,” decided to be buried rather than cremated, and had a cross on her casket.

  Richard wryly commented that Anne had either a “Presbytolic” or a “Catholitarian” funeral service. My brother, sister, and I asked if Richard could say something at her service, and he found the most excellent words of both praise and comfort.

  Religion on Pern?

  RICHARD J. WOODS

  “IF YOU COME to the church, you’ve gone too far.” That pretty much sums up Anne McCaffrey’s approach to organized religion.

  Anne once told me that she came from Catholic stock, but separated from Rome over a number of issues long before I met her. Nominally, she was Presbyterian, a wise choice for the Republic of Ireland, where she had moved with two of her three children in 1970. In the end, her funeral was conducted warmly and well by a retired Presbyterian minister, Rev. Jim Carson. He had been her choice, and it was the right one. (Jim asked me to give a reflection at the service, which I was honored to do. But that’s another story.)

  Because Anne had excluded religion from her Pern stories in particular, many fans and even some professional critics assumed that she was an atheist. Some celebrated the assumption; others denounced it, for instance, as, “Anne’s hatred of religion and morinic [sic] view on religion as an evil destructive force. The people of Pern are not human, since every one of them are atheists.”1 She did have many atheist fans, who peppered the dozens of McCaffrey (and other) forums w
ith their views, not least in the “Atheist OUT Campaign” string on the New Kitchen Table page.2

  But Anne was not an atheist. Her attitude toward religion, including religion on Pern, was more nuanced than might appear from blogs and brief reviews, however, and it was especially so toward the end of her life. Thereby hangs my tale.

  The Dragonlady of Wicklow

  I first met Anne in 1981. I was working on a book about trends in contemporary culture and spirituality, especially the implications of some ground swells in regard to an apparent revival of neo-Celtic themes in music, literature, and art. Although I had read the Dragonriders trilogy and the Harper Hall trilogy, I was still unaware that Anne was laying the groundwork for a vast science fiction saga. I was inclined to see her stories more as the exploration of an alternative medieval world with Celtic undertones. And I was very fond of dragons. Always had been, and it wasn’t all that trendy then.

  Thus armed with happy ignorance and eagerness, I took advantage of a trip to England, where I was conducting research at the time, to visit Ireland and, if possible, to interview Anne McCaffrey. I wrote, she wrote back, and I was invited to come around. I still have the postcard she sent. At the time, Anne lived in Kilquade, a tiny village between Bray and Wicklow Town. It was not easy to find. Hence the phone call. Scribbled at the bottom of the card are some instructions I jotted down: “Road to Bray, right at Loch Garman sign, 7 mi to sign Kilpedder (L), sign to Kilquade, ½ mi down rd, 3 gateways, R L R, last house, church = too far . . .” That would have been tiny St. Peter’s Church, which (she told me later) had a wall dating back to the ninth century. Hence the name, so characteristically Irish—Kilpedder, Peter’s Church. (I never figured out who Quade was.)

  When I finally arrived at Dragonhold, I was ushered into a living room full of dogs, cats, and people—Anne herself, and a few close friends, Derval Diamond and Maureen Beirne among them. Later I figured out they were there in case “the priest” tried to strong-arm her into some kind of confessional debate. Fortunately, that was the farthest thing from my mind, and we got along well enough that she invited me back. Later, she told me, it was not all that common an occurrence. When my book came out, I dedicated it to Anne. And I did go back.