Born and raised in New York City, Russ graduated with honors from Cornell in 1957, and earned an MFA from Yale Drama School in 1970. She sold her first story (“Nor Custom Stale”) to F&SF in 1959, but was most prolific as a fiction writer in the 1970s. From the mid-1960s she wrote essays, reviews, and other nonfiction, writing about as much criticism as she did fiction. Russ taught at a number of colleges, and was a faculty member at the University of Washington until her retirement in 1994; by then chronic fatigue syndrome and back problems had forced her to mostly stop writing. Russ won both the Hugo and Nebula, as well as many lifetime achievement awards, such as the Science Fiction Review Association’s Pilgrim Award in 1988 and retroactive Tiptree Awards for “When it Changed” (1972) and The Female Man.
Joanna Russ was one of the hardest writers to track down for this book. I’d never met her, but we had some mutual friends, and I was finally able to find the assisted living community in Arizona where she was living and talk with her about how much I enjoyed teaching her work. Two months later she had the stroke that eventually led to her death in April 2001. Her papers are archived at the University of Oregon.
The Hugo Award–winning “Souls,” written after Russ had become something of an icon and outlasted many of her critics, generated wide acclaim.
SOULS, by Joanna Russ
First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 1982
Deprived of other Banquet
I entertained Myself—
—Emily Dickinson
This is the tale of the Abbess Radegunde and what happened when the Norsemen came. I tell it not as it was told to me but as I saw it, for I was a child then and the Abbess had made a pet and errand-boy of me, although the stern old Wardress, Cunigunt, who had outlived the previous Abbess, said I was more in the Abbey than out of it and a scandal. But the Abbess would only say mildly, “Dear Cunigunt, a scandal at the age of seven?” which was turning it off with a joke, for she knew how harsh and disliking my new stepmother was to me and my father did not care and I with no sisters or brothers. You must understand that joking and calling people “dear” and “my dear” was only her manner; she was in every way an unusual woman. The previous Abbess, Herrade, had found that Radegunde, who had been given to her to be fostered, had great gifts and so sent the child south to be taught, and that has never happened here before. The story has it that the Abbess Herrade found Radegunde seeming to read the great illuminated book in the Abbess’s study; the child had somehow pulled it off its stand and was sitting on the floor with the volume in her lap, sucking her thumb and turning the pages with her other hand just as if she were reading.
“Little two-years,” said the Abbess Herrade, who was a kind woman, “what are you doing?” She thought it amusing, I suppose, that Radegunde should pretend to read this great book, the largest and finest in the Abbey, which had many, many books, more than any other nunnery or monastery I have ever heard of: a full forty then, as I remember. And then little Radegunde was doing the book no harm.
“Reading, Mother,” said the little girl.
“Oh, reading?” said the Abbess, smiling; “Then tell me what are you reading,” and she pointed to the page.
“This,” said Radegunde, “is a great D with flowers and other beautiful things about it, which is to show that Dominus, our Lord God, is the greatest thing and the most beautiful and makes everything to grow and be beautiful, and then it goes on to say Domine nobis pacem, which means Give peace to us, O Lord.”
Then the Abbess began to be frightened but she said only, “Who showed you this?” thinking that Radegunde had heard someone read and tell the words or had been pestering the nuns on the sly.
“No one,” said the child; “Shall I go on?” and she read page after page of the Latin, in each case telling what the words meant.
There is more to the story, but I will say only that after many prayers the Abbess Herrade sent her foster-daughter far southwards, even to Poitiers, where Saint Radegunde had ruled an Abbey before, and some say even to Rome, and in these places Radegunde was taught all learning, for all the learning there is in the world remains in these places. Radegunde came back a grown woman and nursed the Abbess through her last illness and then became Abbess in her turn. They say that the great folk of the Church down there in the south wanted to keep her because she was such a prodigy of female piety and learning, there where life is safe and comfortable and less rude than it is here, but she said that the gray skies and flooding winters of her birthplace called to her very soul. She often told me the story when I was a child: how headstrong she had been and how defiant, and how she had sickened so desperately for her native land that they had sent her back, deciding that a rude life in the mud of a northern village would be a good cure for such a rebellious soul as hers.
“And so it was,” she would say, patting my cheek or tweaking my ear; “See how humble I am now?” for you understand, all this about her rebellious girlhood, twenty years back, was a kind of joke between us. “Don’t you do it,” she would tell me and we would laugh together, I so heartily at the very idea of my being a pious monk full of learning that I would hold my sides and be unable to speak.
She was kind to everyone. She knew all the languages, not only ours, but the Irish too and the tongues folks speak to the north and south, and Latin and Greek also, and all the other languages in the world, both to read and write. She knew how to cure sickness, both the old women’s way with herbs or leeches and out of books also. And never was there a more pious woman! Some speak ill of her now she’s gone and say she was too merry to be a good Abbess, but she would say, “Merriment is God’s flowers,” and when the winter wind blew her headdress awry and showed the gray hair—which happened once; I was there and saw the shocked faces of the Sisters with her—she merely tapped the band back into place, smiling and saying, “Impudent wind! Thou showest thou hast power which is more than our silly human power, for it is from God”—and this quite satisfied the girls with her.
No one ever saw her angry. She was impatient sometimes, but in a kindly way, as if her mind were elsewhere. It was in Heaven, I used to think, for I have seen her pray for hours or sink to her knees—right in the marsh!—to see the wild duck fly south, her hands clasped and a kind of wild joy on her face, only to rise a moment later, looking at the mud on her habit and crying half-ruefully, half in laughter, “Oh, what will Sister Laundress say to me? I am hopeless! Dear child, tell no one; I will say I fell,” and then she would clap her hand to her mouth, turning red and laughing even harder, saying, “I am hopeless, telling lies!”
The town thought her a saint, of course. We were all happy then, or so it seems to me now, and all lucky and well, with this happiness of having her amongst us burning and blooming in our midst like a great fire around which we could all warm ourselves, even those who didn’t know why life seemed so good. There was less illness; the food was better; the very weather stayed mild; and people did not quarrel as they had before her time and do again now. Nor do I think, considering what happened at the end, that all this was nothing but the fancy of a boy who’s found his mother, for that’s what she was to me; I brought her all the gossip and ran errands when I could and she called me Boy News in Latin; I was happier than I have ever been.
And then one day those terrible beaked prows appeared in our river.
I was with her when the warning came, in the main room of the Abbey tower just after the first fire of the year had been lit in the great hearth; we thought ourselves safe, for they had never been seen so far south and it was too late in the year for any sensible shipman to be in our waters. The Abbey was host to three Irish priests, who turned pale when young Sister Sibihd burst in with the news, crying and wringing her hands; one of the brothers exclaimed a thing in Latin which means “God protect us!” for they had been telling us stories of the terrible sack of the monastery of Saint Columbanus and how everyone had run away with the precious manuscripts or had hidden in the woods,
and that was how Father Cairbre and the two others had decided to go “walk the world,” for this (the Abbess had been telling it all to me for I had no Latin) is what the Irish say when they leave their native land to travel elsewhere.
“God protects our souls, not our bodies,” said the Abbess Radegunde briskly. She had been talking with the priests in their own language or in the Latin, but this she said in ours so even the women workers from the village would understand. Then she said, “Father Cairbre, take your friends and the younger Sisters to the underground passages; Sister Diemud, open the gates to the villagers; half of them will be trying to get behind the Abbey walls and the others will be fleeing to the marsh. You, Boy News, down to the cellars with the girls.” But I did not go and she never saw it; she was up and looking out one of the window slits instantly. So was I. I had always thought the Norsemen’s big ships came right up on land—on legs, I supposed—and was disappointed to see that after they came up our river they stayed in the water like other ships and the men were coming ashore by wading in the water, just as if they had been like all other folk. Then the Abbess repeated her order—“Quickly! Quickly!”—and before anyone knew what had happened she was gone from the room. I watched from the tower window; in the turmoil nobody bothered about me. Below, the Abbey grounds and gardens were packed with folk, all stepping on the herb plots and the Abbess’s paestum roses, and great logs were being dragged to bar the door set in the stone walls round the Abbey, not high walls, to fell truth, and Radegunde was going quickly through the crowd, crying, Do this! Do that! Stay, thou! Go, thou! and like things.
Then she reached the door and motioned Sister Oddha, the doorkeeper, aside—the old Sister actually fell to her knees in entreaty—and all this, you must understand, was wonderfully pleasant to me. I had no more idea of danger than a puppy. There was some tumult by the door—I think the men with the logs were trying to get in her way—and Abbess Radegunde took out from the neck of her habit her silver crucifix, brought all the way from Rome, and shook it impatiently at those who would keep her in. So of course they let her through at once.
I settled into my corner of the window, waiting for the Abbess’s crucifix to bring down God’s lightning on those tall, fair men who defied Our Savior and the law and were supposed to wear animal horns on their heads, though these did not (and I found out later that’s just a story; that is not what the Norse do). I did hope that the Abbess or Our Lord would wait just a little while before destroying them, for I wanted to get a good look at them before they all died, you understand. I was somewhat disappointed, as they seemed to be wearing breeches with leggings under them and tunics on top, like ordinary folk, and cloaks also, though some did carry swords and axes and there were round shields piled on the beach at one place But the long hair they had was fine, and the bright colors of their clothes, and the monsters growing out of the heads of the ships were splendid and very frightening, even though one could see that they were only painted, like the pictures in the Abbess’s books.
I decided that God had provided me with enough edification and could now strike down the impious strangers.
But He did not.
Instead the Abbess walked alone towards these fierce men, over the stony river bank, as calmly as if she were on a picnic with her girls. She was singing a little song, a pretty tune that I repeated many years later, and a well-traveled man said it was a Norse cradle-song. I didn’t know that then, but only that the terrible, fair men, who had looked up in surprise at seeing one lone woman come out of the Abbey (which was barred behind her; I could see that), now began a sort of whispering astonishment among themselves. I saw the Abbess’s gaze go quickly from one to the other—we often said that she could tell what was hidden in the soul from one look at the face—and then she picked the skirt of her habit up with one hand and daintily went among the rocks to one of the men—one older than the others, as it proved later, though I could not see so well at the time—and said to him, in his own language:
“Welcome, Thorvald Einarsson, and what do you, good farmer, so far from your own place, with the harvest ripe and the great autumn storms coming on over the sea?” (You may wonder how I knew what she said when I had no Norse; the truth is that Father Cairbre, who had not gone to the cellars after all, was looking out the top of the window while I was barely able to peep out the bottom, and he repeated everything that was said for the folk in the room, who all kept very quiet.)
Now you could see that the pirates were dumbfounded to hear her speak their own language and even more so that she called one by his name; some stepped backwards and made strange signs in the air and others unsheathed axes or swords and came running towards the Abbess. But this Thorvald Einarsson put up his hand for them to stop and laughed heartily.
“Think!” he said; “There’s no magic here, only cleverness—what pair of ears could miss my name with the lot of you bawling out ‘Thorvald Einarsson, help me with this oar’; ‘Thorvald Einarsson, my leggings are wet to the knees’; ‘Thorvald Einarsson, this stream is as cold as a Fimbulwinter!’”
The Abbess Radegunde nodded and smiled. Then she sat down plump on the river bank. She scratched behind one ear, as I had often seen her do when she was deep in thought. Then she said (and I am sure that this talk was carried on in a loud voice so that we in the Abbey could hear it):
“Good friend Thorvald, you are as clever as the tale I heard of you from your sister’s son, Ranulf, from whom I learnt the Norse when I was in Rome, and to show you it was he, he always swore by his gray horse, Lamefoot, and he had a difficulty in his speech; he could not say the sounds as we do and so spoke of you always as ‘Torvald.’ Is not that so?”
I did not realize it then, being only a child, but the Abbess was—by this speech—claiming hospitality from the man, and had also picked by chance or inspiration the cleverest among these thieves and robbers, for his next words were:
“I am not the leader. There are no leaders here.”
He was warning her that they were not his men to control, you see. So she scratched behind her ear again and got up. Then she began to wander, as if she did not know what to do, from one to the other of these uneasy folk—for some backed off and made signs at her still, and some took out their knives—singing her little tune again and walking slowly, more bent over and older and infirm-looking than we had ever seen her, one helpless little woman in black before all those fierce men. One wild young pirate snatched the headdress from her as she passed, leaving her short gray hair bare to the wind; the others laughed and he that had done it cried out:
“Grandmother, are you not ashamed?”
“Why, good friend, of what?” said she mildly.
“Thou art married to thy Christ,” he said, holding the headdress covering behind his back, “but this bridegroom of thine cannot even defend thee against the shame of having thy head uncovered! Now if thou wert married to me—”
There was much laughter. The Abbess Radegunde waited until it was over. Then she scratched her bare head and made as if to turn away, but suddenly she turned back upon him with the age and infirmity dropping from her as if they had been a cloak, seeming taller and very grand, as if lit from within by some great fire. She looked directly into his face. This thing she did was something we had all seen, of course, but they had not, nor had they heard that great, grand voice with which she sometimes read the Scriptures to us or talked with us of the wrath of God. I think the young man was frightened, for all his daring. And I know now what I did not then: that the Norse admire courage above all things and that—to be blunt—everyone likes a good story, especially if it happens right in front of your eyes.
“Grandson!”—and her voice tolled like the great bell of God; I think folk must have heard her all the way to the marsh!—”Little grandchild, thinkest thou that the Creator of the World who made the stars and the moon and the sun and our bodies, too, and the change of the seasons and the very earth we stand on—yea, even unto the shit in thy belly!—thinkest
thou that such a being has a big house in the sky where he keeps his wives and goes in to fuck them as thou wouldst thyself or like the King of Turkey? Do not dishonor the wit of the mother who bore thee! We are the servants of God, not his wives, and if we tell our silly girls they are married to the Christ it is to make them understand that they must not run off and marry Otto Farmer or Ekkehard Blacksmith, but stick to their work, as they promised. If I told them they were married to an Idea they would not understand me, and neither dost thou.”
(Here Father Cairbre, above me in the window, muttered in a protesting way about something.)
Then the Abbess snatched the silver cross from around her neck and put it into the boy’s hand, saying: “Give this to thy mother with my pity. She must pull out her hair over such a child.”
But he let it fall to the ground. He was red in the face and breathing hard.
“Take it up,” she said more kindly, “take it up, boy, it will not hurt thee and there’s no magic in it. It’s only pure silver and good workmanship; it will make thee rich.” When she saw that he would not—his hand went to his knife—she tched to herself in a motherly way (or I believe she did, for she waved one hand back and forth as she always did when she made that sound) and got down on her knees—with more difficulty than was truth, I think—saying loudly, “I will stoop, then; I will stoop,” and got up, holding it out to him, saying, “Take. Two sticks tied with a cord would serve me as well.”
The boy cried, his voice breaking, “My mother is dead and thou art a witch!” and in an instant he had one arm around the Abbess’s neck and with the other his knife at her throat. The man Thorvald Einarsson roared “Thorfinn!” but the Abbess only said clearly, “Let him be. I have shamed this man but did not mean to. He is right to be angry.”
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