Isegoria

H.P. Lovecraft has become something of a geek staple over the years for his “sanity blasting” horror stories. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, on the other hand, is a fantasy classic:

Three times Randolph Carter dreamed of the marvellous city,
and three times he was snatched away while still he paused
on the high terrace above it. All golden and lovely it blazed in
the sunset… Mystery hung about it… the poignancy and suspense
of almost-vanished memory, the pain of lost things…
When for the third time he awakened with… those hushed sunset
streets still untraversed, he prayed long and earnestly to the hidden
gods of dreams… But the gods made no answer and shewed no
relenting, nor did they give any favouring sign when he prayed to
them in dream… [A]fter even the first [prayer] he ceased wholly
to behold the marvellous city; as if his three glimpses from afar
had been mere accidents or over-sights, and against some hidden
plan or wish of the gods.
At length, sick with longing for those glittering sunset streets… nor able
sleeping or waking to drive them from his mind, Carter resolved to go
with bold entreaty whither no man had gone before, and dare the icy
desert through the dark to… unknown Kadath

— H. P. Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

The only fantasy novel from an author not known for his subtlety, this bizarre, witty, elegant little gem is an odd tale with an odd history. That we have the story at all is amazing, since Lovecraft wrote it for his own amusement and never submitted it to any publisher, refused to circulate it among his friends (contrary to his normal practice), and did not even bother to type it; it was not published until years after his death.[1] Written in deliberate imitation of another author (the inimitable Lord Dunsany), it is nonetheless distinctly, even quintessentially Lovecraftian. It never mentions Cthulhu, yet paradoxically it’s fair to say it’s the best Cthulhu Mythos novel ever published.

“When Barzai the Wise climbed Hatheg-Kla
to see the Great Ones dance and howl above the clouds
in the moonlight, he never returned. The Other Gods were there,
and they did what was expected. Zenig of Aphorat sought
to reach unknown Kadath in the cold waste, and his skull
is now set in a ring on the little finger of one
whom I need not name.”

Lovecraft himself — a pulp horror writer who ironically earned his living as a ghost writer — is mainly remembered today for his creation of the Cthulhu Mythos, an idea for an open-ended shared universe which continues in popularity today, a good seventy-five years and more since it first took form.[2] As a horror writer, he suffered the major handicap that none of his stories are actually frightening. However promising an idea might sound in the abstract, any tension is sabotaged by his deliberately quaint style (marked by overuse of a few favorite words, such as “foetor” and “eldritch” and a tendency to end the last line of his story in italics),[3] an assumption the readers share his phobias (about foreigners and anything that lives in the sea), and the ease with which his all-powerful fiends are defeated (Wilbur Whateley, the precocious half-human half-alien who plans to open the way for his alien kin to swarm into the world and eliminate mankind, is killed by a dog while sneaking into a library; Great Cthulhu himself, a godlike being whose advent will usher in the End Times, is sent packing by being rammed with a yacht). But read as fantasy, his stories have more appeal, especially the idea of a secret history (which strikes a cord in these paranoid, conspiracy-theory-ridden times) and another world that underlies our own and occasionally threatens to flood over into it — in his horror or science-fiction/horror stories, always with tragic consequences; in his fantasies, with moving poignance. His early work reads as imitation Poe, but without the immediacy and psychological insight that has kept people reading Poe for over a century and a half. His later work became a pastiche of motifs borrowed from his favorite contemporaries (ironically this is a major part of its appeal today; reading Lovecraft is like reading an anthology of the best horror writers of his times). In between the two, he wrote a series of otherworldly fantasy stories that mark the unappreciated high point of his literary achievement. Fans of his horror tend to disparage his fantasy because it is so very different from his other work; fans of fantasy rarely discover it because they only know of him through his reputation as an eccentric hack. Only relatively few have discovered its merits on their own, making the Dream-Quest paradoxically a seldom-read classic by a much-read author.

The Dreamlands

By noon, after a long uphill ride, he came upon
some abandoned brick villages of the hill-people . . .
Here they had dwelt till the days of the old tavern-keeper’s
grandfather, but about that time they felt that their presence
was disliked. Their homes had crept even up the mountain’s slope,
and the higher they built the more people they would miss
when the sun rose. At last they decided it would be better
to leave altogether, since things were sometimes glimpsed
in the darkness which no one could interpret favourably.

Lovecraft’s Dreamlands sequence, of which the Dream-Quest forms the core and capstone, consists of no more than a dozen or so stories and fragments written between 1919 (when he first discovered and began imitating Dunsany’s work) and 1926-27; the sequence ends with “The Strange High House in the Mists” (his single best story) and the Dream-Quest itself, the culmination of all that had gone before.[4] For while the concept of the Dreamlands and whole mode of writing is borrowed directly from Dunsany’s masterpieces, [5] Lovecraft also looted his own earlier stories for motifs, locations, and characters in a way that was new to him. While he was fond of reusing locations (e.g., Arkham, Miskatonic University), items (The Necronomicon), and of course the gods of his evolving Mythos (which he called “Yog-Sothothery”), aside from the Dream-Quest it was rare for Lovecraft to use the same character twice: the chief exceptions were Herbert West (whose six stories had explicitly been commissioned as a series) and Randolph Carter, who appears in five tales altogether [6] and seems to have been an idealization or projection of Lovecraft himself.

By contrast, the Dream-Quest features return appearances by a slew of characters from earlier stories: Carter consults with the aged priest Atal of Ulthar (surviving companion of Barzai the Wise from “The Other Gods”), gains the aid of King Kuranes (the hero of “Celephais”), is rescued from the Dark Side of the Moon by the cats of Ulthar (“The Cats of Ulthar”), and recruits the ghoul who was once the great painter Richard Upton Pickman (“Pickman’s Model”) to lead a ghoul-army on an invasion of Kadath.

There, on a tombstone of 1768 stolen from the Granary
Burying Ground in Boston, sat the ghoul which was once
the artist Richard Upton Pickman. It was naked and rubbery,
and had acquired so much of the ghoulish physiognomy
that its human origin was already obscure. But it still
remembered a little English, and so was able
to converse with Carter in grunts and mono-
syllables, helped out now and then by
the glibbering of ghouls.

All these and many other elements are woven together into a continuous narrative, without any chapter breaks: Lovecraft’s stated model for this was Walter Beckford’s Vathek (1786), a short decadent Arabian-nights novel, but obviously the smooth flow of the story, passing from scene to scene and sequence to sequence with never a pause, perfectly captures the nature of the dreams it imitates; in real nightmares, abrupt breaks are rare (except, of course, at the end) and surprising segues can happen at any time. Sometimes, as in his descriptions of Randolph Carter’s capture by the night-gaunts, HPL drew on actual nightmares of his own and incorporated them into the story, with considerable effect:

[H]e thought he saw a very terrible outline of something
noxiously thin and horned and tailed and bat-winged….
Then a sort of cold rubbery arm seized his neck
and something else seized his feet… and Carter knew
that the night-gaunts had got him . . .
They made no sound at all themselves, and even their
membraneous wings were silent. They were frightfully cold
and damp and slippery, and their paws kneaded one detestably.
Soon they were plunging hideously downward through
inconceivable abysses… He screamed again and again,
but whenever he did the black paws tickled him
with greater subtlety…
[H]is captors… were… shocking and uncouth black beings
with smooth, oily… surfaces, unpleasant horns that curved inward
toward each other, bat-wings whose beating made no sound,
ugly prehensile paws, and barbed tails that lashed needlessly
and disquietingly. And worst of all, they never spoke or laughed,
and never smiled because they had no faces at all…
but only a suggestive blankness where a face ought to be.
All they ever did was clutch and fly and tickle;
that was the way of night-gaunts.

Given the horror they inspire in him, it is all the more surprising that Carter latter allies himself with the night-gaunts; one of the understated themes in the book is the “hero’s” willingness to make common cause with various loathsome beings when it suits his purposes — first with the zoogs (small, vicious, cannibalistic forest creatures), then the ghouls, and eventually the night-gaunts. He has wholesome allies, too — the cats of Ulthar and King Kuranes — but on the whole he seems willing to avail himself of the aid of anyone who can further his quest and feels no remorse about abandoning erstwhile allies once he no longer needs them. He needs such help, because the foes who oppose his quest are fearsome indeed: the not-quite-human Men of Leng, the Moon-beasts, the masked priest of the forbidden monastery (inspired by Dunsany’s Thulba Mleen and in turn later contributing to the Mythos figure The King in Yellow), as well as mindless dangers such as dholes, gugs, ghasts, and shantaks. But the greatest threats he faces are not mortal but divine and wholly malevolent: the sinister guardians of earth’s gods, known as the Other Gods.

The Other Gods

“[Earth's] gods kept from you
the marvellous sunset city of your dreams
… for verily, they craved the weird loveliness of that which
your fancy had fashioned. They are gone from their castle
on unknown Kadath to dwell in your marvellous city
… and walk no more in the ways of the gods.
The earth has no longer any gods that are gods,
and only the Other Ones hold sway on unremembered Kadath.
You have dreamed too well, O wise arch-dreamer,
for you have drawn dream’s gods away from the world
of all men’s visions to that which is wholly yours…
Fain would the powers from Outside bring chaos and horror to you,
Randolph Carter… but that they know it is by you alone
that the gods may be sent back to their world.”

The object of Carter’s quest, while simplicity itself, is startling in its audacity. Once the gods have taken away his vision of the sunset city that so draws him, he vows to find the gods’ dwelling in Kadath and force them to grant his wish (as with Dunsany’s Small Gods, the gods of earth, while powerful, are no match for a forceful individual or “experienced dreamer” such as our hero). To complicate matters, no one knows where Kadath might be located, so he must first quest for information. Since the story takes place in the Dreamlands — an alternate world we can enter only when dreaming, which has rules and laws all its own — he meets with many strange, beautiful, and terrible things along the way; these incidents provide much of the story’s charm. Some of the people he meets, like Kuranes, are dead in the real world but live on in Dreamland, while others have never existed except in dreams (and nightmares).

Unfortunately, the mild gods of earth, or “Great Ones,” are protected by the strange and terrible “Other Gods” and their minions, who destroy those who in any way trespass on the Great Ones. Evil and powerful beings like Azathoth (the embodiment of chaos itself “at the centre of all eternity”) and Nyarlathotep (messenger of the Other Gods, also known ominously as “the Crawling Chaos”) who dwell in the abysses of darkness between the stars, the Other Gods are the equivalent here of what eventually came to be known in Mythos stories as the Great Old Ones or Outer Gods. There are hints of yet another group in the god Nodens (what later redactors dubbed the “Elder Gods”), but his status is unclear; he delights in Nyarlathotep’s discomfiture and his minions, the night-gaunts, are feared by Nyarlathotep’s servitors, but he may simply be an unusually powerful and independently minded Great One or a rival Other God, not an altogether different order of being.

“So, Randolph Carter, in the name of the Other Gods
I spare you and charge you… to seek that sunset city . . .
For know you that your gold and marble city of wonder
is only the sum of what you have seen and loved in youth
… This loveliness, moulded, crystallised, and polished by years of
memory and dreaming, is your terraced wonder of elusive sunsets.
Go now… Forget not this warning, lest horrors unthinkable
suck you into the gulf of shrieking and ululant madness.
Remember the Other Gods; they are great and mindless
and terrible, and lurk in the outer voids. They are
good gods to shun… and pray to all space that you
may never meet me in my thousand other forms.
Farewell, Randolph Carter, and beware; for I am
Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos!”

The ending of the tale, which comes immediately after Carter’s confrontation with Nyarlathotep himself, is interesting for several reasons, and full of ironies. First, Carter finally achieves his goal, only to find it fruitless; after many exploits he reaches Kadath but discovers it deserted, the gods having abandoned their Dreamland equivalent of Mount Olympus to revel in the city of his vision. Then he discovers that the city he dreamed about was actually of his own creation, something his mind made out of memories of his own past and all the nostalgia he felt for the things lost over the years. Nyarlathotep pretends to send him on a mission to recall the errant gods, but this is only a trap; too late Carter discovers he is flying through space on a one-way trip to Azathoth “for madness and the void’s wild vengeance are Nyarlathotep’s only gifts to the presumptuous.” But in the final twist and revelation, Carter suddenly remembers that he is dreaming — this is after all a dream-quest — and at the last minute forces himself to wake up. We have been reminded from time to time that the whole story is a dream (at one point Carter is even advised to wake up and start again but demurs because he’s afraid he might forget too much he’d already learned in his quest), but such a simple solution to his direst of straits and immanent destruction of body and soul together is so obvious it never occurs to most readers. In an ending borrowed straight from Dunsany’s “Where the Tides Ebb & Flow,” but none the less effective for that, Randolph Carter “leaped shoutingly awake within his Boston room” to the beauty and light and life of the real world:

And vast infinities away,
past the Gate of Deeper Slumber and the enchanted wood . . .
the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep strode broodingly into the onyx castle
atop unknown Kadath in the cold waste, and taunted insolently
the mild gods of earth whom he had snatched abruptly
from their scented revels in the marvelous sunset city.

The Dream-Quest and Your Game

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is one of those rare classics of fantasy which any gamer can sit down and play immediately, since it’s the inspiration for Chaosium’s “Dreamlands” setting for the classic Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game. While Chaosium has never replicated Randolph Carter’s quest (or indeed any of Lovecraft’s stories) as an epic RPG adventure, the setting derived from it and its associated short stories has gone through four editions (1986, 1988, 1992, 1997), with a fifth due out shortly; they have also published thirteen adventure scenarios using the setting. In addition, the Dreamlands setting was the basis of a stand-alone set of Chaosium’s collectable card game, Mythos (1997).

Notes

Lovecraft’s work is available in multiple overlapping editions, and the Dream-Quest is no exception. The standard edition is that published by Arkham House as part of a three-volume set of all HPL’s fiction; DQ forms part of the third volume, At the Mountains of Madness (1964, corrected text 1985; the other two volumes being The Dunwich Horror and Dagon and Other Macabre Tales; a fourth volume, The Horror in the Museum, reprints his ghost-written work that appeared under other author’s names). The story is also available in trade paperback as part of The Dream Cycle of H. P. Lovecraft (Del Rey, 1995), which also collects virtually all the stories related to the Dream-Quest, either by being set in the Dreamlands or by featuring a character whom Lovecraft later re-used in his novel (for example, “Pickman’s Model” and “The Statement of Randolph Carter”). The most attractive edition, however, is the first mass market paperback, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (Ballantine, 1970), where our novel is the featured story and not buried toward the back of some other collection. (Cover shown is of the 1996 reissue of this [Ballantine Books, July 1996; reissue edition; ISBN 0-3453-3779-4.]) Along with its companion volume, The Doom That Came to Sarnath (1971), this was part of Ballantine’s famed “Adult Fantasy Series” and unlike the hardcover has the advantage not only of a better cover (an evocative wraparound piece by Gervasio Gallardo, replaced in 1982 by an even more striking one by Michael Whelan) but also fittingly ends with Lovecraft’s single best story, “The Strange High House in the Mist.”

[1] We have R.H. Barlow to thank for the story’s survival; a teenage fan who became one of Lovecraft’s closest friends and eventual literary executor, Barlow persuaded Lovecraft to loan him the manuscript, which he surreptitiously typed; he also preserved Lovecraft’s manuscripts after his death and presented them to the John Hay Library in Providence, as well as providing the text that was posthumously published by Arkham House.

[2] Scholars debate endlessly about exactly which stories by Lovecraft and his imitators do and do not belong to the “Mythos,” but the seminal story remains Lovecraft’s own “The Call of Cthulhu,” published in the February 1928 issue of Weird Tales. Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu RPG takes the sensible approach by equating the Mythos and “Lovecraftian” — e.g., anything in Lovecraft’s fiction. In part, the Mythos seems to have begun as a sort of game whereby Lovecraft and his friends could link their stories and exchange ideas. It also seems to have been a means whereby Lovecraft signaled that ghost-written stories were his work, by inserting elements of his Mythos into them. The Mythos has become more popular than ever in the last twenty years, largely because of the roleplaying game sparking a revival of interest in Lovecraft; in both quality of scenario-writing and its impact on the gaming and fantasy-fan communities the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game exceeds the contributions of all but the very best of the fiction writers using the Mythos (e.g., Clark Ashton Smith).

[3] In one unintentionally funny example of Lovecraft’s technique undercutting the desired effect (in this case, to describe events with the Poe-like immediacy of a first-person narrator), “The Diary of Alonzo Typer” ends with the main character writing in his journal a description of being dragged away to a horrible death — as if a character in such circumstances would calmly stop to write in his diary while grappling with a monster. Most of Lovecraft’s fiction is completely humorless; the Dream-Quest is a rare and welcome exception, and it mainly generates its humor through the deliberately inapt choice of adjectives (a technique Lovecraft may have learned from Clark Ashton Smith, who uses an over-elaborate vocabulary to great comic effect in tales such as “The Colossus of Ylourgne” and “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros”).

[4] Stories in the sequence include “Celephais” (Kuranes), “The Other Gods” (the fate of Barzai), “The Cats of Ulthar” (a cautionary tale explaining just why cats are sacred in Ulthar), “The Silver Key” (the eventual fate of Randolph Carter), “The Strange High House in the Mist” (Nodens), “The White Ship,” “Polaris” (Lomar), “The Doom That Came to Sarnath,” “The Quest of Iranon,” “Ex Oblivione,” and possibly “Beyond the Walls of Sleep.” Closely related but not part of the sequence are tales like “Pickman’s Model” (the pre-ghoul Pickman), “The Statement of Randolph Carter” (introducing Carter himself), “Nyarlathotep” (featuring a modern-day appearance by the Crawling Chaos), and “Azathoth” (a novel fragment that seems to have provided the Dream-Quest‘s climax).

[5] Dunsany’s great contribution to fantasy are the eight volumes of fantasy short stories he published between 1905 and 1919: The Gods of Pegana (1905), Time and the Gods (1906), The Sword of Welleran (1908), A Dreamer’s Tales (1910), The Book of Wonder (1912), Fifty-one Tales (1915; a collection of fables also known as The Food of Death), The Last Book of Wonder (1916), and Tales of Three Hemispheres (1919). Lovecraft drew heavily from all these, but especially A Dreamer’s Tales, The Book of Wonder, and The Last Book of Wonder, plus the “Idle Days on the Yann”/”A Shop in Go-by Street”/”The Avenger of Perdondaris” sequence (collected in Tales of Three Hemispheres under the general title “Beyond the Fields We Know”).

[6] The five Randolph Carter stories are “The Statement of Randolph Carter” (1919), “The Unnamable” (1923), “The Silver Key” (1926), The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926-27), and “Through the Gate of the Silver Key” (1932-33), the latter a weak collaboration with E. Hoffman Price.

The Worm Ouroboros is the ancient image of a serpent consuming itself by its own tail — and the name of one of the almost-forgotten classics of fantasy:

“[T]he grandest heroic fantasy or sword-and-sorcery
tale in the English language”

— Fritz Leiber

“[F]orty-odd years ahead of its time…
the single greatest novel of heroic fantasy”

— L. Sprague de Camp

Before there was D&D, before there was Tolkien, and before fantasy even existed as a distinct, recognized “genre” of literature with its own imprints, dedicated small presses, and reserved shelves in libraries and bookstores, there was The Worm Ouroboros (1922). If today Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is the work that defines fantasy, then once upon a time Eddison’s book was a major contender for the archetypal epic fantasy.

["I have read all that E. R. Eddison wrote."
"I... think of him as the greatest and most convincing
writer of 'invented worlds' that I have read."

— J.R.R. Tolkien on Eddison

Admired by fellow fantasists like Tolkien, C. S. Lewis (who liked the Worm so much he invited Eddison to visit the Inklings and read his works-in-progress[1]), H. Rider Haggard, James Branch Cabell, James Stephens (“he has added a masterpiece to English literature”), Fritz Leiber (who admitted preferring Eddison to Tolkien), and Ursula K. Le Guin (who placed him first among her examples of superb fantasy stylists, above Kenneth Morris, Tolkien, and Dunsany), Eddison pioneered what has come to be thought of as “Tolkienian fantasy,” the grand invented-world epic novel. His book, written over eighty years ago, even comes with the now-requisite paraphernalia: Although the Worm lacks a map, it does come with a timeline and guide to pronunciation, while Eddison’s later books (the Zimiamvia series) include not only these but maps of his imaginary realms, genealogical charts, and lists of dramatis personae, as well as a guide to citations. (Eddison’s characters, whatever world they’re from, have a tendency to quote Shakespeare or Donne or more obscure 16th and 17th century poets and playwrights.)

“[N]either allegory nor fable
but a Story to be read for its own sake”

— E.R.E.

“So Excellent Well Writ”

Eddison’s most outstanding characteristic is, of course, his language. The Worm Ouroboros is the only great fantasy novel written in Shakespearean prose. Other fantasies have been set in the 16th and 17th century (or fantasy-world analogues to Tudor times, give or take a half-century or so), such as Mirrlees’ Lud-in-the-Mist (1926), Hodgson’s The Night Land (1912), and Briggs’ Hobberty Dick (1955), but none featured characters who speak as if they were spontaneously reciting lines from Shakespeare. Eddison was particularly fond of Shakespeare’s lesser contemporaries, especially the Jacobean revenge dramatists, his favorite being John Webster (The Duchess of Malfi). He absorbed their vocabulary and phrasing so thoroughly that he could reproduce it perfectly to suit his own purposes:

Now spake Spitfire saying, “Read forth to us, I pray thee, the book
of Gro; for my soul is afire to set forth on this faring.”
“‘Tis writ somewhat crabbedly,” said Brandoch Daha, “and most damnably long.
I spent half last night a-searching on’t, and ’tis most apparent no other way
lieth to these mountains save… (if Gro say true) but one . . .”
“If he say true?” said Spitfire. “He is a turncoat and a renegado.
Wherefore not therefore a liar?”
“But a philosopher,” answered Juss. “I knew him well of old . . .
and I judge him to be one who is not false save only in policy. Subtle
of mind he is, and dearly loveth plotting and scheming, and, as I think,
perversely affecteth ever the losing side if he be drawn into any quarrel
… But in this book of his travels he must needs speak truth,
as it seemeth to me, to be true to his own self.”

Few writers display so much love of words for their own sake: Eddison at one point spends an entire page describing the hero’s bed, and he thinks nothing of devoting a paragraph or two to the magnificence of a villain’s clothes and accoutrements; his most prosaic passages are filled with vivid similes and memorable phrases. This verbal luxuriance helps create a heightened sense of drama that befits his larger-than-life cast. For if Tolkien celebrates everyman, the “little people” of our world, through his hobbits, then Eddison glories in the high and mighty: regarding “common men,” he has one of his more sympathetic characters say “better a hundred such should die than one great man’s hand be hampered.”[2] Accordingly, just as Richard III, Hamlet, and Macbeth focus on the doings of kings and princes, lords and ladies, rather than ordinary people, so too Eddison’s tale concentrates on the great lords and sensuous, strong-willed ladies of his invented world. Everything in Eddison’s world is grander, more intense, and more dramatic than in our mundane reality, from their speeches to their deeds to their passions.

Demons and Witches, Goblins and Imps, Pixies and Ghouls, Oh My

Like a black eagle surveying earth from some high mountain
the King passes by in his majesty. His byrny was of black chain
mail, its collar, sleeves, and skirt edged with plates of dull gold…
On his left thumb was his great signet ring fashioned in gold in the
semblance of the worm Ouroboros that eateth his own tail…
His cloak was woven of the skins of black cobras stitched together
with gold wire, its lining of black silk sprinkled with dust of gold.
The iron crown of Witchland weighed on his brow, the claws
of the crab erect like horns; and the sheen of its jewels
was many-coloured like the rays of Sirius
on a clear night of frost and wind
at Yule-tide.

— King Gorice XII of Witchland enters a banquet-hall

While most readers will have little trouble with the archaisms (those who do would be well advised to read the book in Paul Thomas’s excellent annotated edition,[3] which glosses the more unusual expressions), even those who get swept up in Eddison’s style and story often balk at his nomenclature. Rather than use real-world nations (English, French, Spaniard, and so on) or transparent equivalents (for example, Montaigne, Castille, Eisen, Vodacce in 7th Sea), Eddison opted to dub the heroes of his book the Demons and the villains the Witches, thus creating much confusion (the Demons are heroic and in his eyes wholly admirable; the Witches while treacherous are great warriors and most definitely male). The other nations are called the Goblins (who include the brilliant traitor Lord Gro), the Pixies (most notably the beautiful Lady Prezmyra), the Imps (a wild folk who have names like Fax Fay Faz, Philpritz Faz, and Mivarsh Faz), and the Ghouls (who have been exterminated to the last soul in a genocidal war by our heroes just before the story begins), but these names are just odd window-dressing: all these folk are human.

Besides the names of the nationalities, the personal names are also notably eccentric — the four heroes of the story, for example, are the brothers Lord Juss (king of Demonland), Spitfire, and Goldry Bluzco, along with their cousin Brandoch Daha (their subordinates include the lords Vizz, Volle, and Zigg). The villains include not only Gorice XII, Witchland’s sorcerer-king, but his generals Corund, Corinius, and Corsus (very distinct in personality but with names easily confused on a first reading) and the advisor Lord Gro. Place names similarly range from grand (Carce, Krothering) to simply bizarre (Kartadza, Melikaphkhaz, Thremnir’s Heugh). Occasionally Eddison’s eclectic, haphazard way of naming characters and places (not unlike those used by most modern-day fantasy novelists, or most DMs for that matter) strike gold (for example, Lady Mevrian), but all too often they flop (who can take seriously swashbuckling adventurers named Spitfire and Gaslark?).[4]

There but not Back Again

There was a man named Lessingham
dwelt in an old low house in Wasdale, set in
a gray old garden where yew-trees flourished
that had seen Vikings… in their seedling time

— Opening sentence of The Worm

One other element has deeply puzzled readers for eighty years: the “Induction.” Today most invented-world stories simply start in the world of the story, but that’s part of Tolkien’s legacy — earlier fantasy often devoted precious pages to establishing the relationship or “bridge” between the fantasy world and our own (cf. Alice’s falling asleep at the beginning of Alice in Wonderland). Eddison’s bridge is odd indeed: his story begins with a man named Lessingham, who falls asleep and is carried to Mercury in a dream, where he witnesses the events of the story. However, after the second chapter Eddison stops mentioning the invisible watcher and never returns to the frame story at the end. Many critics have simply assumed Eddison forgot about his point-of-view character since they are at a loss to otherwise explain his disappearance.

In fact, Eddison’s broken frame is a deliberate part of the book’s plan — yet another homage to the Elizabethan and Jacobean plays he loved. In this case, his model was Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, which begins with an “Induction” where a sleeping beggar is dressed in a rich man’s clothes and told he’s a lord who had dreamed he was a beggar. The baffled beggar, a man named Christopher Sly, is convinced by what the hoaxers show him and begins to watch a play: this play is “The Taming of the Shrew” itself. In the anonymous play Shakespeare based his own play on, the story returned to Christopher Sly at the end, but Shakespeare includes only the set-up, not the pay-off. Performances of the play invariably omit the Induction and single later reference to Sly. Like Shakespeare, Eddison in his own Induction introduces us to an inset story which then takes on a life of its own, eviscerating the need for any return to the real world.

Similarly, though the narrator says he has been transported to Mercury (not via a conventional spaceship but in a chariot drawn by hippogriffs), he’s very obviously not on the first planet from the sun but a quicksilver fantasy variant of our own world — not only do the characters in the book quote Herrick, Donne, Shakespeare, old ballads, and the like but several references to telling time by the phases of the Moon establish that they are on Earth (albeit a weird fantasy version of our Earth). Eddison’s world is mercurial, not Mercury: quicksilver, ever-changing.

Perhaps the truest indication of Eddison’s intent lies in the poem with which he prefaced his work: a fragment from the ballad of Thomas the Rymer (14th century), telling of his meeting with the Queen of Elfland, who has come to carry him off to a strange world, neither Heaven nor Hell but full of marvels unguessed at by mortal men. The poem is unaccountedly omitted from the annotated edition, but its presence in the original suggests that Eddison intends to show the reader, like Lessingham, a wondrous new world somehow linked to our own but standing apart, with its own rules.

A Flawed Masterpiece Is Still a Masterpiece

“‘. . . none may come alive unto [Koshtra Belorn],
for the mantycores of the mowntaines will certeynely
ete his brains ere he come hither.’”

“What be these mantichores of the mountains
that eat men’s brains?” asked the Lady Mevrian.

.”. . . ‘The beeste Mantichora, whych is as much as to say
devorer of menne… These be monstrous bestes,
ghastlie and ful of horrour, enemies to mankinde,
of a red coloure, with ij rowes of huge grete tethe
in their mouthes. It hath the head of a man,
his eyen like a ghoot, and the bodie of a lyon
lancing owt sharpe prickles fro behinde. And hys
tayl is the tail of a scorpioun. . . And hys voys
is as the roaryng of x lyons.’”

– Brandoch Daha reads of manticores in Lord Gro’s book

For all its virtues, The Worm Ouroboros is too eccentric to capture a mainstream audience as Tolkien did. Despite being much admired, it is little imitated (though a few bits inspired by it did find their way into The Lord of the Rings — cf. Pippin’s theft of the palantir and Saruman’s attempted assassination of Frodo). Perhaps this is because the style, a major part of the story’s appeal, is simply too hard to fake; only someone who lived and breathed Jacobean drama could pull it off.

That the book, despite a revival in the 1960s (which saw its first paperback publication) and for a decade or two thereafter, has begun to sink out of sight in recent years is a great pity: there really is nothing else quite like it. For those who like adventure fantasy, the Worm has it all: evil sorcery, battles with monsters, impossible quests, battles by land and by sea, with swords and with bare hands, battles with the elements (particularly in an epic mountain-climbing sequence), a varied and powerful cast of well-motivated villains (including King Gorice, who is reincarnated in a new body each time the heroes slay him — e.g. Gorice X, Gorice XI, Gorice XII), scheming ladies perfectly capable of setting their own agendas, some discreet sex (most notably Brandoch Daha’s encounter with the Lady of Ishnain Nemartra, which he thinks lasts a single night only to be surprised afterwards to find an entire week has gone by; or Lady Sriva of Witchland’s avoiding her fiancé to arrange a tryst with his rival, only to stand both men up and go seduce her King instead), dungeons to escape from, kidnapped friends to rescue, powerful enchantments to be broken, and much, much more. Eddison sets the stakes high: whoever comes out triumphant in the all-or-nothing three-year struggle he chronicles will rule the world.

[W]ith a horrid bellow [the mantichore] turned on Juss, rearing
like a horse; and it was three heads greater than a tall man…
The stench of its breath choked Juss’s mouth and his sense sickened,
but he slashed it athwart the belly… so that the guts fell out. Again
he hewed at it, but missed, and his sword… was shivered into pieces.
So when that noisome vermin fell forward on him roaring like a thousand
lions, Juss grappled with it… [I]t might not reach him with its murthering
teeth, but its claws sliced off the flesh from his left knee downward to the
ankle bone, and it fell on him and crushed him on the rock, breaking in
the bones of his breast. And Juss, for all his bitter pain and torment, . . .
thrust his right hand, armed with the hilt and stump of his broken
sword… until he searched out its heart… , slicing [it] asunder
like a lemon.”

– Lord Juss’s hand-to-hand combat with a mantichore on a mountain-side

But of all his varied and vivid cast, none stands out like the treacherous Lord Gro, one of fantasy’s great villains. A former adventurer of spectacular accomplishments, Gro is smart, brave, witty, likable, and learned; an author and an explorer, popular with the ladies and invaluable when plotting strategy. Unfortunately, he has one fatal character flaw: he cannot stand to be on the winning side. When the side he’s on begins to win (often through Gro’s own efforts), he feels compelled to betray it and go over to their enemies. Rather than gain him a reputation as the champion of the underdog, this makes him a despised outcast, the eternal traitor, distrusted even by those who depend upon his help. Even so he continues to perform great deeds at extreme risk for first one side and then the other of this cataclysmic war, allying first with the Witches to help them conquer Demonland, then with the Demons to help them expel the invaders, and finally with the Witches again in their final extremity; he simply cannot help himself. Rarely has a fantasy author created such a sympathetic villain.

Ouroboros

“This sword Zeldornius gave me. I bare it at Krothering Side
against Corinius, when I threw him out of Demonland. I bare it
… in the last great fight in Witchland. Thou wilt say it brought me
good luck and victory in battle. But it brought not to me…
that last best luck of all: that earth should gape for me
when my great deeds were ended.”

– Brandoch Daha laments the passing of his enemies

“Would [the blessed Gods] might give us our good gift, that should be
youth for ever, and war; and unwaning strength and skill in arms.
Would they might give us our great enemies alive and whole again.
For better it were we should run hazard again of utter destruction,
than thus live out our lives [in peace] like cattle fattening
for the slaughter, or like silly garden plants.”

– Lord Juss wishes his enemies alive again

The most extraordinary thing of all about The Worm Ouroboros, however, comes at the very end; a final surprise that trumps everything that’s come before and leaves the reader stunned — either delighted or appalled. Eddison had provided a clue of his intent in the name he gave the book, “the wyrm (dragon) which devours its own tail”[5] — that is, the Midgard Serpent, who encircles the entire earth; anyone tracing its length would come in time back to his or her starting point and begin all over again. And this is exactly what Eddison’s novel does. Granted a wish by the gods after their great deeds, Lord Juss, Brandoch Daha, and the others cannot think of anything they would like more than the chance to do it all over again. Accordingly, time is looped back; their foes brought back to life; all their hard-fought victories undone and waiting to be achieved again.

To Eddison, and the Demons, this is the happiest of happy endings: the final paragraphs of the book repeat the scene from the first chapter, and his heroes will be able to battle his villains forever. It’s a frame of mind familiar to any D&D player who’s just completed a long, hard, challenging, but ultimately successful campaign: a tinge of regret that it’s all over and that combination of characters, players, DM, NPCs, and plot will never come again. Eddison offers a means by which his fictional heroes can go back and enjoy it all over again. Seventeen years before Joyce pulled the same trick in Finnegan’s Wake, The Worm Ouroboros loops back in a closed circle, and its events repeat over and over again forever.

Notes

[1] In addition to inviting him to Inklings meetings as an occasional guest, Lewis struck up a correspondence (in Middle English) with Eddison that lasted the remainder of Eddison’s life (he died in 1945). The “E. R.”, by the way, stands for Eric Rucker (Rick).

[2] Eddison and Tolkien debated their respective positions when they met, as Tolkien recounted long afterwards: “I read his works with great enjoyment for their sheer literary merit… I disliked his characters (always excepting the Lord Gro) and despised what he appeared to admire… Eddison thought what I admire ‘soft’ (his word: one of complete condemnation, I gathered); I thought that… he was coming to admire, more and more, arrogance and cruelty.” (JRRT, letter 24 June 1957). It’s hard to imagine, for example, that Frodo, or indeed any of Tolkien’s heroes, at the end of The Lord of the Rings would wish to repeat all the horrors experienced during the quest, as Eddison’s heroes do.

[3] The best edition of The Worm Ouroboros is the 1991 trade paperback edited, with annotations, by Paul Edmund Thomas (Dell; ISBN 0-440-50299-3; 1991, 448 pages). Unfortunately, this edition leaves out not only the prefatory poem (an excerpt from the ballad of True Thomas) but also all the illustrations that accompanied the original 1922 edition. While most of these are of only minor interest, the brooding portrait of Gorice XII and the swirling picture of his destruction (“The Last Conjuring in Carce”) are both sadly missed. Fortunately, they are included in the mass market paperback edition from Ballantine (ISBN 0-345-25475-9; April 1967, 520 pages), which is still readily available through used bookstores (and online through Amazon.com’s used books and bookfinder.com). (The mass market edition cover is shown in this article.) Two editions are currently in print: one in the Fantasy Masterworks series, published in Britain by Millennium Books (ISBN 1857989937; April 2000, 520 pages, £6.99); while only available in a limited number of bookstores in this country, it can be ordered direct from England via amazon.co.uk. The other is by Replica Books (ISBN 0735101396; 1999, 445 pages, $32.95).

[4] Part of the book’s eccentric nomenclature might be due to the fact that Eddison made up the story as a child and only wrote it down and published it years later, when he was forty. An unpublished picture book survives that he drew when he was ten (e.g., c.1892), which clearly illustrates scenes out of The Worm; it is now in the Bodleian Library at Oxford.

[5] Tolkien paid tribute to Ouroboros years later by borrowing the name for Farmer Giles’ sword, Caudimordax, or Tailbiter, these simply being the Latin and English equivalents, respectively, of the Greek “ouroboros” (JRRT, Farmer Giles of Ham, 1949). It is important to note that “the worm ouroboros” does not refer to a creature in Eddison’s book but the book itself — the story that never ends but always loops back and begins anew.

Other Works: Readers who enjoy Eddison might want to explore his other works. These include an attempt to create an authentic Icelandic-style saga (Styrbiorn the Strong, 1926), a translation of an actual saga (Egil’s Saga, 1930), and the Zimiamvia series: Mistress of Mistresses (1935), A Fish Dinner at Memison (1941), and The Mezentian Gate (1958), the latter left unfinished at Eddison’s death and published posthumously; all three were gathered with some additional material into an annotated edition, Zimiamvia, by Paul Edmund Thomas in 1992. The Zimiamvia series has tenuous connections to The Worm (Lessingham, the observer in the Induction, is a major character in Mistress and Fish Dinner) but is wholly different in tone, being more Eddison’s presentation of his private religion (a form of Aphrodite-worship) than an adventure novel. Still, the series does include two great characters: the elderly wizard-philosopher-councilor Dr. Vandermast (inspiration for a character in the Forgotten Realms Cormyr novels) and the villainous Horius Parry, a.k.a., “The Vicar,” as well as a bizarre and impressive scene in which King Mezentius creates Earth as a parlor-trick at a dinner party. Most readers of The Worm find the Zimiamvia books repellent, but they also have their admirers who consider them far superior to the better-known book.

Bridge of Birds, by Barry Hughart, is an unusual fantasy classic in that it takes place in a fantastic pre-modern East:

“My surname is Lu and my personal name is Yu, but I am not
to be confused with the eminent author of The Classic of Tea.
Everyone calls me Number Ten Ox.”

“My surname is Li and my personal name is Kao,
and there is a slight flaw in my character,”
he said matter-of-factly. “You got a problem?”

— Number Ten Ox meets Master Li for the first time

Sometimes, superlatives fail us.

There are a great many good books in the world, and even more books that are worth reading for one reason or another. But truly great books are rare; books that, once read, join that permanent shelf of books we read and reread over and over again. Such books are as good a century after first publication as the day they first appeared, as good on the tenth reading as the first. There have only been a handful of them in our genre in the century and a half or so since modern fantasy first appeared, and by almost any standard Bridge of Birds is one of them. I personally rank it among the ten best fantasies ever published.

Like most great books, Bridge of Birds came out of left field; it bore little resemblance to other fantasies published at the time or in the years preceding it (or, despite a few feeble imitations, since). Meeting with instant acclaim, it won the World Fantasy Award — a considerable feat for an author’s first novel[1] — tying with Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood (a book with a brilliant concept marred by poor execution) for the year’s best novel. The following year, it won the Mythopoeic Award as well. Unfortunately, Hughart’s follow-up, The Story of the Stone (1988), was as bad as Bridge of Birds was good, a tired rehash of themes and motifs from the first book that utterly fails to recapture the spark that made the original stand out. By the time the third book, Eight Skilled Gentlemen (1991), appeared and proved Hughart could write a worthy companion to the first book, his popularity had waned and publishers had lost interest. Dancing Girl, the fourth book in the projected seven-book series, was never published and Hughart, who’s now approaching seventy, has abandoned authorship, meaning that the three books already published (collected in 1998 into the three-in-one omnibus The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox) stand as a truncated but completed whole.

“In the carefree days of my youth I once sold [the Emperor]
some shares in a mustard mine.”
We stared at him.
“A mustard mine?” the abbot said weakly.
“I was trying to win a bet concerning the intelligence
of emperors,” [Master Li] explained.

Chinoiserie

Oriental fantasy, of course, has a long and honored history, dating back to the first stirring of interest in myth and folklore in the 1760s, the reaction against the Age of Reason that would eventually lead to modern fantasy a few generations later. China’s use as an exotic setting for wonder tales goes all the way back to The Arabian Nights (most readers forget that Aladdin is Chinese and ends up marrying the emperor of Cathay’s daughter) and possibly beyond — e.g., the 14th century Travels of Sir John Mandeville (which are pure fantasy but were regarded by some gullible souls as factual) and 13th century Journey of Marco Polo (which, though fact-based, were read as wonder tales by disbelieving Europeans).

Probably the best pre-Hughart example of “Chinoiserie” are Ernest Bramah’s Kai Lung stories (The Wallet of Kai Lung, 1900; Kai Lung’s Golden Hours, 1922; Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat, 1928), which employ for humorous effect an ornate, mock-polite language that is deliberately quaint in its tone — as, for example, when a ruthless highwayman takes the storyteller Kai Lung prisoner with these words: “Precede me, therefore, to my mean and uninviting hovel, while I gain more honour than I can reasonably bear by following closely in your elegant footsteps, and guarding your Imperial person with this inadequate but heavily-loaded weapon.” Oriental fantasies were so popular in the pulp era, in the hands of writers like E. Hoffman Price (a minor member of the Lovecraft circle), that Weird Tales at one point spun off a sister magazine, Oriental Stories (later renamed Magic Carpet). Fantasies set in China were also popular in children’s literature, in works such as Shen of the Sea (winner of the 1925 Newbery) and the illustrated fable The Five Chinese Brothers (1938).

More popular than any of these, however, were various series that were not fantasies set in China but mysteries with a Chinese hero (or, more often, villain). Foremost among these was the Fu Manchu series by Sax Rohmer (1911ff) and its many imitators, giving vent to “yellow peril” xenophobia by recounting the fiendish plots of the insidious Dr. Fu Manchu (whose master plan, it turns out, is to replace the British Empire with self-rule by indigenous peoples — something latter-day readers can contemplate without undue horror). Directly opposed to these are the Charlie Chan stories of Earl Derr Biggers (mostly written in the 1920s and inspiring two movie series that spanned the 1930s and 40s), featuring a Chinese-American detective from Honolulu who always sees through the obvious but false to the essential truth beneath. Chan may speak in pidgin-English (“Confucius say . . .”, contrasted with Number One Son’s slangy American), but Biggers leaves no doubt that he’s a brilliant detective — much smarter than the Anglo-Americans surrounding him. Less well remembered, but perhaps the only one of these to exercise an influence on Hughart, is Robert van Gulik’s Judge Dee series (1950s-60s). Like Hughart’s books, the Judge Dee stories are set in 7th century China during the Tang dynasty, an era later remembered as a golden age; they also share a generally plainstyle dialogue and rather earthy approach toward sex (Master Li from time to time mutters “ah, to be ninety again” when observing Number Ten Ox’s latest female companion), violence, torture, profanity, and so on.

It turned out to be more difficult than he expected…
Master Li… scorched the air with the Sixty Sequential Sacrileges
with which he had won the all-China Freestyle Blasphemy
Competition in Hangchow three years in a row.

An Ancient China That Never Was

One element in Hughart’s success is that his book does not start as fantasy but as a historical novel in a very specific time and place: the village of Ku-fu in the Year of the Tiger (A.D. 639), the fifteenth day of the eighth moon, during the silk harvest.[2] When every child in the village between the ages of eight and thirteen is struck with a strange plague and falls into a coma, our narrator, young Lu Yu (better known as Number Ten Ox) sets out on his nineteenth birthday to find a sage in Peking who can tell them “how a plague learned to count.” The drunken sage he returns with, an ancient little old man of about a hundred and ten named Master Li, quickly works out that only the Great Root of Ginseng can cure the ill children, and so the mismatched pair undertake an epic quest to find the priceless ginseng root.

Unlike so many quests — for revenge, for money, for power — Number Ten Ox’s quest is well-motivated: Whenever he falters, he thinks of the dying children and their grieving parents and presses on, whatever the danger ahead. This adds a very human (or even humane) element to the story and gives it a realism more generic fantasies may lack: The heroes are forced to continue when they might otherwise have turned back because their conscience cannot let them accept the consequences of failure. This is not to say that they are sterling characters. Master Li, after all, has “a slight flaw in his character” and has no hesitation about swindling, forging, stealing, burglary, murder, impersonation, or assassination in a good cause. As he says to Number Ten Ox as they enter one town:

“Unfortunately… we will have to murder somebody
… We must pray that we will find somebody
who thoroughly deserves it.”[3]

— Master Li

Number Ten Ox, by contrast, is relatively innocent when the book starts and remains uncorrupted throughout by his experiences. Huge, gentle, attractive to the ladies, and extraordinarily strong, he is wiser but essentially unchanged in the end. True, he joins in Master Li’s frauds and impersonations and cheerfully beats to death or chops up any number of guards and other malefactors, but this is because his local abbot told him to (“Number Ten Ox, our only hope is Master Li…. You must do as he commands, and I shall be praying for your immortal soul.”). In a brilliant masterstroke, Hughart made Number Ten Ox the story’s narrator and point-of-view character. This not only gives Ox the opportunity to explain things about Chinese culture to Western (“barbarian”) readers but enables us to see the story through the eyes of a normal person, of average intelligence and typical reactions. Master Li is the genius, the Holmes to Ox’s Watson — always remembering that in the original stories Watson is an intelligent man, not the sputtering dunce that later movie adaptations made of him, whose reasonably quick wits serve as a foil for Holmes’ brilliance. As the story develops and they survive increasingly sticky situations, it develops into a kind of buddy movie: the brave, strong, undaunted Ox providing the muscle (and heart) and the clever, ancient, cynical Master Li the brains.

“Master Li, how are we going to murder a man who laughs at axes?” I asked.
“We are going to experiment… Our first order of business will be to find
a deranged alchemist, which should not be very difficult.
China,” said Master Li, “is overstocked with deranged alchemists.”

The Quest for the Great Root of Ginseng

For roughly the first third of the book, the fantasy element is kept to a minimum, but gradually impossible events begin to occur with greater and greater frequency. We get a cursed ghost, forced to reenact her last moments night after night unless the heroes can break the cycle (which leads to the spectacular Sword Dance challenge); a flooded city filled with treasure but guarded by the animated corpses of murdered women; a ruined city in a desert haunted by “The Hand That No One Sees,” a huge invisible monster that silently stalks and destroys any who come there (one of Hughart’s most effective creations); an evil tyrant who has reigned for a thousand years with no one seeing his face, who has removed his heart and hidden it so that he is unfazed by axe-blows, the deadliest poisons, or any other attack; and perhaps most dangerous of all the Old Man of the Mountain, an evil immortal sage who will sell any secret — for a price (the sign outside his cave reads “Here Lives the Old Man of the Mountain./Ring and State your business./His Secrets are not sold cheaply./It is Perilous to waste his time.”), not to mention a dangerous underground labyrinth flooded by the tide at regular intervals (so those trying to navigate its maze have strictly limited time in which to do so before being battered to death or drowned) and the occasional anachronism like the Bamboo Dragonfly (a sort of gunpowder-powered autogyro, useful in escaping from Certain Death).

“I suggest we hurry, because with every passing moment
I grow closer to expiring from old age.”

— Master Li

At the same time, the protagonists and readers are introduced to a memorable array of characters: not just Ox and Master Li but also Miser Shen (who briefly joins them in their quest), Hen-Pecked Ho (the second greatest scholar in China, who eventually becomes a heroic axe-murderer), the Ancestress (horribly bloated, thoroughly evil, and the most dangerous woman in China), Lotus Cloud (open-hearted, promiscuous, and capable of capturing the life-long devotion of any man who sees her), the Key Rabbit (the cowardly and much-put-upon chief henchmen of the evil Duke of Ch’in), Doctor Death (the aforementioned deranged alchemist), and of course the vividly drawn people of Ox’s village. The setting remains exotic, but through the characters Hughart succeeds in the difficult task of making the world of 7th century China come alive and enabling the reader to immerse himself or herself in it, until we think of the characters as real, believable people, just like modern-day folk from our own culture.

[I]t was a relief when the mirages began,
because they gave us something to look at.

— Number Ten Ox

The quest Li and Ox thought they had undertaken becomes entangled with a greater mystery. As the villain of the piece, the Duke of Ch’in, puts it, they have undertaken “the right quest for the wrong reason. You and your antiquated companion have followed paths that cannot be followed, defeated guardians that cannot be defeated, escaped from places where escape was impossible, and you have not had the slightest idea of what you were really doing, or where you were really going, or why!” To the original quest, to save the children of Ku-fu, is added another: to rescue a forgotten goddess, lost for a thousand years. Unfortunately, to do so it is necessary first for them to defeat the greatest tyrant China has ever known, the First Emperor, the man who gave China its name (Ch’in) — an equivalent Western parallel would be for medieval characters (say 8th century A.D.) to be forced to combat an undead Alexander the Great.

Happily Ever After

I suppose there is only a slight chance that a person will be called upon
to rescue a goddess, but the odds will increase dramatically if the person
is as illustrious as my readers, so I will offer two pieces of advice.
Beware her divine light, and take cover.

— Number Ten Ox

What makes Bridge of Birds stand out in the end is its unique mix of the realistic and the fantastic, the funny and the tragic, the grand and the sordid, the epic and the intimate. The seeming anarchy of its endless profusion of invention and wild events suddenly reveals an inner symmetry as all the pieces click together. Hughart’s timing is perfect: Just when the reader is beginning to feel the characters have enjoyed one lucky coincidence too many, Master Li himself voices the same concern and in it discerns divine manipulation forcing our heroes along a specific path. But the epic quest works only because Hughart makes us care deeply for the people met along the way however briefly, as when a dying Miser Shen whispers a prayer to his murdered daughter, dead forty years; or when Number Ten Ox has a touching encounter with the ghost of his childhood love, the girl he would have married had she lived. The book is studded with such moments, hilarious or poignant vignettes that all tie together in the end into one great climax, the purest eucatastrophe[4] known to me in fantasy, where all the threads come together and every single plot point is resolved. There’s really nothing else quite like it in all of fantasy literature.

Bridge of Birds and Your Game

A well-motivated quest. Dozens of vividly drawn, believable characters: heroes and villains and simple ordinary folk. Labyrinths and monsters and treasure, immortal malefactors, and settings both bizarre and memorable — what’s not to like? Bridge of Birds is ready-made as an epic fantasy campaign, and it is beautifully paced with enormous variety. For those not quite ready to abandon their familiar pseudo-medieval pseudo-Europe setting for an oriental one, there are still plenty of individual elements worth borrowing. The Hand That No One Sees (which players are liable at first to mistake for a Bigby’s Hand spell that’s gone horribly wrong) has found its way into several of my campaigns. The drowned city and the tide-haunted labyrinth beneath the Duke of Ch’in’s palace are extremely creepy dungeons ready-made for exploring. The Old Man of the Mountains is a fine example of using an evil sage in a campaign — his information is infallible, but will the characters be willing to pay his price? Hughart’s later books in the series also provide wonderful elements for any fantasy roleplaying game, such as the madman called The Laughing Prince and a magnificent and sinister tomb modeled on that of the First Emperor (both from The Story of the Stone), or the mysterious figures from the distant past who give their name to Eight Skilled Gentlemen, a book which also features a memorable shamanka (female shaman) and a truly apocalyptic ending — a case where events of three thousand years before must be discovered and the last achievements of a destroyed civilization repeated if disaster is to be averted. Eight Skilled Gentlemen also contains Hughart’s finest villain, Sixth Degree Hostler Tu, a memorable combination of mass-murderer, serial killer, cannibal, and food-obsessed madman who combines elements of Hannibal Lector with Gollum (the book begins on the day of his execution and ends with his deification) — a worthy foe for any hapless party of adventurers who let their guard down when they come to stay at a nice quiet inn.

Best of all, of course, are Master Li and Number Ten Ox: mismatched partners whose journeys could take them almost anywhere and who might give or need help, calling for a short-term collaboration with your own PCs. Hughart’s book is rich enough that the possibilities are nearly endless; had Bridge of Birds existed when D&D was being created, it’s likely that monks would not have been a discordant element in early editions but that the whole “matter of China” would have been as core to the game as, say, dwarves or berserkers or rangers.

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John Rateliff describes an obscure fantasy classic, A Voyage to Arcturus:

Not every classic is immediately recognized as such upon publication. Some find great success from the very start, like Richard Adam’s Watership Down (1972), Hughart’s The Bridge of Birds (1984), and Cabell’s Jurgen (1919). Others meet with a small but enthusiastic reception that steadily grows, such as Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954-55) or Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros (1922). Still others make little impact on their debut and languish in obscurity; awaiting their time, known to only a few: Wm. Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land (1912), Hope Mirrlees’ Lud-in-the-Mist (1926), and David Lindsay’s masterpiece, A Voyage to Arcturus (1920).

Few great works of fantasy can have been so initially unsuccessful as A Voyage to Arcturus. Published in 1920, it sold only about five hundred copies in its author’s lifetime. [1] But lack of sales does not equal lack of influence, especially among a genre as dependant upon word of mouth recommendations as fantasy. Those few surviving copies of Lindsay’s book were passed around from reader to reader among aficionados of fantasy and science fiction in England. C. S. Lewis, for example, spent a long time looking for the book before he finally found a copy, which he promptly loaned to his friend Tolkien. Lewis credited Lindsay with “first suggest[ing] to me that the form of ‘science fiction’ could be filled by spiritual experiences” — that is, that a pulp genre could be co-opted as the vehicle for presenting a sophisticated philosophical message. The example of Lindsay and Charles Williams together directly inspired Lewis to write his own science fiction trilogy, the first two books of which-Out of the Silent Planet (1938) and Perelandra (1943) borrow heavily from Lindsay’s work (although Lewis prettified what he borrowed in Christianizing it).

Science Fiction or Fantasy?

But Lewis’s work, though heavily influenced by A Voyage to Arcturus, is tame and conventional in comparison with the original. In a time when most science fiction had hardly moved beyond Verne and Wells, Lindsay broke the mold, moving so far beyond what most people thought of as the new genre of “scientifiction” (the conventions of which gelled a few years later in Hugo Gernsback’s not very deft hands) that the result is really not science fiction at all but fantasy. At the time it was first published, A Voyage to Arcturus would probably have been classified as “planetary romance,” a now extinct genre that included works such as Burroughs’ Barsoom series (1912ff), where John Carter falls asleep in a cave and thereby travels to a Mars that is a pure fantasy world. In such stories, the “science” is only a device to get to the adventure and is paid no more than lip service if that. [2] Thus C.S. Lewis’s Ransom travels to Mars in a sphere that works “by exploiting the less observed properties of solar radiation” and is carried to Venus in a crystal coffin by an angel. Lindsay, typically, had already gone this one better: Maskull, Nightspore, and Krag travel to Arcturus via “backlight” — the theory being that, since every action has an equal and opposite reaction, then light must have a complementary negative light, or backlight, that makes the return journey at the same speed.

“[Lindsay] is the first writer to discover what ‘other planets’ are
really good for in fiction. No merely physical strangeness or
merely spatial distance will realize that idea of otherness
which is what we are always trying to grasp in a story about
voyaging through space… To construct plausible and
moving ‘other worlds’ you must draw on the only real
‘other world’ we know, that of the spirit.”

— C. S. Lewis

This confusion over exactly what category the book belongs in is neatly reflected in its first paperback publication: Ballantine originally issued the book as “A Ballantine Science Fiction Classic” (first printing, 1968); a few years later, the book was incorporated into their Adult Fantasy Series line and reprinted with the “unicorn head” sign that marked the series (second & third printings, 1973). For my part, I suggest ignoring the pseudo-science fiction trappings of the frame story, which Lindsay himself swiftly discards, and concentrating on the main tale: not a voyage to a distant star (which is covered in less than a single page of the book) but the epic fantasy of one man’s journey through Tormance, to which are devoted fourteen of its twenty-one chapters.

“You are looking for mysteries,” said Krag, “so naturally you
are finding them. Try and simplify your ideas, my friend.
The affair is plain and serious.”

— Krag to Maskull, before the departure

Stranger in a Strange, Strange Land

There are two ways to read A Voyage to Arcturus: as a simple if rather baffling adventure story, brutal and bloody-handed enough to satisfy even a Robert Howard fan, and as the purest Gnostic tract ever embodied in a fantasy novel between Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger (1919) and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (three volumes: 1995, 1997, 2000). Perhaps the best method, as with Spenser’s Faerie Queene, is to read through first for the sheer exuberance of the story, ignoring any allegorical or symbolic implications, then re-reading it again looking for the deeper meanings. It is, at any rate, impossible to discuss the book in any meaningful way without including spoilers, so anyone wishing to experience the story unguided should stop now and resume this piece after reading the novel.

“You will go, but he will return.”

On the surface, A Voyage to Arcturus is the story of Maskull’s quest. The story opens with a séance in London attended by shallow, uninteresting people and crashed by three strangers: Maskull, his friend Nightspore, and Krag, who is known to Nightspore but not Maskull. The medium summons a protoplasmic spirit, whom Krag throttles and kills; after the break-up of the séance, Maskull and Nightspore decide to accept Krag’s invitation to accompany him to Arcturus. But once there, Maskull wakes to find himself alone, wandering through a strange landscape and meeting stranger people; much the best way to read the book is to simply skim through the first five chapters and start reading in earnest with chapter six, when Maskull wakes to find himself on Tormance, as the planet circling Arcturus’s two suns is called. Once there, he makes up his mind to seek Surtur, the god of harsh reality, no matter what the cost or what obstructions Crystalman, the god of pleasant illusions, may put in his way.

“Am I a secondary character?… I must make up my mind that this is
a strange journey, and that the strangest things will happen in it. It’s no use
making plans… everything is unknown… nothing but the wildest audacity
will carry me through, and I must sacrifice everything else to that… . And
therefore if Surtur shows himself again, I shall go forward to meet him,
even if it means death.”

Maskull’s journey across Tormance, seeking to learn how to distinguish between what is real and what is not, takes him through a riot of experience. He grows new sense-organs as he makes his grim pilgrimage from land to land: a poign or heart-tentacle that later turns into a third arm and still later withers and falls off; a breve with which he can telepathically communicate but which he later can transform into a sorb or third eye. He meets natives of various lands, from the gentle Joiwind (so sensitive that she lives on water so as to not harm any other living creature) to the dangerously persuasive Tydomin (who tries to take his body for herself so she can live as a man; his projected spirit becomes the “ghost” at the opening séance before it is sent back by Krag’s killing its spirit-body) to the passionate Sullenbode (who exists in potential and is only called into individual life and personality by his attention, dying when he is temporarily distracted; she literally cannot live without his devotion). He briefly becomes a disciple of the prophet Spadevil, only to stone him to death shortly thereafter. He meets both of Tormance’s gods, and distrusts them both; each seeks to claim him as his own. He encounters a plenitude of new creatures (an arg or seal-dog, a shrawk or predatory giant flying reptile, a cuttlefish tree, a flock of floating blue jellies), bizarre landscapes and natural features (fountains where the water goes up but never falls back down, evaporating from the top; male and female stones that act as a charm against the opposite sex; a sea made up of a swirl of waters of varying densities; a lake with a solid surface that can be played like a drum by jumping up and down on it), new kinds of weather never experienced on earth (including green snow-shades of Dr. Seuss’s oobleck?). He even, in one of Lindsay’s tour de forces, encounters new primary colors cast by the smaller and fiercer of Tormance’s two suns, Alppain: jale and ulfire.

“I am wading through too much blood,” said Maskull.
“Nothing good can come of it.”

In all Maskull’s quest, although crammed full of incidents, lasts only for a total of four and a half days (with a break at mid-day due to the twin suns’ heat), or the equivalent of about nine Earth days, instead of the weeks or months spent on a typical fantasy quest (Tormance being three times the size of our planet). He throws himself into each new viewpoint he comes across, committing crimes in the process that even Vance’s Cugel the Clever might blanch at — for example, he murders Joiwind’s brother so that the latter will not distress his sister with a report of Maskull’s recent activities. He vows to execute Tydomin, then changes his mind and spares her, then winds up killing her after all. He embraces hedonism, then asceticism, then a life of simple pleasures, all in quick succession. Through it all, though, he never forgets his quest: to find Surtur and reach Muspel[3]; twice he is compared to Prometheus, seeking to find and bring back divine fire whatever torments await him personally. Gradually both Maskull and the reader come to understand that both our world and Tormance are somehow tainted: reality itself is false, and the world we see and touch and smell is a prison, corrupt to its roots. It is Crystalman’s world: like that of Wm. Blake’s Urizen, something forced into being that prevents us from connecting with the cleaner, purer underlying existence. For this reason, the corpse of everyone who dies (and they are many — for example, four of the five women Maskull encounters die, though he only actually deliberately kills one of them himself) takes on a mocking grin, the sign of Crystalman: the flesh is his, though the departed spirit is not. Only pain has the redemptive power to break this world’s grip on us and help us see through its illusions. Hence Krag’s seemingly motiveless brutality on each of his brief appearances; he is Surtur himself, inflicting desperate remedies to free likely allies from Crystalman’s lures. In the end Maskull himself dies and, in a scene that has baffled readers for decades, Nightspore at last appears, having in some sense been Maskull’s other self who could only appear when his primary died. Gazing upon Maskull’s body, he asks Krag/Surtur:

“Why was all this necessary?”
“Ask Crystalman,” replied Krag sternly. “His world is no joke.
He has a strong clutch… but I have a stronger…
Maskull was his, but Nightspore is mine.”

The final chapter of the book, and the most apocalyptic, consists of Nightspore undertaking the last stage of Maskull’s quest. With Krag’s help he reaches a tower and climbs it to look out over Muspel, the only land opposed to Crystalman’s domination:

He pulled his body up, and stood expectantly on the stone-floored
roof, looking round for his first glimpse of Muspel.
There was nothing.
He was standing upon the top of a tower… Darkness was all around him… .
Suddenly… he had the distinct impression that the darkness around him, on
all four sides, was grinning… [H]e understood that he was wholly surrounded
by Crystalman’s world, and that Muspel consisted of himself
and the stone tower on which he was sitting.

And, with that revelation, Nightspore descends the tower, rejoins Krag, and alone but indomitably the two sally forth to resume their struggle against the foe.

Lindsay’s Legacy

For all its bizarre detail and cosmic underlying plot, the greatest legacy from Lindsay’s book is as an example of sheer audacity. Most writers are content to shuffle around a few conventions of whatever genre they work in, rarely daring anything really new. Lindsay shows just how far a writer can go if he or she abolishes all self-limits. A single example will suffice: late in the story, Maskull meets Leehallfae, the last surviving phaen — “though clearly a human being… neither man nor woman, nor anything between the two, but… unmistakably of a third positive sex.” Since the phaens are neither male nor female, Lindsay promptly makes up a new set of pronouns to refer to the character: ae (=he/she), aer (=his/her), aerself (=himself/herself), using them so naturally that within a paragraph or two the reader completely accepts them. Compare, by contrast, the difficulties a gifted but conventional author like Le Guin runs into trying to apply pronouns to the hermaphrodites of The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) with the ease with which Lindsay resolved the same issue fifty years earlier. Nor are the phaens included simply as an exercise in experimental grammar: like Tolkien’s elves, they are immortal but can be killed, which combined with their unique physiology gives them an interesting outlook on life (and death) — and all this vivid, indelible impression within the space of roughly half a chapter from the time Maskull meets Leehallfae to when ae dies:

“I am not frightened,” said Leehallfae quietly… “but when one has
lived as long as I have done, it is a serious matter to die. Every year
on earth one puts out new roots.”

In short, Lindsay’s example invites readers, writers, and gamemasters to become more daring, more iconoclast, and this is where A Voyage to Arcturus really stands out. There has always been a small, appreciative audience for the truly weird, whether Jack Vance’s Dying Earth, Barker’s Tekumel (Empire of the Petal Throne), or Jorune. Some may applaud and others cringe at his bizarre nomenclature, but even here he is utterly distinctive — in addition to those characters already mentioned in passing above might be added Panawe, Oceaxe, Crimtyphon, Catice, Dreamsinter, Polecrab the fisherman (one of the few genuinely likeable characters in the whole book), Gleameil, Earthrid, Haunte, Corpang, and so on; not to mention places (Poolingdred, the Lusion Plain, the Ifdawn mountains, Sant, the Wombflash Forest, Swaylone’s Island, Matterplay, Threal, Barey, and of course Muspel), and things (the two suns, Branchspell and Alppain; Teargild, the single moon; the Sinking Sea; Irontick; Blodsombre, the midday heat; and so on). The literary critic Harold Bloom, a great admirer of Lindsay’s, produced an overtly Gnostic fantasy novel called The Flight to Lucifer (1979) that recreates the events of A Voyage to Arcturus as Bloom understands them on a one-to-one basis, but a truer tribute would have been to create something wholly new with its own apocalyptic plot, personalized nomenclature, and unblinking commitment to its own vision, whatever it might be — and the same uncompromising willingness to accept the marketplace obscurity that is likely to result.

A Voyage to Arcturus and Your Game

Lindsay’s entire thrust is to reject the generic in favor of your own unique personal vision. As such, his book is packed full of ideas that can be adapted into an ongoing fantasy, science fiction, or horror game. They have the added feature that relatively few have read Lindsay’s book and thus the average gamer will have no clue what some new thing inspired by Lindsay’s work might be when he or she encounters it; it’s far enough outside the normal gaming experience to be virtually impossible to second-guess. Be warned, however, that Lindsay is best administered in small doses, lest it completely weird out your gamers.

Notes

[1] Lindsay (1878-1945) was already in his forties when A Voyage to Arcturus, his first book, was published, having quit his job at Lloyd’s of London to devote himself full time to authorship. The book’s failure, and the similar failure of his later books (the best two of which remained unpublished at his death and for thirty years thereafter from his inability to find any publisher willing to issue them), embittered his life — according to one legend, he died from blood poisoning from a rotten tooth, having become so pessimistic and fatalistic that he refused to see a dentist. Of his seven books, The Haunted Woman (1921) centers around a strange room in an old house that only sometimes exists; Devil’s Tor (1932) relates the consequences of re-uniting two parts of an ancient amulet; The Violet Apple (1976) tells what happens when a modern-day man and woman eat the fruit grown from seeds said to be from one of the trees in the Garden of Eden; The Witch (1976) is difficult to describe, since the only edition available omits the ending that explains the whole, but definitely worth reading.

[2] The tradition of inserting fantasy worlds into science fiction settings is still alive and well today, with Darkover and Pern being only two of many examples. Although notable exceptions exist, most science fiction stories do not bother themselves about the “science” and its plausibility or otherwise. This has, in fact, been a feature of science fiction since its inception: Verne complained bitterly at being grouped with Wells, since Verne considered his own pseudo-science superior to Wells airy inventions (Wells never bothers to explain how Cavorite repeals gravity or just how the Time Machine works). Unfortunately for purists, those very works which are least faithful to science — e.g. Star Trek, Star Wars, Doctor Who — also tend to be the most popular of all science fiction.

[3] The names Surtur and Muspel both come from Norse myth (as readers of the old Deities & Demigods will be well aware). According to the Eddas, Surtur is the king of the fire-giants, who live in the land of Muspel, the first world ever created. During Ragnarok, Surtur leads the fire-giants against the gods; after the Midgard Serpent, the Fenris Wolf, Loki, Thor, Odin, and Tyr are all dead and after Surtur himself has killed Frey, Surtur will burn up the entire world. This ancient prophecy makes Surtur an apt harbinger of destruction for Lindsay, one who will sweep away the false worlds created by Crystalman the demiurge and leave only the first world, Muspel, behind.

John Rateliff discusses Fritz Leiber’s fantasy-classic Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser stories:

“I have a treasure… [a] diamond as big as a man’s skull. Twelve rubies each as
big as the skull of a cat. Seventeen emeralds… [a]nd certain rods of crystal and
bars of orichalcum… Let fools seek it. They shall win it not. For although
my treasure house be empty as air… yet I have set a guardian
there. Let the wise read this riddle and forebear.”

— “The Jewels in the Forest”

Sword and sorcery may not be the most critically acclaimed mode within the fantasy genre, but it’s one of the most enduring and has proven perennially popular. The first sword and sorcery story was probably Dunsany’s novella “The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth” (1907), which brought together all the basic elements: an evil wizard, a brave young hero, a magic sword, and a host of obstacles preventing the hero from getting at the wizard with the sword. Sword and sorcery was a mainstay of the fantasy pulp magazines, best exemplified in the work of Robert E. Howard, whose Conan series (1932-36) pretty much set the standard for decades to follow. Howard may have been a hack, but he was an honest hack, able to vividly convey his own wild-eyed enthusiasm for violence as a solution to virtually any problem. Conan himself is a paean to the virtues of the Noble Savage who grows in character throughout the series, culminating in the novel Hour of the Dragon (also known as Conan the Conqueror) where a middle-aged Conan has acquired a sense of responsibility and fights to defend the subjects of his usurped kingdom.

Howard had many imitators, most of whom aped his style and lacked both his imagination and his sincerity, like modern-day musicians engineering pops and crackles into their songs to make them sound more like bygone artists they admire. One follower who avoided this trap was Michael Moorcock, who in the early 1960s attempted to re-invent the genre by inverting its conventions with Stormbringer (1963), the first (and best) of the Elric of Melniboné series. Instead of an uncivilized barbarian, Moorcock gives us an overcivilized decadent; instead of rising from adventurer to king, Elric declines from emperor to peopleless wanderer; instead of the straightforward Conan’s loyalty and occasional gallantry, the subtle Elric betrays and brings about the death of every friend, subject, relative, or subordinate who puts their trust in him. In fact, Elric is just the sort of treacherous wizard whom Conan specializes in lopping the heads off of. Unfortunately, instead of stopping after the impressive feat of writing the epic tale of Elric’s death, Moorcock proceeded to churn out a flood of prequels, all essentially retellings of the same story, diluting the impact of the original with every regurgitation.

“I have heard tell that death sometimes calls to a man in a voice only he can hear.
Then he must rise and leave his friends and go to whatever place death shall
bid him, and there meet his doom… He might look at two such as you
and say the Bleak Shore. Nothing more than that. The Bleak Shore.
And when he said it three times you would have to go…. “

— “The Bleak Shore”

Long before Moorcock, however, another author had found a way to combine Howard’s gusto with a more literate sensibility: Fritz Leiber. Even before Howard’s death, Leiber and his friend Harry Fischer had in 1934 created the characters of Fafhrd, a clever barbarian, and the Gray Mouser, a consummate thief — both expert swordsmen, both adventurers extraordinaire, and both relying in more or less equal parts on their skill at swordplay, their brains, and their luck, but above all, on their partner. The two young authors even in 1936 submitted a story apiece (Leiber’s “Adept’s Gambit” and Fischer’s “Quarmall”) to H. P. Lovecraft, famous as an encourager of young artists, who thought Fischer had more imagination but judged Leiber the better writer. Fischer soon abandoned writing to become a salesman of corrugated cardboard boxes (any job being precious in the Depression),[1] but despite rejection notices from Weird Tales Leiber pressed on, honing his style and developing a whole world (Newhon, an anagram from “No when”) as a backdrop for the pair’s adventures. With the advent of John W. Campbell’s Unknown,[2] Leiber finally found the perfect venue for his tales: an audience that craved adventure but demanded witty dialogue and plot twists, above all insisting that the stories obey their own internal logic. The five stories that appeared there are still among the best in the entire series (and, by extension, the entire sword and sorcery genre): “Two Sought Adventure” (later renamed “The Jewels in the Forest”), “The Bleak Shores”, “The Howling Tower”, “The Sunken Land” (which contains the inspiration for D&D‘s cloakers), and “Thieves’ House” (from whence all subsequent Thieves Guilds derive).

“That was unwise, as I have many times warned you. Advertise often enough
your connection with the Elder Gods and you may be sure that some
greedy searcher from the pit… ”
“But what is our connection with the Elder Gods?” asked the Mouser,
eagerly, though not hopefully. . .
“Those are matters best not spoken of,” Ningauble ordained. “. . . However,
I can tell you this much: the one who has placed the ignoble spell upon
you is, insofar as he partakes of humanity, a man. . . and an adept.”
The Mouser started. Fafhrd groaned, “Again?”

— “Adept’s Gambit”

In its early days, the Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser series had ties to the Cthulhu mythos — Leiber’s first book, Night’s Black Agents (1947), was actually published by Arkham House, the small press publisher created to put the ephemeral tales that made up the Lovecraft Tradition in more permanent form (e.g., hardcovers). Ningauble of the Seven Eyes, Fafhrd’s sorcerous patron, is probably a minor Elder God (among his titles is “Gossiper of the Gods”), and Fafhrd himself hails from the Cold Wastes (Kadath?). Over time, however, Leiber developed his own mythology; the Mouser’s patron, Sheelba of the Eyeless Face, is like nothing in Lovecraft, owing more perhaps to tales of Baba Yaga, but with Leiber’s own distinctive twists:

“Close by the southern side of the road a rather large, rounded hut stood
on five narrow posts… [L]ightning glared, revealing with great clarity
a hooded figure crouched inside the low doorway. Each fold
and twist of the figure’s draperies stood out… precisely.
… If the hood had been empty, the draperies at its back
would have been shown clearly. But no, there was only
that oval of ebon darkness, which even the levinbolt
could not illumine.”

— “The Circle Curse”

Leiber’s major contribution to sword and sorcery, however, may well be Lankhmar itself: the great city that is the adoptive home of his two heroes and to which they return time and time again. Lankhmar is the direct ancestor of all the great crowded, sprawling, wicked cities that have formed backdrops in fantasy ever since, from the City State of the Invincible Overlord and Waterdeep to Thieves’ World‘s Sanctuary and Pratchett’s Ankh-Morpork (in fact, the Gray Mouser and Fafhrd guest-star in the very first Discworld story, “The Colour of Magic”, under the pseudonyms of The Weasel and Bravd). It is fitting, therefore, that the only novel in the series, The Swords of Lankhmar, is set almost entirely within and beneath the city, from the palace of its decadent (and crazed) Overlord to the rat-tunnels underneath the city (home to the wererats, a new type of lycanthrope Leiber created that has proved extremely popular) to the temple of the Gods of Lankhmar themselves (sinister evil skeletons who emerge only on rare occasions to destroy some threat to the city or some rival faith that has dared to challenge their supremacy).

“Too much good luck was always dangerous.”

— “The Sunken Land”

Between their greed for treasure, their lust for adventure, their weakness for a pretty face, and the troublesome quests their sorcerous patrons send them on, neither the Mouser nor Fafhrd ever lack for things to do. Through one novel, four novellas (“Adept’s Gambit”, “The Lords of Quarmall”, “Stardock”, and “Rime Island”), and some thirty short stories,[3] his heroes win and lose treasures, girls, and occasionally their dignity (“Lean Times in Lankhmar”, “The Two Best Thieves in Lankhmar”), but their friendship always carries through. Eventually they even meet the right girls, acquire henchmen, and settle down, embracing middle age and responsibility with the enthusiasm they once devoted to battling monsters and foiling the plots of evil wizards; Leiber’s work is unusual in that his characters are well-rounded enough to change over time, the more than fifty years he spent writing the series being matched by several decades passing within the internal chronology of the stories.

By the time he had finished it, Leiber’s Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser series had transcended its pulp roots to become the epitome of “sword and sorcery” — a genre he not only defined but which Leiber is actually credited with naming. By the simple expedient of shifting from a single hero to a duo of equal partners, he opened up a world of possibilities: with two main characters, he had vastly expanded opportunities for dialogue (something at which Leiber, with his background in theatre, excelled) — something of a problem with the strong, silent, brutish types of Howard’s direct imitators. He can also play with perspective: some tales are told primarily from Fafhrd’s point of view (“The Sunken Land”), others from the Mouser’s (“The Howling Tower”), while most switch back and forth between the two, often with interesting and sometimes humorous effect (e.g., “Bazaar of the Bizarre”). Leiber’s attractive mix of humor, horror, and action have kept his stories from aging as badly as most pulp tales have done: even the pair’s many girlfriends (different in every story, until about the middle of the sixth book) tend to be extremely capable, less damsels in distress than interesting companions encountered along the way. And, finally, to the appeal of his intelligent and essentially good-hearted if larcenous heroes must be added the range of great supporting characters (particularly Sheelba and Ningauble), the many surprises his imagination provides as foils for the heroes (a living building, a malign cloud that possesses the susceptible, body-swapping master sorcerers, sword-armed monsters that hatch out of giant eggs, and Death himself), and of course the sheer quality of the writing: no one has ever done sword and sorcery better.[4]

Fafhrd, the Gray Mouser, and Your Game

Leiber was a major influence on the creation of D&D (he even contributed some pieces to The Dragon), and it’s no surprise to find many elements of the series found their way into the game. The D&D magic system may derive from Vance, the player character races and whole concept of an adventuring party (characters with vastly different skills working together as a team) from Tolkien, but what heroes actually DO in a typical D&D game is pure Leiber: fighting, sneaking, purloining, exploring, and trying to get out alive when a plan goes bad. In fact, the closest thing Leiber has to an heir for his literary legacy are the D&D novel lines, who have thoroughly assimilated his influence and carry on the sword and sorcery tradition more closely than anyone else writing today.

Not surprisingly, given the close relationship between TSR and Leiber, a great many game products have been published based directly on his work: the Lankhmar boardgame (1976; a simplified version of the wargame created in 1937 by Leiber and Fischer), Dragonsword of Lankhmar (1986, a one-on-one pick-a-path book in which one player plays Fafhrd and the Mouser and the other the two poor sods from the Thieves’ Guild who are going up against them), the “Newhon” entry in the original Deities & Demigods (1980, offering game stats for Fafhrd, the Gray Mouser, Sheelba, Ningauble, and various gods and monsters). Lankhmar was even an official AD&D setting; the line (1985-86, 1990-96) went through three editions and eleven modules (adventures or sourcebooks, the best of which was probably Slade Henson’s Slayers of Lankhmar) but failed to really find an audience, probably because it tried to twist the setting to work with standard AD&D character classes rather than reinventing a variant of AD&D that would work well with very small groups (a DM and one or two player characters), which would have been truer to Leiber’s world.

That missed opportunity aside, the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series is chock-full of great ideas for player characters and DMs alike. Many a PC has been based on a child of one or the other of the two heroes, the result of one of their many casual encounters throughout the series (Leiber himself introduced just such a character in the seventh and final book). Sheelba and Ningauble are ideal motivators for adventures, and settings such as Stardock, Quarmall, The Castle Called Mist (from “Adept’s Gambit”), Thieves’ House, and the Treasure House of Urgaan (“The Jewels in the Forest”) would make fine dungeons. Leiber’s work is also rich with villains, from the Old Man Without a Beard to the Seven Black Priests, from Atya priestess of Tyaa to Hisvet the seductive wererat. In short, anyone who can read a volume of F&GM stories without coming up with a dozen ideas to work into their existing game simply isn’t trying.

[1] Fischer returned to authorship late in life, contributing a short piece on the Mouser’s childhood and another story about a modern-day family of sorcerers to early issues of The Dragon.

[2] Unknown (1939-1943) ceased publication after only four years due to paper shortages during World War II, but its influence on mid-century American fantasy can hardly be overstated. The quality of its contents were such that it has been estimated that over half the stories appearing in this magazine were later reprinted in short story collections and anthologies — a record no other pulp magazine ever came close to matching. Among the authors who appeared here were Heinlein, de Camp, Sturgeon, Kuttner, Pratt, Arthur, Hubbard, del Rey, van Vogt, Bester, Bloch, Boucher, Wellman, Williamson, Wollheim, and many, many others; both Bradbury and Asimov had stories accepted that would have appeared had the periodical run a few more issues.

[3] The first F&GM collection, Two Sought Adventure (1957), collected eight of the best tales. In 1970 Donald Wollheim of Ace Books, who was also responsible for the first paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings, persuaded Leiber to assemble a five-book collection of all the pair’s adventures, put in chronological order from their adolescence to their peak: Swords and Deviltry, Swords Against Death (a reissue of Two Sought Adventure with a few new stories added), Swords in the Mist, Swords Against Wizardry, and The Swords of Lankhmar. To this was added a sixth volume (Swords and Ice Magic, 1977), carrying the heroes into middle age, and finally a seventh (The Knight and Knave of Swords, 1988), which shows them coping with the approach of old age.

The seven books have since been repackaged in a three-volume (trade paperback) and four-volume (mass-market paperback) set from White Wolf, the titles in the latter being Ill Met in Lankhmar, Lean Times in Lankhmar, Return to Lankhmar, and Farewell to Lankhmar, with introductions by the likes of Neil Gaiman (“one of my very favourite books”), Moorcock, and Raymond Feist. Most recently the entire series has been made available in a two-volume omnibus, part of the Fantasy Masterworks series.

Those interested in sampling the series would be well advised to skip over the stories in Swords and Deviltry (late additions to bring the two characters together and provide them with “origin stories”) as well as the frame story for Swords Against Death and plunge right into the heart of the series with “The Jewels in the Forest” and the stories that follow in the second volume (Swords Against Death). Other outstanding stories include “The Cloud of Hate” (Swords in the Mist), “The Frost Monstreme”/”Rime Isle” (Swords and Ice Magic), and most of The Swords of Lankhmar. Like the first volume, the final (The Knight and Knave of Swords) is best avoided by all but completists.

[4] Leiber’s work is not limited to sword and sorcery, of course; he also wrote a number of important horror stories (“Smoke Ghost”, Conjure Wife) and at least one major science fiction series, the Change War stories — one of the most interesting takes on time-travel, and the probable inspiration for the old Pacesetter roleplaying game, TimeMaster. He also wrote one of the single finest Lovecraft pastiches, “To Arkham and the Stars.”