Invented to make beef last through a long voyage, Bovril became a famous British kitchen staple:
Less well-known is its link to an odd, pioneering science fiction novel.
A stout black jar of Bovril with a cheery red top lurks in many a British kitchen, next to tins of treacle and boxes of tea. The gooey substance, made of rendered-down beef, salt and other ingredients, can be spread on toast or made into a hot drink, but what many people don’t realise is that this old-fashioned comfort food has a surprising link to science fiction.
The “Bov” part of the name is easy enough to decipher — from “bovine”, meaning associated with cattle. But the “vril” bit? That’s a different story, literally.
In 1871, an anonymous novel was published about a race of super-humans living underground. The narrator of The Coming Race, who has fallen into their realm during a disastrous descent into a mine shaft, is shocked to learn that they are telepathic, thanks to the channeling of a mysterious energy called vril.
“Through vril conductors, they can exercise influence over minds, and bodies animal and vegetable, to an extent not surpassed in the romances of our mystics,” the narrator realises. Vril gives them strength, as well, rendering them capable of incredible feats. The people call themselves the Vril-Ya, and their society seems in many ways superior to that of the surface dwellers.
The Coming Race was a runaway bestseller. It eventually became clear that the anonymous author was Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the prominent politician and writer (and, to give you a sense of his prose, the first person to start a novel: “It was a dark and stormy night…”). It became such a cultural touchstone that 20 years later, the Royal Albert Hall in London played host to the Vril-Ya Bazaar and Fete, to raise money for a school of massage “and electricity”.
In 1895, a writer for The Guardian newspaper started a review of a new novel with this statement: “The influence of the author of The Coming Race is still powerful, and no year passes without the appearance of stories which describe the manners and customs of peoples in imaginary worlds, sometimes in the stars above, sometimes in the heart of unknown continents in Australia or at the Pole, and sometimes below the waters under the earth.” The work under review? The Time Machine, by H G Wells.
And so you can see how, in the 1870s, when John Johnston, Scottish meat entrepreneur, was coming up with a name for his bottled beef extract, “vril” was a tip-of-the-tongue reference.
[…]
Johnston and other makers of the substance were responding to a demand for beef products in Europe, where raising cattle was prohibitively expensive, and the growth of cattle ranches in South America, Australia and Canada.
There was no way to get fresh meat from these far-flung places to Europe. But rendering the meat down into a paste and sealing it in jars yielded a shelf-stable product that could make the long journeys involved. (Johnston was not the only player in the meat extract game — Justus von Liebig, one of the founders of organic chemistry, founded Leibig’s Extract of Meat Company to commercialise his process. The company later went on to produce Oxo bouillon cubes and Fray Bentos pies.)
How do you make a salty meat paste sound nourishing? By linking it to a fantastical substance with great powers. An excitable advert for Bovril in the program from the Vril-Ya Bazaar reads, “Bo-VRIL is the materialised ideal of the gifted author of ‘The Coming Race’… it will exert a marvellous influence on the system, exhilarating without subsequent depression, and increasing the mental and physical vitality without taxing the digestive organs. It is a tonic as well as a food, and forms the most Perfect Nourishment known to Science.”
[…]
Members of the theosophy movement, including the spiritualist medium Madame Blavatsky, claimed that vril was real. Willy Ley, a German rocket enthusiast writing about conspiracy theories in Germany during the rise of the Nazis in the magazine Astounding Science Fiction, said there was a society in Berlin that believed in vril: “They knew that the book was fiction, Bulwer-Lytton had used that device in order to be able to tell the truth about this ‘power’.
“The subterranean humanity was nonsense, Vril was not. Possibly it had enabled the British, who kept it as a State secret, to amass their colonial empire.”
I have discussed the pursuit of the almighty vril before.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some truth to some of this woo.
Blavatsky was operating without scientific education, in a time before paranormal studies had statistical rigor. If one can establish the physical reality of ANY paranormal phenomenon, one can attribute it to “vril” and declare victory.
Incidentally, Bulwer-Lytton’s books are popular with a considerable subset of modern occultists — they purchase them, they start to read them, and usually they can’t make it all the way through “The House and the Brain,” much less Zanoni.
Gaikokumaniakku: “Blavatsky was operating without scientific education, in a time before paranormal studies had statistical rigor. If one can establish the physical reality of ANY paranormal phenomenon, one can attribute it to ‘vril’ and declare victory.”
Yes, lol. The woo is likely limited, for the most part, to extremely mild “psychic” phenomena like autonomic response to trauma a second before it happens, and not to channeling spirits from beyond the grave… or whatever weird stuff that dramatic performers like Blavatsky et al. thought was cool in early-twentieth-century Germany.
I’d like add to the list of obvious derivative works at least Torg (under the original name).
Slightly less direct ones range from Gygax’s underdark (D series) to this filk by Kanefsky.
Gaikokumaniakku says:
Blavatsky was a mostly typical representative of late 19th to early 20th Centuries’ mysticism. Either way, it’s not like the concept was completely original, yes?
When I read Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, I was surprised by how little it had inspired Gygax’s Descent into the Depths of the Earth.
When I read science fiction I compare it to the best science fiction writer, Larry Niven, writing in the golden age of science fiction, 1979, when I was fourteen. Niven is the best at ‘rich tourist in fairyland’. The Coming Race is the story of a rich tourist in fairyland.
Legend has it James Baen gave Niven and Pournelle a case of beer to fix up an outline of 1919 Buck Rogers to 1979 SF standards. There’s enough good stuff in ‘The Coming Race’ to do this. Vril is a good name for psychic power: Virility! and Will! But psychic powers, quoth Niven, are Author Control. Vril is no better than usual, combining healing, mind control, and artillery strikes at the author’s will. The ‘Vril-staff’ operated by hydraulic stops is not bad.
For language and biology Lytton used Max Muller and Louis Agassiz; still solid authorities, well worth stealing from. There are a lot of Brit in-jokes in the invented language, like using ‘Posh’ to mean ‘trashy’.
Vril-Ya are obligate vegetarians, no canine teeth. It’s a minor plot point that if the hero has children with a smitten princess of the Vril, they might have carnivore canines and require destruction as abominations. The Vril-Ya also have inherited power over Vril, as electric eels have inherited batteries for electricity.
It’s a major plot point that Vril females are much bigger, mightier thewed, more endowed with magic Vril power, and generally dominant than male Vril or human males. Cute flirtations and honorable True Love between the charming hero and smitten Vril females, whose mightily-thewed height and dominance he finds off-putting. Bulwer Lytton, not a tall man, was very successful with the ladies. Louis Agassiz mentioned many cases of animals whose females are hugely bigger than males.
Children, being more ruthless and less experienced in the subtle aspects of Vril, are the soldiers and giant robot operators of their people. Vril mothers focus on healing and mind control.
Even in 1979 comic books, Warlord of Skartaris was in an alternate dimension, not actually in a hollow Earth. The Subterranean Race would have to be in an O’Neil colony or something. There are many references to rivers of naptha flowing through the Vril cities. Doesn’t sound safe underground. Or above. Anti-American snipe at 19th century US industrial pollution?
This book is anti-American in the 1870 conservative British way, appalled by American equality and democracy and confidence in our Manifest Destiny when ’200 millions of intelligent citizens, accustomed from infancy to the daily use of revolvers, should supply to a cowering universe the doctrines of the Patriot Monroe’. Of course like all humans we’re inevitably doomed by The Coming Race when they emerge from below.
Since you mention “1919 Buck Rogers,” I’m obliged to note that the post-Star Wars Buck Rogers TV show bears little resemblance to the original novella, Armageddon 2419 AD — in which the hero is named Anthony Rogers.
Isegoria: Thanks, just read it. I’m not sure if I ever read the sequel to the first book before. Pulp based on men who’d been through the Western Front and liked it sure gets bloodthirsty.
Less racist than I remembered. There’s even a good word for Asians not corrupted by evil space alien blood. Still, not politically correct.
The stuff about the crushed subjects of the evil empire spending their days on drugs, never leaving cramped apartments, watching viewscreen agitprop all day, failing to reproduce even with the Emperor giving bonuses, while maintenance workers shake down Princes of the Blood and rail their top concubines at will . . . That Crazy Buck Rogers Stuff.
I can see why Niven and Pournelle gave Buck Mordred, his doom and bastard child by his rape of the Han princess.
I remember trying to like the TV show, because Science Fiction, but thirtyish actors just don’t impress small boys as beefcake and cheesecake. And as you say, the TV show’s not taken from Armageddon 2419, which I’d read and liked. I also liked the trilogy Jim Baen published per the Niven and Pournelle outline. Especially the second, which may have been written by the guy who wrote ‘The Sand Pebbles’. The second novel actually is a novel, not just pulp.
“I remember trying to like the TV show, because Science Fiction, but thirtyish actors just don’t impress small boys as beefcake and cheesecake.”
Do I understand you correctly, sir? Do you mean to suggest that Erin Gray was not a worthy choice to portray Wilma Deering?
https://www.buckwiki.com/data/Wilma_Deering
Scandal! Outrage! I shall write a sternly-worded letter to the Times!
Sir, I regret my response as a small boy!