by Stefan Ekman
Of the four cities examined in this chapter, Ombria is the most self-contained. The setting is concentrated on the city’s four zones, with a city limit or surrounding wilderness barely present. Brief mentions are made of farm-and forestland around the city, but the focus is on the land’s value as productive units (85, 219). The sea is of some importance to trade, and Domina Pearl’s upsetting that trade—through piracy and, later, legislation—constitutes a minor plot element. The border between city and sea is down by the port, with its rotten piers, rough docks, and (implied) prostitution. From beyond the sea, strange plants and animals with magical or poisonous properties come to Ombria, and they are used by both Faey and Domina Pearl (40, 142, 253). Moreover, it is to the distant islands that the tutor is banished when his powerful ally has been destroyed (296). The sea is also invoked as part of the scenery outside the city, but left just as nondescript as the palace gardens. In Ombria in Shadow, the sea is not even a backdrop against which action takes place; it is what Clute refers to as water margins, the “unmapped and ultimately unmappable regions which surround a central empire” and which “fade indefinitely into the distance.”80 The sea, to all intents and purposes, lies not beyond the city limits; it is the city limit.
When the enemy has been vanquished in The Lord of the Rings, the rightful ruler takes the throne in Minas Tirith. Aragorn as King Elessar introduces more nature into his capital, making it a meeting place of nature and culture. Just as in Gondor’s capital, nature is wanting in Ombria. When Ducon lets his charcoal imagine what lies on the other side of the dark portal, it draws him endless woods and streets lined with flower-decked windows. Ducon considers these pictures to be wishes or dreams of a “prosperous, perfect world, a city of ceaseless delights” (213), suggesting that Ombria, without forests and flowers, is imperfect. The shadow city, the embodiment of hope, also embodies the hope for something better than the real city, something with more nature. In that respect, however, Ombria is never “transformed into its shadow” in the way Mains suggests.81 Certainly, the city now has a place for those characters who, in Mains’s words, “existed precariously on the margins”; but even when hope is fulfilled, Ombria remains a city dominated by culture. Ducon is more concerned with repairing the piers, making the streets safe, and catching, feeding, and educating the street urchins (293) than in any way bringing nature into the city, the way Aragorn does. Rather than being an interface between nature and culture, Ombria remains a place where nature leads a liminal existence. This is particularly true in the palace, where the thresholds between the zones—shadow/real, hidden/visible, palace/city—are in various ways linked to nature, but it generally holds true throughout the city. It is nature that is controlled, tame, or just a set of cultural representations, and it exists not outside, inside, or with culture but somewhere in between.
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Minas Tirith, Newford, New Crobuzon, Ombria—four fantasy cities with four different relations between nature and culture have been examined in this chapter. The range of differences suggests a great variety of relations between the two domains. Although Minas Tirith and Newford suggest a binary opposition, favoring nature, none of the cities implies that equating one domain with good and the other with evil would be possible. In New Crobuzon and Ombria, no opposition even exists between the domains; in Miéville’s city, the domains flow into each other, and neither is promoted in relation to the other. In McKillip’s case, nature is not even a domain—the cultural domain is all that matters.
What the four cities all have in common, though, is that with each, the nature–culture relation mirrors some central concern. In The Lord of the Rings, the pervasive theme of stewardship and how to relate to the natural environment is reflected in the way in which the rightful king introduces nature to the sterile, cultural environment of the city. The Newford stories show nature linked to two similarly marginalized domains, those of social outsiders and magical beings, and the three domains are brought into focus in the various texts. New Crobuzon and other Bas-Lag cities blur the borders between nature and culture in the same way that Miéville’s texts blend and dissolve other categories, mixing humans, animals, plants, and machines, treating science as magic and magic as science, and erasing the borders between fantasy, science fiction, and horror. The plot in Ombria in Shadow is centered on the passage between the various zones that structure its urban setting, each crossing in some manner associated with the natural world.
Investigating the relation between nature and culture, as we can see from the four examples in this chapter, offers insights into what lies at the core of a work or world. The obvious question is, why? What is it about this particular relation that appears to be so intimately connected to such basic aspects of works?
As has been observed, one could argue that there is no way to separate nature and culture, that they do not stand in any opposition to each other.82 However, for ten thousand years, ever since humans first decided that the plants on this plot of land were worth protecting and, eventually, worth replacing once they had been harvested—in short, ever since we started farming—we have seen the world in terms of “nature” and “culture.”83 In the beginning, it might have been only in terms of “our garden” versus “the thieving birds” and “the annoying weeds,” but over the ages, the idea that we control some things and not others has become deeply ingrained as well as quite complex. Today, it has become part of the way most people see the world, especially in “Western civilization.” We may consider there to be a difference, and an opposition, or we may believe this opinion to be a fallacy and the reason behind our environmental problems.84 In either case, we accept that the nature–culture opposition is a dominant and deep-seated view in our society.85 As such, it is hardly surprising to find this opposition expressed in works of fiction.
Nor is it surprising that the expression is rooted at the heart of the works’ respective worldviews. Miéville’s world is one of ubiquitous hybridization, where dichotomies are deconstructed, theses and antitheses synthesized, polarities mixed, and borders blurred. On every level in his world, opposites meet, combine, become something greater than the sum of their parts. Blending nature and culture and turning them into new, impossible, and thus fantastic settings spring from the same underlying thrust that drives the Bas-Lag novels. Miéville offers a thought experiment that, if accepted by his readers, takes them to a world that is radically different from the actual world, as most of us are used to perceiving it. If Tolkien is right that fantasy brings “recovery” and allows us to see things clearly, “freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity,”86 then Miéville’s thought experiment allows us to see the world in terms of combinations rather than oppositions.
The Newford stories offer a very different kind of recovery. Rather than ridding the fantasy world of opposites, these stories force the reader to shift focus, to pay attention to the part of the duality that is discriminated against. Like Miéville, de Lint creates a distinct worldview; but it is distinct in what we are looking at, not how we look at it. His world-view is politically motivated, and the recovery it offers is an awareness of how we, who are part of society and of culture, treat our opposites. These opposites are, in Newford, social outsiders and the natural world. The link between their domains and the domain of magic, fairies, ghosts, animal spirits—in short, of the fantastic—turns fantasy into social critique and social critique into fantasy, and the nature–culture relation thus becomes part of the political core of the stories.
In The Lord of the Rings, the narrative constantly returns to the question about the “proper” relation between nature and culture, and the answer is invariably stewardship. The natural world is subordinated to culture, whether hobbit, elven, human, dwarven, or entish; but culture is obliged to care for nature. Nature put to cultural use and kept under cultural control—tame nature—is the ideal; both wilderness and environmental degradation are problems that must be solved, faults that must be rectified. The central battle b
etween good and evil thus becomes a conflict between responsible stewardship and its absence. That this central theme expresses itself in a nature–culture relation that associates the right ruler with natural restoration simply goes along with the more obvious environmental themes, according to which evil means uglifying and destroying the environment (in Isengard, Mordor, or the Shire).87 Middle-earth may seem to offer a wilderness to explore, but the beauty it recovers for us is the beauty of a park or a garden, an orchard or a field of golden corn.
Where Middle-earth is largely a world of nature, the world of Mc-Killip’s Ombria in Shadow is one of culture, and its conflicts are played out on this cultural stage. In the power struggle, the characters move between the city’s zones, their transitions marked by the use of natural imagery. Where the three other authors offer new ways of perceiving the nature–culture duality of the actual world, McKillip takes it to an extreme where nature as a domain is omitted altogether. Her world is the world of urban culture, a social space where nature performs on the edges. It is a world that may yearn for the natural but does not need it; nature is just a representation—for transition, for hope, even for itself—not absent, only symbolic and, ultimately, ornamental.
Each of the four cities offers a new world to its readers, and as an integral part of each world we find an alternative to the traditional nature–culture opposition of the actual world. Even so, they have one thing in common with the actual world: they maintain a division between people and their environment. This division is not necessarily unbridgeable in fantasy worlds, however, and that is the subject of the following chapter.
5 : Realms and Rulers
The previous chapters discussed divisions that are, in one way or another, mainly peculiar to fantasy—either because they do not exist in the actual world, such as polder boundaries, or because, as in the case of the nature–culture division, they can be constructed differently in a fantasy world. This chapter addresses a division that a contemporary reader would generally take to exist in the actual world but that fantasy frequently bridges: the division between people and their environment. Michael Moorcock points out that “our oneness with nature” is a constant theme in epic fantasy and that “[m]any of the writers emphasize the existence of a deep bond between humans and their world. It is the persistent element in a large proportion of modern work.”1 That “deep bond” may actually be even deeper than Moorcock suggests. While a person can act upon, and be acted upon by, his or her surroundings, the actual world requires some sort of physical intermediary for the action to have any effect. In a fantasy setting, a change in someone’s state (physical or otherwise) may result in, or from, a corresponding change in the surroundings. This is the case with various nature spirits, for instance; a dryad would suffer and eventually die from the axe blows that felled her tree far away (in C. S. Lewis’s The Last Battle [1956]), and a water god’s body would be begrimed by all the trash that is dumped into its river (vividly illustrated in Hayao Miyazaki’s film Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi [2001; Spirited Away]). There is an implied identity between the spirit and its natural abode, even if they may be physically parted. Other connections do not necessarily imply such identity, even if a direct link is present. A frequent connection between land and people is expressed in the direct links that exist between many fantasy rulers and their realms, and it is this connection that is explored here.
This chapter consists of four parts. It opens with an overview of how rulers may be connected both politically and directly to their realms. Then follow two examples of ruler–realm relationships that provide central themes for their respective novels. The first example is the Fisher King figure, the wounded king who is linked to a land that has somehow been laid waste—a common motif in fantasy fiction and, in many ways, a typical way of presenting the direct link between ruler and realm. The application of wasted lands and wounded kings varies from the obvious to the oblique—as exemplified by Malebron of Elidor in Alan Garner’s Elidor (1965) and Théoden of Rohan in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954–55).2 Tim Powers uses this trope as a major plot element in Last Call (1992), placing it at the center of a complex of related myths in a primary world where the mythical controls the mundane. The second example demonstrates how the ruler–realm link can be used in a more idiosyncratic manner. In Tourists (1989), Lisa Goldstein uses the connection between ruler and realm to inscribe a conflict between two kings, and their supporters, on a country. In her novel, the kings are symbolized by different shapes, and the power struggle is expressed in terms of various kinds of palimpsests, turning the physical landscape into a kind of writing.
The fourth and largest part of the chapter examines the landscape connected to Dark Lords. The “landscapes of evil” do not constitute the most common example of direct links between rulers and realms; but especially in portal–quest fantasy, the Dark Lord and the dismal land that surrounds him3 offer the most evident connection. After an overview of early instances of evil landscapes that capture the main characteristics of the typical Dark Lords’ realms, three such realms are discussed in detail: Sauron’s Mordor from The Lord of the Rings is set in relation to Stephen R. Donaldson’s Lord Foul and Robert Jordan’s Shai’tan, and their respective lands, to illustrate how the link between ruler and realm can also provide a useful focus in a comparative reading of presentations of evil in fantasy.
LINKING RULERS TO REALMS: AN OVERVIEW
Whether by finding the rightful heir, identifying a suitable candidate for the empty throne, or curing the ailing king, the restoration of the sovereign is a ubiquitous motif in fantasy literature, particularly that of the portal–quest variety. It may be the object of a quest or simply an unintended result; it may even be a minor side effect of the story’s general resolution. Whether central or peripheral to the story, whether a recurring theme or a final twist, restoring the ruler—the proper ruler, the ruler who will make everything well—is part of many fantasy stories’ happy ending. While little has been written about the proper rulers themselves, scholarship paying attention to the happy ending has often included them as a matter of course, so critical thoughts about the ending provide a natural starting point for the ensuing discussion of fantasy rulers and their realms.
Tolkien considered it near compulsory for “complete fairy-stories” to end happily after a eucatastrophe (an unexpected turn for the better),4 and the fourth and final part of John Clute’s model of “the grammar of discourse of fantasy” is “healing/return.”5 The happy ending is only part of a larger framework that fantasy literature shares with folktales, or Märchen, as Brian Attebery points out in The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature.6 He introduces Vladímir Propp’s analysis of the folktale as a possible means of understanding the structural organization of fantasy stories.7 A point Attebery does not make, but that is worth observing in the current context, is that although Propp never discusses his hero in terms of being the rightful ruler, the final event—or “function”—of his morphology is the hero’s wedding and award, for instance of a large portion of the kingdom.8 The restored ruler in a fantasy story does not have to be the hero, but weddings and coronations are certainly common (although, as in Propp’s morphology, not mandatory); Clute describes the eucatastrophic ending as being “where marriage may occur, just governance fertilize the barren land, and there is a healing.”9
The above begs one fairly obvious question: what is so “happy” about an ending in which the proper ruler is restored? Clute’s description, in all its brevity, offers an answer. With the proper ruler follows healing: the worst is over and things will get better.10 The restored sovereign promises an end to tyranny and suffering. Marriage, just governance, healing: we find all three elements in the final volume of The Lord of the Rings (with the revealing title The Return of the King). Aragorn is the true heir who emerges to claim a throne that has remained empty for centuries; his governance promises to be nothing but just, and he heals the land by removing enmity and banditry, as well a
s by repairing the environmental damage done by Sauron.11 Despite having won the throne primarily by virtue of his bloodline, Aragorn proves to be an able and just monarch with great political acumen.
There is something more to the relation between the sovereign and his land than political skill, however, and this something, this mysterious link between ruler and realm, explains why the restoration of the sovereign heals the land. That kingship entails more than politics has been noted by other critics. “Most portal-quest fantasies associate the king with the well-being of the land, and the condition of the land with the morality of the place,” Farah Mendlesohn claims in Rhetorics of Fantasy;12 and in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, Diana Wynne Jones offers examples, proposing that
