Here Be Dragons

by Stefan Ekman

  The cancer of evil corrupts the trees into new forms of life, life that is unnatural, abominable, transgressing boundaries between species, even between the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Trees that are completely overcome by the Blight’s cancer are no longer just trees; they bear no relation to any kind of tree in the world outside. They have taken on traits of the animal kingdom, such as moving and catching prey, and when Rand lops off a branch, he “almost thought he heard them scream” (736), again recalling the Wood of Suicides and how a bush cries out in pain when having a twig broken off.86 Nor are trees alone in transgressing the boundaries of taxonomy. “Flowers can kill in the Blight, and leaves maim,” Rand is warned, and he is told of “a little thing called a Stick” that looks like its name and will bite anyone who touches it, with disastrous results (724). Whether the Stick is an animal or a plant is never specified; the “little thing” is another transgression, a hybrid impossible outside the Blight.

  The boundary between plants and animals is violated in the Blight, as are the boundaries between species. Rand cannot identify which kinds of trees he sees. When he and his companions are attacked by a host of monstrous creatures, the first of these is described thus: “Stiff hair like long bristles covered it, and it had too many legs, joining a body as big as a bear at odd angles. Some of them at least, those coming out of its back, had to be useless for walking, but the finger-long claws at their ends tore the earth in its death agony” (736). The description is one of a mutation beyond any divine creation or natural selection. Body parts from various animals appear to have been thrown together randomly, resulting in the “too many” legs that are strangely joined to the body, with some appearing to have no purpose. The being described is an abomination, clearly diseased, yet alive and ferocious. The arbitrariness of the attacking creatures’ shape is emphasized by the fact that no two are alike (737) and none has shapes recognizable to Rand (or the reader).

  The focus on cancer and transgressions distinguishes Shai’tan’s evil from that of Sauron and Lord Foul, but to fully understand the nature of this evil, some similarities should be considered. Where Tolkien’s and Donaldson’s Dark Lords destroy the natural environment, leaving a dead, sterile landscape, Jordan’s Dark One causes nature to turn into another kind of nightmare. The Blight is nature gone bad, a corruption not only of its plants and animals, but of the very laws that govern the ecosystem. Two important parallels can be drawn between his emanation of evil and those of Foul and Sauron, though. First, as in the case of Sauron, land that has fallen under the control of Shai’tan’s troops is also swallowed by the Blight, as in the case of the kingdom of Malkier (711). Yet the degree of corruption of the land, which in Sauron’s case mainly appears to depend on how long a land has been under the Dark Lord’s control, is related to the distance from the Blight’s edge, more along the lines of Foul’s evil. To enter the Blight is gradually to enter the corruption wrought by Shai’tan’s evil. Rand wonders when the party will move into the Blight, not realizing that the slight change in temperature and the wrongness that this change makes him feel are the first signs (721). This association of the Dark Lord’s evil with radiation effects (in that the evil decreases relative to the distance from its source, dying away gradually), as well as with military control of an area, proves relevant somewhat later in this discussion.

  The second parallel between the evil force of mainly Foul and Shai’tan, but to some extent also Sauron, is the lifeless lands surrounding Shai’tan’s prison. In a dream, Rand sees this place to which “spring had never come […] and never would come. Nothing grew in the cold soil that crunched under his boots, not so much as a bit of lichen. […] [D]ust coated the stone as if never a drop of rain had touched it” (119). This land obviously shares some characteristics with both Mordor and Ridjeck Thome: it is dry, dusty, and dead. Appropriately called the Blasted Lands, it calls to mind a radioactive desert close to a massive radioactive source, as well as the long cold of nuclear winter. In fact, that appears to be the (symbolic) nature of the Dark Lord’s evil in Jordan’s book: where Sauron represents the ills of industrialization and Lord Foul represents the ills of leprosy, Shai’tan represents the ills of nuclear war and radioactivity.

  Quite apart from its association with military control, Shai’tan’s evil in The Eye of the World shares numerous traits with ionizing radiation. As noted before, it decreases with distance, a tendency that also explains the sterility of the Blasted Lands: Close to its source, nuclear radiation kills and sterilizes. As its effect decreases farther away, it does not kill directly but changes the cellular structures, thus causing cancer and mutations, as well as damage to the immune system—and fungal infections are among the first to take advantage of a compromised immune system. In other words, Shai’tan’s evil—as a force—affects the Blight in a manner similar to nuclear radiation: it turns living things into diseased, cancer-ridden wrecks, eventually causing plants and animals to mutate into new, corrupted forms of life. This interpretation is indicated already in the book’s prologue, when Lews Therin takes his life with magic tainted by evil: the air turns to fire and the light “would have seared and blinded any eye that glimpsed it, even for an instant.” Stone is vaporized, the ground convulses, molten rock is cast into the air, and “[f]rom north and south, from east and west, the wind howled in” (xiv). The image closely resembles the blinding light, shock wave, and mushroom cloud that we have learned to associate with a nuclear explosion.87

  Examining the relation between the Dark Lord and his realm, we find that the cancer and mutations, the sterile Blasted Lands and the military control not only explain how ruler and realm affect each other. By understanding the nature of evil through the character of the evil land, a central theme of the novel emerges, with evil representing the ills of nuclear war and the misuse of nuclear power.

  Evil Landscapes: The Personal Touch

  Although the landscape of evil has developed into a fairly traditional trope only occasionally challenged by writers of portal–quest (and some immersive) fantasy, the similarities among the many accounts are largely superficial. As the three evil realms presented in this chapter illustrate, these characteristics include a land where little lives, especially plant life, or where existing life is in some way corrupted, diseased, and dying—traits shared with the genre’s taproot texts, in particular Robert Browning’s “Childe Roland” poem. Other similarities may be found: the occurrence of temperature extremes, which we recognize from Hell in The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost and which is a motif alluded to in Cook’s ironic reversal of the evil realm: Sauron has a volcano at the center of his realm but is able to create a snowstorm in the Misty Mountains;88 Lord Foul protects his stronghold with a river of lava, but the stronghold itself is icy cold, and he afflicts the Land with a preternatural winter; Shai’tan has also prolonged the natural winter, and his realm is unnaturally hot in the Blight, but the Blasted Lands near his prison lacks hope for spring, just like the desolate plains outside Mordor.

  Looking beyond such parallels, the relationship between the evil rulers and their realms offers valuable suggestions as to central themes in the stories, not least because the Dark Lords are the principal antagonists—the main obstacles of the heroes’ quests. No evil is merely generic, even in fantasy; and the nature of evil is mirrored in the nature of the evil landscape—morality puts its stamp on the land. To Tolkien, industrialization is evil, while Donaldson creates evil by projecting the despair and destruction of leprosy on the Land, and Jordan demonstrates the radioactive evil of nuclear devices. Each theme goes far beyond the dark realms to permeate the entire story.89

  The three readings here have also presented three alternative ways of exploring Dark Lords and Dark Lands. Each approach uses a somewhat different starting point in discussing the subject: three aspects of Sauron’s evil in Tolkien, the nature of Shai’tan’s evil influence in Jordan, and the character and motive of Lord Foul in Donaldson. Regardless of point of departure, however, they all
demonstrate a connection between ruler and realm and show that exploring that connection yields interesting critical insights.

  • • •

  The land and the king are one, we are told by Terry Pratchett’s king Verence, an assertion that quickly loses some of its edge when Nanny Ogg wonders, “One what?”90 The witch’s question raises a valid point. A direct link between ruler and realm is a common element in fantasy literature, but the various works display little consensus as to the nature of that link. Perhaps the direct link is merely a stylistic device? If, as Mendlesohn suggests, the king is associated “with the well-being of the land, and the condition of the land with the morality of the place,”91 does this imply that the morality of the king is reflected in the condition of the land? Ought we only to consider the realm as a metonym for its ruler and the land’s condition as an emblematic correlative of the sovereign’s morals or health?

  From the cases discussed in chapter 5, we can see how variation rather than conformity best describes how sovereigns are linked to their countries. The direct link can be central to the plot and of great importance to the protagonists, or it can flash by, all but ignored by the story. Being one with the land may mean that ruler and realm are all but identical, or it could mean that a country without a leader is simply prone to political anarchy. Even when the sovereign acts as a conduit for power, that power can involve a combination of politics, magic, and fertility—or it can keep them separate. An explanation for the direct link may be offered, or the link may be left totally inexplicable. The influence may run from ruler to realm or from realm to ruler, and may even work in both directions at once.

  These differences are not binary, they exist on a scale; nor is this an exhaustive list. In other words, each direct link that we find between a fantasy king or queen and his or her country is in all probability unique. What these links have in common is merely that they tell the reader something about the rulers by describing the realm that surrounds them. Is that, perhaps, all these direct links do? Peter Barry remarks that it is “a common literary-critical ploy” to read the external as internal;92 and a critic could, presumably, read the state of the realm—good or bad—as just a metaphor for the state of the ruler. If the pouring rain outside is a metaphor for the grief of the man in the car, and the sunny day and lush greenery is a metaphor for the happiness of the young couple on the picnic blanket, why not read the sterile land as a metaphor for the sterility of a castrated king?

  The problem with such an approach is that it is reductive as well as denying fantasy’s characteristic ability to create, within its fictive worlds, new rules for how things work. Treating the realm as a metonym for its ruler also implies that the realm is, somehow, less important than the ruler. The land is reduced to a mere setting, a backdrop that at best provides clues for the protagonists (and the reader) and sets an appropriate mood for the story, at worst only allowing us to see the flaws of a sovereign writ large. Implicit in such a reading is the assumption that characters are more important than setting and people more important than place, as if the characters (and people in general) were somehow more “relevant” than settings (and places). As I pointed out in the introduction to this book, I am wary of these attitudes in general; and when it comes to fantasy, whose environments are often radically different from the actual world, there is a distinct risk of misunderstanding a story if its setting is read simply as a metaphor for some internal aspects of the character in charge. In their fantasy worlds, authors are free to set up any rules they like; failing to take such rules into account ignores one of the genre’s most fundamental features.

  Despite their many differences, the various “curious relationships” examined in this chapter also demonstrate the problem with a metaphoric/metonymic reading of the direct link between ruler and realm. Even in cases in which the state of the land suggests a metaphor, as in Jordan’s The Eye of the World, it is not necessarily a metaphor for the ruler’s mental or moral condition. The effects produced by Shai’tan’s evil force suggest that it is possible to read this force, or indeed evil itself, as a metaphor for nuclear radiation—but this tells us nothing about the Dark One himself. Similarly, the palimpsest and the related damnatio memoriae that dominate the changing topography of Goldstein’s Amaz offer a metaphor for the kings’ conflict, but the shapes associated with each king tells us little about either kings or supporters. The rounded shapes associated with the Jewel King are not an external representation of his well-rounded ideas, for instance.

  Even when it is possible to read the external landscape in terms of the ruler’s internal traits, such a reading is reductive rather than expansive. Sauron’s and Foul’s realms are superficially alike, to the point where a list of correspondences could be drawn up. These similarities in realms are only superficial, however, and adhere to a long tradition of what evil landscapes ought to look like. The structure of those landscapes derives from two rather different characters, however. Were we to assume that outward resemblance implied internal similarity in the Dark Lords, we would fail to understand not only Sauron and Foul but also the nature of evil in Tolkien’s and Donaldson’s works. Given how central evil and the battle against it are to the respective plots, we would also risk misunderstanding the plots themselves. Although the ruler–realm relationship is marginalized in some works, it is of central importance in others. If the nature of the direct link is of immediate concern for the protagonists, whether they aspire to the throne themselves (e.g., in Brooks’s Magic Kingdom for Sale/Sold!) or are in some way involved with a sovereign and a land suffering from the same affliction (e.g., in Ende’s The Never-ending Story), an attempt to read the realm as the ruler writ large would make the story well-nigh incomprehensible.

  The case is especially pronounced with The Neverending Story, in which the direct link allows the realm to affect the ruler: the illness of the Childlike Empress is a direct result of Fantastica being devoured by the Nothing. If anything, the Empress is a version of Fantastica writ small, her illness a metaphor for the land’s destruction. Yet, for all their metonymic relationship, Fantastica and the Empress—as well as any other ruler and realm in the genre—are also two separate entities; and a special and curious relationship exists between them. When discussing rulers and realms in a fantasy work, we must also understand the nature of the link—direct or indirect—that connects them. It is not enough to realize that ruler and realm are one—the question we need to ask ourselves is: “One what?”

  6 : Some Final Thoughts

  I consider myself a seasoned traveler in the realm of fairy story. I have long since lost count of all the places I have visited in the myriad fantasy stories I have read over the years. Often, a setting feels more well-known than wonderful, like a vacation resort one has visited several times before. Equally often, however, I blink (my mind’s eye, at least) at the fresh wonders that glitter between the pages: windswept tussock grass in lurid colors, a forest of strange beasts and weird trees, a city of miracles … Whether familiar or alien, the setting combines with characters and plot to create the fantasy story. There is widespread agreement that settings are central to fantasy works—indeed, that a fantasy setting has much in common with the characters who live in, travel through, or otherwise experience it. Nevertheless, few critics have examined the genre from a perspective where those settings are in focus. It was this discrepancy between proclaimed significance and lack of scholarship that gave rise to my original question: what can we learn about particular works as well as the genre in general by examining fantasy settings? That question sparked this exploration into the representations of fantasy landscapes and the ways in which those landscapes interact with their respective stories.

  I have proposed the term topofocal to describe an approach to texts that focuses on the setting. This is not to say that characters and plot are of less importance, but it does mean that it is the setting—in any of its many aspects—that provides a critical way into the work. Each of the four main chapters
offers a different topofocal perspective, examining one particular aspect of fantasy settings. Chapter 2 presents two studies—one quantitative and the other qualitative—of what is arguably the most visible manifestation of fantasy settings: the fictive map. In about three to four fantasy novels out of ten, the setting is presented by both text and map(s). These maps typically share an aesthetic that is relatively free from modern map elements, such as scale and legend; but they nevertheless mostly adhere to modern map conventions. At least two thirds of fantasy maps portray secondary-world settings, but elements or conventions invented as part of such worlds are rare. Overall, the maps convey an impression of adherence to genre conventionality. This apparent conventionality is deceptive, however, as all maps are the result of a mapmaker’s choices about what to include and exclude. If we bear in mind that every map has an author, a subject, and a theme, for instance, a close investigation of an individual map may reveal much about the world of the work. Rather than showing us only where the protagonists are and how they got there, a fantasy map can offer insights about the attitudes embedded in it. These are attitudes to particular map referents, to the culture and land of the map, and to the very world portrayed.

  The discussion in chapter 3 springs from a conspicuous difference between fantasy geography and the geography of the actual world. The same reality prevails all over the actual world (with the exception, perhaps, of extreme cases such as black holes and elementary particles), and on the other side of any border or boundary we cross, the same laws of nature and causality still apply. A fantasy world, by contrast, can be divided into different realities. It is possible to find that magic works on the other side of the border, or to walk from the land of the living to the land of the dead. Such borders may appear to be sharp demarcations, but they are often indistinct, gradual transitions from one reality to another. Regardless of what domain lies on the other side, the hero’s courage is put to the test when crossing the border into the alien and unknown—but it is generally the return that marks the real trial, of one kind or another. Fantasy landscapes are also dotted with enclosed areas—polders—protected from the outside world by a boundary. Inside these boundaries, climate, the nature of magic, even the passage of time itself may be different from the surroundings. Polders are anachronisms, bubbles of the past that are part of the world’s topology as well as its history.