Here Be Dragons

by Stefan Ekman

  10. See Clute, “Taproot Texts.”

  11. J. R. R. Tolkien, Smith of Wootton Major (1967; London: HarperCollins, 2005), 38, cf. 46.

  12. Lord Dunsany, The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924; London: Gollancz-Orion, 2001), 2 et passim.

  13. Neil Gaiman, introduction to The King of Elfland’s Daughter, by Lord Dunsany (London: Gollancz-Orion, 2001), xii.

  14. “Mundanity, n.,” 3, OED Online, December 2011 (Oxford University Press).

  15. Clute, “Crosshatch,” 237.

  16. References to Steven Brust, Taltos. The Book of Taltos (1988; New York: Ace, 2002), and Steven Brust, The Paths of the Dead (New York: Tor, 2002), are given parenthetically in the text.

  17. So far, that is. The Vlad Taltos series is scheduled to be nineteen books in total, but as of August 2012 only thirteen had been published.

  18. The Khaavren Romances are written as a pastiche (or, as Brust calls it, a “blatant rip-off”) of Alexandre Dumas’s d’Artagnan Romances. The first novel is thus called The Phoenix Guards (1990), the second Five Hundred Years After (1994), and the third The Viscount of Adrilankha. The last novel is published in three volumes: The Paths of the Dead (2002), The Lord of Castle Black (2003), and Sethra Lavode (2004). See Steven Brust, “Books by Steven Brust,” The Dream Café, last modified October 25, 2006, http://dreamcafe.com/books.html.

  19. See Dante Alighieri, Inferno, trans. Robert M. Durling, vol. 1 (1320?; New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), xiv, xvi.

  20. “[T]he descent into Avernus is easy […] but to retrace your steps and return to the upper air, that is the task and the toil.” Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I-VI (c. 19 B.C.; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999): bk. 6 (my translation).

  21. References to Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess, Stardust: Being a Romance within the Realms of Faerie (1997–98; New York: DC Comics, 1998), are given parenthetically in the text. Quotations come from the illustrated edition. Page references within square brackets are to the text-only edition: Neil Gaiman, Stardust (New York: Avon, 1999). As there are textual differences between the two editions, discrepancies may exist between the quotations given here and the corresponding text in the text-only edition.

  22. See Genette, Paratexts, 1–2.

  23. Attebery, Strategies of Fantasy, 131.

  24. In 1838: Queen Victoria was on the throne; furthermore “Mr. Charles Dickens was serializing his novel Oliver Twist; Mr. Draper had just taken a photograph of the moon” and “Mr. Morse had just announced a way of transmitting messages down metal wires” (7 [5]). The Morse code was presented in 1838. Queen Victoria had ascended the throne in June 1837 and Oliver Twist ran until April 1839. Since the Market is on May Day, it must be in 1838. (This does not fit with Draper’s photograph of the moon, however, which was taken in 1840 in the actual world.)

  25. Among the most notable examples are the tales of Oisín/Ossian, who believes himself to spend three years in the Land of the Young but returns to find that three centuries have passed; and Thomas the Rhymer, who returns after a time in Elfland to find that seven years have gone by. Fantasy examples range from adaptations of folktale themes or entire stories to more imaginative uses. Examples of the former include the fairy hill in which one night corresponds to a century on the outside in Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions, the Faerie land of the “nether forest” where time stands still in some regions (in part two of Bertil Mårtensson’s series Maktens vägar: Vägen tillbaka [The Roads of Power: The Road Back; 1980]), and Ellen Kushner’s Thomas the Rhymer (1990). More imaginatively, Jeffrey Ford creates a Faerie (“Twilmish”) time scale predicated on the duration of the sand castle a Twilmish inhabits (“The Annals of Eelin-Ok” 2004).

  26. David Langford, “Time in Faerie,” in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, 948.

  27. Evelyn Edson, Mapping Time and Space: How Medieval Mapmakers Viewed Their World, vol. 1 (London: British Library, 1997), 16. The thirteenth century Hereford world map provides numerous examples of such monsters; see, e.g., Harvey, Medieval Maps, especially the detail of Africa (33). For a more thorough discussion, see Mittman, Maps and Monsters, ch. 3.

  28. Erin C. Blake, “Where Be ‘Here Be Dragons’?” MapHist, April 1999, http://www.maphist.nl/extra/herebedragons.html.

  29. Which, it should be noted, is changed to “anyone” in the text-only edition.

  30. “Dionysus,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica Online: Academic Edition (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2010); Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Mary M. Innes (c. 8 A.D.; London: Penguin, 1955), 94 [bk. 4].

  31. “thyrsus,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica Online: Academic Edition (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2010).

  32. Together with the man in the silk top hat, Charmed stands behind Dunstan during his first meeting with the fairy girl who is to become Tristran’s mother (23), and once she regains her freedom from Madame Semele, he watches from the shadows (203). The hairy little man also watches when Yvaine gives the Power of Stormhold to Tristran (206). Finally, Charmed can be seen in the illustrations on pages 7 and 9 among the people arriving at Wall for the Market without being mentioned in the text. He obviously manages to keep out of sight, however. When Tristran asks around for him at the Market, no one admits to having seen him (204 [316]).

  33. John Clute, “Thinning,” in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, 942.

  34. Clute, “Thinning,” 942.

  35. Mendlesohn, Rhetorics, 3.

  36. Vess explains that he had free rein when painting this particular picture, since very little had been written about the book or the characters yet. It is therefore rife with people from history and fiction: the Victorian fairy painter Richard Dadd, Ludwig van Beethoven, Merlin and Nimue, Hayao Miyazaki’s anime characters Kiki and Totoro, Prince Valiant, and many others, including Neil Gaiman and Vess himself. He adds that for the appearance of the goblin market sellers, he was inspired by Lawrence Housman’s illustrations for Christina Rossetti’s poem Goblin Market (Charles Vess, email message to author, February 15, 2006).

  37. Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories,” 37.

  38. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Norton Shakespeare, eds. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (1600; New York: Norton, 2008), 5.1.7–8. Gaiman and Vess have used this line to connect imagination and Faerie before. In their “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Shakespeare’s play is performed in front of Auberon, Titania, and a nightmarish fairy court. The imaginations proclaimed by the text are revealed as truths by Vess’s accompanying illustrations; see Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” in The Sandman: Dream Country (New York: DC Comics, 1995), 82.

  39. References to Garth Nix, Sabriel (New York: HarperCollins, 1995); Garth Nix, Lirael: Daughter of the Clayr (New York: HarperCollins, 2001); Garth Nix, Abhorsen (New York: Eos-HarperCollins, 2003); and Garth Nix, “Nicholas Sayre and the Creature in the Case,” in Across the Wall: A Tale of the Abhorsen and Other Stories (New York: Eos-HarperCollins, 2005), are given parenthetically in the text.

  40. The name suggests that the country mirrors the Old Kingdom; Fr. ancien “old” and terre “land, domain.” A number of names suggest a Francophone origin, for instance the Ancelstierran mist-covered capital Corvere; Fr. couvert “covered, overcast.”

  41. James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (1922; Ware, UK: Wordsworth Editions, 1993), 594.

  42. Mendlesohn, Rhetorics, 1, 3.

  43. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949; London: Fontana-HarperCollins, 1993), 30, 36–38.

  44. See Attebery, Strategies, 87–88.

  45. Campbell, Hero, 217. What Campbell refers to as worlds may, in my terminology, equally well be domains.

  46. Campbell, Hero, 217.

  47. Ibid., 77–78.

  48. Ibid., 78.

  49. Ibid., 217.

  50. John Clute, Scores: Reviews 1993–2003 (Harold Wood, UK: Beccon Publications, 2003), 127.

  51. John Clute, “Polder,” in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, 7
72.

  52. Ibid., 773.

  53. Ibid.

  54. References to Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, are given parenthetically in the text. The following abbreviations are used in the references: FR—The Fellowship of the Ring, TT—The Two Towers, RK—The Return of the King, Appx—appendices to The Lord of the Rings. Book and chapter are given in Roman numerals before the page reference.

  55. Tom Shippey, J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 197.

  56. See, e.g., Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories,” 9–10.

  57. Shippey, Author, 198.

  58. Ibid.

  59. Shippey, Author, 199. See also Shippey, Road, 218.

  60. Flieger, “Taking the Part of Trees,” 155.

  61. Flieger, Question of Time, 110; cf. Tolkien to Naomi Mitchison, September 25, 1954, in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 197.

  62. Clute, “Polder,” 772.

  63. John Clute, “Time Abyss,” in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, 947. According to Clute, “The Lord of the Rings […]—once the immense backstory contained in The Silmarillion […] and other texts is understood—seems to hover at the very lip of […] a profound T[ime] A[byss].”

  64. Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories,” 68.

  65. The following paragraphs are based on my discussion of Lothlórien’s time in Ekman, “Echoes of Pearl,” 67–68.

  66. Flieger, Question of Time, 107–8.

  67. Paul H. Kocher, Master of Middle-earth: The Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972), 98–99.

  68. Flieger, Question of Time, ch. 4.

  69. J. R. R. Tolkien and Christopher Tolkien, The Treason of Isengard, vol. 2 (London: HarperCollins, 2002), 367–69.

  70. Flieger, Question of Time, 107; cf. Tolkien and Tolkien, Treason, 369.

  71. Hammond and Scull, Reader’s Companion, 718.

  72. Flieger, Question of Time, 100.

  73. References to Robert Holdstock, Mythago Wood (1984; London: Voyager-HarperCollins, 1995); Robert Holdstock, Lavondyss (1988; New York: Avon, 1991); Robert Holdstock, The Hollowing (1993; New York: ROC-Penguin, 1995); Robert Holdstock, Gate of Ivory (London: Voyager-HarperCollins, 1998) (originally published as Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn); and Robert Holdstock, Avilion (2009; London: Gollancz-Orion, 2010), are given parenthetically in the text. The novella “The Bone Forest” (1991), a prequel to the events in Mythago Wood, is left out of the discussion as it does not add much to the analysis.

  74. Mendlesohn, Rhetorics, 156.

  75. Marek Oziewicz, “Profusion Sublime and the Fantastic: Mythago Wood,” in The Mythic Fantasy of Robert Holdstock: Critical Essays on the Fiction, eds. Donald E. Morse and Kálmán Matolcsy (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 81. He refers to Mythago Wood only, but the description is equally true for the other three novels.

  76. Clute, Scores, 179. Original publication is given as the Washington Post, October 1997.

  77. Mendlesohn, Rhetorics, 154.

  78. W. A. Senior, “The Embodiment of Abstraction in the Mythago Novels,” in The Mythic Fantasy of Robert Holdstock, 14.

  79. For a more comprehensive discussion of mythotopes, see Stefan Ekman, “Exploring the Habitats of Myths: The Spatiotemporal Structure of Ryhope Wood,” in The Mythic Fantasy of Robert Holdstock. The discussion about mythotopes here draws on this text.

  80. Clute, Scores, 178.

  81. Mendlesohn even goes so far as to claim that Steven is not important to the story of the forest, that he is part of an imported narrative rather than a tale native to the forest. Although her argument is rather persuasive, I would suggest that all narratives in the forest are, in some respect, drawn from outsiders, even when they are only part-outsiders, as in the case of Jack and Yssobel in Avilion (also see the episode with the World War I infantryman [Mythago Wood 263–77]). See Mendlesohn, Rhetorics, 156.

  82. Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Advances in Semiotics) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 80.

  83. Penelope Reed Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth: From Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 19.

  84. Doob, Idea of the Labyrinth, 18.

  85. Eco, Semiotics, 81.

  86. Ibid. However, Aarseth questions whether Eco’s net is a labyrinth at all; see Espen J. Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 6.

  87. Eco, Semiotics, 81.

  88. Paul Kincaid, review of Avilion, by Robert Holdstock, SF Site, 2010, http://www.sfsite.com/01b/al312.htm.

  89. Clute, Scores, 178.

  90. Paul Kincaid, “Of Time and the River: Time in the Fiction of Robert Holdstock,” Vector 260 (Summer 2009): 9.

  91. References to Terry Pratchett, Pyramids (1989; London: Corgi, 1990), are given parenthetically in the text.

  92. Andrew M. Butler, Terry Pratchett (Harpenden, UK: Pocket Essentials, 2001), 33.

  93. It should be noted that with the introduction of the History Monks, especially in Thief of Time (1994) and Night Watch (2002), the nature of time in the Discworld universe developed in quite a different direction from Pyramids.

  94. Clute, “Polder,” 772.

  95. David Langford, introduction to Terry Pratchett: Guilty of Literature, 2nd ed., eds. Andrew M. Butler et al., (2001; Baltimore: Old Earth Books, 2004), 11.

  96. Clute, “Polder,” 772.

  97. Richard Mathews actually claims that time travel—explicit or implicit—is as important to fantasy as space travel is to science fiction; see Mathews, Fantasy, 26.

  98. Suvin appears to use this term to refer to high fantasy found near the center of Attebery’s fuzzy set, but he muddies the terminological water somewhat by referring to The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, where Clute, in fact, sees little use for the term and suggests that it is a marketing euphemism for Sword and Sorcery; see John Clute, “Heroic Fantasy,” in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. It is possible that Suvin sees no difference between the (portal or) quest-driven fantasy of Tolkien and the immersive fantasy of, for instance, Michael Moorcock or Fritz Leiber.

  99. Darko Suvin, “Considering the Sense of ‘Fantasy’ or ‘Fantastic Fiction’: An Effusion,” Extrapolation 41, no. 3 (2000): 226–27.

  100. Swinfen, In Defence of Fantasy, 81.

  101. Manlove, Modern Fantasy, 10. Note that the definition as it stands on p. 1 erroneously uses only “the supernatural.” The error is corrected in Colin. N. Manlove, “On the Nature of Fantasy,” in The Aesthetics of Fantasy Literature and Art, ed. Roger C. Schlobin (1975; Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), 16.

  102. Manlove, Modern Fantasy, 3; cf. Manlove, “On the Nature,” 19.

  103. Manlove, “On the Nature,” 29.

  104. W. R. Irwin, The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 9. Some writers have introduced “meta-rules” for how the internal rules are allowed to change; see, for instance, Lyndon Hardy’s Master of the Sixth Magic (1984), a sequel whose plot focuses mainly on how the rules for magic of the previous novel can be changed.

  105. Doležel, Heterocosmica, 128–29.

  106. Ibid., 131.

  4. NATURE AND CULTURE

  1. For instance, Christopher Manes, “Nature and Silence,” The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, eds. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (1992; Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), vx; Lynn White, Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” (1967), The Ecocriticism Reader, 14; Lynn White, Jr., “Continuing the Conversation,” Western Man and Environmental Ethics: Attitudes toward Nature and Technology, ed. Ian G. Barbour (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1973), 62; Frederick Turner, “Cultivating the American Garden” (1991), The Ecocriticism Reader, 41 (referring to Lévi-Strauss); Herbert N. Schneidau, Sacred Discontent: The Bible and Western Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 58, and René Dubos, “A Th
eology of the Earth” (1969), Western Man and Environmental Ethics, 44–45.

  2. Attebery, Fantasy Tradition, 186.

  3. Andrew Brennan, Thinking about Nature: An Investigation of Nature, Value and Ecology (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 88. See also the discussion in Turner, “American Garden,” 40–54.

  4. Kate Soper, What Is Nature? Culture, Politics, and the Non-Human (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 1.

  5. “nature, n.,” esp. 14b, 9c, OED Online, December 2011 (Oxford University Press).

  6. “nature, n.,” 11a, OED Online.

  7. Soper, What Is Nature?, 15. Such a distinction also agrees with what Andersson defines as the basic concept of nature (for a nature-centered environmental ethics), that nature “has not been anthropogenically affected”; see Petra Andersson, Humanity and Nature: Towards a Consistent Holistic Environmental Ethics (Gothenburg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 2007), 71.

  8. Brennan, Thinking about Nature, 88. He admits to the circularity of the definition.

  9. Keekok Lee, The Natural and the Artefactual: The Implications of Deep Science and Deep Technology for Environmental Philosophy (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 1999), 82–83.

  10. David Kaplan and Robert A. Manners, Culture Theory (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972), 3.

  11. Alfred Louis Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum, 1952), 149, n4a.

  12. Peter Worsley, “Classic Conceptions of Culture,” Culture and Global Change, eds. Tracey Skelton and Tim Allen (London: Routledge, 1999), 13.

  13. Daniel G. Bates, Cultural Anthropology (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1996), 5.

  14. Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (London: Viking, 1990), 9–42, 55. Keekok Lee discusses McKibben’s position in terms of Lee’s seven senses of “nature”; see Lee, The Natural and the Artefactual, 86. For an overview of the so-called end-of-nature thesis and its treatment by supporters of a nature-centered environmental ethics, see Andersson, Humanity and Nature, 74–79.

  15. White, “Historical Roots,” 3–4; Turner, “American Garden,” 40.

  16. Marcus Tullius Cicero, The Nature of the Gods, trans. P. G. Walsh (44 B.C.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 313 [2.152].