The Crow

by Alison Croggon

  THE ELIDHU

  * * *

  Probably the most fascinating and ambiguous entities of Edil-Amarandh, the Elidhu have been the focus of intense speculation in Annaren studies. Literally hundreds of refer­ences are scattered through the available literature, but many are so contradictory that it is difficult to decide definitively who or what the Elidhu were. Sometimes they seem like gods, mythic personifications of natural forces or events, as the Winterking can be seen as the person­ification of a possible Ice Age; at other times (as in many Thorold stories) they are protagonists of folktales; at still others they are pre­sented matter-of-factly as any other historical figure taking forestage in human events. Yet it is not the variousness of the reports about them, but their remarkable consistency, that gives us pause. However they were regarded – as gods or as actual people, as allies or as unpre­dictable and dangerous foes – every reference to the Elementals since the beginning of written records in every region of Edil-Amarandh remarks on their slotted, inhuman eyes, their immortal status, and their ability to change their physical form.

  One difficulty in understanding these entities is the nature of the Elidhu themselves – they are held to be mysterious beings who gener­ally are little interested in human affairs. Of course, the irony is that the records we are likely to find are only of those Elidhu who did associate with human beings. The two Elidhu who feature most in the earlier books – Ardina and Arkan – are often said to be atypical of the Elementals, and certainly appear more humanlike than otherwise, especially as both of them have taken humans as lovers.15

  Books IV and VI of the Naraudh Lar-Chane (translated as The Crow) fill out further our picture of the Elidhu. In The Crow, Hem encounters Nyanar, an Elidhu (who appears to be a forest Elemental) associated with the regions of Savitir and Nazar in the eastern Suderain, border­ing on Den Raven. Nyanar's name has been the subject of some philological speculation. Nyan in the classical Suderain tongue (circa A1000, some three millennia before the events of the Naraudh Lar­Chane) is the word for "change" or "transformation" (hence nyanil – 'ritual' – a word with religious connotations not found farther north in Edil-Amarandh), and also is related to nya, 'blossom' (as in English, a noun as well as a verb). However, others argue that the name Nyanar must be derived from the so far undiscovered language (NAB-1) spo­ken by the mysterious peoples of Nal-Ak-Burat.

  Nyanar brings a somewhat stranger dimension to the Elidhu than we have heretofore seen in the Naraudh Lar-Chane. In Maerad's meet­ing with Ardina in her various guises as wood Elidhu, moon avatar, and otherworldly Queen of Rachida, there is a current of understand­ing and a sense of kinship; even her unsettling dialogues with Arkan the Winterking only suggest things beyond what can be humanly understood. Arkan questions human polarizations and morality. "What is the Light without the Dark? It cannot be. And the Dark was first..." he says, confusing Maerad's certainties. "Only humans lie, because they think that language can give them another reality," he declares later, claiming that human beings, hampered by language, can understand nothing of what he calls truth.16 Although he is described in the Annaren as inikuel (literally, "double-faced," a word that does not have our connotations of hypocrisy but instead invokes strange­ness, beyond the Knowing), Arkan seems in many ways humanly legible: he claims to love, and displays sadness and anger in ways that Maerad can understand, even if she objects to them and ultimately rejects them. Nyanar is not nearly so recognizable, and might therefore be closer to a "typical" Elidhu than either Arkan or Ardina.

  As John Carroll points out in his study The Elidhu of Edil-Amarandh: Traces of the Absolute,17 Hem's initial meeting with Nyanar, in stark contrast with Maerad's dialogues with Arkan, culminates in word­lessness, a profound experience of Elemental "music." It is deeply ambiguous: at once an experience of inexpressible beauty, it also opens Hem to obliterating terror. Perhaps the most unsettling evocation of this terror – a fear of the inhuman implacability of the natural world – is Hem's Elidhu-inspired dream, "He watches as the impossible wave surges inexorably toward him, swallowing the earth in its path. It will devour everything, even the clouds. Mercy is a human vice; the wave knows nothing of it. Soon everything will be silent."18 As the author of the Naraudh Lar-Chane comments, "The music of the Elidhu was shot with darkness, which both deepened its mystery and beauty and drew it far beyond Hem's grasp. The Elidhu were neither good nor evil; such words were invented by human beings to explain human actions."19

  Against this vision of amoral destruction is posited something more benign, an idea of "at homeness." Nyanar speaks of the land­scape as "home," but his environment is, literally, his being. "This is myself," he tells Hem at one point, speaking of the landscape; and at another, "I am all that is here. There is no here that is not me." This is also evident when the Winterking speaks of the anguish of his banish­ment from Arkan-da. Place is more than a location to inhabit: it is the ground of an Elidhu's being.

  In many ways the Elidhu are anarchic, and deeply antagonistic to Bardic ideas of the social Balance. As Dr. David Lloyd argues in his provoking meditation on the place of the Elidhu in the Naraudh Lar­Chane, one of the defining aspects of the Elementals is their direct challenge to Bardic ideas of rationalistic causality. This is expressed in part through a different experience of time, which Lloyd characterizes as mythic time. "Time is not as you know it, you mortal creatures," Nyanar tells Hem. "To us it is a sea, and all times exist together. Nothing is truly gone..." The Elidhu concept of time, as a primordial place of origin, is an idea familiar to us through ritual, which is always a return to origin and creation. In cultures as diverse as the Australian Arunta, the New Guinean Kai, or in Hindu or Tibetan or Catholic ritual, appeal is made to a "beginning" as an expression of the "true" and the "sacred," which authorizes human meaning.20

  The Elidhu's actual experience of primordial or mythic time, and their concomitant understanding that all times coexist, challenges the rational historicism of the Bards in fundamental ways, and at least partly explains the Bardic distrust of the Elidhu as fickle and danger­ous, as "pathological." The Elidhu represented a possibility of renewal and even, perhaps, of revolution, which, after the Restoration, the Annaren Bards sought to repress. David Lloyd in Elements of the Sublime writes:

  Myth... is not defined by its content, but by its temporal struc­ture. That is, where Adorno and Horkheimer emphasize the anthropomorphic tendency that defines myth for them as against the abstraction of reason, I would stress – against that still historicist division of the mythic (as past and as a relation to the past) from the enlightened – precisely what historicism itself distrusts as myth – its appearance as the rhythmic return of the past in an uneasy haunting of progress by the ghosts of its unfinished business.21 It is the persistence and insistence of the archaic that reason should have eradicated, exhibiting the tenacity of irrational attachments and the violence of primor­dial drives. The putatively archetypal content of the Elidhu is less significant, however readily invoked, than its unruly capacity to return. In this, of course, the Elidhu share the char­acteristics of the unconscious to which, on a social and an individual level, they are generally assimilated... Insofar as Bardic historicism itself participates in the rationalization that represses the past and reduces its multiple forms to a single, serial narrative, it must perforce envisage the mythic Elemental as pathological. Where myth was, historical time must come, to lay the past to rest and cure its violence with reason and progress. The therapeutic drive of historicism, which relates the universal narrative of civility, is thus peculiarly repressive, seeking less to release the past in the unruliness of its ever­present possibilities than to discipline it.22

  Banished from Annaren history after the Restoration, the Elidhu never­theless haunt Edil-Amarandh as unfinished business; behind their unacknowledged or demonized presence is the forgotten crime of the transcription and theft of the Treesong, in which both the Light and Dark were equally culpable. As Cadvan says at the end of The Riddle,
"This is a matter of undoing what Light or Dark should never have done."

  On the other hand, as is shown by Nyanar's persistence even in the midst of Sharma's wreckage of his "home," the Elidhu are also harbin­gers of possibility. Lloyd argues elsewhere that the Elementals demonstrate the reconnection of the past with the present, not as a process of nostalgia, but as reclamation of a possible future. "The work of history is not merely to contemplate destruction, but to track through the ruins of progress the defiles that connect the openings of the past to those of the present," he says. Through the figure of Nyanar, present despite the degraded and poisoned environment that Sharma has made of his place and self, "the form of the imagined future is sketched in the ruins of the present."23 One might add that, as symbols of a natural environment betrayed and exploited by a civilization now long vanished, the Elidhu resonate uneasily into our own present.

  THE TREESONG RUNES

  * * *

  At the end of The Riddle, I include some notes on the Treesong runes, to which I refer interested readers. The Treesong was an alphabet of twenty symbols. Ten – those with the pho­netic values A, E, I, O, U, F, S, H, D, and T – were inscribed on Maerad's Dhyllic lyre. The other runes – B, L, N, C, Q, M, G, P, NG, and R – were on the tuning fork stolen by Ire from the Iron Tower.

  Each Treesong rune was a complex constellation of meaning, even if considered only in its lexical sense. It was not only a letter with a pho­netic value; it encoded a line of the twenty-line poem that made up the Treesong, and also worked as a calendar, with the fifteen consonants symbolizing different seasons or significant days, and the vowels rep­resenting phases of the moon. Each rune was also associated with a different tree, each of which had its own network of associations. The density of symbolism associated with each rune is made even more complex by the suggestion of both Nyanar and Arkan that the runes as writing were significantly incomplete: that to be wholly meaningful, they required music. The source of their power is, like the Speech, only imperfectly understood.

  The complete Treesong stanzas (with the moon-associated runes running first, and the others in seasonal order) now reads:

  I am the dew on every hill

  I am the leap in every womb

  I am the fruit of every bough

  I am the edge of every cliff

  I am the hinge of every question

  I am the song of seven branches

  I am the gathering sea foam and the waters beneath it

  I am the wind and what is borne by the wind

  I am the falling tears of the sun

  I am the eagle rising to a cliff

  I am all directions over the face of the waters

  I am the flowering oak that transforms the earth

  I am the bright arrow of vengeance

  I am the speech of salmon in the icy pool

  I am the blood that swells the leafless branch

  I am the hunter's voice that roars through the valley

  I am the valor of the desperate roe

  I am the honey stored in the rotting hive

  I am the sad waves breaking endlessly

  The seed of woe sleeps in my darkness and the seed of gladness

  In an unpublished monograph, Professor Patrick Insole of the Depart­ment of Ancient Languages at the University of Leeds has made a thorough study of the extant sources on the Treesong, and on the symbolism of the runes.241 have drawn extensively on his monograph for this book, and Professor Insole, generally regarded as the foremost authority on the scripts of Edil-Amarandh, has kindly permitted me to quote extensively from his monograph for these notes.

  The runes on the tuning fork and the stanzas and values pertaining to them

  B I am the song of seven branches

  L I am the gathering sea foam and the waters beneath it

  N I am the wind and what is borne by the wind

  C I am the speech of salmon in the icy pool

  Q I am the blood that swells the leafless branch

  M I am the hunter's voice that roars through the valley

  G I am the valor of the desperate roe

  P I am the honey stored in the rotting hive

  NG I am the sad waves breaking endlessly

  R The seed of woe sleeps in my darkness and the seed of gladness

  B

  L

  N

  C

  Q

  M

  G

  H

  NG

  R

  Birt

  Lran

  Nerim

  Coll

  Ku

  Muin

  Gordh

  Phia

  Ngierab

  Raunar

  Winter

  Winter

  Spring

  Summer

  Autumn

  Autumn

  Autumn

  Winter

  Winter

  Midwinter Day

  Some conjectural interpretations of the rune designs

  WINTER is indicated as a flat line, which has been interpreted as representing ice or, more opaquely, as simply the absence of sun/light.

  B is represented by seven branches, referring to the stanza "I am the song of the seven branches." It also appears to represent a tree in winter.

  L shows two levels of water, one above and one below the central horizon, referring to the line "I am the gathering sea foam and the waters beneath it."

  SPRING is indicated by a rising sun motif, perhaps representing growth or the coming of light.

  N refers to the wind.

  SUMMER is indicated by a circle, representing the sun.

  C shows a vertical fish form, representing a leaping salmon.

  AUTUMN shows an inverted semicircle, indicating falling.

  Q shows a "leafless branch," or perhaps flowing blood.

  M represents a valley.

  G is obscure but may indicate the horns of the "desperate roe" (cf. the development of the ancient Semitic letter aleph).

  WINTER

  P shows a leaf form that appears also to represent a hive, with a vertical line marking a center, possibly representing honey.

  NG is two vertical waving lines representing both the reeds and their reflection and also the "sad waves, breaking endlessly."

  R repeats the horizontal line for emphasis and implies Midwinter Day. The two vertical ellipses represent the two seeds of woe and gladness.

  NOTES FOR THE APPENDICES

  * * *

  1. I have referred elsewhere to the myriad difficulties of dating the Annaren Scrolls. The negligible presence of C14 in any of the docu­ments suggests that they must be more than 50,000 years old, although their remarkable state of preservation makes them appear to be no older than three or four hundred years. Some progress is being made using isotopic dating methods on the ingredients of the inks, but the methods the Bards used to preserve their docu­ments, which still remain a mystery to scientists, appear to have affected the molecular makeup of these materials – mainly parch­ment and reed paper – in certain fundamental and profoundly puzzling ways. See "Dating the Annaren Scrolls" by Jean-Paul Carrier, Libridha: A Journal of Annaren Studies, Issue III, Vol 1,2003.

  2. See The Riddle.

  3. See The Languages of the Suderain, Jack Collins, (Chicago: Sorensen Academic Publishers, 2004).

  4. Genealogies of Light: Power in Edil-Amarandh edited by Alannah Casagrande (Chicago: Sorensen Academic Publishers, 2000) and also Jacqueline Allison's The Annaren Scripts: History Rewritten (Mexico: University of Queretaro Press, 1998).

  5. For examples of this kind of claim, see Keepers of the Balance, Markabul of Turbansk, A2578; Sharers of the Light, Inior of Jerr­Niken, A3145; The Gifts of the Gift, Vacarsa of Turbansk, N56.

  6. Genealogies of Light: Power in Edil-Amarandh, edited by Alannah Casagrande (Chicago: Sorensen Academic Publishers, 2000).

  7. "Idols of Light: Aspects of Religious Worship in the Suderain of Edil-Amarandh," Camilla John
son, Libridha: A Journal of Annaren Studies, Issue V, Vol 2,2004.

  8. The Loom of Light by Malikil of Jerr-Niken (N755).

  9. The Breathing Waves of Gis by Intathen of Gent (N560).

  10. For the above information, I am deeply indebted to Dr. Randolph Healy, Margaret Louise Mathematics Fellow at Bray College, Ireland, for his valuable conversation and insights.

  11. Sharma, King of Nothing, the Bard Nindar, Library of Busk (A2153).

  12. A Chronicle of the Black Kingdom by Callachan of Gent, translated by Jessica Callaghan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996).

  13. Ibid.

  14. Ibid.

  15. For more on these two Elidhu, see "The Elidhu" in the appendices of The Riddle.

  16. The Riddle, Part IV.

  17. The Elidhu of Edil-Amarandh: Traces of the Absolute by John Carroll (Mexico: University of Queretaro Press, 2005).

  18. The Crow, III.

  19. Ibid.

  20. "Toward A Definition of Myth," Mircea Eliade, Greek and Egyptian Mythologies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

  21. Dialectic of Enlightenment by Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).

  22. "Ruins/Runes" by David Lloyd, University of Southern California. Unpublished monograph, 2004.

  23. "Elements of the Sublime" by David Lloyd, University of Southern California. Unpublished monograph, 2005.

  24. "The Symbolism of the Treesong Runes," by Professor Patrick Insole, Department of Ancient Languages, University of Leeds. Unpublished monograph, 2003.