Write What You Know?

Write what you know.  A maxim regularly proposed by people who don't write to people, especially young people, who want to write.  Possibly the most vilified, misapplied and misunderstood of all writing advice.

On the face of it, it seems like artistic sabotage, especially for a fantasy writer.  Followed literally, it would mean, unless you've had a life like Jack London or Joseph Conrad, all most of us would be able to write would be little, slice-of-life tales of social realism.  Not that there's anything wrong with stories of that kind if they're what interests you, but it isn't what all authors want to write — and, more to the point, it's not what all readers want to read.

It's especially bad advice to give a child who wants to write.  Again, the child might genuinely want to tell a story of someone of their own age going to school and living the same kind of life they do, but most will want something more exciting to write about.  In any case, the worst possible thing to do to a child-writer, or any child, is to clip the wings of their imagination.  Their work's highly unlikely to get published, whether they write school stories or improbable tales of international espionage, and it's far better for their future enthusiasm if they have fun doing it.

The literal interpretation would certainly rule out any fantasy.  How can anyone write about immortal sorcerers, wandering swordsmen or swordswomen, meetings with gods or commanding vast armies if they write only what they know?

But that's not all there is to it, of course.  Write what you know is possibly the worst-phrased maxim to mask genuinely good advice.

What lies behind it was expressed beautifully by the Anglo-Irish writer Lord Dunsany, who in the early 20th century virtually invented the fantasy short story as we know it.  Dunsany wrote exotic tales of Elfland, the edge of the world and the lands that lie beyond the fields we know, but he considered:

It is my belief that those sudden visionary pictures which are the true essence of any art arise like a flower from a seed that has fallen into the mind, sometimes in infancy, sometimes in later childhood, sometimes in adult years, but often as imperceptibly as any seed blown on the wind finds a home for itself in the earth at the end of its wandering.  Bricks without straw are more easily made than imagination without memories.

Half a century later, another great writer, Bob Dylan, said it more succinctly and far more colloquially:

Open up yer eyes an' ears an' yer influenced

an' there's nothing you can do about it

My own favourite image of this process is a vast cooking-pot.  Into the pot goes everything that happens to me, everything that happens around me, everything I hear about, every item from the news, everything I read, watch or listen to, everything I think or discuss with other people.  The pot simmers constantly over the heat and I stir it regularly.  When I write, I dip in a ladle and take a spoonful out.  Everything I threw in is there, but changed, blended into new forms and new combinations that bear little resemblance to the raw ingredients.  This is the stew that makes my stories.

So how does this work?  In At An Uncertain Hour, I had to write about a character who reluctantly takes on commanding the army of a great alliance for a thousand years to defeat an evil empire, even though what he really wants to do is wander the world on an enchanted ship.  Strange to say, I've never actually done any of that myself.  Hardly writing what I know.

On the other hand, like most of us, I've had to choose between fulfilling moral and social obligation and letting myself drift along doing what I love.  I've had to square up to taking on positions of authority — not commanding a vast army, but managing people at work or running performance clubs — in spite of doubts about whether I'm really a natural for it.  I've fulfilled duties while dreaming of being free and footloose.

In addition to this, of course, I've observed many other people in positions of authority (often over me), followed the news about public figures, read works of history and biography about great leaders and generals of the past.  All in all, I'm surprisingly qualified to write about this character.

The things we know above everything else are our feelings and emotions, and these are what we tap into and extrapolate to experiences we've never known and are never likely to know.  Suppose your character is being hauled before the King, wondering whether the sentence is going to be instant execution.  It's not only unlikely that this has happened to any modern writer — it would also be highly inadvisable to attempt to seek out the experience. 

On the other hand, you might well remember sometime having been called in to see the boss, wondering just how much trouble you're in, terrified that you're going to be out on your ear.  Resurrect that memory and remember just how you felt; then expand and transfer it, try to feel those emotions again but much, much more intensely, and apply them to how another person might feel.

Imagination = experience + extrapolation + empathy.  As simple as that.

All right, it isn't really simple, but it's a start.  Of course, there are practical issues as well: things a writer might simply not know.  I recall long ago hearing a writers' cautionary tale.  A sheltered Edwardian lady wrote a novel in which her hero went to an Oxbridge college and ended up rowing in the University Boat Race.  Now, the whole point of a rowing team is that they have to learn to keep in perfect synchronisation, otherwise chaos ensues; but this author, in her enthusiasm, wrote a sentence something to the effect of Everyone rowed fast, but {the hero} rowed faster.

The moral of the tale was supposed to be that she'd no business writing about something she had no experience of, but I take a completely different moral from it.  If she wanted to write about the Boat Race, fair enough, but she should have got hold of a good book about rowing techniques and read it cover to cover.  Ideally, she should also have found a nearby rowing club and gone to watch practice there.  Perhaps talked to some of the rowers (shocking for a nice lady, but she could have taken a chaperone) and memorised some of the phrases they used and the experiences they'd had.  That would have enabled her to write the episode not only without that obvious blunder, but with a depth of involvement that made it seem she must be an expert rower.

We're living in an age where, compared with that Edwardian lady, we have any information we need just the click of a button away.  It's not always quite that easy, of course, but we really have no excuse but laziness for not researching the things we put into our stories.

Anyway, research is fun.  It's an opportunity to learn things, gain new experiences.  It might even take our lives off in rich, unexpected directions.  At worst, it'll stand us in good stead in trivia quizzes.

Write what you know?  Perhaps it's time to abandon that misphrased saying and the inadvertent damage it can do, and bring out in its place the true meanings that it masks.  Write what you feel.  Write what excites you.  Write what you want to know.

Remember, Remember the Fifth of November

Remember, remember

The Fifth of November,

Gunpowder treason and plot.

We still remember the Fifth of November in Britain, even if it's only as an excuse to let off fireworks at any time from the beginning of October to Christmas, but many people know little about the event that sparked it all off.  The popular version is that a man called Guy Fawkes tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament, but was discovered at the last minute.  Although we celebrate the failure and burn Fawkes in effigy, there tends to be a sneaking admiration for him whenever politicians are being particularly aggravating.  Guy Fawkes has been described as the only man who ever entered Parliament with honest intention.

In fact, it was a lot more serious than that.  It's been suggested that, had the plot succeeded, it would have been as devastating to 17th century Britain as 9/11.  More so, in fact, as it would have taken out virtually the whole leadership of the country, as well as a lot of innocent bystanders.  And Fawkes wasn't even its instigator.

The plot was formed between a group of Catholic gentry from the Midlands — several were related to Shakespeare through his mother's family, the Ardens.  Under Elizabeth I, who died in 1603, Catholics had been forced to pay fines but had generally been left to get on with their religion, as long as they kept it behind closed doors.  She did become harsher after the Pope ordered that it was the duty of all English Catholics to assassinate her, but there was no wholesale persecution.

Nevertheless, it was far from an ideal situation for them, and many Catholics hoped for better when James VI of Scotland became James I of England.  He was the son of the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, but his education had been supervised by the arch-Calvinist John Knox.  In fact, James rejected both extremes, sticking with Elizabeth's middle-of-the-road Church of England.

Early in 1604, a meeting was held between Robert Catesby, Thomas Wintour and John Wright, at which Catesby proposed his plan to blow up Parliament on the day the King was due to open it.  In the months that followed, a number of co-conspirators were recruited, including Guy Fawkes, also known as Guido Fawkes, a staunchly Catholic soldier who'd been fighting for the Spanish against the Dutch Protestants.

The plot was put on hold when the expected session of Parliament was postponed several times because of outbreaks of the Plague in London, but by the time the opening approached, on 5th November 1605, the plotters were ready.  The plan was to wipe out the King, his sons, the Privy Council, Lords, Bishops and Common — and, as collateral damage, anyone else who happened to be close by — and simultaneously raise a rebellion in the Midlands.  The rebels would seize James's daughter, Princess Elizabeth, and place her as their puppet on the throne.  Elizabeth was later Queen of Bohemia and known by evocative names like the Winter Queen and the Queen of Hearts; at nine years old, though, she presumably wouldn't have had much of a say.

The popular rebellion was probably nothing but wishful thinking, but the attack on Parliament could well have succeeded.  The problem was that several of the plotters had friends of relatives in Parliament, and one broke ranks and sent a warning to his brother-in-law that I say they shall receive a terrible blow this Parliament; and yet they shall not see who hurts them.

When news of this came to James, he took it very seriously.  It must have resonated with him — his father had been assassinated by being blown up — and he ordered the cellars to be searched, a tradition still carried out before the State Opening of Parliament, though only as a ceremonial relic.

The plotters had rented a disused undercroft beneath Parliament and built up a large number of barrels of gunpowder there, hidden under piles of firewood.  Fawkes, the gunpowder expert, had stayed to set the fuse before making his escape, while the rest had left London to prepare their rising.  Guy Fawkes was caught waiting to lay his fuse and arrested, while the rebellion fizzled out into a fight at Holbeche House in the West Midlands, at which most of the plotters were either killed or captured.  All the survivors confessed under torture and were hung, drawn and quartered.

There was some backlash against Catholics in the short term, with the Jesuits being generally blamed for the plot, although there's no evidence any Jesuit was directly involved.  In the long run, though, there was no increase of persecution of Catholics — in fact, their lot improved somewhat during James's reign, and he kept out of the Protestant Alliance in the Thirty Years War, although his daughter was centrally involved.

From the first anniversary of the plot, nationwide celebrations were held to give thanks for its failure, and this gradually evolved into lighting bonfires to burn effigies of Guy Fawkes, the main public hate-figure, or of the Pope.  This seems to have been a deft hijacking of the fires of Samhain, or Halloween, a few days earlier, at which an effigy of the Summer King was burnt on a bonfire, a possible descendent of an actual human sacrifice (as I discussed in more detail in my post last week).

Fireworks were let off as part of the celebrations from early on — they contain gunpowder, after all — and have now taken over as the main focus of the festival.  Until recently, it was common for children to take their "guy" around before burning it, asking for a penny for the guy, but this seems to have largely died out, and burning effigies in general is less common than it used to be.  Halloween rituals imported (or reimported) from America have largely taken over at this time of year.

It's easy to sympathise with the Gunpowder Plotters as persecuted men who only wanted religious freedom, but this is a naive view.  In modern terms, they were terrorists who were willing to accept any level of slaughter, of the innocent as well as their actual targets, and their objective was certainly not toleration and freedom.  It's probable they'd have treated Protestants a good deal worse than Elizabeth or James had treated them, and they'd almost certainly have snuffed out the early stirrings of parliamentary democracy which, by the end of the century, were to lead to a constitutional monarchy.  History would have been very different if Guy Fawkes had lit that fuse.

Some years ago, I wrote a poem called Guy Fawkes, which appeared in my self-published collection Lessons of History, which looks at him from all angles, from stuffed effigy to terrorist to sacrificial king.  I thought it would be good way to finish this piece.

Guy Fawkes

 

silly straw-stuffed face

crookedly amiable

cries in silent agony

as stuck-out tongues of fire

gently lick him

asking why

in his innocence

he is falsely condemned

archetypal anarchist

who so nearly carried out

what we dream of in anger

not that we would but

just suppose

and so we burn him now

for letting down our fantasy

king for the day

or a summer maybe

becomes a shield against

fear of age

of non-renewing

and this years hope turns to ash

so that next years hope can grow 

 

willing sacrifice

the cancer to be cut out

takes on himself

the fears of the world

dug into the soil

hung up on a tree

burnt into the skies

thank God it isnt me

he lives between our dreams

hiding behind our minds

he slips among shadows

of hopes and fears

and triumphs at last

as we feel the pain

of a stuffed nothing 

 

penny for the guy

                                                mister

penny for your thoughts

More than Candy: The Traditions of Halloween

Halloween: aka Samhain, aka All Saints' Eve, aka All Souls' Eve (yes, it was originally the same festival).  Christian feast-day, Celtic celebration, or a day for goofy costumes and candy?  Well, all of these, and more.

One thing to consider is why we celebrate the eve, rather than the day.  Eves are also celebrated for May Day and for Christmas, although in those cases the day too is important.  I remember many years ago reading (and believing at the time) that Halloween represents a festival for evil before it's banished by the holy day.

This is a load of nonsense, of course.  Night-time festivals like Samhain certainly represent the dark part of the light-dark cycle, but the idea of identifying dark with evil is relatively modern.  To our ancient ancestors, light and dark were simply two essential sides of the same cycle.  Dark had its dangers, to be sure, but that didn't make it evil.  It was also the time for hunting.

The actual explanation is that many ancient calendar systems (most notably today the Jewish calendar) count the day as running from sunset to sunset.  This means that the activities of the night of 31st October start the festival that continues into the 1st November.

So is Samhain really a Celtic festival?  Well, that depends what you mean by Celtic.  Properly speaking, the term refers to a family of languages within the Indo-European group, and by extension to the ancient tribes who spoke them.  It's applied, somewhat inaccurately, to the inhabitants of the countries or regions where Celtic languages are still spoken — Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Brittany — but in reality these are all racially and culturally mixed countries.

The Celtic languages and the associated cultural elements were the last of a series of waves to sweep over western Europe and into Britain before the Roman conquest.  Or, possibly, the last three waves, representing the Goidelic (Gaelic), Brythonic (British) and Belgic groups, although the actual relationships between these three isn't clear.

In any case, the Celtic languages arrived in Britain during the 1st millennium BC, replacing whatever languages were spoken before.  Nothing of these has survived, and speculation that some may have been related to Basque, the odd-one-out of European languages, are no more than an intelligent guess.  It used to be believed that the Pictish language of north-east Scotland, which survived till well after Roman times, was one of these, but the prevailing view now is that it was probably Celtic in origin.

Nevertheless, this doesn't mean that the older populations, or their cultures, simply disappeared.  The old model was of successive waves slaughtering, driving out or enslaving their predecessors, as European colonialism has done so efficiently in recent centuries.  However, DNA profiling has shown that, aside from obvious recent arrivals, most people in Britain are actually descended from the hunter-gatherers who followed the retreating ice northwards.  On the matrilineal side, at least, which is easier to trace.

This suggests that all these new arrivals, including the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, may well have been relatively small numbers, mainly male — perhaps restless young men — who bred with native women.  They might sometimes have become leaders, or acquired the cool factor in some other way, and begun influencing both the culture or the language, in the same way that most of the "Romans" in Britain were actually Britons who'd adopted Roman language, dress and customs.

The older customs would have survived, though, alongside the new imports, just as both English and the modern Celtic languages almost certainly include elements from the unknown ancient languages.  It's convenient to refer to Samhain, Beltane and the rest as Celtic, but there's no reason to suppose they don't go back thousands of years before the Celtic influence began to be felt. 

So what was Samhain?  Well, for one thing, it was the ancient New Year's Day, marking the official beginning of winter in the agricultural calendar.  Other elements have to be largely deduced from later folk traditions, but two elements seen paramount: burning bonfires, often with a human effigy on them, and the presence of spirits, ghosts and the otherworld.

There are suggestions that Samhain may have been the occasion of human sacrifice.  In the ballad of Tam Lin — one of the masterpieces of the ballad tradition — the eponymous hero has been kidnapped by the faerie queen and is growing distinctly nervous as Halloween approaches, since at the end of seven years she pays a tithe to Hell, and I so fair and full of flesh am feared it be myself.  Although we don't get to see how exactly she pays her tithe — Tam Lin  is, of course, rescued by his True Love — this seems to indicate a ritual sacrifice, perhaps of the Summer King to be replaced by the Winter King.

Or maybe not.  It's notoriously hard to be sure whether to take descriptions of religious rituals literally or symbolically, since adherents tend to talk of them in literal terms regardless.  One of the major prejudices against Christianity in the Roman world was that it was a cannibalistic religion, since the rituals involved eating the flesh and drinking the blood of its dead leader.  If we step away from what everyone in the modern western world knows instinctively, whether or not they're Christian, it's easy to see how such a misunderstanding could be possible.

In the same way, the sacrifice might always have been a symbolic one, using an effigy to represent the dying god.  That's pure speculation, of course, and both Roman writers and archaeology suggest that the Britons performed human sacrifice.  On the other hand, the Romans had a vested interest in presenting the conquered people as barbarous, while the finds are inconclusive.  A handful of pre-Roman human remains have been unearthed that appear to have been ritually killed, but very few, and it's not clear from the context whether these were sacrificed or ritually executed — for sacrilege, for instance.

As for the otherworldly aspects, the folk traditions strongly suggest that Samhain was a festival of the dead.  Archaeological finds show that prehistoric homes often had bodies buried under the floor, suggesting that dead ancestors were seen as still present.  Samhain seems to have been a time when your ancestors might well visit you and expect a decent welcome.  This wouldn't necessarily have been something to fear, but it must, at best, have been spooky.

In any case, a night when the dead could return implied a night when all kinds of beings could get through the veil into our world, and not all of them would be friendly.  From the fae-folk to malevolent demons, they had to be discouraged, scared off or placated, and many Halloween traditions, from the fancy-dress to the scary stories, may have originated for this purpose.

The early Church simply appropriated Samhain, as it appropriated many pagan festivals and pagan sacred sites, eventually reserving it only for the most exalted of the honoured dead (All Saints) and shunting the ordinary folk (All Souls) to the following day.  Beyond that, little was done to discourage the pagan traditions.  With the exception of occasional bouts of zeal, the mediaeval Church tended only to care that the peasants attended Mass on Sundays and major saints' days.  As long as they fulfilled their obligations, they could get up to whatever they chose in the woods or on the hill above the village.

The puritans, though, took a dim view of a celebration that was half pagan, half popish.  After 1605, the perfect excuse was presented to hijack Halloween when the failure of the Catholic Gunpowder Plot began to be celebrated in a suspiciously similar way on its anniversary, 5th November.  The figure of special hatred became Guido (Guy) Fawkes, although he was actually only the hired gunpowder expert.  The plot's leader, Robert Catesby, and his cronies were mostly midlands gentry — several were related to Shakespeare on his mother's side.  Nevertheless, Guy Fakwes became the one whose effigy was burnt on bonfires all over the country, although sometimes it was the Pope.

This was close enough in date to take over from the fires of Samhain, and many Halloween traditions died out, though they lasted longer in villages and more out-of-the-way parts of the country.  When I was a child, in the 1960s, Halloween was scarcely a blip in the UK, except that there might be a ghost story on TV.  Instead of trick or treating, we went around a few days later with the "guy" that was to be burnt — this was actually the origin of the word guy meaning a man — asking for "a penny for the guy".

I say "we" — my parents didn't approve of this, since they considered it begging.  We had a bonfire — technically a balefire, since a bonfire should burn bones — and fireworks, but there was only one year when we made a guy.  We didn't have the heart to burn him, though, and propped him up against the house to watch the fireworks.  It's probably just a child's imagination, but I'm sure he looked relieved.

One tradition that survived for a long time in some villages was Souling, in which the children of the village went round to each house giving it blessings and good luck for the next year in return for specially baked soul cakes and other goodies.  A surviving Souling Song gives the wish-list:

A soul a soul a soul cake

Please good missus a soul cake
An apple or pear
A plum or a cherry
Or any good thing to make us merry

Not quite candy, but it still sounds familiar.

Whether it was descended precisely from this or from a similar tradition, the custom seems to have survived and flourished in America, turning into trick or treating.  I don't know where the trick aspect came from, but I suspect it was a graphic illustration of the consequences of not accepting the blessing.  Or maybe it was actually a kindness: getting the bad luck out of the way quickly and ritualistically.

When I was a kid, trick or treating was barely known in the UK.  We became gradually familiar with it through American films and TV, and I suspect it was after ET that it began to take off — I seem to recall that it was the 80s when I began noticing children doing it.  Even now, though, it's much more random and disorganised than in the US.

It's a long way from human sacrifice to candy, but the joy of true traditions is their variety and adaptability.  Whether you dress up in scary costumes, put on a horror film, go the church to give thanks for the saints, or head off to the woods to reconstruct a pagan ceremony, tonight has something for everyone.

Technology in Fantasy - Oxymoron or Opportunity?

How many fantasy writers does it take to change a light-bulb?  None — technology belongs in science fiction.

But does it really?  Leaving aside types of fantasy with more modern-style settings, is fantasy technology really such an oxymoron?  We tend to think of technology in terms of the recent — computers, jet engines, nuclear power stations and the rest — or what we might have in the future, such as warp drives or matter transportation.  We might stretch a point to include devices from the age of steam, but no further.

But that's misunderstanding what technology is.  A water-mill is technology; a suit of armour is technology; a plough is technology.  Hell, even bashing two rocks together to crack nuts could be regarded as technology.  The most successful piece of technology ever invented is arguably the wheel — though the plough might give it a run for its money.

Whatever kind of world you might create, it's going to have technology of some kind, and that means the technology is going to have to make sense.  Inventions aren't made in isolation; sometimes you can't have one thing without another.  The light-bulb (the one fantasy writers won't change) couldn't have been developed before the later 19th century, because it required a near-vacuum inside and depended on the development of high-quality vacuum pumps.

This kind of thing goes on all the time.  One of the most persistent misunderstandings about the ancient world is the belief that the Greeks invented the steam engine, but were too otherworldly to realise its potential, but that misrepresents them.

The first known steam engine was invented by Hero of Alexandria in the 1st century AD.  Called the aeolipile, it was a device that used pressurised steam to make a sphere rotate.  No records survive of it being put to practical use, but it's unlikely that this was pure otherworldliness.  Others of Hero's inventions, such as his force pump, were used, as were many inventions of the Greek world.  Archimedes's famous eureka moment is often seen as a breakthrough in pure physics, but he was actually addressing a very practical problem, while his irrigation screw was so successful that it's still in use for some purposes.

The Greeks were actually a highly practical people, and the Romans even more so.  So why didn't they see the potential of the steam engine?

The answer is that steam production requires huge pressure, and the materials need to be strong enough to withstand this pressure.  The reason steam power became a practical option in the Industrial Revolution was that metallurgy had reached the point that steel could be made strong enough to do the job.  Hero had to make do with inferior iron which, though it would do for occasional demonstrations and "miracles", would have exploded if the aeolipile had been used on an industrial level.  Perhaps it did.

There's a number of these myths about technology in other cultures, especially China.  The Chinese came up with printing long before Europe had it but, we're told, it took Gutenberg to think of using movable type.  Well, not quite.  The Chinese did develop movable-type printing, but it just never caught on.

This is because of the difference between the writing systems.  A European printer needed, with upper and lower case, numerals and punctuation, perhaps seventy or eighty drawers of blocks (a big drawer for e and a rather smaller one for q).  Chinese script has thousands of symbols.  Although systems were developed to make the blocks more accessible, it just took too long.  In that time, you could have etched a whole plate and been on to the next.

A rather different misunderstanding applies to the Chinese use of gunpowder.  Again, they had it long before we did, but supposedly only used it for fireworks, leading some people to regard them as naive, others as more civilised than us.  Actually, by at least the 13th century, if not before, Chinese armies were equipped with bombs and ballistic rockets, and even had a device for launching multiple rockets simultaneously.  The only thing they didn't manage to come up with was the gun as a means of delivery.

These examples illustrate three of the main elements that control what technology a culture might or might not have: the state of the supporting technology, cultural necessities, and mere chance — whether anyone happens to think of the idea.

Even if you're presenting a primitive culture where some genius has come up with the concept of the wheel, the invention will rely on whether he or she has the tools to create a circle of wood.  Or the idea might be there (from using logs as rollers, perhaps) and the challenge is to develop tools and products at the same time.

Technologies affect one another in many ways, and this is especially true in the technology of warfare.  In the mid-mediaeval period, for  instance, when the cutting-edge weapons (erm, sorry) were the sword, lance and mace, chain-mail armour was good enough to give a knight a sporting chance of survival. Crossbows were more deadly, but they took too long to reload to be a serious problem.

Then the longbow came into its own: incredibly fast loading and capable of piercing mail.  The answer was plate armour, but that came at a price.  Many of the French knights felled by arrows at Agincourt actually drowned in the mud of the battlefield, because the weight of their armour prevented them from rising once they were down.

The armourers fought back, developing plate armour that was both light and tough, and this (along with Joan of Arc's inspiration) played a large part in the eventual French victory in the Hundred Years War.  Even this new armour, though, wasn't a match for the hand-held, anti-personnel guns that emerged.  Through the 16th and 17th centuries, armour became increasingly more irrelevant, and was eventually abandoned.

Technology is a vital part of world-making, and it needs as much thought and research as anything.  Of course, unlike the "harder" forms of science fiction, fantasy offers plenty of short-cuts and cheats, and it's sometimes possible simply to create an alternative that doesn't have the same requirements.  You want artificial lighting in a society too primitive to have sophisticated vacuum pumps?  Just call it a glow-globe, and imply that it doesn't work the same as a modern incandescent light-bulb.

And, of course, there are always the standard fantasy get-out-of-jail-free cards: It's the product of magic, and no-one understands how it works or I know it doesn't make sense, but the god who created this world ordained it so.

On the whole, though, it's far more fun if your world makes sense.  That means that the technology needs to make sense too, whether it's a cart, a suit of armour, a ship or a light-bulb.

So, how many fantasy writers does it take to change a glow-globe?

 

(Light-bulb by Trixyrogue)

 

River God in The Colored Lens Autumn 2013 Issue

The Colored Lens Autumn 2013 Issue #9

Edited by Dawn Lloyd and Daniel Scott

Contributors: Rhonda Eikamp, Nyki Blatchley, Rachel Hayes, Lauren Fawcett, Sean Monaghan, Holly Jennings, Jamie Lackey, Sara Puls, Matthew Hentrich, Jennifer Stakes and David Gallay.

 

Available to buy here on Kindle

My story in this issue is River God, an ecological fantasy story.  This had, if I remember correctly, more than a touch of influence from John Boorman's haunting film The Emerald Forest (as, I strongly suspect, James Cameron's film Avatar also did) but I've looked at the situation from a completely different angle.  If we should choose, for our own convenience, to dam a river in an unspoilt paradise, it certainly impacts on the indigenous people who rely on it.  But what about the god who lives in the river and has kept it flowing for millions of years.  He's not going to be happy, I imagine.

This story tells of how the god and his people fight back against the more questionable aspects of progress.

The river-god turned over in his sleep.  He’d worked hard for countless millions of years, guiding his river down to the sea, and he needed rest.  Voices came and went, but this was more insistent and beat on the gates of his slumber.

“Awake, O great god.”  The voice slipped into a dream that wasn’t quite a dream.  “Your people call on you in their need.”

His bed was less comfortable than usual: hard, jagged stones, instead of gentle water to rock him.  The dream from within slowly merged with the world outside, and the voice was saying, “You shall have whatever offering you wish, great god.  We beg you to awake.”

The river-god sat up, rubbing his eyes, and looked about.  So that was why his bed felt so uncomfortable.  The course down which his water should pour was empty, exposing its stony bottom.

 

Read more in the magazine

 

Penumbra: The Best of Vol.1

 
 Penumbra: The Best of Vol.1

Edited by Celina Summers

Cover by Kelly Shorten

$2.99

 

Featuring: Andrew Kaye, Terra LeMay, Rachel Acks, James Beamon, Chuck Rothman, Nyki Blatchley, Damien Walters Grintalis, Nathaniel Lee, Daniel Ausema, Bruce Golden, Rebecca Birch.

 

 

This includes my story A Deed Without a Name, from Penumbra's Shakespeare issue:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nothing was visible of the sun, from where I sat waiting for them to come, except its scattered light seeping through black clouds like blood through a bandage.  It was only mid-afternoon, but the stain barely showed above the dark edge of the land, already waning into an early, stormy winter's night.  Looking up through the branches of the dead oak tree, I saw towering layers of cloud stacked unevenly.  A sharp wind shrilled against the twisted tree. 

The oak crested a slight swell in the dismal undulations of the plateau, twisted in the throes of its death by lightning many years ago.  I sat cross legged beneath it.  My clothes were mere rags that looked sometimes grey, sometimes a bright motley, but neither the wind nor the coming storm bothered me.  They’d be here soon.

Few came this way.  Perhaps a holy man would cross the moor on his pilgrimage; a knight-errant would search for adventure; a wandering peddler or minstrel sought the quickest way to the rich markets.  It was something else, though, that I waited for. 

Out of the gloom to north, south and east, three figures emerged, muffled in cloaks and hoods.  They moved slowly and laboriously, and the smallest of the three stumbled as though it could go no further.  Each approached the dead oak, as if using it as a goal to help them keep going.  They stopped at last, staring at one another, perhaps wondering whether to greet a new comrade or flee from a dangerous enemy. 

They didn’t notice me, sitting beneath the tree.  I didn’t expect them to.

 

 

 



In Search of Robin Hood

A couple of months ago, I wrote about the origins of the legend of the Holy Grail, and I thought this time I'd do the same for the greatest of the OutlawHeroes: the Outlaw of Sherwood Forest.

Everyone knows Robin Hood, whether your favourite is the portrayal by Errol Flynn, Richard Greene, Kevin Costner, Jonas Armstrong, Russell Crowe or countless others.  Or maybe even in Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, where he goes by the name of Locksley.  Robin is a nobleman dispossessed by Bad King John and the Wicked Sherrif of Nottingham, who gathers a vast outlaw band, including Little John, Will Scarlet, Alan-a-Dale and Friar Tuck, along with his love Maid Marian, to rob the rich and give to the poor, defend the people's rights and generally upset the Sherrif till Good King Richard comes back from the Holy Land and sorts everything out.

That's the story now, and it's an excellent story, but not at all how the legend began.  The earliest ballads of Robin Hood, dating from at least as far back as the 15th century, include the extraordinarily long A Little Geste of Robin Hood and his Meiny, which is 456 stanzas long and represents the earliest extant telling of the whole central legend.

We're not told who Robin is or how he fell foul of the law, merely that he's a good yeoman, who's an outlaw in Barnesdale with his followers, Little John, Will Scathelock and Much the miller's son.  He meets a poor knight, Sir Richard at the Lee, whose lands are in mortgage to the rich Abbot of St Mary's, and is unable to meet the deadline for repayment.  Taking pity, Robin loans him the amount needed to meet his debt, which Sir Richard promises to repay in a year's time.  Sir Richard redeems his land, and returns a year later to repay Robin.  However, Robin has already had the opportunity to rob St Mary's Abbey of twice the sum owed and tells Sir Richard to keep his money.

Little John then infiltrates the following of the Sherrif of Nottingham, already mentioned as Robin's nemesis, and, under pretext of helping him take Robin, leads him into a trap.  Robin spares the Sherrif's life in return for an oath guaranteeing safe conduct.  To test this, Robin attends an archery contest at Nottingham (which, of course, he wins) but the Sherrif breaks his word and tries to arrest him.  Escaping, the outlaws take refuge in the castle of Sir Richard, who is later seized and imprisoned by the Sherrif in punishment.  Robin and his men rescue him, and Robin shoots the Sherrif dead.

By this time, the King (Edward, our comely King) has heard of Robin's exploits and sets out to capture him.  Coming to Barnesdale, he finds Robin, who entertains him so courteously that the King offers him a pardon and a place in the royal household.  Robin only remains in the King's service for fifteen months before he grows fed up and returns to his life as an outlaw in Barnesdale.  Twenty-two years later, he's betrayed and murdered by his kinswoman, the prioress of Kirksley.  The end of the ballad is very perfunctory, but another early ballad, The Death of Robin Hood, tells the story in more detail.  This includes the famous scene where the dying Robin looses off an arrow and asks to be buried where it lands (therefore, as the old joke goes, being the only man ever to be buried in the ceiling).

Now, it should be obvious just from that brief synopsis that a great deal has changed over the intervening centuries.  Sir Richard, a central character here, has been almost forgotten, although his story featured in one episode of the 1950s TV series, and Marian is conspicuous by her absence.  One theory is that Robin and Marian first met in folk ritual, rather than story.  Robin gradually came to be identified with the Green Man and appeared in the May rituals as consort to the May Queen, and this may well have been Marian's original identity.

Only three "merry men" are ever mentioned in the early ballads: Little John, Will Scathelock and Much the miller's son — conveniently, the list forms a perfect half-stanza in ballad meter.  "Scathelock" eventually mutated into "Scarlet", but two of Robin's other standard followers, and one of his enemies, appear each in their own ballad.

Robin Hood and Alan a Dale, a somewhat later ballad, tells how Robin takes pity on a young man whose betrothed has been cruelly denied him and given instead to an old knight.  Robin succeeds in putting this right, but there's no suggestion that Alan joins the merry men.

Similarly, Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar tells the familiar story of Robin's meeting with Friar Tuck.  Here, though, Robin merely entertains the unnamed friar in the greenwood and sends him on his way laden with gifts.

Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne tells of Little John being taken by the Sherrif of Nottingham.  Meanwhile, Robin meets a stranger who turns out to be Guy of Gisborne, a bounty hunter searching for him.  They fight, and Robin kills Guy, then goes to Nottingham disguised as his enemy to rescue Little John, who kills the Sherrif.  Again.

All these are one-off tales that gradually became integral to the legend, but a couple of the differences are more fundamental.  Robin Hood has become so firmly associated with Sherwood Forest that it's a shock to find that he was originally placed in Barnesdale, in southern Yorkshire (a fact now recognised by the local airport being named after him).

I suspect the reason for the change was the prominence of the Sherrif of Nottingham in the legend.  On the face of it, it would seem unlikely that he would be pursuing a Yorkshire outlaw, and this was eventually "corrected".

It's a curious anomaly, but county courtesy was doubtless laxer than now, and maybe one or more Sherrifs of Nottingham were noticeably diligent in chasing outlaws beyond their borders.  There was also a crucial period in the 1320s, following the Earl of Lancaster's rebellion, when the Sherrif of Nottingham was also given responsibility for policing Yorkshire, and it's possible that this aspect of the story arose then.

It's also clear that this version takes place not during the Third Crusade (the 1190s) but while a king called Edward was on the throne.  This could be any of the first four Edwards (1272-1377, 1461-1483) all of whom might well, by contemporary accounts, have been described as "comely".  Edward IV, for instance, was the grandfather of Henry VIII, who was supposed to be the spitting image of his granddad.

In fact, much of the legend seems to belong to a later period than the 12th century.  Given the importance of archery in every version, it would be odd for it to be taking place before the full development of the English longbow.  Robin is described as a yeoman, the class of peasants free from feudal obligations who became more numerous as the feudal system decayed, and who formed the backbone of the archers that destroyed the French armies at Crécy and Agincourt in the 14th and 15th centuries.

There's also no trace of the "Normans and Saxons" element common in modern interpretations.  In fact, this element seems to have been invented by Sir Walter Scott and was anachronistic even for the 1190s.  By that time, the issue wasn't really that the lords and knights were foreign conquerors, but that so many of them were absentee landlords, putting far more stock in their French possessions than their English lands.  This was particularly true of Richard I, who barely acknowledged that he possessed England, other than as a resource to fund his wars.  By contrast, "bad" King John was busy encouraging the growth of trade and towns throughout the kingdom.

By the later mediaeval period, many landholders were also building up patchwork "empires" of manors all over the country, destroying any hope of a relationship with the serfs on any given manor.  Many of these empires were owned by abbeys, who were too busy becoming piously rich to care about the peasants they owned.  The Little Geste seems to be deliberately contrasting the conscientious lord of a single manor (Sir Richard) with the corrupt abbot.

As I've suggested, the merry men were almost certainly not the small army depicted in some modern versions.  Mediaeval outlaw gangs, unless they were of high enough status to hold a castle, were typically no more than three or four men, so the four (including Robin) mentioned in the ballads are probably the whole group.  On the other hand, that may not have been the limit of Robin's power.  Near the end of the Little Geste, when Robin returns to Barnesdale, he blows his horn and

Seven score of wight young men

            Came ready on a row,

And fairè didden off their hoods,

            And set them on their knee:
'Welcome,' they said, 'our dear mastèr,
            Under this green-wood tree!'

Robin may not have had a large gang of his his own, but he seems to have been the Godfather of Barnesdale.  Some of the ballads suggest that he could call on other outlaws gangs, at need, to augment his own.

The ballads almost certainly include stories from tales about other outlaws.  A notable outlaw ballad from the same period, Adam Bell, Clym of the Clough, and William of Cloudesley, which derives from the north-west of England, contains similar stories. The most striking parallel here, though, is not with Robin Hood but with the Swiss legend of William Tell, in the scene where William of Cloudesley is forced to shoot an apple off his son's head.  Both legends appear to have borrowed the motif from a Danish story.

Nevertheless, there's a highly tempting candidate for the "real" Robin Hood, although many scholars dismiss it.  In 1322, a Robert Hood of Wakefield is recorded as being made outlaw, possibly as a result of the Earl of Lancaster's rebellion against Edward II, which led to the situation referred to above, when the Sherrif of Nottingham was restoring order to Yorkshire.

A lot is made of Robin's name, and he's sometimes referred to as "the Hooded Man", but that misses the point that Robin was the normal diminutive of Robert, while Hood was and is quite a common surname.  Surnames were fairly widespread even by the late 12th century, and were the rule, rather than the exception, by the 14th.  There's nothing at all unusual about the name.

A number of other features of the Little Geste seem to be reflected at this time, including Edward (several years before his ex-king/red-hot-poker interface) making a progress through the north, during which he pardoned many rebels, and a "Robin Hood" appearing in the accounts of the royal household immediately afterwards.

On the other hand, Robin Hood appears earlier than this as a generic name for an outlaw.  It's possible, of course, that the minstrels took up this particular outlaw simply because he had the right name (imagine what the tabloid press today might make of a notorious criminal called Robin Hood, Jesse James or Billy Kidd) but that still leaves the question of where that name came from.

Even if there was a model, it's doubtful whether there was ever one man who did all the things described in the early ballads, let alone in the later versions.  Which is fair enough.  Robin Hood is an archetype, a figure we can think of whenever we suffer from corrupt authority.  The legend that's developed is a great story.  I remember watching reruns as a kid of Richard Greene's TV series The Adventures of Robin Hood, and I wouldn't have anything different in the wonderful Errol Flynn film.  Some other versions — well, they have their good points, at least.

The legend of Robin Hood will and should continue to evolve, continue to be reinterpreted.  But the earliest versions were great stories too, and it would be good if the whole diversity of the tradition were better known.