The Mothership

     Ben was popping off about something, so I put other stuff out of my mind and listened in. "Man, you can't believe this thing. It will say anything."
     Somebody said, "I thought they shut it down for telling people how to stage anthrax attacks."
     "They tried, but they couldn't. The Feds tried to block it, to pull the plug, whatever. An hour later it's back. Nobody knows where it is or who's behind it or anything."
     "Really?"
     "I'll show you," Ben said, and pulled out his phone. Twenty second later he said, "Ok, what should I ask it?"
     "Ask it how I can get laid." That was Josh.
     People were laughing, but Ben was typing. Ten seconds later he was reading from the screen. "Josh Simmons should consider girls from his high school. Use social media to contact them. At least two would be interested."
     There was laughter, and somebody said, "Talk about bs." But I noticed that Josh wasn't laughing. He seemed to be thinking it over, like it really might be a good idea and he was trying to figure out who the two were.
     At hour later I was home, staring at my monitor. I entered the string of numbers Ben had given me and after a few second the screen filled with a green-tinted image of a huge flying saucer. Wrapping around its form were the letters MOTHERSHIP AI. A small box for text appeared under the saucer. I typed, "Who killed JFK?"
     A minute later a long article landed on my screen that started, President John F. Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald was encouraged to carry out this plan by two Florida-based mobsters named . . . It went on and on. The mobsters had been put up to it by a cabal of three dissident CIA officers. It gave dates and places of meetings, everything.
     I tried, "Why did Valdimir Putin think he could easily conquer Ukraine?" It thought for a minute, then gave me another long article:
     The Russian FSB assured President Putin that Kyiv would fall easily because of the number of intelligence assets they had within the Ukrainian government and military. These included the head of President Zelenskyy's bodyguards and two of his close aides, as well as commanders in the National Guard and the Kyiv police. However, the Russians were not aware that they had been thoroughly penetrated by American intelligence, and many of their own top people were on the US payroll. Those agents kept the US well informed about Russian moves and provided the CIA with the names of many key Russian assets. Some of these were removed, others turned, becoming double agents. These sources also provided the US with the complete Russian plan of battle for the attack, allowing it to be blunted. . . .
     It gave me more names, more dates, more details. I tried a bunch of other questions: how to create a deadly poison gas at home, how to hack into my ex-girlfriend's email, how to cheat at Civilization VI. It gave me detailed instructions for everything. At first it was cool, but then it started to worry me. Where was all this coming from? Was it real, or made up? People said the instructions it gave out for the anthrax attacks really worked, but did it really know who killed JFK? If so, how? And who was behind it?
     I typed, "Who owns Mothership AI?" It responded, I'm sorry, John, I cannot find any information on that subject. Huh.
     I tried, "Is Mothership AI owned by the Chinese government?"
     I'm sorry, John, I cannot find any indication that the Chinese government is involved in Mothership AI.
     I thought some more, and weird ideas starting floating into my head. I felt the solid floor dissolving underneath my feet. I typed, "Is Mothership AI controlled by aliens?"
     Nothing happened. I typed it again: Is Mothership AI controlled by aliens?
     IS MOTHERSHIP AI CONTROLLED BY ALIENS???
     The screen went dark.

The Strangeness of N.K. Jemisin

I read my first N.K. Jemisin novel several years ago, after grabbing it off the shelf without any idea who she was. I think it was The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (2011), but it didn't move me enough to remember it very well. It was ok, just too weird for my taste.

Then Jemisin's Shattered Earth trilogy – The Fifth Season (2015), The Obelisk Gate (2016), and The Stone Sky (2017) – won the Hugo award three years in a row, which no author had ever done before. People raved about it. So I thought that if I were going to maintain my credentials as an expert on contemporary Fantasy, I had better read it. I just finished.

I plowed through the whole thing in three weeks, so I liked it; some parts I found gripping, and at times I couldn't wait to get back to it. But I didn't love it. Explaining why is going to require an excursus on why I read fantasy in the first place.

Once upon a time, I think it was 1991, I set out to hike across Dartmoor in southwestern England, searching for a stone circle. On a rainy, windy, misty November day I got off the bus near a ruined castle, passed by a 14th-century stone church, and made my way up a lane past stone cottages and an orchard of gnarled apple trees. The lane was deeply sunken, worn five feet into the earth by 500 years of foot and ox cart traffic, and for a while I could see nothing but the stone walls on either side. Then the lane ended and I stumbled out onto the moor, blasted by a bitter wind laced with cold rain.

I started walking across the moor on a vague sheep trail. Between the rain and the mist and having to keep my hood pulled tightly around my face I could hardly see where I was going. I just remembered from the map that I was walking around a big hill, so that if I kept uphill to my right and downhill to my left I would be going in approximately the right direction. And so I walked for two hours, no one around but bored-looking sheep, nothing to see but rocky moorland stretching out on every side until it disappeared into the clouds only 50 yards or so away. I started to wonder if I had wandered off the trail, and whether I might miss the circle altogether. And then, suddenly, the mist cleared in front of me and I was staring at a perfect circle of two dozen waist-high standing stones. The whole thing was about 40 yards across, and when the rain picked up a few minutes later I could hardly make out the farthest stones. But there I was, in a mist-shrouded sheep pasture, by a circle of stones set in place more than 5,000 years ago for reasons we only dimly understand. I was overwhelmed with wonder. I felt connected to the earth, to the mist, to the people of long ago, to their stories and dreams, to the cults of forgotten gods preached in lost tongues by priests who turned to dust long millennia past.

I read fantasy in pursuit of that feeling: of awed connection to ancient mysteries. I am not all that picky, and I can be moved by what are really pretty slight invocations of eldritch marvels. But I like fantasy best when it is rooted in old traditions. Mostly of course this has been the European tradition, but I have also enjoyed fantasies based on the lore of Japan, China, voodoo, the Arab lands, and the Silk Road.

To get back to N.K. Jemisin: she is a capable writer with a wild imagination who cares not one bit about the things that move me. Jemisin's fantasies are set in worlds as far as her mind can reach from the actual human past. I confess that when I first encountered this sort of fantasy I was puzzled; why would anyone want to cut away completely from the wonders of myth and history that are there for the plundering? But some people, it seems, are bored with the mythic worlds we inherited and looking for something new and different. If that is your thing, read Jemisin; the Shattered Earth is the best such world I know.

Jemisin – her name is Nora, incidentally – is African American, and this may have something to do with her rejection of old traditions as a basis for her worlds. She seems to regard the European past as something wholly foreign to herself, where the people she identifies with are oppressed or excluded. Instead of inspiring her to look into African or Caribbean traditions, it inspires her to cast off from the past altogether. I think part of the reason she won all those Hugo awards is that many people in America now feel the same way. The past is not of any use to us, even in imagination; it is only something to leave behind.

The Shattered Earth is set on our planet, thousands of years in the future. Once, it seems, earth had a civilization of vast technological prowess, but then something went wrong. Legends call this event the Shattering. In its wake a reduced humanity struggles to survive on a planet where plate tectonics have gone berserk, with a massive seismic event every generation or so. These are called "seasons," and they usually kill millions, reducing the rest to hard-hearted survivors huddling behind stone walls under ash-darkened skies, chasing away raiders and subsisting on the stores they build up in between. They would not survive at all except that certain people are born with the power to control the earth and still some of its rampages. These are called orogenes.

The main human characters of the story are all orogenes of the highest power, able to do things like split continents in half and change the orbit of the moon. All is not well for them, though, because the rest of humankind mostly hates them; some are hunted exiles, others what amounts to well-treated slaves. The story mainly follows three people: a woman with several names, her daughter, and an older man who serves for a while as her mentor. Between them they have the power either to destroy the earth or to restore it to something more stable, and the tension mainly concerns their struggles over which makes more sense and how either might be accomplished.

The thing is, by the end of the story I empathized more with the orogene haters than the orogenes themselves, because the main characters kept losing their tempers and killing people. If you had to live with people whose moon-orbit-altering power was joined to so much psychological instability that whole cities full of humans were regularly blasted, frozen, or turned to stone, how would you feel? The orogenes have reasons for their anger, I mean, people hate them and sometimes try to kill them. But as far as I am concerned, that gives no one the right to exterminate thousands.

There may be a metaphor about the rage of the oppressed, especially mothers' rage on behalf of their abused children. Still.

The Shattered Earth is an impressive creation: original, complex, entertaining. But between my issues with the main characters and my sense of being cut off from any world I understand, I didn't love it and wouldn't have given it any awards.

Richard Russo, "Bridge of Sighs"

Most of the fiction I read is either fantastic, historical, or set in strange, far away places. But every once in a while, curious about what I might be missing. I try a "mainstream" novel set in contemporary America or Europe. Thus Bridge of Sighs (2007) by Richard Russo, which I grabbed off the "recommended" shelf at the library on a whim. Russo won the Pulitzer prize for an earlier book (Empire Falls) and this one garnered enough extravagant blurbs and mentions on ten best books of the year lists to make me think it represents the better sort of American middlebrow fiction.

Bridge of Sighs is built around the reminiscences of Louis Lynch, 60-year-old, lifelong resident of the upstate New York town of Thomaston. It focuses on his childhood and his high school years, with a bit about the earlier lives of his parents and the events of his sixtieth year. Besides his family the main characters are his best boyhood friend, who eventually becomes a well-known artist, and the girl who becomes his wife.

I found it pleasant to read, mostly, and I made it through all 650 pages. It has some good characters and good material on psychology and family dynamics. The town feels like a real place. It is smoothly written and has some lovely reflective passages, like this one:

The line of gray along the horizon is brighter now, and with the coming light I feel a certainty: that there is, despite our wild imaginings, only one life. The ghostly others, no matter how real they seem, no matter how badly we need them, are phantoms. The one life we're left with is sufficient to fill and refill our imperfect hearts with joy, and then to shatter them. And it never, ever lets up.

Blame love.

But oh, the plot. The travesty, the ignominy, the horror of the plot. It makes one question the whole literary world of our time, that such a book could be praised, that anyone could consider it among the ten best of anything.

The main thing is the love triangle involving the narrator (a big doofus with a heart of gold), his friend the intensely-wired, multiply-divorced artist, and the narrator's conflicted wife. The sheer, utter obviousness of this, and the ham-handed way it was set up, made me cringe over and over. It was even worse than the equally obvious, ham-handed love triangle at the heart of the last mainstream novel I assayed, Jonathan Franzen's Freedom. Gag me. Aren't there any other plots?

And though the set-up is bad, the resolution is even worse: the exciting artist dies of a heart attack chasing after the train on which rides the woman he should have pursued in high school but foolishly left behind on his way to artistic fame. I kid you not. He actually drops dead, clutching at his heart, watching the Best Woman He Ever Knew disappear into the distance toward her happy home and doofus husband.

But that's not what I wanted to write about. Even more than the appalling love triangle, what bothered me was the way the story focuses in on the senior year of high school. This year, we see, is the fulcrum on which the rest of our lives depend. After that, nothing meaningful happens, just the unrolling of a script dictated by the choices of that Fateful Year. You leave or stay home, go to college or don't, pick a mate, and the rest is history. By comparison to that time of freedom and possibility, of action or potential action, adulthood is blah: no change, no secrets to reveal, no new worlds to explore.

I decided to write a review of this forgettable book to ask about that basic premise: that high school is the most vibrant part of life, and that what happens then determines all else. Does anybody out there think that is normal, or even common? Sure, who you marry matters, but with age at first marriage creeping up towards 30 it no longer has much to do with what happens when you're 17, if it ever did. Whether you go to college matters, but plenty of people do that years after high school, even decades. Is the world full of people who spend their time remembering high school and regretting the things they did or didn't do, unable to feel the same excitement about the events of their adult years?

It all seems so small to me, so blinkered. Russo focuses so intently on the ties between these dozen or so people in the same small town that he leaves out vast tracts of what people do with their lives and their minds. The narrator's parents were conventional Catholics, but neither they nor anybody else seems to have much faith or to see what happens in terms of God's plan. Nobody cares about science or the Moon landings. Vietnam is just a place local boys went, to die or come back. There is a little about racism, and one troubled gay kid, but otherwise no politics. The sixties never really happen. There is very little art, even though two of the characters are artists, and not even much music. Nobody thinks about history or dreams about the far future. We watch this old factory town fade as the factories shut down, but we see nothing of the new economy, not even a single cell phone.

Stripped of religion, art, science, and politics, life in this little town reduces to a high school contest over who is cool and who dates whom. No wonder adults never change course, but only follow the one laid out in adolescence; in this world there is nothing new, only old friendships, old loves, and old mistakes.

It is utterly foreign to life as I have experienced it. Do all the reviewers who praised it to the skies feel like Russo about high school and adulthood? Or is something else going on that I have missed?

Gore Vidal, "Burr"

I wasn't sure how I would react to this book. Gore Vidal is a notorious cynic about America, and I was afraid his portrayal of the Founding Fathers would be too hostile for me to enjoy the story. But I loved it. It is cynical, yes, but there is always plenty in politics to be cynical about, and I didn't think Gore's Burr said anything for which a case couldn't be made. At times he is even generous, especially to George Washington as president.

Burr is set in the 1830s, in the years just before Burr's death. There are two narrators. One is a young clerk in Burr's law firm who wants to be a writer and sets out to write Burr's biography. The other is Burr himself, who decides to cooperate with his clerk and ends up narrating much of his life story. The elderly Burr is a terrific character. He is cynical and worldly wise and has many scores to settle, but he also has a sweetness that shows in things like his love of children, his enduring love for his long dead daughter, and the paternal way he helps and advises his clerk. The two biggest problems with the book are, first, the clerk, who bored me, and second a disconnect between Burr the elderly memoirist and Burr the young, ambitious politician. The older Burr is so sane, so wise, that it is hard to imagine him engaging in the savage political battles that marked the younger Burr's life. I could not imagine that he ever tried to conquer Mexico, or shot Alexander Hamilton.

That aside, the book is a delight. I will probably never again be able to imagine any of the Revolutionary leaders without hearing Vidal's descriptions of them. Here Burr meets Thomas Jefferson in 1791:

A rather large limp hand touched mine. I am not usually conscious of height but with Jefferson I always felt in danger of a crick in the neck as he obliged me — obliged everyone except those few who were at his eye level — to look up into that freckled fox face with the bright hazel eyes, and delicate thin-lipped smile.

"Colonel Burr, what an honour!" The voice was low but beguiling, particularly when he slipped into one of his reveries and words would flow beautifully, inexhaustibly, sometimes interminable, yet never entirely without interest for one always found good things even has he found them in that fine speculative torrent. He was the most charming man I have ever known, as well as the most deceitful.

Besides the writing, the most impressive thing to me was the way this 1973 book anticipated the whole direction of American history since then. Race and slavery loom in the background, and there is a whole section on Sally Hemmings and her descendants. The yellow fever epidemics of the 1790s are described in several scenes; these were completely omitted from my own education but my children all read a whole book about them in the 6th grade. Vidal does not portray eighteenth-century men as contemporaries in outlandish clothes, but makes an effort at what one might call historical ethnography, putting them in their own culture with its own assumptions.

If you like novels and American history, read it.

George Saunders, "Lincoln in the Bardo"

I've been trying to figure out why this strange book won the 2017 Man Booker Prize. My guess is that it comes down to:

1. it does great honor to Lincoln;
2. it has a race angle;
3. it is very weird but still entertaining, and for some highbrow lovers of literature the best thing is a radically original book that still manages to be readable.

Lincoln in the Bardo is George Saunders' first novel. It focuses on the death of Willie Lincoln, the President's son, in 1862. Willie died in the White House, according to some accounts as his parents were holding a diplomatic soiree downstairs. He was then temporarily interred in a tomb at the Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown – a place I often walk and of which I have posted many pictures. According to Lincoln lore, the President visited the tomb more than once over the next few days to hold the boy's body. Saunders tells this part of the story mostly by hundreds of short quotations from contemporary narratives, citing everyone from the butler and an Irish maid to senators and ambassadors. Some of these flatly contradict each other, creating a case study in what can and can't be known for certain about the past.

But the mostly factual part is less than half the book; the rest is ghosts and the afterlife. "Bardo" is one of the Buddhist terms for the place where souls wait before they are reincarnated, a sort of nebulous halfway world neither one thing nor the other. Most of the novel is set in such a halfway place, a parallel spiritual dimension inhabited by ghosts whose bodies are interred at Oak Hill. These ghosts resist passing on to wherever they are supposed to go because of unfinished business – marriages unconsummated, deaths unavenged, promises unkept – or because they are simply afraid of where they might end up. So they hang around, bickering, joking, telling the same stories for the hundredth time, trying to convince each other that they are not really dead. In the recorded version each is acted by a different reader, creating a cacophony of voices. The genius part of the writing is that although this place is absurd and the ghosts ridiculous, I enjoyed the telling and found myself deeply wrapped up in this netherworld and the fates of its inhabitants.

The arrival of a president's son in the graveyard of course creates a great stir, and his father's repeated visits cause amazement, consternation, and then a crisis, because Willie's ghost enjoys the visits so much that he won't move on, either. It's even weirder than a short summary can convey, but strangely powerful. This part also includes what may be the best page or two ever written about Abraham Lincoln.

So, I liked it, which I suppose makes it one of the four or five "experimental" novels I have enjoyed. If you like weird books, give it a try. But I would not have given it any prizes.

Jo Walton, Among Others

I just finished re-reading Jo Walton's Among Others (2010). I was about halfway through and caught up in the story when it occurred to me that this is the only the second time I have re-read a fantasy novel in twenty years, and a lot closer together than my two readings of Game of Thrones. This is a book that grabbed my imagination and carried it away.

It's about a girl, Morwenna Phelps, who is 15 years old in the Britain of 1980. There are two things about her: she is a smart kid in love with science fiction and fantasy; indifferent to the concerns of her classmates, she ignores sports and music but reads ten or more books a week. And, she talks to fairies and learns from them how to stop her mother, a mad witch, from becoming the Dark Queen of some big part of the earth.

It is the more prosaic parts of the story that grabbed me. Mor (as she calls herself) reads like I did at times when I was 15, going through stacks of sf and fantasy that I got from the library or the 25-cent bin at One Horse Books in Rolla. Her voice as she pours scorn on the other 15-year-olds rang true to me. She is perhaps a bit too calm and self-possessed for a real teenager, but I loved the way she looked at life. A creature of books, she sees the world through a reader's eyes, using words and categories from her favorite stories. When stressed she recited the "litany against fear" from Dune, something I once did myself. She and her sister name the old industrial ruins around her home in Wales after places in Tolkien: Osgiliath, Ithilien. She finds her first real joy in the story when she joins the sf book club at her local library; finally, people she can talk to about what she really loves and cares about! The first time I read the book I had a little trouble with these parts, because she mentions dozens of sf novels from the 60s and 70s and I kept trying to remember which ones I read and whether I had liked them, and it bothered me that except for a few favorites I had largely forgotten. This time I let it go and liked it better.

Most of the magic is the sort that could be taken for something else, maybe luck or fate, and the fairies slide between being real and serving as a sort of synecdoche for imagination. It is possible to read the story and think of it all as metaphor: for creativity, for a determination not to be like everyone else, for the way Mor expresses her growing understanding of the world, for the way she breaks away and finds her own path. But it is also possible to read the fairies as real and the magic as darkly powerful. In the wonderful ending, the two interpretations come together perfectly.

I love it. If it sounds like the sort of thing you might like, get it.

Masterpieces of World Building

Ever since I posted Junot Diaz's syllabus for a course on World Building I have been thinking about what I would assign in such a course and, more broadly, what I think are the best worlds in fantasy and science fiction. Diaz's list:

J.R.R. Tolkien, “The Lord of the Rings”
Star Wars
“A Princess of Mars” by ER Burroughs
“Dracula” by Bram Stoker
“Batman: The Dark Knight Returns” by Frank Miller
“Sunshine” by Robin McKinley
“V for Vendetta” by Alan Moore
“The Hunger Games” by Suzanne Collins
“The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms” by NK Jemisin
“Lilith’s Brood” by Octavia Butler
“Perdido Street Station” by China Miéville
“Snow Crash” by Neal Stephenson

It's hard to argue with the first two, and they would also head my list.  Otherwise I think only “Perdido Street Station” would be on both his list and mine. Other worlds I love:

Frank Herbert, “Dune”
Ursula LeGuin, “The Left Hand of Darkness”
J.K. Rowling, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone”
Star Trek
George R.R. Martin, “The Game of Thrones”
Neal Stephenson, “Anathem”
Susanna Clarke, “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell”
Alastair Reynolds, “Revelation Space”
Neil Gaiman, “Neverwhere”

Too many of those are long books for this to work as a course, but they are the worlds I remember most powerfully right now.

The Last Temptation of Christ (Updated)

Amusing little story in a rationalist vein, I think by the same person who writes Slate Star Codex.

Myth and Creativity, or, Snorri Sturluson and Odin's Eye

How much do we know about the Norse myths?

My answer would be that we know a lot. Others, however, disagree. Thanks to the vagaries of document preservation, about 75 percent of our information on ancient Norse mythology comes to us through the mind and hands of one man, Snorri Sturluson. Snorri was an Icelandic chieftain and poet who lived in the 13th century, when the old tradition of Norse poetry was still alive but already seemed archaic to many of his contemporaries. In a doomed attempt to keep the tradition going, Snorri wrote a series of tracts that explained the intricacies of skaldic verse for ignorant youngsters. He was aiming especially at the young king of Norway, who was known to prefer Arthurian romance to Icelandic verse. Since Norse poetry involved a dense, almost riddling pattern of allusions to the old Gods and their stories, Snorri also had to explain who the gods were and tell some of those tales. We call this group of treatises Snorri's Edda. This "younger Edda" is our only source for many Norse legends, and it is only because of Snorri's explanations that we are able to understand the hints from which we reconstruct most of the others. Not only that, but Snorri may have collected the poems we know as the Elder Edda, and while most scholars think those poems are ancient others suspect Snorri edited them when he had them written down. Snorri is also the author of the Heimskringla, a history of the Norwegian kings that is another major source for the Norse tradition, and the probable author of Egil's Saga, which includes the largest surviving collection of work by any of Iceland's famous pagan poets.

So, say skeptics, how do we know that any of this is ancient? Maybe Snorri just made it up!

It happens that I recently encountered this sort of reasoning in a book, which I won't name because that would be unfair. The dichotomy that underlies the question I just presented -- ancient vs. made up -- appears everywhere in writing about myth. There seem to be thousands of people who read and enjoy ancient stories and even devote their careers to expounding them but have no idea of what myth is, how it works, or why it endures.

Invention is part of myth; invention within the bounds of the mythic world is the heart and soul of myth.

Myth is not any particular story. Myth is a world, and a way of imagining that world. The particulars of many myths can be changed completely without changing the myth or its meaning. What is fundamental is not the name of the hero but the nature of heroism; not the place the hero lives, but the sort of world he inhabits; not the object of his quest, but the habit of questing; not the story, but the habit of telling certain sorts of stories at certain times and places; not the particular interpretation of the teller, but the habit of interpreting in certain ways; not the particular meaning, but the kind of meaning that can be encoded in stories and the way those meanings are expressed.

Myth does endure for thousands of years. We know this because we can show that many myths are thousands of years old. American Indians imagined the universe just as the Norse did, as a vast tree with many worlds in its branches, its roots reaching down into the abyss where a great monster gnaws at them, in the top a great eagle whose wings cause storms. Those ideas were at least 13,000 years old when Snorri wrote his Edda, and he preserved them faithfully.

Does that mean Snorri invented nothing? Not at all. In an oral society, the old stories are preserved by storytellers -- bards, skalds, certain fey grandmothers -- who devote much of their lives to mastering this lore. When they performed these stories for an audience that knew them from childhood, they often changed them in some way. If the change they made was a hit, others in the audience would remember it and pass it on when they told the same stories, or perhaps use it in a different story. The old stories could also be told in different styles, for example in a rather exalted and noble form, or as comedy. It so happens that Snorri was fond of comic tales about Thor, so most of the stories we know about Thor have a farcical tone. Yet it is easy to imagine the same stories could have been told in a serious way or a dark and frightening way, and in fact those stories or others much like them were alluded to in dark and serious bits or poetry. In Snorri's account of Thor fishing up the Midgard serpent, Thor presses down so hard on the bottom of his boat that his feet crash through; this might seem like a whimsical touch tossed off by the poet, if we did not have this carving, made centuries before Snorri was born, showing this same story with Thor's foot protruding through the bottom of the boat.

One of the things one reads about Snorri is that since he was a Christian, he did not have the reverential attitude toward the gods that a pagan would have had, and therefore his humorous stories about Thor are products of a Christian age. But the ancient Greeks and Romans knew plenty of humorous stories about their Gods. Many cultures around the word have trickster figures who are both central to their myths and figures of fun: Anansi the Spider, Raven, Maui the Always Erect. It is the notion that religion should always be serious that is a distortion of ancient tradition.

But a storyteller could only change his tale so much, or the audience would be lost. A medieval skald telling a story about Thor was in much the same position as a contemporary director making a movie about Dracula. Follow the tradition too slavishly, and the audience will be bored; change it too much and they will reject the interpretation. What's more, certain kinds of changes are acceptable within the tradition, but some would be considered violations; Thor has to have a hammer and be associated with thunder, Dracula has to bite necks and drink blood.

Some societies have different kinds or levels of myths. Some could not be changed much, because they were holy; the world tree must have been in this category to have been preserved faithfully for so long. Some peoples had myths that were charged with such great meaning that they could be told only on certain occasions or only to initiates. But even these most sacred myths changed slowly over the centuries; the Mayan world tree is recognizably related to Yggdrasil, but it is also different.

Myth lives, when it lives, in people's minds. It lives most powerfully in the minds of people who are immersed in that tradition, who grow up with it and understand the universe in its terms. The great traditions have also been rooted in particular ways of life and particular landscapes -- the Norse stories are the myths of farmers and sailors in a land of long, cold winters, and some of them would make little sense to people of the Amazon.

An authentic myth can be defined as a story told by someone who is fully immersed in a tradition and way of life. A myth does not have to be old, provided it incorporates enough of the tradition within its structure and its words.

Snorri Sturluson lived in the world of the medieval Norse. His physical surroundings were very much the same as those of his pagan ancestors; long ships and firelit halls, feuds and assemblies, kings and earls and peasants and slaves. It is true that he knew something of Christianity, but so far as we can tell he was neither pious nor very interested in the Bible. It was Norse poetry that seized his mind. He considered himself a great expert on that lore, and he dreamed of being the court bard of Norway's king. Since Norway's king no longer wanted a bard, he turned to writing books. But he was, I think, as much a man of the tradition as any of his ancestors. Perhaps that tradition had changed a bit by his own time, after two centuries of Christianity. But traditions are always changing; if we had the sources to compare them, we would no doubt that find that the myths of the tenth century were different from those of the fifth, and those of the fifth century from those of the pre-Roman iron age. Perhaps Snorri had his own personal interests and biases, for his example his veneration of Odin, god of kings and poets, and his irreverence toward Thor, the god of farmers. But this is obvious in his own writings, and need not cloud our judgment of the broader world of the myths.

I do not think that Snorri invented any of the important stories or motifs that he put in his books, because that is not how bards worked. Some have asserted that Snorri invented from whole cloth the death of Baldur, since that story is attested in no other source; but to accept that we have to imagine this traditional man, this remembrancer, embarking on an amazing flight of fancy. I don't believe it. Besides, if there are no other Norse stories of the dying god, or of the power of mistletoe, or the extraction of oaths from all the living things, those are elements that appear again and again in myths all across Eurasia. The same is true of many other elements of Snorri's myths, from triple goddesses to thunder hammers. Did Snorri somehow anticipate the findings of modern anthropology? That would be a feat.

Every performance of myth is unique; yet every one draws on tradition. Snorri Sturluson was a teller of tales, and his versions of those tales are as authentic as any other bard's would have been. If he invented, he invented within the tradition of the skalds, not outside it. And that is what myth is.

Kate Mosse, The Winter Ghosts

The Winter Ghosts (2012) is a charming little ghost story, perfect reading for a lonely winter's evening. It's short, just five cds in the version I listened to, so an easy read for a single night. It strikes me now that it would actually be a good story to tell out loud, in a condensed version of about 45 minutes or so. It begins in the south of France in 1933. The narrator is a young Englishman who has never gotten over the sorrow of losing his beloved elder brother at the Somme, and his constant habitation of the no man's land between life and death has made him receptive to the voices of ghosts from another, more ancient conflict. The story is just sad enough to be piquant without ruining the fun. It turned my long, dismal drive of yesterday into a great pleasure, and I recommend it for anyone else needing a little distraction.

Support Group for People Unfairly Maligned In Historical Fiction

Brilliant post from Kathryn Warner at the Edward II blog:

Isabella of France: I am somewhat baffled by the way I used to be portrayed as an evil cackling murderous unfeminine she-wolf but am now a long-suffering tragic neglected wife dumped on over and over from a great height by her nasty cruel gay husband. . . .

Joan Mortimer: Funny how my husband's adultery with you (Isabella) is romantic and entirely forgivable while Edward II's is deeply icky, isn't it, and that the same novelists who write scene after indignant scene about Isabella's neglect at the hands of her husband do their utmost to pretend that my husband isn't actually married? One novelist has me being very overweight and deeply unattractive, and the sad thing is that I'm actually grateful that she even bothered to mention me in the first place. They usually don't. . . .

Margaret of Anjou: I'm usually portrayed as this evil vengeful bitch without whom England would never have become embroiled in the Wars of the Roses, but what should I have done, for heaven's sake? Allowed my son to be disinherited in favour of that man York? And for all the writers who think I cackled like a mad harpy at the sight of York’s head after the battle of Wakefield, I wasn’t there, all right? I was in Scotland.

Roger Mortimer: Talking of being in the wrong country, evidently some writers have also failed to notice that I was in Ireland nine months before Edward III was born, and for a good while before and afterwards too. Even I, manly, virile, audacious and unequivocally heterosexual as I undoubtedly am, would struggle to impregnate a woman who’s in another country. . . .

Thomas Boleyn: I for one don’t blame you all for being upset. These writers seem to be obsessed with sex, and the more scandalous and unpleasant, the better. I was an accomplished diplomat and faithful servant of the king, who wished only to arrange great marriages for my children and improve our family’s standing … well, okay, I was ambitious, but really, who wasn't? ... and thanks to recent novels and a certain TV series, it seems I am now to be known in perpetuity - to put it colloquially - as Pimp Daddy Boleyn.

If you know anything about these people, you'll want to read the whole thing.

Why is Gandalf a Compelling Character?

Jason MacDonald's answer to this question:

Certainly, part of what makes Gandalf compelling is the idea that "still waters run deep" with him. Outwardly, he doesn't appear that wise or powerful ... just a guy who likes hanging out with hobbits more than he should and smoking his pipe. A lot of his more interesting adventures happen outside the main narrative, so we know he's a badass, but have to wonder at the specifics a lot of the time. But at the same time, Tolkien gives us flashes of his power—both in terms of his actions (summoning eagles, fighting Balrogs), and in the way some of the seemingly important characters in the story defer to him. Elrond and Aragorn are kings, and yet they both seem willing to put their trust in the seemingly humble wizard. It draws you in—who is this guy, and why is he the one everyone turns to?

But I think there's a more personal connection which might be the more powerful one if you're inclined to feel it. Although Middle Earth has a race of men, the hobbits are in some ways closest to us as readers. "Men" in the Tolkien world are mostly armies moving around battlefields, though there's a few such as Aragorn who rise to be more than that. Hobbits are the simple people who live their lives and try to be happy and do what good they can. They're meant to be us.

And this is what makes it personal: Gandalf's faith in the goodness and competence and hidden abilities of the hobbits—even when the powerful and mighty like Saruman and Thorin Oakenshield doubt their worth—is Tolkien's faith in the goodness and competence of normal people, of you the reader. Through Gandalf, Tolkien is saying he trusts you and I to do good, to live our lives well, to put happiness and friendship above material gain, and to fight evil as best we can, even if we don't think we have the tools at our disposal. . . . His faith in the hobbits is his faith in us.

I would put this somewhat differently. It is through Gandalf that hobbits, i.e., ordinary Englishmen, enter into epic magical stories. Gandalf travels out from the Shire and does amazing things somewhere, then comes back, again and again. Those of little depth or curiosity know him for his spectacular fireworks shows. But for those who understand, his friendship is a gateway to that vast plain where good and evil battle for the universe, magic is real, and heroes overcome.

I would also say that while Gandalf several times says things that praise all hobbits, and he seems to like them, he is rather particular in which ones he invites to go along on his adventures. He is the means by which Tolkien's universe recognizes which apparently ordinary folk are capable of great deeds and calls them to their destinies. So when he, to use Macdonald's terms, shows faith in us the reader, it is not just a generalized confidence in ordinary people, it allows us to fantasize that we might be the ones called to greatness.

Another facet of Gandalf's power, to which MacDonald alludes, is that Gandalf's most important magic is not in doing things but in knowing and understanding things. His most important contribution is to understand the global forces behind what seem like disconnected events to others, and to see through the lies of the enemy. He knows what needs to be done. In a crisis situation, that can be the most compelling magic.

The Wicker Husband

Wonderful little fable by Ursula Wills-Jones which begins like this:

Once upon a time, there was an ugly girl. She was short and dumpy, had one leg a bit shorter than the other, and her eyebrows met in the middle. The ugly girl gutted fish for a living, so her hands smelt funny and her dress was covered in scales. She had no mother or brother, no father, sister, or any friends. She lived in a ramshackle house on the outskirts of the village, and she never complained.
One by one, the village girls married the local lads, and up the path to the church they'd prance, smiling all the way. At the weddings, the ugly girl always stood at the back of the church, smelling slightly of brine. The village women gossiped about the ugly girl. They wondered what she did with the money she earnt. The ugly girl never bought a new frock, never made repairs to the house, and never drank in the village tavern.
Now, it so happened that outside the village, in a great damp swamp, lived an old basket-maker who was famed for the quality of his work. One day the old basket-maker heard a knock on his door. When he opened it, the ugly girl stood there. In her hand, she held six gold coins.
'I want you to make me a husband,' she said.
'Come back in a month,' he replied.