While others seek the passageway to elven realms in vain, Poul Anderson throws wide the gate to let his readers enter into wonder … Anderson is a “literalist of the imagination.” He makes what is magical real and what is real magical. Of such power is poetry born.

—“An Invitation to Elfland,” Sandra Miesel, from Poul Anderson’s Fantasy

Poul Anderson gets a lot of love around these parts, and with good reason. While I can’t speak to his metric ton of science fiction, he’s written a lot of great fantasy novels, including Three Hearts and Three Lions, and the Nordic-flavored War of the Gods, The Broken Sword, and Hrolf Kraki’s Saga. All of these are worth finding and reading.

But Anderson also wrote some excellent short stories. I have a couple of his collections and will vouch for the excellence of Fantasy (1981, Pinnacle Books, Inc).

Belying its vanilla title (Fantasy? Was Pinnacle Books considering Men with Swords as an alternative?), Fantasy is actually a wide-ranging, eclectic group of short stories that includes “soft” sci-fi (debatably fantasy) stories, a handful of essays, including a satirical non-fiction look at the sword-and-sandal brand of fantastic fiction (“On Thud and Blunder”), and a few excellent traditional fantasy tales.

Anderson is one of my favorite fantasy authors for the simple reason that he writes so damned well. His style is simultaneously lucid and poetic, free-flowing and starkly evocative. Take this passage from “The Tale of Hauk,” a Viking-themed story about a son who must destroy his father Geirolf. Geirolf has died a “straw death” (i.e., in bed, rather than on the battlefield) and returns as a rampaging revenant to strike back at those who let him wither thus. Weapons will not bite Geirolf; Hauk must engage him in a hand-to-hand struggle to the death. As Hauk walks towards the howe to battle his father-turned-monster, Anderson writes:

Long did the few miles of path seem, and gloomy under the pines. The sun was on the world’s rim when men came out in the open. They looked past fields and barrow down to the empty garth, the fjordside cliffs, the water where the sun lay as half an ember behind a trail of blood. Clouds hurried on a wailing wind through a greenish sky. Cold struck deep. A wolf howled.

Beautiful stuff.

Some of my other favorites from Fantasy include “A Logical Conclusion,” a story about two men—one a barbarian hero, the other a modern, civilized businessman—who switch bodies, and ultimately decide to remain in their new forms. “The Valor of Cappen Varra,” originally published in Fantastic Universe in 1957, may very well be the inspiration for the Dungeons and Dragons bard class. Cappen Varra, a quick-bladed ladies’ man and Minstrel of Croy, has fallen in with a crew of northern barbarians. On a wind-tossed night at sea, the northmen force him off their longship to investigate a troll-infested island. His wit and his singing voice are his only weapons. Cappen Varra makes another appearance in the collection in “The Gate of the Flying Knives.”

A couple other worthy entries include “Superstition,” a story about the role of magic and belief in a future time after man’s single-minded adherence to science has led to apocalypse, and “The Visitor.” This last story stuck with me most of all. The eponymous visitor is a psychic who, at the behest of a horribly scarred man, visits the strange dream world of a young girl who lives in a sad state of isolation. I won’t spoil the ending, but who this girl is and how she came to live in this ageless, lonely Neverland between the worlds is a shock that drags you back into terrible reality.

Anderson’s rambling essay “Fantasy in the Age of Science” describes the differences and similarities of the fantasy and science fiction genres. He arrives at what seems to be a simple, elegant differentiation: Science fiction is distinguished by the assumption that the universe makes sense and that man can reach an understanding of it. In contrast, “Fantasy is under no such obligation. It’s free to bring in the completely supernatural, that which is beyond nature and forever unamenable to the scientific method.” He argues that science is perhaps reaching its limits, at least in an epistemological sense. Black holes and random quantum processes means that “magic is loose in the world,” Anderson says. Fantasy helps us work out these problems, wedding theory and observation while maintaining our basic humanity.

Anderson also provides an overview of the past and present of fantasy fiction in “Fantasy in the Age of Science.” He pats his SF and fantasy readers reassuringly on the back: “Far from being neurotic escapists, persons interested in science fiction and fantasy strike me as being, on the average, uncommonly aware of reality, and apt to make efforts to improve it,” writes Anderson. He praises J.R.R. Tolkien in this regard. He cites Robert E. Howard too, painting a generally positive picture of swords and sorcery/heroic fantasy.

Overall, if you’re a fan of Anderson’s, and particularly of his, well, fantasy offerings, Fantasy is definitely worth tracking down.

Steve Trout adds:

I recently read Poul Anderson’s “Time Lag” in Best of F&SF 11:  Two human colonies, long separated, are in a war because one has expanded its population beyond their planet’s ability to sustain them. An interesting story with serious implications. Anderson has long been a favorite author of mine.