Wildside Press has released two interesting volumes that I failed to mention earlier this year, Tiger By the Tail! Two Dominic Flandry Adventures and Killer’s Dozen: Thirteen Mystery Tales, respectively authored by Poul Anderson and Richard A. Lupoff.
This is a saga, to be read round a fire against the lurking dark.
– Robert Low on The Whale Road
Most Robert E. Howard fans find a good Viking saga hard to resist. Many have delved into the treasures hoarded by H. Rider Haggard and Poul Anderson seeking the “Northern thing” that inspired Tolkien and sang with moody restlessness in the blood of Robert E. Howard.
All that is deep and gloomy and Norse in me rises in my blood. I would go east into the sunshine and the nodding palm trees, but I bide and the dream of the twilight of the gods is on me, and the dreams of cold and misty lands and the ancient pessimism of the Vikings.
It seems to me, especially in the autumn, that that one vagrant Danish strain that is mine, predominates above all my Celtic blood.– To Harold Preece, ca. October 1930
Robert Low, right, lives his tales of the Oathsworn. His deep knowledge of his period gives his writing depth and power.
Scotsman Robert Low has written a saga worthy to stand with the greats of yore. The Whale Road launches the four-book Oathsworn series, which follows a band of Norse mercenaries through adventures across Europe and into Asia, from the market towns of Scandanavia to the steppes of Russia to the Great City of Constantinople, known to the Norse as Miklagard.
The saga follows the growth of Orm Rurikson from a green and fumbling youth into a seasoned fighter and leader of men.
The Rough Edges blog brought to my attention a short (sixty-six pages) Science-Fiction chapbook published by World Science Fiction Library, entitled Two Worlds of Poul Anderson: Science Fiction from the Golden Age.
It collects two tales: the novella “Industrial Revolution,” first published in Analog in 1963 and reprinted several times since then; and the short yarn “Duel on Syrtis” which first appeared in Planet Stories in March 1951 and has not been reprinted since 1993.
Poul Anderson‘s chapbook is reviewed by James Reasoner in this entry and by Steven H. Silver here. “The Industrial Revolution” is a scientific problem story with ‘government against independent business’ as backdrop. Mr Reasoner wrote that the second tale was a “tough, hardboiled, and very suspenseful story ” and defines it as “a Western transplanted to Mars.” This slim book looks good. Many thanks for the recommendation.
Heritage Auction Galleries is handling the consignment of a Frazetta painting that is probably well-known to most Sword-and-Sorcery art devotees. Here’s the description from the website:
Warrior with Ball and Chain, Flashing Swords #1, paperback cover, 1973
Oil on board
23 x 19 in.
Signed lower right
This stirring, savage, and superb Frazetta masterwork, sometimes titled Warrior with Ball and Chain, first appeared on the cover of the sword and sorcery anthology edited by Lin Carter, Flashing Swords #1, Dell Books #2640, 1973.
One of the top Frazetta paintings in private hands, Warrior with Ball and Chain was purchased in the February 1993 Guernsey’s auction, and according to its listing there, is one of the largest Frazetta covers ever painted. Some aficionados feel his piece may have been originally created for the Lancer Conan series of the late sixties, but not used there, since the Conan figures of two of the Lancer covers are so similar to the Warrior.
A copy of the Flashing Swords #1 paperback is included with this lot.
Being so new to The Cimmerian, I never met Steve Tompkins personally (living in Australia, I’d have found it hard) or, sadly, corresponded with him while he was still living. So all I know of him comes from my reading his posts and articles — but they say quite a lot. It’s clear that Steve Tompkins is a great loss.
I’ve been reading his contributions on The Cimmerian since I first became aware of the website, though I haven’t by any means perused them all, and won’t have time to before the anniversary of his death on the 23rd. But after reading just some of his offerings, I can fully believe the statement concerning him in About The Bloggers that “he was likely the single most well-read individual in all of fantasy fandom” and “one of the field’s most perceptive, unique and delightful critics.” These are tributes whose dead-on-target truth is conspicuous. Steve Tompkins had wit, perception, wide-ranging knowledge and a command of language that allowed him to express all these with enormous readability.
This means something — actually, a lot — to me personally, since Mr. Tompkins said very kind things about my work, even going so far as to compare Ravens’ Gathering with Poul Anderson’s Hrolf Kraki’s Saga — a compliment that literally made my jaw sag. If you haven’t read the Saga of King Hrolf Kraki as Anderson recounts it, and don’t, you’ll be robbing yourself.
Even an incomplete reading of what Steve Tompkins produced shows how broad his tastes were, and all of it was stimulating. “Green Hell, Golden Civilization,” about Fawcett’s discovery of unexpectedly great achievements in the Amazon basin by its native peoples, made me vow, “I have to find out more about this!” (and I will). His three-part essay, ”Derleth Be Not Proud,” (nice pun) showed genuine appreciation of Lovecraft’s work and a far more erudite knowledge of his influence than I have. It taught me plenty about it that I hadn’t known before.
“Thongor. Brak. Conan. One of These Things Is Not Like the Others … “ is such a spirited, passionate — and cogent — defence of REH’s unique quality as a writer that I’ll bet money, if an afterlife exists, Steve is hoisting a beer — or a large Jack Daniels — with Robert E. Howard right now, and that they are finding each other congenial.
That George MacDonald Fraser, Arthur C. Clarke and Charlton Heston were members of his personal pantheon along with Howard is further proof that we’d have been compatible. Maybe our opinions would have differed sometimes, but I can be sure that Steve’s would always have been well-informed and provided food for thought. With regard to the men mentioned above, I trust Steve Tompkins is having a drink with them too.
Considering that all of them are gone from us makes me remember some words from another MacDonald. John D., through the mouth of his high-level beach bum and retriever, Travis McGee. “They keep emptying out the world. The good ones all stand on trapdoors so cunningly fitted into the woodwork that you don’t see them until it’s too late. And they keep pulling those lousy trip cords.”
I generally know if a film’s been worth my while if my thoughts are conflicted. Such was the case with James Cameron’s long-gestating epic Avatar, which already has climbed past the 1 billion mark at the international box office in a matter of weeks. Plenty have already offered their thoughts, but I feel sufficiently moved to join them.
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.
Even though I consider myself fairly well-read, there are a great many authors whose work I haven’t truly explored. One of the most important of those is Poul Anderson, undoubtedly one of the most prolific and influential speculative fiction authors out there. I don’t know exactly why I haven’t read more of Anderson’s work, but it certainly isn’t through any dislike or aversion. The Broken Sword was harder-going for me than The Lord of the Rings, but like that more famous novel, it was all the more rewarding as a result. I also have a copy of Three Hearts and Three Lions somewhere in my great pile of unread books, and no doubt more than a few short stories of his among the dozens of anthologies I haven’t looked through. Still, I never got around to pursuing more additions to the shelf: perhaps the sheer breadth of his work was daunting in itself.
It may seem rather presumptuous of me to then write a post regarding an author about whom I have little prior knowledge. Suffice it to say that I know just enough about Poul Anderson to ken that he was/is hugely influential and worth looking into. Upon hearing of his birthday, I decided to mosey about the internet just a bit to see if there was anything online. I came across “On Thud and Blunder,” an essay on verisimilitude in world-building that draws from Anderson’s clearly vast reference pool–ocean, more like–and makes a stand for getting the details right. Having read and re-read it many times, I consider it one of the very finest writings on the subject of world building out there.
Poul Anderson would be eighty-three years old today. That means I’ve been reading his fiction for about thirty years now. The realization of that would be even more twinge-inducing if I didn’t constantly remind myself that I was 
a mere thirteen years old when I started.
My love for Poul’s writing began when I bought a first-edition copy (1952) of Vault of the Ages from the Oswego Public Library (the same institution from whence I purchased my first Harold Lamb and Merritt books). Alex Schomburg dustjacket/endpapers and everything. All for one shiny quarter (the library ended up rebuying the book in paperback). The second (or first?) Anderson novel ever published.
“Vault” was a pretty good introduction to Poul Anderson for a thirteen year-old. The book was written for the “Young Adult” market, with a certain proportion of the sermonizing that genre usually requires. On the plus side, Poul based his novel around a post-apocalytic setting, provided numerous great combat/battle scenes and featured “northern barbarians” as sympathetic antagonists whose narrative purpose was to give a stagnant culture a shot in the arm.
James Maliszewski, the proprietor of Grognardia and a Friend of The Cimmerian, has posted an article on The Escapist website. It is called “The Books That Founded D&D” and I found it quite interesting. I thought it worth some commentary.
Mr. Maliszewski starts his essay noting the various reasons why J.R.R. Tolkien should be dismissed as major influence upon the role-playing game that Gygax and Arneson developed. Most of the evidence used to back this up is cited from Gygax’s own writings. The fact that these writings date from before and after the threatened lawsuit by Tolkien Enterprises means very little, in my view.
Tolkien deeply influenced Dungeons and Dragons. That is my humble opinion and I stand by it. The Elves as portrayed in D&D would be far different if JRRT had never written his novel, The Lord of the Rings. The same for D&D dwarves. Double ditto for “orcs,” which species (with that particular appellation) would never exist, but for Tollers. Triple ditto for the “halflings” in the game (whom I always considered ridiculous, in game terms). All of that, however, is fodder for another blog entry. Now, let’s get to all the stuff that James Maliszkewski and I do agree on (more or less)…
