The Traveling Round Table Fantasy Blogs – 5

Way back in 2012 six specfic writers, including me, decided to set up a monthly circulating blog series: one unifying topic, fantasy, and one post each per month, on each member’s site in turn. Eventually it was named, partly in jest, “The Great Traveling Round Table Fantasy Blog,” and it lasted for most of three rounds.
My own posts are the only ones I can now retrieve, but some of them still strike me as interesting, if somewhat out-of-date. I’m therefore aiming to re-post them here for those who may be interested. I’ve also included the image that became our leit motif: The Arthurian Round Table, from a picture in Winchester, UK.
And the 5th topic was/is:

(Not 50) Shades of Fantasy

Continuing the Language in Fantasy trend, this time I’ll look at shades in high fantasy, that is, variations by both authors’ style and time. Which logically lets me start with one of the fathers of modern fantasy, Lord Dunsany. Here’s the intro to Carcassonne:

They say that [Camorak’s] house at Arn was huge and high, and its ceiling painted blue; and when evening fell men would climb up by ladders and light the scores of candles hanging from slender chains. And they say, too, that sometimes a cloud would come, and pour in through the top of one of the oriel windows, and it would come over the edge of the stonework as the sea-mist comes over a sheer cliff’s shaven lip where an old wind has blown for ever and ever (he has swept away thousands of leaves and thousands of centuries, they are all one to him, he owes no allegiance to Time).

Writing pre WWI, Dunsany has more than an echo of Yeats’ Celtic twilight: whimsical tone, slightly formal, archaic usages such as the “they say” beloved of medieval romances. And characteristic of Dunsany, whimsy extended into a long, flapping, image-ridden sentence that in the wrong hands could come perilously close to a place in the Bulwer Lytton awards.

From around 1922 we have:

“His highness rode a hot stirring horse very fierce and dogged; knee to knee with him went Styrkmir of Blackwood o’ the one side and Tharmrod o’ the other. Neither man nor horse might stand up before them, and they faring as in a maze now this way now that, amid the thrumbling and thrasting of the footmen, heads and arms smitten off, men hewn in sunder from crown to belly, ay, to the saddle, riderless horses maddened, blood plashed up from the ground like the slush from a marsh.”

Yep, that other Daddy of the Genre, E. R. Edison, from the chapter “The Battle of Krothering Side,” in The Worm Ouroboros. And yes, nobody sounds or ever again could sound like Edison. The lavish detail, the exuberance, the outrageous yet so brilliant faux Elizabethan language is a Phoenix. One of a kind. 

The writing in The Worm actually ranges widely, from battle scenes like this, sounding almost straight out of Malory, to the ornate settings, and breathtaking natural beauty like the sunset that closes this chapter, or the first view of Zimiamvia. But it’s a good shade away from Dunsany, not least in the ferocity of its focus, and the equally ferocious insistence of its rhythm.

Now here’s one of the modern heirs of both Edison and Dunsany. Describing magic outright this time, 70 or so years later, when fantasy styles have greatly simplified – or been dumbed down, imo – for a far larger, less literate readership.

Lynn Hall had changed again. This time she showed me how her secret wood devoured it, in a monstrous tangle of root and vine that wove into its stones and massed across its gaping roof. Past and future and the timeless wood scattered broken pieces of themselves within two rooms. Nial Lynn’s marble floor lay broken and weathered by the years, even as his blood or Tearle’s flowed darkly across it. A curve of tree root so thick it must have circled the world had pushed through the floor beneath Corbet’s table…

Much plainer than Edison or Dunsany, yes, and yet no less part of Elsewhere in the starkness of images like the broken marble floor and the flowing blood, here in service to the time-folding, reality-dissolving effect so common in Patricia McKillip’s work. This one is from
Winter Rose, Chapter Twenty-Three.

And now a particularly famous figure from modern (high) fantasy who first appeared in the late ‘60s and returned in the 2000s, through his creator’s trademark mix of utterly everyday details and sudden, yawning vistas of unreality:

The leaves shook and the man came briskly down the ladder. He carried a handful of plums, and when he got off the ladder he batted away a couple of bees drawn by the juice. He came forward, a short, straight-backed man, grey hair tied back from a handsome, time-worn face. He looked to be seventy or so. Old scars, four white seams, ran from his left cheekbone down to the jaw. (The Other Wind Ch. 1)

Yup, it’s Le Guin’s famous mage, Ged, in his (happier) old age. Now an almost poverty stricken dweller on the heights above Havnor, with a plum tree and some goats and chooks – chickens, to American readers – a handsome old face, and the four scar marks that invoke his first mortal struggle in the magical world.

In this quote everything looks deceptively simple. Until you begin to analyse the subtle, resilient rhythms of the prose, and the almost invisible patterning of assonance and alliteration. If Edison is the High Priest of Ornament, Le Guin is the Mistress of Understatement.

Further into the present, and not quite high fantasy, here’s a good Canadian writer doing urban fantasy at its most attitudinous. It’s from The Second Summoning, a world where Keepers use their magic to maintain the fabric of reality against determined incursions from Hell, below, but sometimes, accidentally, from Heaven above. In this one, a street evangelist is confronted by a currently human-embodied angel (read the book for the full outrageous details):

“Greenstreet Mission. We’re doing a Christmas dinner. You can get a meal and hear the word of God.”

Samuel smiled in relief. This, finally, he understood. “Which word?”

“What?”

“Well, God’s said a lot of words, you know, and a word like it or the wouldn’t be worth hearing again but it’s always fun listening to Him try to say aluminum.” (Ch. 7)

But, I hear you muttering, where are the famously gritty and dourly “realistic” masters like George R. R. Martin? OK, I confess. I loved Fevre Dream, years ago, but the Thrones books feel to me like a fantasy version of Stephen King’s gross-out followers. It’s not realism I find in Martin. Perversely, it’s like King, a “gritty fantasy” gross-out.

When it comes to gritty, I’d sooner go with another prize-winning contemporary woman fantasy writer, and the opening of her first book in the Five  Gods Universe:

Cazaril heard the mounted horsemen on the road before he saw them. He glanced over his shoulder. The well-worn track behind him curled up around a rolling rise, what passed for a hill on these high windy plains, before dipping again into the late-winter muck of Baocia’s bony soil. At his feet a little rill, too small and intermittent to rate a culvert or a bridge, trickled greenly across the track from the sheep-cropped pasture above. The thump of hooves, jangle of harness, clink of bells, creak of gear and careless echo of voices came on at too quick a rhythm to be some careful farmer with a team, or parsimonious pack-men driving their mules. (Lois McMaster Bujold The Curse of Chalion Ch. 1)

It’s not over-gritty – yet. Before the end it will go beyond gritty to grotesque, to appallingly realized unrealities, like Cazaril’s demon-pregnancy, but here the only signals are in the landscape. The natural fallacy. Bleakness in the meager messy surroundings foreshadows Cazaril’s own plight, penniless, dressed in rags, with crookedly healed fingers and a back thick with flogging lesions, creeping like a beggar toward his last hope of sanctuary, after a life of war, siege and the galleys that have left him only the knowledge of “how to prepare a dish of rats.”

I meant to end with a tour de force from the grand master of modern (high) fantasy, who in one book can do all the shades of tone and voice from chatty children’s book to King James Version mythology, with epic and romance and comedy and tragedy in between. But as of 2022 or so, there’s a new recognised fantasy sub-genre, cosy fantasy: founded single-handedly – or bookly – by Travis Baldree, with Legends and Lattes, especially in its second, Tor Books edition. It promptly spawned a whole host of “something-and-something” titles like Tea and Treachery and Potions and Perils, plus copy-content names like  A Fellowship of Bakers & Magic or The Baby Dragon Cafe. Not many I’ve tried, sad to say, rival Legends overall. Baldree’s  characters are notable, especially the rattkins, and already much beloved. In my case, the second book’s tantalising dip into “other books the protagonist reads” is another big drawcard. But chiefly, Travis Baldree is a word-smith like Le Guin, though even more unobtrusive. This is most noticeable in the second book, Bookshops and Bonedust, with seemingly casual look-around moments, scenery prospects, so to speak, such as this:

… long ranks of narrow buildings curved in dwindling arcs towards the beach. Their clapboard sides were bleached pearly gray by sun and salt mist, burnished silver in the late morning light. Uneven boardwalks stitched them together, and old, sparsely cobbled roads wound between, sifted over with sand in places.

“Clapboard” doesn’t sound too alternate-world toward-high-fantasy, though the view-work is masterly, from the drone-level overhead vista to the narrow-down on sifted sand. You can read right over the workmanship the first time, since you’re focused on the content, your first proper look round the seaport of Murk. What lifts the whole into a word-smith range, though, is that “bleached pearly gray” and “burnished silver.” Suddenly, the prosaic metamorphoses, and sensawunda is right there in a fistful of words.

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Sylvia Kelso lives in North Queensland, Australia. She writes fantasy and SF set in analogue or alternate Australian settings. She has published twelve fantasy novels, two of which were finalists for best fantasy novel of the year in the Australian Aurealis genre fiction awards, and some short stories in Australian and US anthologies. Some of her books can be found in the Bookview Cafe online store:
https://bookviewcafe.com/bvc_author/sylvia-kelso/