Category Archives: State of the Lands

State of the Lands: Poetry in Epic Tales (Seriously, What Up with That?)

Thou art wise to consider such a synthesis, Solemn. There are many worlds, but only a single nature.

-Final Judgement, The Eye of Kog

I have a question. Or perhaps it’s a rant. And maybe no one cares, though I’m far too egotistical to go for that. But it’s a Two-World Tuesday (OK in all honesty, a world and a half, you’ll see what I mean). But here’s the thing:

Over and over in classics of epic fantasy which I adore, I hit a patch where there’s this poem. And I love-love the story, but the poem just stops me cold.

And I’m wondering- why on earth is that in there?

Keep the Tale Moving

As a modern-day epic fantasy author, I’m challenged to construct a story that somehow brings the reader into an entirely new world, slips in all the information they need to understand that world and empathize with the characters, and keep them on track with a

Illus. Rachel McReynolds

ripping good plot that forces them to turn the page. If there’s no magic, monsters, other races, incredible geography, unthinkably-evil villains and mind-numbingly old prophecies coming true… then why not write a paranormal-thriller-shapeshifting-romance set in the Alleged Real World? Like everyone else!

{<— Shapeshifter with romance, I got. Alleged Real World? Not so much!}

Point being– why are you stopping your draft for anything, for any reason, much less for something so overt, decorative, distracting and pace-slaying as a POEM. Yet that’s what our forefathers, the giants of the genre, did all the time. ALL the FRICKIN’ TIME!!

  • C.S. Lewis broke into poetry frequently, most annoyingly to my taste in Till We Have Faces, and just at the climax before we figure out what’s going on.
  • Not to be outdone, Tolkien put tons of songs into LoTR, both at times when things were already going slowly (Tom Bombadil singing about how much he loves his wife), and also at times of great pathos (the Elves of Lothlorien singing their grief at the death of Gandalf). But the former case, when we don’t need to care, is in plain English doggerel complete with heigh-ho’s and hey-nonny’s. In the latter, when we really could get some emotional impact from the words… then, Tolkien puts the poem into ACTUAL-FACTUAL ELVISH! Because of course he made up languages from like six years old, and they hadn’t built the signs to warn fantasy authors about world-building yet. I mean, honestly, Elvish? And it goes on for two pages!
  • Just this past month I finally got around to reading George MacDonald’s Lilith, which was a head-bender in its own right let me assure you. I staggered on through a tar-pit of allegory for about the first third, and finally caught the thread of his plot, hanging on for dear life and enjoying it fairly well. But I’m not kidding, hanging on.
    • Suddenly there’s a real situation: an evil-looking feline creature has run through the MC’s library and is hiding in a dark corner.
    • And this is kind of supernatural and he’s not sure what to do but his mentor the Librarian says “I got this”. And proceeds to recite a poem. No, not kidding. A rhyming poem, full of Christian allegory (which is fine, but now?) and all the assurance that the Guy Above is going to win (which is fine, but ditto).
    • And every three or four stanzas the cat in the dark corner yowls in pain, and I’m wondering is it because the goodness in the verse is hurting it, or are the metered rhymes just driving it nuts like they are me? And it goes on for at least four pages! Verse-Verse-Verse-cat yowls, lather-rinse-repeat.
    • The cat gives up hiding and comes out, and the plot labors back into gear again. And I’m still hanging on. But dude, why?

I got tired of just asking myself why about this, and decided to have a think. And here’s what I think.

They Kind of Had To

I’m not posing as a scholar of the historiography of literature here. I’ve read some stuff, looked back in my reading list, and thought about it a while. And I came up with some thoughts, maybe they’re even excuses. Nothing I say about these giants in the least bit diminishes their stature.

Poems Are What They Started With!

If you think about it, the roots of epic fantasy are epic tales, told by our ancestors and describing a world they sincerely believed had existed. Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, Beowulf (you KNOW how JRRT went gaga over that one). All poems! Even the lays of Roland and Arthur were in verse: it was quite literally the stuff of which the genre was born. I hadn’t ever really considered that. The notion of telling a TALE with an epic fantasy flavor was far less than a century old by the time these guys got started.

A Whole New World

Here’s one I bet you might not have thought about: how many years went by with people writing extraordinary stuff– new discoveries, monsters, supernatural occurrences– but all still set in the Alleged Real World! Almost everything we think of as classic horror and sci-fi, it all stayed “here”. And why not, creating a whole world is so laborious. But the epics of the past, despite having gods and miracles and creatures beyond the pale, were nevertheless all still part of this world, and their authors believed it had all happened in their distant past.

Breaking away from that, to create something entirely new, did not come easy. Thus was born the emphasis on world-building. Though in fact, you ALWAYS have to build a world for your reader, even in lit-fic. But now it’s a game where ANYTHING could be on the chopping block of change– taxes, nuclear families, gravity– better explain it soon or the reader’s going to assume the default setting.

And I guess these guys figured that the best way to enforce the notion of a world’s character, its believability if you will, was for it to have poetry. Yeah, me either.

Put Your Name on It

Sort of related to the previous theme, some of the earliest efforts in fantasy were portrayed as frame-tales, or via “primary sources”, etc. in an effort to cloud the issue of authorship. How better to make a tale seem real than to point elsewhere for authority? This doesn’t do much to explain the existence of poems in the tale, but it does create a kind of buffer between the writer and any critique of their work. Hey reader, this verse is just there, don’t blame me! Then too, of course media wasn’t so rampant and easily available, the competition for a free hour not as desperate. Stories could take their time, perhaps, for a poem or two along the way.

Hey- They WANTED To

For all these reasons (and also just because, I suspect), the fantasy giants were drawn to the notion of writing poems into their stories. I can’t judge from quality– I mean, at all, I have no idea– but I think in many cases they were being true to their roots, in others perhaps they were truly trying to add verisimilitude to the tales and make them more believable by the lights of their day, and then too, in the case of the Christian authors, they may essentially have been trying to write hymns. Since the allegory put them in that vein to start with, they were looking at joy and worship and giving us their version of the Psalms. The ones I recall have meter, and could be set to music.

Thither Go I?

Can anyone name an extended passage of verse or lyrics within an epic fantasy tale of the last couple decades? I’m not the widest-read fellow and most of my page-flips are in the past, but I can’t pull up a single example. So, I should definitely avoid this trap in the future, right? I mean, I do have the usual ancient prophecy at the start of Judgement’s Tale, and a soldiers’ marching song in The Ring and the Flag. But when the bard Salinj’r refers to the cryptic tomb-epitaph they find in the Shimmering Mindsea, during The Plane of Dreams— you know, the epic rhyming verse poem that could serve as the basis of two or three plot seeds– I should bring those out in prose, I’m sure. Forget the rhymes and meter I found in there. And the Song of the Silvertongue, which I’ve only taken down maybe a quarter of: I should leave that alone in the mists of history, no point in bringing the other eight to twelve verses out in poem. Everybody already knows who won the Battle of the Razor.

Sure, that’s what I ought to do. I get it. Then I start to think about what makes a world seem real, and I come back again and again to the notion that the characters feel joy, have a capacity for happiness. Those kind of people, damn it, they recite tales, say stuff that rhymes, they sing songs. Just has to be part of the story, is all. I mean, I didn’t set out to write poems, I just… found them along the way.

What’s your opinion? Have you ever run across a poem in a tale that really boosted you along? Or are you one of those old-fashioned holdovers that isn’t looking to turn the pages at record speed? Comment here, you could be saving me from myself!

State of the Lands: Casus Belli

Thou art wise to consider such a synthesis, Solemn. There are worlds aplenty, but only a single nature.

-Final Judgement, The Eye of Kog

This concerns a subject I think is central to most genre fiction and especially epic fantasy, something that’s been tapping on the pane of my mind since I began chronicling. As an amateur military historian I was first drawn to the tales of armed struggles in ancient times. Now working as an analyst I’ve started to categorize things more often, try to get to the underlying causes. And after all, what could be more consequential to your tale than the existence or outbreak of a war?

So then– that raging conflict you’ve got in the background of your medieval mystery-paranormal romance: What’s up with that anyway? I mean, is there a particular reason for both sides to have been locked in a death-grip for the last four centuries, without result? You might want nothing to do with it, but hey, you made people start reading, now you’re stuck with us! Hopefully this article will serve as a handy guide to the many temperatures of tiff your world can get into.

Layers (Conflicts Are Like Ogres)

One thing that’s very important to distinguish at the start is that wars have causes (what Thucydides would call prophasis), which underlie (and even belie) the reasons that one side might give (the proschema). Sometimes these can be close to the same thing, but evil men need excuses (so the Dark Emperor might lust after the wealth or women of your hero’s homeland, but would loudly announce that said hero is a vile sorceror who must be hunted down). I’ve been surprised sometimes at tales where no such distinction is made, though this is strongly affected by the level of the conflict in your world.

I referred to this in a post a while back on the various types of fantasy. In brief, if the tale is epic in scope, that means the world is at stake. This strongly indicates that the bad guys are outright aggressors and neither give, nor have, a good reason for their violent attempt. If Sauron wins, it’s game over for all Middle Earth: curtain down, no more history. He wants it all, because he wants it. Not a lot of wiggle room there. {In heroic fantasy and sword-and-sorcery tales, stakes are lower with much more room for doubt, equivocation, confusion and half-measures.}

Why would an author pass up a chance to explore the casus belli (meaning the triggering act, the stated reason for a war)? No way I could exhaustively list them, but let’s take a stab at some important ones, both from the Alleged Real World and the tales folks have written about other places.

Here’s how I would represent those Greek words I mentioned before, about the real cause and the stated message:

Doesn’t Have to be Complicated

So in the example of Middle Earth, Sauron just wants to conquer everything. It’s possible that his Orcs and evil Men will enjoy life after his victory, but for the most part it’s all going to be his way or the highway. And by the time the war is well underway (The Fellowship of the Ring), Sauron is no longer hiding his intentions, pretty much everyone knows what he wants and the heroes are only arguing about the best way to oppose him. So that maps the War of the Ring–and many other epic fantasy struggles–clearly into the upper left corner.

Forging Justification

Let’s try a tougher one, the German invasion of Poland that started WW 2. In truth, it was naked aggression, invasion of a weaker neighbor to gain lebensraum and secure more power for the Master Race. But the Nazis used their mastery of (and addiction to) propaganda to mask their evil intentions with a staged provocation. Or didn’t you know that the Poles actually invaded Germany first? Usually called the Gleiwitz Incident, the Germans used concentration camp prisoners and stolen uniforms to make it seem that Poles had come across the border and attacked several targets, including a radio station from which they presumably broadcast an anti-German message, thereafter being conveniently shot before authorities could arrive. Not that it cut much ice with the Allies, who appropriately called B.S. within days. But the war was on, and even most Germans had no idea what was really happening (and honestly, many did not much care at that point– but if they had been completely on board, why all the play-acting?).

See how it goes? Think about who really gains from starting the conflict, that’s your left-to-right axis. Then consider whether lots of people, or only a few, really know the true reason or if they’re fighting (perhaps bravely, probably tragically) under a false flag. This one distinction, between prophasis and proschema, by itself could give you a wonderful point of departure for traitors, surprises, disillusionment; in the end I believe it could bring your tale a greater level of heroism.

I’ll try one more and then beg you for advice about a fourth, but hopefully you can already use the blank graph at the top of this article to plot the position of your own wars.

Noble Causes and the Eye of the Beholder

In the American Civil War (yeah, going to step right into the hornet’s nest, why not?) we have a prophasis problem because historians and pundits rage unabated about what REALLY caused the war. Slavery? State’s Rights? Cultural division between North and South had been growing since the Revolution, and as the Southern states saw the balance of power in Washington swing away from them, they banded together to protect their way of life (including of course, their “peculiar institution”).

To the Yanks, a small group of Rebel slaveowners fought to retain their power, and sold their people a bill of goods about preserving their liberty.  On the other hand, “to free the slaves” might have served as a good reason for Northerners to don a uniform (and wealthy Yanks were happy to have the plantation power destroyed). But it’s hard to swallow that thousands of Confederates risked their lives just so the wealthy few could continue to own them. That would be like you and me dodging bullets to protect Bill Gates’ right to keep winning the lottery. And remember, hardly anyone in mid-19th century America believed that blacks should be accorded an equal’s place in society. Lincoln included.

So I’d say the American Civil War could have several plot-points, depending on whether you’re covering the conflict from the Northern or Southern PoV.

In a war, each side tends to swallow its own message as the reason for the fight, and dismiss the enemy’s reason as propaganda. And guess which one gets to write the history?

Final Exam: Mordant’s Need is Also My Own

There are two kinds of people in the reading world: those who already know how mortally cool the Mordant’s Need series by Stephen R. Donaldson is, and those who need a time-out. Don’t be someone who needs a time-out. But if you want me to tap dance on the Spoiler Line, here we go. Just remember, you owe me a plot point when I’m done: tell me where the war goes on my map and why.

The kingdom of Mordant is under siege by the army of the High King (a neighboring empire). The king of Mordant, Joyse, has become senile and refuses to allow any other nation access to his Congery, an association of wizards who “do it all with mirrors” and are the only center of sorcerous power in the world.  All nations have suffered attacks by monstrous creatures, perhaps summoned by a rogue Imager who cannot be traced. The High King’s emissary demands that Joyse hand over access to the Congery so they all can be protected; in response, the insane monarch of Mordant challenges him to a game of checkers, which the emissary does not even know how to play.  That interview does not end well, and the war is on.

So. Plot that! And enjoy thinking about the different driving forces that send your heroes into battle, I hope you come away with some good thoughts to sprinkle into conversations and the central action of your tale.