Sir Gawain & the Green Knight/Pearl/Sir Orfeo, J.R.R. Tolkien

6 stars

First Sentence: When the siege and the assault had ceased at Troy,
and the fortress fell in flame to firebrands and ashes,
the traitor who the contrivance of treason there fashioned
was tried for his treachery, the most true upon earth—
it was Aeneas the noble and his renowned kindred
who then laid under them lands, and lords became
of well-nigh all the wealth in the Western Isles.

Thoughts: Tolkien gave the world two gifts. The first was as the father of modern fantasy, and the second was in translating and sharing the medieval literature that inspired him to create his own world. Of course, these poems were published after his death by his son Christopher,* but he intended to publish them when he finished fiddling with them.

Sir Orfeo is a medieval English retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Euryidice. In this version, Queen Heurodis is kidnapped by the King of Faerie right under Orfeo’s nose. He goes on a quest to find her, and this time remembers not to turn around before they return to the real world. I love a happy ending.

Pearl is an allegorical poem. The narrator is distraught after the death of his two-year-old daughter Margery (Pearl). He’s crying over her grave when he sees a heavenly light. His daughter appears before him decked in pearls. They have a dialogue over purity and Heaven and all that good stuff. The narrator doesn’t want Pearl to leave him again, so she lets him follow her to the outskirts of Heaven. He gets a glimpse of the life to come, but when he tries to go in he’s thrown back to Earth.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the most famous of the poems. It’s been fully accepted into the Canon and is taught in school, which makes me wonder if the version I read in high school was Tolkien’s. Sneaky way to get into the curriculum, Professor. I’ve always loved this story and its version of Gawain which is much better than the Gawain in Malory-based Arthurian legend.

We all know the story of how the Green Knight showed up at Arthur’s Christmas feast and asked someone to chop his head off and Gawain did it and the knight picked up his head and told Gawain to meet him next Christmas and he would exchange a blow for a blow. Then Gawain goes on his journey and ends up at a castle with a very hospitable host and hostess. The host goes hunting for three days while the hostess flirts with Gawain, and at the end of the day Gawain and the host exchange what they gained. Except Gawain doesn’t give him the green girdle the hostess gives him so when he meets the Green Knight he gets a cut on his neck for being dishonest.

That’s all well and good, but the thing about literature, real Literature, is that it’s a living being that can be interpreted and re-interpreted. Which is a roundabout way of saying that this poem inspired what is probably my favorite movie of this century, The Green Knight. It is everything I ever wanted in a movie. If you haven’t seen it, you absolutely must.

*I appreciate Christopher Tolkien’s work sharing his father’s unpublished works but I think he was taking it too far near the end. I half-expected him to publish The Annotated To-Do Lists of J.R.R. Tolkien before he died.

The Nibelungelied, D.W. Mowatt trans.

6 stars

First Sentence: The old stories tell us of great heroes, joy and misery, feast and lament, and the clash of brave warriors.

Thoughts: I may have mentioned this before, but this is my favorite medieval epic. It’s the only one I’ve found where the women have any sort of agency. Kriemhilde and Brunhilde don’t just sit around mooning over their favorite knights and indulging in courtly love. The actually take initiative. Brunhilde sets up the challenges to win her hand in marriage her ownself while Kriemhilde takes her revenge into her own hands. They’re spunky ladies and I love them.

But the story doesn’t begin with them. Oh, it does start talking about how Kriemhilde is The Most Beautiful Maiden in All the World, but it quickly shifts focus to Sifried, aka Siegfried the great hero of the Germanic world. We meet him after he’s had all his big adventures killing the dragon Fafnir and stealing the treasure of the Nibelungs and rescuing the Valkyrie from the flaming circle. Now he’s getting ready to settle down. But with whom? Well, he’s heard that The Most Beautiful Maiden in All the World lives in Burgundy so he goes over there to see what she’s all about.

But first he has to get past her brother, King Gunther. Here begins one of the great bromances in European literature. Gunther and Sifrid get on like a house on fire. They fight wars together, hang out all the time, show off to each other on the tournament field. Then Gunther hears about a nice eligible queen in Iceland and decides to go over there to see if he’s the lucky one who can win her. He asks Sifrid to come with because they’re besties now. Sifrid suddenly remembers why he came to Burgundy in the first place and tells Gunther he’ll come along as long as he gets to marry Kriemhilde when they come back. Gunther agrees and off they go.

Brunhilde is my favorite character in the whole piece. She’s a strong independent woman who don’t need no man. But this is a medieval epic so she’ll have to get married eventually. And it has to be to Gunther because he’s one of the heroes of the piece. Gunther wins her because he came prepared with the Powers of Trickery in the form of Sifrid and his cloak of invisibility.

They come back to Burgundy for a magnificent double wedding. When the couples retreat to their respective chambers, Sifrid and Kriemhilde get down to the lovin’ while Brunhilde and Gunther have the best wedding night scene ever. When Gunther tries to consummate the marriage, Brunhilde pushes him off her, ties him up, and hangs him from a nail for the rest of the night. And, for some unknown reason*, there are no fantastic epic paintings of this scene except this one by Henry Fuseli:

Gunther considers his options and chooses the worst possible one. He asks Sifrid to come by the next night in his invisibility cloak and beat up Brunhilde until she agrees to have sex with him. Sifrid, who is also a dick, does so and also steals her ring and magic girdle for trophies. He swears to his dying day that he did not rape her, but I don’t believe him. Taking a woman’s girdle was a highly symbolic act in medieval literature.

To top it all off, Sifrid gives his trophies to Kriemhilde as presents. When Brunhilde catches her wearing them it sparks off a huge fight that leads to the tragedies to come.

Eventually Sifrid becomes too powerful and Gunther gets greedy. He hatches a plan with his second-in-command Hagen to steal the Nibelung treasure from Sifrid. Hagen finds Sifrid’s weak spot and spears him there while Sifrid is getting a drink of water from a stream. Kriemhilde is devastated. What Brunhilde’s reaction was remains a mystery because she drops out of the story at this point.

From then on the epic is about Kriemhilde and her revenge. She marries King Etzel, aka Atilla the Hun, and settles in with him in his lands. Once her revenge has cooled enough, she invites her brothers and their knights over for a visit. Then she sets her knights against Gunther’s and everyone ends up dead at the end because this is Literature.

Isn’t that better than Guinevere mooning over Lancelot? I think so.

*I know the reason. Most of the painters of Olden Days were men.

Nordic Hero Tales from the Kalevala, James Baldwin

5 stars

First Sentence: “You must rise early in the morning,” said Dame Louhi, the Wise Woman of the North.

Thoughts: Fans of MST3K might remember the fourth season episode The Day the Earth Froze where a witch torments a Finnish village until she gets a Sampo. No one knows what a Sampo is until the hero Lemminkäinen makes one for her.

This book is a retelling of The Kalevala, the Finnish national epic. It’s also the basis of The Day the Earth Froze.

Dame Louhi lives in the northern land Polhyola with her daughter The Maid of Beauty. All is well until the day that Wainamoinen washes ashore. He’s a bard and wizard from the Land of Heroes to the south. Dame Louhi and The Maid of Beauty nurse him back to health. When Wainamoinen asks to go home, Dame Louhi asks him to make her a Sampo.

As in the movie, no one in the story knows what the heck a Sampo is. (Personally, I think Louhi made it up.) She says it’s a magic mill that will grind wheat, silver, or salt. Wainamoinen doesn’t know how to make one, so he goes home to get his friend Ilmarinen, the smith and wizard who smithed the sky. He tricks Ilmarinen into going to Pohyola, but once Ilmarinen gets a good look at The Maid of Beauty he doesn’t care. He gets the random magic items to make the Sampo and after several false starts creates it.

Dame Louhi is thrilled. She finally has enough wheat, silver, and salt but no one can turn the Sampo off. She puts it in a magic place of great magic to keep it safe and then reneges on her promise to bestow The Maid of Beauty on Ilmarinen as his wife. So Ilmarinen goes home to sulk.

The next year, Wainamoinen and Ilmarinen both head back to Pohyola to ask The Maid of Beauty to choose one of them as her husband. To no one’s surprise, she chooses the younger, handsomer man: Ilmarinen. They have a big wedding and go back to the Land of Heroes to live happily ever after. At least, until their slave boy gets insulted one time too many and kills all the women in Ilmarinen’s house. The Land of Heroes becomes a Land of Desolation. The two wizards decide to go back to Pohyola and get the Sampo from the magic place of great magic to restore their land. Dame Louhi doesn’t like this idea, so a war breaks out and the Sampo is destroyed.

And that’s why, to this day, no one knows what a Sampo is.

Please note this is not the actual Kalevala, but a retelling. In the introduction, Baldwin (not that one) claims that the original poem is dull, dull, dull, but considering the story he tells in the ensuing pages combined with the Russo-Finnish co-production fifty years later, I think I’ll reserve judgment until I read it for myself. How boring can it be if it inspired such insanity?

Those are famous last words, aren’t they?

The Once and Future King, T.H. White

5 stars

First Sentence: On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays it was Court Hand and Summulae Logicales, while the rest of the week it was the Organon, Repetition and Astrology.

Thoughts: Back the misty past of 2020 I mentioned that Idylls of the King was my second favorite interpretation of Arthurian legend. Now I reveal what my favorite Arthurian story is: this one. It’s delightfully humorous, full of anachronisms and realistic characters, and, best of all, lets Arthur be the main character. Even during the long section in the middle that focuses on Guinevere and Lancelot’s affair, Arthur is always in their minds.

The novel is divided into four parts. The first is the most famous: “The Sword in the Stone.” This is the story that got Disneyfied, although the version in this book is not the one on screen. The original stand-alone novel is what Disney used. White revised it for The Once and Future King one-volume edition to make some points about war that tied in with the themes of the rest of the novel. There is no Mad Madame Mim in this “Sword in the Stone;” instead we get Merlyn changing Wart into an ant and a goose to see what individuality and combat are really like. The section where he removes the sword also plays out differently from the film, and the section where Wart and Kay meet Robin Hood isn’t even hinted at. Books are one thing, films are another, and rarely do they overlap.

The second section is “The Queen of Air and Darkness,” which focuses mainly on the princes of Orkney: Gawaine, Agravaine, Gaheris, and Gareth. All of them know the one story Arthur was never told about his past: how Uther Pendragon seduced their grandmother Queen Igraine and killed her husband so he could marry her himself. They’re all very devoted to their mother, Queen Morgaine, who could care less about them. Morgaine is important because when we meet her she is killing a cat for a spell, an action which has earned her the distinction of being the first ever Sworn Enemy of the Blog.

While all this is happening up north, Arthur is waging war against all the other kings of the British Isles to secure his rule. Merlyn is not happy about all of this fighting and urges Arthur to base his kingdom on peace once he finishes up this little battle thing he has going on. It ends with the beginning of Arthur’s downfall when Morgaine shows up in her tent to seduce him. Merlyn, meanwhile, is trying to remember what he forgot to tell Arthur about his past (specifically, who his mother was). He’s a little distracted right now because Nimue is due to show up to shove him in a tree.

In “The Ill-Made Knight” we finally meet Lancelot who then meets Guinevere. Lancelot, as tradition demands, is the best of all Arthur’s knights, but he’s also ugly as sin. This doesn’t keep the Guinevere, or Jenny as Lancelot calls her, from falling in love with him. The affair plays out as it always does with the exception of Elaine who plays a more active role in her own affair with Lance. She seduces him twice of her own initiative but, as her story demands, he never loves her because he’s too wrapped up in Jenny. Elaine and Jenny meet a few times and hate each other like poison. Elaine does die, but she makes sure her death drives a wedge between the lovers in Camelot. I like Elaine.

The only other plot point I’d like to point out in this section is that Agravaine kills Morgaine after catching her in bed with a man fifty years her junior. Agravaine may be on the cusp of villainy in this novel, but he’s a Hero of the Blog for killing the cat killer. I hereby dub him Sir Agravaine of Justice Done.

“The Candle in the Wind” is the only song by Elton John that I hate with the fire of a thousand suns. Both versions. It’s also the title of the last part of this book. Here we learn that Arthur found out about his kinship with Morgaine and tried to have their son Mordred killed King Herod-style when Mordred was two. Mordred, understandably, has never forgiven his father for this. He convinces his half brother Agravaine to help him get revenge on Arthur, which begins with revealing Lance and Jenny’s affair in a way that Arthur can’t brush off like he did the other two times it was revealed. This, of course, breaks up the remnants of the Round Table and leads to the final battle that kills both Arthur and Mordred. Except we don’t get to that part here. The book ends the night before the battle. Arthur is in his tent with a page, talking about his life and the peace he always hoped to achieve. He tells the page, Thomas, to go home before the battle. Wars are not glorious and no good will come from this one. He wants young Thomas to remember all he told him and tell the world about his dream. This young page is, of course, Thomas Malory who goes home to Warwickshire where he will later write the story of King Arthur and his Round Table.

I warned you there were anachronisms.

There is a fifth book called “The Book of Merlyn” but it’s basically a rehash of the animal transformation scenes from “The Sword in the Stone” with commentary from a temporarily-released Merlyn who wants to bash Arthur (and us) over the head with his message about war. I’m sure it would be a terrible book if it really existed, which it doesn’t. IT DOESN’T.

Can you tell that White was completely done with war after living through two world wars? Can you blame him? He saw what war does to people, but he was also realist to know that it’s very difficult to stop because human nature has been trained to combat. It’s a bleak view of humanity, but there is a glimmer of hope at the end. Arthur never lost hope in Merlyn’s vision and neither should we.

The Autumn of the Middle Ages, Johan Huizinga

4 stars

First Sentence: When the world was half a thousand years younger all events had much sharper outlines than now.

Thoughts: When you ask “what was life like in the Middle Ages?” the first response you should get is “Can you narrow that down a little?” Because the Middle Ages lasted a long time—between approximately 395 (the fall of the Western Roman Empire) and around 1300-1400-ish (the beginning of the Renaissance)—and Europe is a big place, especially when your modes of transportation are limited to horse with or without carriage, boat, or your feet with your feet being the most popular option. What that very long sentence is trying to say is that the answer to the first question really depends on where and when.

Which is why Johan Huizinga focused on a very narrow slice of time (end of the 1400s-very beginning of the 1500s) and a very specific place (Burgundy). At that particular moment in time, the Renaissance proper was already going strong in Italy but it hadn’t quite made it all the way up to the northern parts of the continent. Also, by choosing this time and place he was able to show the transition between the two chapters in the history books. It was a gradual process, unlike the history book interpretation where everyone goes to bed at the end of the Middle Ages chapter and wakes up the next day and says “Hey, it’s the Renaissance now! Let’s get our Greco-Roman on!”

By focusing on the process of change, he’s also able to explain the difference between the two arbitrary time periods. According to Huizinga, it involved a shift in worldview, from the allegorical medieval mindset to the more scientific Renaissance way of thinking.

He begins with the literature because that was what influenced and reflected the way medieval people thought. We run into an old friend here, The Romance of the Rose, along with another old friend Christine de Pizan! Hi you two! Please stay on opposite sides of the room while you’re here! Romance of the Rose was a major source of the common allegories of the time and even de Pizan wasn’t immune to them. Everything had an allegory to medieval Burgundians: emotions, colors, social structure, everything. But since allegories had been used so much over the last several centuries they were kind of stale and arbitrary, almost a habit. Much like the memento moris set up all over the place. Death was an ever-present presence, especially since the Black Death ravaged the continent, but how much attention did people pay to the skulls and skeletons and whatnot when they were all over the place? These people partied in the graveyards.

From literature, Huizinga moves to art and this is where he really shines. He discusses the changes in the art world, focusing mainly on Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden. He analyzes their paintings in great detail and shows how they showed the changes between the allegorical medieval traditions to the more realistic Renaissance views.

There is a section of illustration plates in the center of the book but, alas, they’re all in black and white. Huizinga does his darnedest to recreate the colors with words but it doesn’t have the same impact. For example, van Eyck’s Annunciation is very different in color and you can actually see all the details that Huizinga talks about. The Melun Madonna is also a more vivid experience in color. In black and white all you (I) can really notice is the weird anatomy that was apparently supposed to show the figure of the ideal woman but in color you’ll also get the weirdly-colored angels in the background and the pasty, pasty skin tones of the mother and child.

Seriously, click on the Melun Madonna link. It is a (NSFW) sight to behold.

This is a dense book, but well worth your time if you, like me, are a big huge giant nerd who loves medieval things. The illustration plates are well worth your time if you like looking at old paintings and changing beauty standards over time. Seriously, what is up with these women’s breasts?

Doomsday Book, Connie Willis

4.5 stars

First Sentence: Mr Dunworthy opened up the door to the laboratory and his spectacles promptly steamed up.

Thoughts: I’ve mentioned before that I’d like to be able to go back in time with a digital camera to capture things we’ve lost to the ravages of time and/or idiots, so you know I was delighted when I started Doomsday Book. In the far off land of Oxford, UK in the far off time of 2054 the history department is doing just that. Sans the digital camera, of course, because they can’t risk paradoxes. Fooey. They will, however, give you a translator in your head (as well as having you bone up on the language of the area they’re sending you to) and a voice recorder in your wrist so you can record your field observations. Along with all the necessary vaccines for the diseases running rampant, of course.

They have to be careful sending someone back, of course. The time machine (aka “the net”) isn’t too terribly accurate in the fourth dimension the further back you go. That’s why they’re not sending people back to visit Queen Hapshetsut in ancient Egypt. Even going back to the 1300s is risky, although Mr Gilchrist doesn’t think so. He’s the interim head of the history department while the actual head is gallivanting around Scotland on a fishing trip*. One of his students, Kivrin, wants to go back to 1320 to see the Christmas celebrations. Why that year? It’s in the time period she’s studying, but far enough back that she won’t have to worry about that pesky Black Death coming to Merrie Olde England yet. That didn’t happen until 1348.

I’m sure you see what’s coming.

No one knows when Kivrin is at first. According to the technician, she went through without a hitch. Unfortunately as soon as she lands in medieval Oxford, she comes down with a nasty flu. Her life is despaired of. A priest is called in. Her translator device is malfunctioning until she figures out how to get around it. When she comes to she finds herself in a manor with a group of women waiting for the Man of the House to get done with a trial in Bath so he can join them. Kivrin befriends the youngest daughter, Agnes, and eventually her older sister Rosamund. She gets to set up and join in the Christmas festivities right before a visiting clerk falls ill. That’s when Kivrin notices a large blackish lump under his arm and checks the calendar.

Back in 2054, a lot of people are also coming down with a nasty flu, beginning with the tech who ran the net for Kivrin. He keeps asking for Mr Dunworthy, Kivrin’s tutor, and dropping cryptic messages about something going wrong with the drop. Mr Dunworthy is swamped with trying to keep everything at the college running smoothly during the quickly enacted quarantine, including housing a group of visiting bell-ringers and ducking another student’s very irritating and overbearing mother. On top of that he also has to watch his best friend Mary Ahren’s thirteen-year-old nephew on his holiday visit. Mary is a doctor and very busy at the hospital.

Mr Dunworthy abides. He finds Colin very eager to help out in any way he can, running errands or gathering supplies or warning people when the irritating and overbearing mother is on her way. He does it because he wants to be in on the gossip. Also he’s hepped up on gobstoppers. Then the tech recovers enough to tell Mr Dunsworthy the terrible truth: something did go wrong with the drop and Kivrin’s right at the beginning of the Black Death. That’s when Mr Dunsworthy gets the flu.

Reading this during an actual pandemic, I must say this book is strangely prescient. Especially in regards to the protesters complaining about all the restrictions. The only difference is this was fiction which has to make sense while in the real world there is no limit to bottomless stupidity.

In the meantime, Oxford University needs to hop to. They only have 33 years to get their time travel lab up and running.

*Or so they say. No one can actually ever find him. An affair is briefly suspected. Me, I think he’s hunting for the Cake Fridge.

Parzival: The Quest of the Grail Knight, Katherine Paterson

5 stars

First Sentence: In the ancient days, when Arthur was king of Britain, there lived a boy who had never heard of the great son of Pendragon or of his bold knights.

Thoughts: This is a children’s book version of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s medieval epic Parzival from the 1200s and I am insanely jealous of Kids These Days because they get cool stuff like this. But honestly, I can’t complain too much because Kids My Day had cool stuff too: Isaac Asimov’s series on the planets in the solar system, Robert Ballard’s book about finding the Titanic*, and children’s versions of classic horror stories.**

What we did have back then was Katherine Paterson. I couldn’t figure out why her name looked familiar until I looked at the bio on the back flap. She was the one responsible for Bridge to Terabithia which scarred me for life. She also gave us Jacob Have I Loved which I appreciated because the pretty sister didn’t get all the rewards at the end. She also, apparently, wrote a modern-day version of Parzival which I’m not interested in because I’m medieval for life.

_{Hardcore Bayeaux}

So, back to the epic. Parzival is better known as Percival in the English and French versions of the Arthurian legends. In the earliest versions, he was the one who found the Holy Grail. In later versions that honor was given to Galahad the Annoyingly Virtuous and Parzival/Percival was relegated to a supporting role. In this epic, though, he’s on his own.

We begin with Parzival’s extremely innocent childhood. His mother kept him ignorant because she didn’t want him running off to be a knight like his father. Of course, Parzival eventually learn that knights exist and immediately wants to run off to be a Knight of the Round Table. His mother, giving in to the inevitability of epics, fits him out with lousy armor and an old nag of a horse and sends him on his way.

The first thing he does on his quest is steal a ring from a lady while she’s trying to sleep. The second thing he does is get on the bad side of Sir Kay who never really had a good side. He vows to defeat a bushel-load of knights in tournaments and rides off to show Kay who’s boss. He stops for the night at the house of an old knight who gives him some good advice. First, stop talking about your mother all the time; it makes you look like a mama’s boy which isn’t very knightly. Secondly, stop asking so many questions; it makes you look like an idiot. Part of this advice leads Parzival to his doom.

After freeing a city under siege and marrying its queen, Parzival goes off on more adventures. He ends up at the castle of the Fisher King. If you’re not familiar with the Fisher King, a brief summary: He was a powerful king who was wounded in his thigh+. The wound festered and refused to heal until his successor came along to perform the appropriate rites and take his place. This does not happen here. Parzival is invited in for dinner which is preceded by an elaborate ritual where a bevy of fair maidens display the Holy Grail to the assembled. Parzival wonders about this and many other things he sees at the castle, but he remembers the old knight’s advice and keeps his mouth shut. The next morning he’s kicked out of the castle and everyone berates him for not asking The Question.

The rest of the story is Parzival trying to get back to the Fisher King and figuring out what The Question was he didn’t ask. Along the way he loses and finds his faith as well as a brother and runs around with Sir Gawain for a bit.

While I was working on this review, I found an English translation of von Eschenbach’s poem on Project Gutenberg. I’m not a fan of reading things on my phone but I will make a large exception for this. I want to read all the bits Paterson cut for time. Can’t scare the kids away from medieval legends by making this a Weighty Tome, after all.

*Which the Titanic museum at Pigeon Forge did NOT have available in their gift shop. Fifteen hundred knock-offs of the Coeur de la Mer from the movie and not a single copy of the book by the guy who found the goshdarn ship? HA-RUMPH.

**On which more later.

+Extreme upper thigh because he’s a fertility figure.

City of Brass, S.A. Chakraborty

4.5 stars

First Sentence: He was an easy mark.

Thoughts: I had actually started reading the second book in the Daevabad trilogy, Kingdom of Copper, but halfway through I realized I needed to know what happened first for anything to make sense. Back to the library I went. Helpful hint: start this series at the beginning. It’s not one you can do in medias res.

It all begins in Cairo in the late eighteenth century-ish. Nahri is a perfectly ordinary thief and con woman hatching elaborate schemes to rob people blind. She also dabbles in fake demon exorcisms, and it’s at one of these that she accidentally summons a djinn. Or an ifrit, rather, which possesses the girl she’s supposed to be exorcising. That night the ifrit corners her in a cemetery and sets a bunch of ghouls after her. A real djinn shows up to rescue Nahri from the ghouls with a real, live flying carpet.

(What’s the difference between a djinn and an ifrit you may ask? They’re both fire creatures, but the djinn submitted to Suleiman’s Curse (or Blessing, depending on the tribe) that limited their powers while the ifrit didn’t.)

Turns out Nahri is also a djinn, but she’s been disguised as a human through a very subtle illusion. Not only that, she’s the last surviving Nahid, the family that once ruled the djinn capital at Daevabad. The djinn that Nahri summoned is Dara who was killed in Daevabad defending the Nahid 1400 years ago. His spirit was enslaved after his death so he’s spent the last few hundred centuries as a genie in a bottle. He brings Nahri back to her ancestral home where all sorts of mischief immediately breaks loose.

Daevabad is currently ruled by the Qatanis, a family from the Eastern Sahara djinn tribe that overthrew the Nahids. The youngest son, Alizayd-Ali-to-his-friends, is the family troublemaker as youngest children are wont to be. He’s been surreptitiously funding the Tanzeem, a group of shafit (half-human, half-djinn) who are fighting for equal rights. The shafit are second-class citizens in Daevabad, which is bad enough but compounded with the fact they aren’t allowed to leave and you have a formula for some rather spectacular explosions. Which is what happens. Ali, who is eighteen years old and has all the good sense you’d expect from a male that age, is shocked—SHOCKED!—to find out that the Tanzeem have been using his money to buy weapons for their upcoming uprising. He immediately washes his hands of them and concentrates on being his father’s bodyguard, but the Tanzeem won’t let him go that quickly.

Nahri adds another dimension to this complicated situation. King Ghassan al-Qatani immediately recognizes her for what she is and starts manipulating her to further his own ends. The Nahid are natural healers both of themselves and others, so he throws her into a fast-track training program so he can restart the djinn infirmary. He makes Ali befriend her to soften her up to the family so he can marry her off to his oldest son Muntadhir. Nahri, bewildered by her new world, is in over her head.

Dara, meanwhile, is having his own troubles. He’s become a legend over the last fourteen centuries, and not a good one. Everyone knows him as a peerless, frightening warrior who had wiped out entire cities in the name of the Nahids. He doesn’t trust the Qatanis and keeps trying to pull Nahri away from them. Eventually Nahri discovers why Ali befriended her, looks around, and realizes she’s caught up in plots within plots. She thought she knew all about deception until she discovered politics.

The worldbuilding in this series is excellent. Everything fits together like an intricate mosaic. It feels like a complete universe in itself with a history and a future.

As with any good series-starter, this one throws a few intriguing clues at you in the final chapter that will ensure you’ll hunt down the next book. It worked for me! Of course, I already started reading the next book so I’ll have to recheck it out to finish it. Maybe now it’ll make more sense.

The Saga of Grettir the Strong

4 stars

First Sentence: There was a man called Onund.

Thoughts: Grettir the Strong is one of the last Icelandic sagas, written at the end of the Saga Era. As the title suggests, it’s about Grettir Asmundsson, nicknamed “The Strong,” who was Iceland’s most famous outlaw and, according to legend, a man born out of his time. He’s the perfect symbol of the changes in Icelandic culture from the Viking Era to the Renaissance when the saga was written.

As with all Icelandic sagas it begins with Grettir’s genealogy. His ultimate important ancestor was Onund who was nicknamed “Tree Leg” after losing his leg in battle*. He replaced it with a wooden leg, but during one battle someone knocked the wooden leg off, so he propped himself up on a tree stump and kept fighting. His descendants weren’t nearly so adventurous, preferring to settle down and work the farm. Then Grettir was born.

Grettir was a true child of the old Viking warriors. He was quick to anger, good with a weapon, and bad-tempered. He was also unnecessarily cruel to animals as a child which if I’m not mistaken is a sign of a future serial killer. But Grettir wasn’t all bad. He was also a skilled poet and many of his verses were included in the story.

Young Grettir got started on the outlaw path early by killing a man when he was fourteen. He was outlawed for three years for this killing so he went to Norway to wait out his time. There he met his half-brother Thorstein Dromund who will become important later. Grettir gets into more trouble in Norway, so he heads back to Iceland where he travels around the island getting into fights.

Eventually all the fighting pays off when Grettir is asked to take care of a vengeful ghost named Glam. After an all-night battle Grettir overthrows the ghost, but Glam curses him before he dies for good. He tells Grettir that he will never be any stronger than he is right now and that he will be afraid of the dark for the rest of his life. Grettir laughs it off, but he also goes back to Norway where there are more people around. There he accidentally kills a few people (like you do) and gets run out of the country. When he gets back to Iceland he finds out that the father of the men he killed is one of his countrymen and he’s gone to the Thing to ask that Grettir be outlawed again.

The rest of the saga is Grettir wandering around Iceland, trying to stay one step ahead of his enemies. He meets up with the heroes of some other sagas, gets involved in a good ol’ family feud when his older brother is killed, rails against the new Christian ways of his formerly pagan country, and ticks off a witch. Eventually he’s killed as you knew he would be and it’s up to his half-brother Thorstein Dromund—remember Thorstein Dromund? It’s a saga about him—to go to Constantinople to avenge Grettir’s death and fool around with a married Scandinavian woman who bailed him out of jail.

This is one of the better sagas, mainly because it focuses on one person throughout rather than a whole village like the Laxdæla Saga. Grettir is a good main character because he’s the kind of man you love to hate. He’s vicious and cruel but he’s also very witty and a heckuva poet. The poems in the Penguin edition deserve special mention because the translator left the kennings intact but explained them off to the side where they don’t interfere with the main text. That’s why Penguin editions are the best.

*This doesn’t come up in the saga but according to the family tree in the appendix Onund was descended from a man named Ivar Horse-cock. Those Vikings sure did know how to pick a nickname.

Laxdæla Saga

4 stars

First Sentence: There was a man called Ketil Flat-Nose, who was the son of Bjorn Buna.

Thoughts: Laxdæla Saga is the story of Gudrun Osvifsdottir and her four husbands. Before you get to the story of Gudrun Osvifsdottir and her four husbands, though, you have to go through the genealogy of every single family living in the Lax River valley. This is a feature of the Icelandic sagas, not a bug. They all start off with a genealogy of the main characters going all the way back to the first family member to come to the island. I have a book that explains why, but we’ll go into all that later. For now just know that Gudrun or any of her husbands don’t show up until about halfway through the saga.

That’s all right though because that gives us time to hang out with Gudrun’s third father-in-law, Olaf the Peacock. Olaf was the illegitimate son of Hoskuld Dalla-Kollson, a prominent man in Laxriverdale society. While he was out viking one day, Hoskuld decided to buy himself a concubine. The one he picked was named Melkorka and she refused to speak. Everyone thought she was mute until Hoskuld caught her speaking Irish to her son. Turns out Melkorka was not only able to speak, but she was the daughter of the Irish king Myrkjartan. Hoskuld set Melkorka up with a place of her own and favored her son Olaf above his other, legitimate, sons. This, obviously, caused a bit of familial tension.

Olaf later went to Ireland to meet his grandfather and get showered with honors. Then he went to Norway where he made friends with King Harald Graycloak and his mother, the witch-queen Gunnhild.* He came back home to show off his honors and his snappy new duds (which is how he got the nickname “Peacock”), and wasted no time in using both to win the heart of the daughter of famous Icelandic poet Egil Skallagrimmson. He went home to Laxriverdale, fathered a son named Kjartan, and fostered his nephew Bolli. Kjartan and Bolli became the best of friends…until Gudrun showed up.

It’s like that sometimes.

Gudrun is an interesting woman. She’s got a mind of her own but she’s also driven by fate. As a child she had a strange dream which a wise man interpreted as meaning she would have four husbands and told her how each marriage would end. By the time she met Kjartan and Bolli she had already divorced her first husband and was widowed by her second husband. She was looking for husband number three but things didn’t turn out the way she expected—even though she knew it would be happy but end with her being widowed again, the dream and interpretation were vague enough to leave some doubt as to which brother she would choose. No matter which one it was, it would have ended with heartbreak and bitter recrimination, which it did.

Still, Gudrun kept on keeping on, running her farm, raising her kids, until the feuding in Laxriverdale got too much and she moved away. Then she married husband number four and after he drowned (again, this was predicted) she became Iceland’s first nun. Because even though this was Iceland and women had more rights there than they did in most of Europe, it was still medieval times and there wasn’t much for old women to do once their children had grown up.

If you’re interested in Icelandic sagas, this is definitely one of the most famous. Notice I didn’t say “best” because, to be honest, it’s a little dry. Then again, I started my saga reading with Njal’s Saga which is an absolute diamond of a story so every other saga suffers in comparison. But if you want to know what life in Viking times was like, Laxdæla Saga will give you a spectacular portrait of what it was like to live in medieval Iceland.

*I also have a book about Gunnhild and we’ll discuss her at great length later. I like Gunnhild, at least Poul Anderson’s version of her.