Gandalf and the Witch King

 Gandalf and the Witch King from Rankin and Bass' The Return of the King (1980)

Something I brought up writing about The Return of the King - the confronatation between Gandalf and the Witch King. It's one of the most striking moments in the book and Peter Jackson left it out of the movie. He sort of included it in the extended cut, but it's moved about and weak. I've castigated Jackson for always dropping nuance in favor of action. I can at least appreciate that for someone making a visual work of art. But, man, he's handed an utterly staggering scene and he doesn't do it. I remember sitting in the theater, waiting for the scene, and BAM, nothing! Sheesh.

   In rode the Lord of the Nazgul. A great black shape against the fires beyond he loomed up, grown to a vast menace of despair. In rode the Lord of the Nazguˆl, under the archway that no enemy ever yet had passed, and all fled before his face. 

   All save one. There waiting, silent and still in the space before the Gate, sat Gandalf upon Shadowfax: Shadowfax who alone among the free horses of the earth endured the terror, unmoving, steadfast as a graven image in Rath Dınen.

   ‘You cannot enter here,’ said Gandalf, and the huge shadow halted. ‘Go back to the abyss prepared for you! Go back! Fall into the nothingness that awaits you and your Master. Go!’ 

   The Black Rider flung back his hood, and behold! he had a kingly crown; and yet upon no head visible was it set. The red fires shone between it and the mantled shoulders vast and dark. From a mouth unseen there came a deadly laughter. 

   ‘Old fool!’ he said. ‘Old fool! This is my hour. Do you not know Death when you see it? Die now and curse in vain!’ And with that he lifted high his sword and flames ran down the blade. 

   Gandalf did not move. And in that very moment, away behind in some courtyard of the City, a cock crowed. Shrill and clear he crowed, recking nothing of wizardry or war, welcoming only the morning that in the sky far above the shadows of death was coming with the dawn. 

   And as if in answer there came from far away another note. Horns, horns, horns. In dark Mindolluin’s sides they dimly echoed. Great horns of the North wildly blowing. Rohan had come at last.

 

 Gandalf and the Witch King (and Grond in the background)

by Ted Nasmith

 

EPIC

So I'm taking a break from the long 19th century and swords & sorcery and diving into epic high fantasy for a little while. I can't help myself. Rereading The Sword of Shannara sparked a renewed interest in big, sprawling struggles against evil. Right now I'm plunging into Stephen Donaldson's First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. So far, it's pretty wild.

Remember, big fantasy wasn't alway bad. It only got bad when fans and writers got lazy. The fans where happy with more of the same old dark lords and plucky farm boys crap and the writers were happy enough to provide them. And the publishers discovered that the fans were even happier when the series piled book on top of book. 

But there's good, good stuff out in the fields epic high fantasy. Over the next couple of months I'm hoping to work my way through some classic books, a few newer ones, and maybe even a few written as critiques of the genre.

Northwestern Middle-earth

The Lord of the Rings remains my first, and truest love of epic high fantasy. Prof. Tolkien turned me on to thick appendices, detailed maps of fictional realms, and invented languages and histories.

He also elevated fantasy to an operatic scale with a deep moral underpinning, things that weren't especially important to the tales writers like Howard, Smith, and Moore told. Or at least the moral issues were grayer. They wrote darker ambiguous tales that focused on one or two characters with less clear cut relationships to good and evil.

Instead of mighty thewed warriors or cagey wizards, in LotR Tolkien threw small, average men (well, hobbits) into the struggle against utter darkness. Part of the purpose of that was to depict the need for everyone to confront evil. Another was to illustrate the costs such a conflict imposes on even the victors.

Like the great body of myths that underlay German culture, Tolkien wanted to create something similar for the English. To do this he famously developed entire languages and a history that covers thousands upon thousands of years. In The Silmarillion he wrote stories akin to Beowulf and Sigfried and the wars between the Icelandic eddas. These stories would be the deep history that set the stage for the War of the Ring.

from the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant

I have a great love for history and I'm sure the faux history of LotR is a big part of what made it so appealing. Discovering the appendices when I finished The Return of the King was like finding a diamond at the bottom of a gold mine. It contained just enough about great and terrible events to conjure potent images in my head: the War of Dwarves and Orcs fought in the dark tunnels below the Misty Mountains, Ar-Pharazôn's rebellion against the Valar for example. It was easy to, and I did, lose oneself in LotR.

All those things are good and great, but it's the struggle between good and evil that effects me the most. As many people effect a supposedly worldly cynicism and talk about how there's no such thing as clear cut good and evil, most of them don't really believe it. In the 20th century humanity got a good view of what evil of the blackest: witness Stalinism, Hitlerism, Maoism, etc. (Hell, talk about evil dark lords. They really do exist) 

from the Fionavar Tapestry

Sometimes the forces arrayed against villainy aren't pure and noble, but they still fight. I'm all for bringing nuance into fantasy but to posit, as some authors seem to be doing, that the whole world is really only gray, strikes me as simpleminded. There is indeed evil in the world and I enjoy stories about the fight against it. In these malignant times, when women are enslaved, men routinely beheaded, and millions driven from their homes, I think we're well served to be reminded that such forces can be fought and defeated.

All of that goes into my definition of high fantasy, a term coined by Lloyd Alexander in an essay titled "High Fantasy and Heroic Romance." It is set in an imaginary world and there is at its heart a struggle against the forces of evil that are set to overwhelm it. Right now, investigating some of the genre's works I have read as well as some I haven't yet is what interests me right now.

It's a genre that's taken hits over the past decade. It's been criticized for reducing the world to a simply Manichean struggle, racism when it creates "evil" races liked orcs, endlessly reusing now-tattered props like the simple hero, wise sorcerer, and dark lord. There's some truth to all these claims. Often, though, the failures came from the pens of authors who picked up the trappings of LotR but neglected to look at its deeper themes and construction. 

from the Earthsea Cycle

Even today, when the genre has supposedly passed by such stories of good vs. evil told on a massive scale, its impact is still evident. In a 2009 essay, Richard K. Morgan disparaged Tolkien claiming his heroes were "Irritatingly Radiant Good" and his villains "Towering Archetypal Evil." So when I read his novel, The Steel Remains, I was more than surprised at the essential heroism and willingness to fight evil of his trio of heroes and the blithely evil villains. No doubt he thought by making his characters cynical and brooding he was somehow bettering Tolkien but there's still no doubting they're the good guys. 

George R. R. Martin has made clear he is a fan of Tolkien and wanted to combine big fantasy with what he sees as more realism. R. Scott Bakker's bleak (by which I mean like the blackest night when the stars, moon, and sun have all been snuffed out) Second Apocalypse series is heavily influenced by LotR, including its own versions of orcs, dragons, and trolls (sranc, wracu, and bashrags if you care to know), and has a map that looks like it might have come from the pen of JRRT himself. 

In case those of you who remember how I've long railed about all those thick books and endless series of fantasy novels, let me say I don't hate them all. I hate the ones that can't justify their length by the strength of their prose or storytelling. And that's most of them.  

Epic is a question of scale, not length. Worlds at stake and struggles against the forces of evil are what matter. In five short books, Lloyd Alexander's wonderful Chronicles of Prydain put the whole known world at risk. Joy Chant's Red Moon and Black Mountain does the same thing in a single volume. Glen Cook's original Black Company trilogy is monstrously epic and under a thousand pages. More recently John Fultz did epic in his three Books of the Shaper.

So that's what I'm working on these days. And I am still reading the long 19th century stuff, but this is going to take up lots of my reading and writing time so I figured why not give the site a new look to herald that? Enjoy!

Why The Sword of Shannara You Ask

Some folks might have noticed the gold hued Hildebrandt Bros. cover of the original The Sword of Shannara over there on the top left corner. Yeah, I've reread it for my next Black Gate review. And I don't hate it. There, I've said. You can burn my membership card in the guild of swords & sorcery aficionados, but I sort of like the poor thing.

For those uninitiated in the history of The Sword of Shannara, legendary Ballantine editors Lester and Judy Del Rey were looking for something to echo the success of The Lord of the Rings (and kick off their new Del Rey imprint). They discovered young Terry Brooks, and worked with him to turn his manuscript into a novel that would do just that.

And it did. According to Wikipedia, it sold 125,000 copies its first month in print. The Sword of Shannara was one of the first fantasy books to climb the New York Times Bestseller list and awakened the publishing industry to the potential of fantasy fiction. It also set the stage for scads of other Tolkien pastiches to appear. Like GRRM paving the way for a host of other grimdark authors, Terry Brooks and Sword showed there was profit to be made in a certain direction.

While we've all had it up to here with secret heirs, bands of diverse heroes bound together on a quest, and evil dark lords and their monstrous hordes and henchdemons, there was a time when we didn't. An innocent time when not everyone and his brother and sister were writing that exact same story, again, and again, and again. When the only big fantasy novel you had read was LotR because that's all there was.

I can't stress how important and mind-blowing it was when The Sword of Shannara first appeared. My fantasy reading friends (all guys I must admit) and I went nuts. The original hardcover was over seven hundred pages long and I know two guys who read it straight through in a day. It took me at least three or four. It was the longest book I had ever read at that point in my life.

Even though we were young, I was only eleven, we all saw the blatant Tolkien rip-offs homages. The whole basic plot: determined band sets off to the big villain's kingdom for some magical folderol that will defeat him. We didn't care. Sure the Siege of Tyrsis equals the Siege of Minas Tirith, Stenmin equals Womrtongue, and a host of other people, places and things in Sword mimic or echo things in LotR. And we still didn't care.

Tolkien's heroes

Brooks' heroes

We were so hungry for new fantasy that satisfied the same things LotR had done for us; good triumphing over evil, adventure and excitement, and cool characters. There was other fantasy out there, Moorcock, Philip Jose Farmer, Ursula K. LeGuin, among others, but they were not offering the same things as Tolkien (and I'm sure all of them would be proud to admit that). Brooks and the Del Reys knew exactly what the hordes of young fantasy fans were hungering for and they gave it to them. They took Tolkien, made it simpler and easier to read, and WHAM!, took us for a roller coaster ride.

I came up with the idea of revisiting The Sword of Shannara last year. It's been a decade or so since I last read it and it seemed like something ripe for examination. To gain a little added insight into the book's history, I sprang for the 35th Anniversary Annotated Edition. Brooks towers over the history of fantasy because of the vast numbers of books he's sold and the fact he served as a gateway for so many readers into fantasy. I'm curious how much he matters anymore. I hope to generate a little discussion about this come Tuesday.

Here's my Black Gate article from 2015: You Can't Go Home Again. 

The Hobbit - like you haven't seen this already

   So here we go.  The trailer looks so much better than my expectations for the movie allow me to believe it to be.  That's based entirely on Peter Jackson's track record of pretty much botching the LOTR movies.  How so you ask?  By making Gandalf look like a high strung fool, Aragorn like a reluctant king, making Elrond runaway, etc. And there's more but why bother?

   Like the LOTR movies, this will look gorgeous and mostly spot on.  It's a less complex book than the LOTR so maybe he won't be tempted to "improve" on Tolkien's characters.  He clearly felt the need to up the action and fanboy quotient by portraying all sorts of stuff from the Unfinished Tales and LOTR appendices. Whatever.