“Where now are the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?
Where is the harp on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing?
Where is the spring and the harvest and the tall corn growing?
They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow;
The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.
Who shall gather the smoke of the deadwood burning,
Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?”
The Two Towers
So Aragorn translates “a forgotten poet long ago in Rohan, recalling how tall and fair was Eorl the Young, who rode down out of the North; and there were wings upon the feet of his steed, Felaróf, father of horses. So men still sing in the evening” (1, p. 112).
Memories of a golden age echo loudly and often in fantasy novels. In fact, fantasy novels come in for a fair bit of flak for the mythology of the Golden Age, which is pretty amusing, given the fact that the myth of an aureate past is part of our common culture, whether we’re talking about Hesiod’s Golden Age or the Garden of Eden, or the Krita Yuga of the Mahabharatra. Or the age of revolutionary idealism in late 18th-century America, with the blood of tyrants watering the Tree of Liberty. Or the five years in which The Greatest Generation achieved immortality. Or that most false Golden Age of all—the Wonder-Bread incarnation of a 1950’s sitcom reality that almost half of America wants to resurrect.
It’s enough to make a fantasist despair, especially lately. I mean really—this is the kind of stuff you can’t make up. Despair is part of the discussion in the coming weeks when we look at present and future more than past. Tonight I want to open a conversation about the mythologized long ago, and how we as readers understand the past, the ways the mythology of a Secondary World accords with and/or comments upon our own reality. I contend that the world-building of fantasists rather reflects our own culture and civilization’s desire to see in the past some kind of glorious age, a time of honor and valor, when people of principle valued integrity over wealth, reputation over authority. It’s certainly a common theme
Yes, I think it’s time we moved off of the Kingkiller Chronicles for a while, although I reserve the right to circle back whenever The Doors of Stone is published.
Where Now Are the Horse and the Rider?
Also known as Ubi Sunt? and Et in Arcadia ego. In Judeo-Christian tradition we look back to a pre-lapsarian Eden, a place of perfect plenty wounded and deformed by Adam and Eve’s sin (most memorably, physically, and explicitly, in John Milton’s Paradise Lost). In The Silmarillion, Tolkien envisions Arda, a world—well, more of an eternally-lit flat solar system—of perfect symmetry distorted and wrenched awry by the war between Melkor and the Valar. “Epic,” writes Charles A. Huttar, “typically lays before a contemporary audience a vision of lost glory, of an age when heroes walked the earth whose stature we may emulate but not equal” (2, p. 92). In short—epic gives us Utopia.
The past is presented as an ideal long-gone whose echo we might catch in our best moments. Beowulf arrives at the court of a dispirited Hrothgar, an old king surrounded by lesser men, to kill both Grendel and his mother and so rid the Danes of their scourge; but the poet notes that the mighty mead-hall Heorot will burn and all the men within who celebrate the monsters’ deaths will themselves die. In time. The ideal cannot last and the world will, indeed must, inevitably degenerate. Aragorn will perish, and so will Frodo; even the Shire so beloved to the hobbits will outlast them, and in time will know new masters. A Golden past casts a long shadow, one that imparts to the present an elegiac mood.
This is more than nostalgia for “simpler times,” although the sentiment does tend to appear along with a certain disdain for modern times, and especially for technology in its dehumanizing, polluting and destructive incarnations. William Morris envisioned his utopia in News From Nowhere as a dream-vision, a post-modern return to the good old days of pre-industrialist England with a side dish of communism, the abolition of money, and apparently a robust system of public sanitation, since no one seems to be dirty and nothing offensive assaults our narrator’s nose. It’s an attractive but twee vision, despite its profound similarity to a more popular, techno-friendly and futuristic incarnation—Star Trek’s United Federation of Planets. But I’m wandering now, from a utopian past and into a utopian future.
Is such a thing even possible? Most fantasies start with a heroic Golden Age and devolve into a disorderly and degenerate present, one in which our heroes will shine forth to reassert the ideals of the heroic past. (There are, of course, exceptions. Erikson and Esselmont especially approach the past as archaeologists, not mythographers.) Even so, despite ending on a high note with the reimposition of order, there’s usually the acknowledgement that “nothing gold can stay.” I don’t have the source at hand right now and don’t have time to check (but I hope one of our Middle-Earth experts can back me up) that Tolkien tried to continue the story of Gondor into the Fourth Age but gave it up, as he found corruption and pettiness creeping back into the Court of the High King after Aragorn’s reign. Maybe the Golden Age myth depicts a high point that can’t be maintained, because human beings are fallible and greedy, ignorant, petty….and we love them anyway.
An additional point of interest appears in fantasy’s corollary form: science fiction. Science fiction doesn’t usually bother with a Golden Age, being as it is, after all, the property of myth. No, science fiction looks forward, casting itself into the future, and that future is usually either utopic or dystopic. A quick survey of the field since H. G. Wells started mucking around with time suggests the future is split, and we’re either going to Omelas or we have Morlocks to look forward to.
Next week, Zwackus is reviewing Saladin Ahmed’s The Throne of the Crescent Moon. And Angmar is launching a new series about classic poetry. Look for it.
Notes
1. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers. NY: Houghton-Mifflin, 1954.
2. Charles A. Huttar, “Tolkien, Epic Traditions, and Golden Age Myths.” In Twentieth-Century Fantasists: Essays on Culture, Society and Belief in Twentieth-Century Mythopoeic Literature. Ed. Kath Filmer. NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1992, 92-107.
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