The Broken Sword by Poul Anderson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars No Eucatastrophe Here! Wow--The Broken Sword (1954) is quite a visceral experience. I liked Poul Anderson’s novel back in high school but had forgotten everything about it, so I wanted to try Bronson Pinchot reading the audiobook, and was very affected by the weird book. Raw Viking Faerie Power! Incest, fratricide, patricide, torture, rape, massacre, quests, sea and land battles and sieges, brutal violence with brains and blood and guts, heartless scheming old gods, prodigious hatreds and loves, a demon-possessed singing sword that has to kill someone every time it’s unsheathed including, ultimately, its bearer (inspiration for Elric’s Stormbringer). The story takes place in about the 9th century AD in England and environs, when the Danelaw is giving English lands to Viking invader settlers. A violent explorer called Orm comes to England, coveting the land of a local family, so he and his men surround their hall and set it afire, burning all the men inside. With Viking gallantry, they let a few women escape, one of whom, the mother of the immolated family, is a witch who goes off to brew revenge. Orm falls in love with a young local Christian lady, who’ll only marry him if he converts, which he finally agrees to do. While she’s pregnant, Orm goes off raiding (the new religion not sticking too deeply), and while he’s gone she bears the baby, but before she can get it christened an elf lord named Imric happens by-- An elf lord?! Wasn’t this a historical Vikings in England novel?! Well… wherever the new White Christ’s religion hasn’t horned in, Faerie overlays the human world, so that people never quite see it even though it’s all around them, other than, perhaps, feeling a spooky passing wind or seeing some eerie distant lights. In Faerie there are different immortal beings: elves (tall, slender, graceful, cold, supposedly incapable of deep love, technologically and magically advanced), the elves’ bitter enemies, trolls (shorter, wider, stronger, barbaric, also cold, also capable of magic), and then various other “peoples” lesser in power and culture, supporting actors in the never-ending conflict between elves and trolls: goblins, imps, Sidhe, leprechauns, half-gods (gods who used to be strong but have been partially displaced by the new god). Then behind all those and using them (and humans) as proxy chess pieces in a long Cold War lurk the Aesir gods (Odin, Thor, etc.) and their epic enemies the Jotun giants. When Imric begets a changeling by raping an insane troll princess kept for the purpose in an elf-dungeon for 900 years and substitutes the “baby” for Orm’s son, the contrasting and conflicting destinies of two identical alien “twins” are set in motion, that of the happy go lucky human Skafloc raised by elves as an elf, and that of the anti-social changeling elf-troll Valgard raised by humans as a human being. Anderson details their doomed parallel lives with relish, and when their paths finally intersect, the results are not for the faint of heart. Valgard is a worthy antagonist foil for the hero Skafloc, one moment glad about destroying his family and the next ravaged by guilt and a stunned incomprehension as to how he could do such things. Neither human nor troll/elf, neither fully himself nor only a shadow of Skafloc, lonely, pathetically believing that femme fatales love and understand him when they’re just manipulating him, evincing defiant bravery even in the face of assured doom (I’ll kill Skafloc and tread the earth under my feet: I am death!), Valgard is impressive in his giant, shield-biting emotions. Skafloc is (at first) the luckier doppelganger, having the best of both human and Faerie worlds, but also his nature is (at first) sunnier than that of Valgard. I like how Skafloc confuses his own brutal killer’s heart with that of his demonic sword, so that by turns he feels that he’s being used as the sword’s tool or acting in accord with his heart. The more Skafloc uses the sword to kill trolls, the more he starts becoming pitiless like Valgard. Anderson strips everything they love or need or want away from both men, leaving them as “heroes” for opposite sides, both fey, bleak, and bloodthirsty. There are no flat evil villains in this novel, but more or less flawed and feeling and fated people (or elves, trolls, etc.). Trolls are worse than Elves, but both sides have been performing atrocities on each other for millennia. Both sides are brutal. Humans are, too. So are the Aesir and Jotuns. Odin is a callous manipulator. The hate here is overwhelming! Valgard for Imric and Skafloc; Skafloc for Valgard and trolls; the witch for Orm and his line; elves for trolls and vice versa; Aesir for giants and vice versa; old gods and Faerie for the new White Christ and so on. Yet so is the love here, especially between Freda and Skafloc (beyond mores, religion, and fate) and even of Lea for Skafloc, giving the lie to the truism that elves cannot feel deeply. The moment when Orm’s raised ghost tells his widow to stop mourning him, because down in hell when he hears her crying it’s like vipers biting him, and she says, “Take me with you!” is weird and moving. A summary can’t do justice to the dark joys of language that Anderson revels in! His descriptions achieve an over the top, sublime beauty, as of the starry sky or stormy seas or massive clouds or terrific battles, and so on. Like this: “As if sound had frozen to death and the aurora danced above its grave.” He uses some archaic words like “ere” and “twain” and “fey” and “weird” and some old syntax, as in “bitter was the night,” and “I like not this rede.” Throughout, all sorts of alliteration and consonance. He even ascends to pseudo-Anglo-Saxon verse for intense moments as when Skafloc improvises poetry on the spur of the moment to express his love for Freda or his awe at stormy seas or his appreciation of a horrible battle. Both Tolkien and Anderson were inspired by Norse mythology and the Edda, but with different effects and aims and results. Anderson retained the grim fated hate filled feuding and god manipulating side of that source material, while Tolkien (in LOTR) wedded it to his Christian eucatastrophic consolation, removing all appearance of god or gods from LOTR, but leaving them (or God) behind the scenes. Anyway, there’s nothing in Tolkien like the troll princess Gora’s mad ramblings as she’s about to be raped to make a changeling: "The world is flesh dissolving off a dead skull. . . . Birth is but the breeding of maggots in the crumbling flesh. Already the skull's teeth leer forth, and black crows have left its eye-sockets empty. Soon a barren wind will blow through its bare white bones." Audiobook reader Bronson Pinchot relishes reading such lines, rampaging along the boundary between enhancing an appalling and exciting story and overdramatizing it. View all my reviews
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