In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews a lyrical early novel by Patricia McKillip
Sybel, a teenage girl living all alone among the mountains, spends her days caring for a menagerie of mythical creatures, including a cat, a falcon, and a boar, until a man named Coren arrives with a baby he entrusts to her for safe-keeping. Sybel is reluctant to take the baby under her protection, but this isn’t just any baby boy: he’s the heir to the kingdom.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reads an enjoyable and high-octane fantasy from one of the genre’s most original voices
Here’s a question for you. Have you heard of the poet William Ashbless? He has his own Wikipedia page. Yet he doesn’t exist. He never has. Ashbless was the creation of two writers, Tim Powers and James Blaylock, in the 1970s when they were college students. Unimpressed by the terrible poetry being published in their school magazine, Blaylock and Powers decided to invent their own poet and submit ‘his’ work to the magazine as a joke. It was enthusiastically accepted.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews a classic fantasy novel that responds to the epic poem Beowulf
History, they say, is written by the victors. Although this isn’t universally true – there are many testaments and narratives by those who were on the losing side, or who were victim to tyrannies or empires which overran or subjugated them – it’s certainly broadly true of literature. If we think of Anglo-Saxon literature, for every ‘Battle of Maldon’ – the poem telling of the Saxons’ defeat at the hands of the Vikings in Essex in 991 – there are many examples of triumph, victory, and glory, of which Beowulf is the supreme example.
Beowulf is a fascinating poem in itself. It was effectively lost for the best part of a millennium, and it would have been lost from literary history altogether if it hadn’t been for one nineteenth-century scholar who made a copy of the single surviving manuscript, shortly before that manuscript was badly damaged in a fire.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews the pioneering fantasy novel by Poul Anderson
In 1954, a bold and exciting new work of fantasy fiction was published, influenced by Norse myth and describing a heroic quest, containing elves, giants, magic swords, enchantment, an epic battle, and plenty of singing. The novel was called The Broken Sword by the Scandinavian-American author Poul Anderson: a book which has been eclipsed by the more famous novel which appeared that year, The Lord of the Rings (or at least began to appear that year: The Fellowship of the Ring was published in 1954).
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reads the rich and rewarding planetary romances of a forgotten pulp writer
What happens if you cross the Martian adventures of Edgar Rice Burroughs with the pulp fantasy of Robert E. Howard? You get the planetary fantasies of Leigh Brackett, the underrated writer of ‘science fantasy’ who penned a number of hugely entertaining short stories and novellas set on Venus and Mars.