BAF 07 - The Young Magicans, page 1
part #7 of Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series
18-06-2024
reworking of an older PDF file
As in the notable companion volume to this work, dragons, elves, and heroes, these are tales of fantasy, of wonder, myth, glory—heroic chronicles in the tradition of the ancient legends. These are the tales by contemporary writers that prove magic has not left the world, that mysterious powers and epic deeds still hold the fascination for mankind that they did when stories were told by word-of-mouth. So the young magicians of the tide carry on the tradition in tales that charm, terrify, enchant, embolden and reassure.
For it it is true that the reading world is turning more and more to fantasy to escape the awesome realities of our world, it is equally true that man models himself on that larger-than-life figure, that Cod, or gods, that heroic knight or seductive enchantress, that being with the extra power to dare what mere mortals cannot—but whose courage is very mortal indeed. And always there is the reinforcing knowledge that it is men who weave these tales…
So here are magnificent works by Morris, Eddison, Cabell, Merritt, Dunsany, Lovecraft, Smith, Carter, Howard, de Camp, Kuttner, Vance, Lewis and finally, new poems by that magician without whom no anthology of contemporary fantasy would be complete—J. R. R. Tolkien.
Other Lin Carter titles
TOLKIEN: A LOOK BEHIND THE LORD OF THE RINGS
DRAGONS, ELVES, AND HEROES (Ed.)
Also available from Ballantine Books.
Edited, with an Introduction and Notes by Lin Carter
BALLANTINE BOOKS • NEW YORK
Copyright © 1969 by Lin Carter
The Maze of Maal Dweb, by Clark Ashton Smith, originally published as “The Maze of The Enchanter” in The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies (Auburn, Cal.: Privately Published, 1933) and copyright 1933 by Clark Ashton Smith; also appeared in Weird Tales for October, 1938, copyright 1938 by the Popular Fiction Publishing Company; and in Lost Worlds (Sauk City,
Wis.:Arkkam House, 1944), copyright 1944 by Clark Ashton Smith. Reprinted by permission of Arkham House. through the dragon glass, by A. Merritt, which originally appeared in All Story Weekly for November 24,1917, is from The Fox Woman & Other Stories (New York: Avon Publishing Company, Inc., 1949), copyright 1917, 1945 by Eleanor H.
Merritt. Reprinted by permission of Brandt & Brandt. the valley of the worm, by Robert E. Howard, which originally appeared in Weird Tales for February, 1934, copyright 1934 by the Popular Fiction Publishing Company, is from Skull-Face and Others (Sauk City, Wis.: Arkham House, 1946), copyright 1946 by August Derleth. Reprinted by permission of Glenn Lord, agent for the estate of Robert B. Howard. heldendämmerung, by L. Sprague de Camp, originally appeared in Amra, vol. 2, no. 29; copyright © 1964 by L. Sprague de Camp. Reprinted by permission of L. Sprague de Camp. cursed be the city, by Henry Kuttner, which originally appeared in Strange Stories for April, 1939, copyright © 1939, 1966 by Henry Kuttner, is reprinted by permission of the Harold Matson Co., Inc.ka the appalling, by L. Sprague de Camp, was originally published in Fantastic Universe Science Fiction for August, 1958; copyright © 1958 by King-Size Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of L. Sprague de Camp. turjan of miir, by Jack Vance, was originally published in The Dying Earth (New York: Hillman Periodicals, 1950); copyright © 1950 by Jack Vance; reprinted with the permission of the author and his agents, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc., 580 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York, 10036. narnian suite, by C. S. Lewis, which originally appeared in Punch for November 4,1953, is from Poems by C. S. Lewis (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1965), edited by Walter Hooper, copyright© 1964 by The Executor of the Estate of C. S. Lewis. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. once upon a time, by J.R.R. Tolkien, copyright © 1965 by the Macmillan Company; reprinted by permission of J.R.R. Tolkien. the dragon’s vist, by J.R.R. Tolkien, copyright © 1965 by the Macmillan Company; reprinted by permission of J.R.R. Tolkien.
Copyright © 1969 by Lin Carter
First Printing: October, 1969
Printed in the United States of America
BALLANTINE BOOKS. INC.
101 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10003
Cover Painting: Sheryl Slavitt
The Young Magicians is dedicated to the man who invented fantasy,
William Morris and to those living writers, his spiritual descendents, who, for one or another reason, are not represented herein:
Lloyd Alexander
Paul Anderson
Jane Gaskell
John Jakes
Fritz Leiber
Michael Moorcock, and
Andre Norton.
Contents
Introduction
Diana’s Foresters
Rapunzel
The Sword Of Welleran
In Valhalla
The Way Of Ecben
The Quest Of Iranon
The Cats Of Ulthar
The Maze Of Maal Dweb
The Whelming Of Oom
Through The Dragon Glass
The Valley Of The Worm
Heldendämmerung
Cursed Be the City
Ka the Appalling
Narnian Suite
Once Upon A Time and The Dragon’s Visit
The Dragon’s Visit
Azlon
Appendix
Introduction
Diana’s Foresters
By “Tolkienian” Fantasy, I mean stories of warfare, quest or adventure set in imaginary worlds or lands or ages of the author’s own invention: worlds where magic really works and the gods are real. Which means: stories more or less similar in style, mood and setting to J. R. R. Tolkien’s magnificent fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings.
Tolkien’s book is a masterprice of disciplined imagination, and the greatest wonder-tale of our time, but it is far from being unique. There are many such stories, and at one time they were very widely popular. Today, reading tastes have turned more to the story of social or psychological realism set in modem scenery, and this change has pushed the wonder-tale aside, relegating many of our finest traditional adult fantasies to the dustier and less-frequented back shelves of your public library.
But such tales have always been with us. They go back to the very dawn of literature itself. The earliest stories known are adventure fantasies laid in more-or-less imaginary settings, as a glance at the Odyssey or the Gilgamesh Epic or the pages of Herodotus and Pliny will prove. Man has always loved tales of marvel and mystery in the glamorous scenery of curious, far-off lands—not so much because he is a credulous animal (although he is that), but simply because it is part of the nature of man to have an appetite for Marvels.
It is strange, and more than a trifle sad, that some people simply cannot understand or sympathize with our taste for such tales. Respected literary critics and distinguished novelists and otherwise intelligent educators tend to look askance at such reading-matter. The man who lives next door—perhaps even your wife—is amused and more than a little contemptuous to find you reading such a book as this one. To them it seems childish for a grown man of intelligence and intellectual curiosity to want to read about dragons, knights, witches and magic rings. They call such stories “fairy-tales”—as if the term of itself carried a derogatory connotation!—and seem to be infuriated that an adult could waste his time with such stuff. After all, they argue, everyone knows dragons are not real, there are no knights or witches these days and magic rings do not work.
It is almost impossible to argue with such a point of view. People who do not themselves read or enjoy fantasy have no conception of why we read it or of the kind of enjoyment we derive from it. But the next time you suffer die indignity of such a put-down, you might try defending your reading taste with this line of reasoning:
We read fantasy not so much to escape from life (that is one of their labels, “escapist reading”), but to enlarge our spectrum of life-experience, to enrich it and to extend the range of our experience into regions we can never visit in the flesh. For fantasy is not all airy-fairy nonsense, it can be deadly serious and deeply meaningful. Of course it is true that dragons do not exist (alas!): but the Dragon is not just a king-sized crocodile to us—it is a hieroglyph of the imagination, and it symbolizes the terror and beauty and awe of that side of nature we call The Destroyer. And of course there are no more real witches—there probably never were, at least not the bent, malefic crones of the Brothers Grimm—but Evil is real enough, and all too common, and we learn and savor something of its nature through the figure of the
Witch. And perhaps there are no more real knights, no pure and noble heroes of selflessness and strength. But heroism and nobility and unselfish courage do exist, and it is good to be reminded of the fact through so glittering and romantic a symbol. And as for magic talismans, I thank whatever gods may be that the world is still rich in Magic. I own such a talisman myself. It is a little ceramic figure of a dog the size of your thumbnail. It is only a dime-store jimcrack, but I would not sell it for a hundred times its value. I picked it up in my backyard when I was about five years old: I found it on the afternoon I came running home, filled with the thrilling news that on that day I had learned how to spell cat and dog. To me, that worthless little figure is a magic key. I associate it with the opening-up of the most enchanted world I know—the world of books. For me, the chipped little china dog is embued with glowing and wondrous associations. And that is Magic! So in the reading of fantasy we deepen and enrich our life-experience. For we are dealing, not with imaginary things which do no
By the forging of Gram cold iron was revealed; by the making of Pegasus horses were ennobled; in the Trees of the Sun and Moon root and stock, flower and fruit are manifested in glory.
Beyond the fact that fantasy deals meaningfully with the great archetypes of human experience, there is also the lure and luster of the far-off, the remote, the little-known. Possibly the most magical and evocative phrase in the English language is
Over the hills and far away,
and this is not merely my own opinion, but the judgement of literature. The mere speaking-aloud of those six words sets a person dreaming: if it were not so, it would not have been used by poet after poet after poet. No one knows the forgotten genius who first coined this haunting phrase, but you will find it in the nursery-rhyme “Tom, Tom, the Pipe/s Son.” And in the works of the 17th Century poet Thomas D’Urfey; and in The Beggar’s Opera; and in a poem of Chesterton; and a poem called ’The Hills of Ruel” by Fiona Macleod; and even (for that matter) in one of my own verses.
Man has always delighted in things fabulous and faraway. From the beginning, man saw himself as Homo viator, Man the Voyager, and the most familiar symbol for man’s life is that of the Journey: the adventure through a world filled with shadowy perils and wonders, on the road that stretches between those twin portals of the Unknown we call Birth and Death.
The temptation to stray from that path whereon we all tread, to turn aside for a time, to go at right angles to Reality, as it were, has proved irresistible to a very large number of the world’s authors.
Early writers did not find it necessary to invent imaginary worlds, because the world itself was still largely unknown, unexplored, unmapped. The forgotten storytellers of Grimm’s Märchen did not have to go far afield to find a fitting home for their ogres and witches and enchanted princesses: the forest that lay, thick and dark and mysterious, just beyond the next farm would do. Homer, who sang for a seagoing people, did not have to venture outside the world to the Circumambient Main, the world-encircling Ocean River, for his fabulous locales: only a few days journey by sea from Troy was far enough away to be the location of Circe’s isle of Aeaea or Calypso’s Ogygia, or the country of the Cyclops. Chretien and the other Arthurian romancers were mostly Frenchmen writing about an ancient and mythological Britain, so there was no need to create a new geography for Camelot the City of Marvel.
But by the 17th and 18th Centuries, it was beginning to get difficult to write wonder-tales because we knew much more about the real world, and were finding out more all the time. Voltaire had to go to America for a site remote enough from everyday experience to serve as the locale of Candide’s El Dorado. And the fabulous Kingdom of Prester John got shoved off the map frequently. First it was supposed to be in India; then, when we got to know quite a bit about India, tale-tellers located it on the shadowy borders of Cathay; finally it ended up in the depths of Africa.
And by the 19th Century, things really got tough for the tellers of fantastic tales. That is why such stories from that period seem dated when we read them today. Even the best of them: it is hard, even when reading so splendid a romance as H. Rider Haggard’s She or King Solomon’s Mines, to retain the suspension of disbelief necessary to the enjoyment of such tales, because we know that the site of the Lost City of Kôr is now the scene of a Mau Mau uprising, and that the country where Allan Quatermain discovered Solomon’s lost diamond mines is now bidding for membership in the United Nations.
The authors of the wonder-tale solved this problem in three ways. They turned to the remote past and wrote stories laid in the Lost Continent of Atlantis. Or they invented science fiction and found a fertile field for Marvels on the dead sea-bottoms of Mars or the mysterious caverns within the Moon, or on a planet circling a remote star. Or they invented the purely imaginary world for their settings. And, in so doing, laid the foundations of the tradition whereof The Lord of the Rings is but the most recent, and probably the finest, example.
•
The first writer to do this with any particular degree of success in recent fiction was William Morris. His misty, Medieval worldscapes were swiftly followed by Lord Dunsany s little kingdoms “at the edge of the world” or, at least, “beyond the Lands We Know.” And by other experiments in neogeography from the hands of such writers as Eddison, Cabell, Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard, and many more—most of whom are represented herein.
Of course, many writers toyed with the pleasures of world-making before William Morris arrived on the scene, and we need not go all the way back to Homer and the Gilgamesh-‘poet to find them. When Plato soberly recorded the history of Atlantis and placed it in the shadowy seas beyond the Pillars of Hercules, he was world-making. So was Scheherezade (that most gifted storyteller of them all), when she dispatched Sindbad to the isle of Kasil, the Valley of Diamonds, or the country where the Roc builds its colossal nest.
But the history of literature is a complex overlapping pattern at best. There were lost cities in literature before She, tales of terror before The Castle of Otranto, and stories of mystery and detection before Poe*—but we measure the beginnings of a new literary tradition, usually, from the author who really makes an impact with his innovation, and who starts a trend. Hence we consider that the heroic fantasy laid in an imaginary world really begins with The Wood Beyond the World by William Morris, which was first published on May 11,1895.
* Hamlet is a murder-mystery, for instance. So is Oedipus Rex,
for that matter
This anthology is devoted to those fantasy writers in this genre who derive from the Morris tradition. A companion volume entitled Dragons, Elves, and Heroes (published by Ballantine Books simultaneously with this book) presents the best examples I can find of the same sort of thing, but done by writers who lived before Morris. In the main, this companion anthology draws from ancient epic and saga literature—Beowulf, the Kalevala, the Volsunga Saga—or from mythological texts such as the Welsh Mabinogion, the Persian Shah Namah, or the Icelandic Elder Edda. A reading of both anthologies will, I hope, give you a good understanding of just what has been done in this field of the imaginary-world fantasy up to our time.
Each selection is prefaced with a brief note on the author’s life and work, and for the convenience of interested novices who have little familiarity with this kind of story, I have appended a selected bibliography of other books by the writers herein included or referred to: for the sake of convenience, I have listed only those titles currently available in paperback.
It is heartening to realize that not all of these writers belong to the dead past. Of the fourteen authors represented here, four are still alive and still working in the genre. And, while for one or another reason I have not been able to include a specimen of their work in this anthology, there are many other writers now working in the Morris/Dunsany/Eddison/Tolkien tradition: writers like Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson and John Jakes here in America, and British authors such as Jane Gaskell and Michael Moorcock, whose recent contributions to the genre have been intelligent, imaginative and important.
Those of us who write this kind of fantasy are still few: but our numbers increase. Nor need we, I think, be ashamed of our calling. Shakespeare had something to say on this; it is relevant to our art, although he really meant it to be applied in another context. Do you recall Falstaff’s words in the First Part of King Henry TV, Act I, Scene 2—?
