FULL AUDIO
https://hobgoodfellowe.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/OOC-Some-fantasy-poetry.mp3
It seems that a question that frequently comes up is: can anyone recommend some good pre-Tolkien fantasy?
When this question arises, the usual suspects are then wheeled out. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros, or anything by Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Mervyn Peake or Lord Dunsany. Usually Poul Anderson, Hope Mirrlees, Fritz Leiber and Clark Ashton Smith get a mention too.
I thought it might be an interesting exercise to read and discuss some pre-Tolkien fantasy writers that don’t get mentioned as often. In particular, I thought I might focus on some out of copyright short stories. The plan is to record the short story as an audio file, then discuss it. But, for my first outing, I thought I’d start with something a bit different: poetry.
And… I’ve probably lost about half of you.
Anyway. For those who remain. I’ve selected five poems. I considered others, including works by William Blake and William Morris, but kept coming back to these. My criteria was: 1) short enough to listen to quickly, and 2) sufficiently fantasy-ish that the work can be at least argued to have influenced later fantasy writers. I won’t labour each discussion. Just a quick note on why I think each work is interesting and how I think it might have influenced things, even if perhaps indirectly. I’m going to start with a bit of Keats, because why not?
Here are the individual poems. I’ll paste the links below so that you can click on them as you read, if that’s your preference.
Audio for the poems:
https://hobgoodfellowe.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/La-Belle-Dame-sans-Merci-Keats.mp3
https://hobgoodfellowe.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/The-Kraken-Tennyson.mp3
https://hobgoodfellowe.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Goblin-Market.mp3
https://hobgoodfellowe.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/The-Fairies.mp3
https://hobgoodfellowe.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Jaberwocky.mp3
La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad (by John Keats)
Read: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44475/la-belle-dame-sans-merci-a-ballad
Audio: https://hobgoodfellowe.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/La-Belle-Dame-sans-Merci-Keats.mp3
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
And the harvest’s done.
I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever-dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.
I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan
I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery’s song.
She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna-dew,
And sure in language strange she said—
‘I love thee true’.
She took me to her Elfin grot,
And there she wept and sighed full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.
And there she lullèd me asleep,
And there I dreamed—Ah! woe betide!—
The latest dream I ever dreamt
On the cold hill side.
I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci
Thee hath in thrall!’
I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gapèd wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill’s side.
And this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
The perilous faerie enchantress has long been a staple of European tradition, from Arthurian stories to Spanish romances. Here, we have a beautifully imagined moment of a man ensnared. He knows that he is doomed to become one of the pale ghosts, but cannot move himself from the fairy hill.
For influence, the Beauty Without Mercy certainly echos across various fantasy works where fairies are beautiful, dangerous and powerful. I suspect that some modern urban fantasy writers may owe something to Keats, though likely via a twisted descent. The path probably runs through other authors. I’m thinking of Poul Anderson’s water nixie in Three Hearts and Three Lions, or Howard’s frost giant’s daughter. The motif is so common and so broad that it’s impossible to say how much influence Keats had with this particular poem, and how much might be simply an inheritance of folklore and tradition. In the end, this poem is possibly best viewed as a good example of a very well-trodden trope.
On a couple more specific points, I do suspect that Tolkien’s representation of elf-maids was likely influenced by the depiction here–especially the trope of meeting a fair elf-woman in the wilds, and falling immediately in love. I wonder also if the invisible rose that appears over a fairy-charmed mouth in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is an echo of the lily and the rose in this poem. Certainly, the sad, false revelry of Faerie in both Jonathan Strange and The Ladies of Grace Adieu seems to be a reverberation of Keats. Though, again, this is not a notion unique to Keats. Katherine Briggs argues quite convincingly that Faerie was traditionally viewed as a land of the dead, and its seeming revelries were fragile and false. Clark has cited Briggs’s fairy dictionary as a key influence.
The Kraken (by Alfred Lord Tennyson)
Read: https://poets.org/poem/kraken
Audio: https://hobgoodfellowe.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/The-Kraken-Tennyson.mp3
Below the thunders of the upper deep,
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides; above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages, and will lie
Battening upon huge sea worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
Okay. So who doesn’t immediately think of Lovecraft? I’m not the first to point out that Tennyson’s The Kraken feels strongly like a proto-Lovecraftian poem. As far as we know, however, there is no evidence that Lovecraft ever read The Kraken. But, given Lovecraft’s enthusiasm for poetry, and given the general popularity of Tennyson, it seems implausible that this poem didn’t cross Lovecraft’s reading list at some point.
That’s mostly it for The Kraken. The poem probably has influenced other writers too, though when it comes to slumbering sea monsters, H.P. Lovecraft himself will have had a far greater and more direct influence.
I want to move onto goblins now.
Goblin Market (by Christina Rossetti)
Read: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44996/goblin-market
Audio: https://hobgoodfellowe.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Goblin-Market.mp3
Here, I’m breaking my rule about keeping the poems short. This poem is too long to paste into the body of a post, but you can read it via the link above, or listen to it if you prefer. I’ll read out only the first stanza in the full audio of me nattering away.
Morning and evening
Maids heard the goblins cry:
“Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy:
Apples and quinces,
Lemons and oranges,
Plump unpeck’d cherries,
Melons and raspberries,
Bloom-down-cheek’d peaches,
Swart-headed mulberries,
Wild free-born cranberries,
Crab-apples, dewberries,
Pine-apples, blackberries,
Apricots, strawberries;—
All ripe together
In summer weather,—
Morns that pass by,
Fair eves that fly;
Come buy, come buy:
Our grapes fresh from the vine,
Pomegranates full and fine,
Dates and sharp bullaces,
Rare pears and greengages,
Damsons and bilberries,
Taste them and try:
Currants and gooseberries,
Bright-fire-like barberries,
Figs to fill your mouth,
Citrons from the South,
Sweet to tongue and sound to eye;
Come buy, come buy.”
I wanted to include Goblin Market because the idea of dangerous, magical goblin creatures plying a trade in strange and dangerous goods has echoed down through stories, and I suspect it is mostly due to this one poem. Lud-in-the-Mist obviously owes something to the notion of addictive and dangerous fairy fruits. Obviously, also, simply eating food in Faerie is itself a mortal danger: Chistina was working from a tradition too.
I also wonder how much the Froudian goblins of The Labyrinth owe to the shambling, animal-faced and weird goblins of the Christina Rossetti? There are perilous fairy markets in Neil Gaiman’s writing–I’m thinking in particular of The Books of Magic, and also Stardust. A fairy market appears in Hellboy at least once, if I remember right… or was that only in one of the movies? I lose track. There is something like a modernised version of a fairy market in The Rivers of London too. It’s all over the place, really. So much so, that the fairy market is now infringing at the boundaries of the cliched. However, interestingly, the theme of a dangerous fairy market doesn’t really seem to occur much in folklore, or in stories before Christina Rossetti. As far as I can determine, this one poet is more or less solely responsibly for this particular trope. That is something of an accomplishment.
It’s also worth noting that the dangers of eating fairy food in Faery-land, traditionally, don’t seem to encompass fruits specifically. It’s food more generally. And is stories where someone does eat fairy-food, it tends to be bread, or a feast, or something quite random.
The Rossetti family, incidentally, were well known eccentric intellectuals at their time. The risqué sexual elements of this poem probably owe something to a liberally minded family in which a woman felt free to write such stuff. They were a curious bunch, on the whole, the Rossettis. Christina’s brother had a pet wombat, and it is very likely that England narrowly avoided a feral wombat infestation when the wombat’s intended mate died at sea mid-transport. A wombatish goblin appears in Goblin Market, and Lewis Carroll–who we shall come back to–originally wrote a wombat into the Mad Hatter’s tea party, basing it on the Rossetti’s rather sleepy and indolent pet wombat. His publisher thought it too obscure an animal, so he changed it to a dormouse.
Enough trivia. Let’s move onto another changeling story, but this one shorter.
The Fairies (by William Allingham)
Audio: https://hobgoodfellowe.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/The-Fairies.mp3
Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren’t go a-hunting
For fear of little men;
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together;
Green jacket, red cap,
And white owl’s feather!Down along the rocky shore
Some make their home,
They live on crispy pancakes
Of yellow tide-foam;
Some in the reeds
Of the black mountain-lake,
With frogs for their watchdogs,
All night awake.High on the hill-top
The old King sits;
He is now so old and grey
He’s nigh lost his wits.
With a bridge of white mist
Columbkill he crosses,
On his stately journeys
From Slieveleague to Rosses;
Or going up with the music
On cold starry nights,
To sup with the Queen
Of the gay Northern Lights.They stole little Bridget
For seven years long;
When she came down again
Her friends were all gone.
They took her lightly back,
Between the night and morrow,
They thought that she was fast asleep,
But she was dead with sorrow.
They have kept her ever since
Deep within the lake,
On a bed of fig-leaves,
Watching till she wake.By the craggy hillside,
Through the mosses bare,
They have planted thorn trees
For my pleasure, here and there.
Is any man so daring
As dig them up in spite,
He shall find their sharpest thorns
In his bed at night.Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren’t go a-hunting
For fear of little men;
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together;
Green jacket, red cap,
And white owl’s feather!
The Fairies by William Allingham is one of the better known fantastical poems that doesn’t seem to have contributed as much to modern fantasy. It is actually very good summary of folkloric beliefs around fairies… but a lot of these beliefs don’t seem to have transitioned very fully into modern stories. And even where a particular motif has slipped through, it’s hard to know if old, lost kings in Elfland, or fairies not understanding the difference between death and sleep, or the keeping of weird frogs as guards might have started here, or there, or somewhere else. These sort of elements occur a lot, in a lot of stories. It’s worth noting that Allingham also wrote a poem about the processions of the dead (and phantoms of the soon-to-be-dead) that supposedly might be spied upon outside a churches on certain nights of the year. That poem (The Dream) isn’t as well known, as poetry goes, but it’s also a very fine little supernatural poem, and worth looking up if you like Allingham’s poetical style.
I can’t trace much to The Fairies, besides the odd snippet in the odd book–it is often quoted, especially that bit about how we daren’t going hunting. So, why did I include it? Well, it’s just a very nice poem, and getting enough into the fantastical (rather than say, the strictly folkloric) to qualify. I suspect there are influences that I’m simply unaware of. Others may be able to chime in.
And now onto the last poem I wanted to cover. I mentioned Lewis Carroll earlier, so this should be no surprise.
Jabberwocky (by Lewis Carroll)
Read: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42916/jabberwocky
Audio: https://hobgoodfellowe.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Jaberwocky.mp3
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
He took his vorpal sword in hand;
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree
And stood awhile in thought.
And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
I wanted to include Jabberwocky for several reasons. One, is that this is probably the closest we come in short fantastical poetry to an epic structure: where a hero strikes forth, confronts and overcomes something monstrous or evil, and then returns home. That the poem barely takes a minute to recite makes one wonder at the length of some modern epic works…
Ah well. I think the other thing that is important and worth noting about Jaberwocky, and maybe all of Lewis Carroll’s work, is that it has all very likely formed a pretty strong bedrock for the fantastical, dry humorous works of a British bent. By this I mean Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams and others who write in that wry tongue-in-cheek style. They are often pretending to be a bit foolish, but its all a clever trick: there’s a lot of wisdom in Pratchett and Adams both, and Carroll very much seems to be one of the original voices in that vein: the wise fool, quietly advising the reader how best to navigate a mad world. Obviously, Carroll alone did not invent this mode of humour. You can look to other authors, like Jonathan Swift, and find similar offbeat half-serious, half-foolish fantasies. But, I do think that Carroll probably did a lot to make this fantastical wise nonsense into something accessible for children. And that probably contributed a lot to its entrenchment in British culture. It probably isn’t a coincidence that members of the Monty Python crew did have a go at a film adaptation of Jaberwocky.
Curiously, I do think the same vein of fantastical wise-fool humour was evident among American writers at one point. Both Mark Twain and Frank Baum come to mind. Even Thorne Smith, perhaps? It seems to have eased off a little as a mode of humour in American writing, though, obviously it is still going strong in the UK.
So, that’s my little walk through some fantasy poetry from before Tolkien. You might have other suggestions to read, or you might think I’ve missed something important, while including something trivial.
I’ll do my best to respond to comments and thoughts you may have.
tldnr: Here’s some pre-Tolkien fantasy poetry. Some of it is fun to read and listen to, and in places it’s probably contributed to modern fantasy motifs and themes.