"Found Them? In Mercia?"

Not a good place to go looking for coconuts.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail was released the summer between my high school graduation and my freshman year of college, which, of course, was perfect timing. When I moved into my freshman dorm the last week of August, 1975, everyone on the floor was quoting the film. One guy had a hand-lettered sign on his door that said, Stop! Who passes this door must answer me these questions three, ere the other side he see...

I wasn't terribly surprised by any of this. I thought it was wonderful. I wonder if I would have been surprised in 1975 had anyone told me the film would still be frequently quoted in 2015. And, since I already outed myself as one who played Dungeons & Dragons, I might as well go ahead and acknowledge the well-known fact that when playing Dungeons & Dragons, it is practically obligatory to quote extensively from that film.

• "He's not at all well."
• "Run away! Run away!"
• "Perhaps it will help to confuse it if we run away some more."
• "There are some who call me...Tim."

So, in choosing which of the multiple Anglo-Saxon kingdoms to focus on  for The Sorcerer's Apprentice, I am immediately drawn to Mercia, the kingdom mentioned in the opening scene of the film, when King Arthur and his trusty servant, Patsy, are riding through the countryside on pretend horses while Patsy imitates the sound of horses' hooves by clacking two coconut half-shells together. They meet a stranger who confronts them with this fact and asks where they got coconut shells. When Arthur replies, "We found them," the stranger's reaction is the line I am using as the title of this post.

If that's not a good enough reason, how about this one: the names of the other major kingdoms: Wessex, Essex, Sussex, East Anglia, Northumbria, Kent--the so-called Heptarchy--are all pretty familiar today. Here in the USA, one can find many places named Essex, for instance. Sixteen, according to Wikipedia. There are 15 towns and six counties named Kent in the US. My home state of Pennsylvania has a Northumberland County, Northumberland being just a more Anglo-Saxony way of saying Northumbria. But there doesn't seem to be anyplace in our world called Mercia, other than the original. Even the original Mercia is today more often referred to as the "Midlands."

So it sounds a little more exotic than the others, at least to my ear, and less well used, though it has the advantages of being short and simple and easy to pronounce.

And there's a Tolkien connection. Tolkien grew up in Warwickshire, in Mercia. He loved Warwickshire. Several locations in Middle Earth are likely based on real places in Warwickshire. And back when Tolkien was trying to map his legendarium onto the real-world map of Europe (something quite like what I would have done), he put Tirion, the refuge of the elves, on Warwick.

So those are reasons enough to want to tell a story set in Mercia. But a have an even better one. A really interesting bit of Mercian history that sounds perfect for the starting point of my novel. More about that next time.

The Anglo-Saxons

The major Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Britain, ca. 600. Source.

I don't know whether they teach high-school history any better today than they did in my day, but I got a dime-store version of the fall of the Roman Empire that went something like this:

There was a great empire. It was pagan at first, and persecuted Christians. Later it became Christian. Outside the empire were pagan barbarians. The empire kept the barbarians at bay and prospered. Eventually, it couldn't keep them out anymore and they came in. They killed and destroyed because, being pagan, they didn't know or care that you aren't supposed to kill people, and being barbarian, they didn't know or care that civilization is a good thing. So they torched the place. Then there were Dark Ages.

It wasn't until much later in life that I came to understand how simplistic this version is. Mike Duncan's History of Rome podcast and Robin Pearson's History of Byzantium podcast were helpful to me in this regard.

But then I realized that the simplistic narrative is pretty close to the truth if you look specifically at Britain. Maybe we English-speaking people are apt to take a Britanno-centric view of the Fall of Rome.

The Anglo-Saxons, at least in the first 150 years or so after their arrival in Britain, really weren't interested in civilization. We know very little about this period, because the Anglo-Saxons left very little in the way of written records. But this is good for my purposes. If my novel is set during this period, there are plenty of gaps in the historical record into which I can weave my story. I can choose historical kingdoms, and maybe even use known historical figures for some of my characters, since so little is known about their lives.

These people truly were interested in little more than war and plunder. Going out and fighting other people (including other Anglo-Saxons) just to steal their stuff seems to have been both their principal economic activity and their principal form of recreation. Anglo-Saxon kings and warriors of this period seem to fall into the gray area between "the government" and "a criminal gang shaking down the peasants for protection money." With all due respect to J.R.R. Tolkien, who loved these guys...really?

I guess I have already outed myself as a Star Trek geek, so let me just say that my thumbnail image of the Anglo-Saxons is that they are Klingons. That is, a warrior people who think fighting battles and drunkenly toasting each other afterward is what life is all about. Star Trek's Klingons are more complicated than that, but that's an adequate first approximation. Whenever I have a question about Anglo-Saxon culture, I'll just ask myself, "What would Kahless do?"

I feel pretty good about this. I have a handle on the setting now. A general "where" and "when." Next I need a more specific "where" and "when."

Today's word count is 55,167. Yes, I know. Slightly less than yesterday's. Some of the word count is notes, which I delete when I don't need them anymore. Sometimes I revise and condense stuff.

J.R.R. Tolkien, Corey Olsen, and Me

I began reading J.R.R. Tolkien when Tolkien was still alive.

I read The Hobbit when I was 11 or 12, I don't exactly remember. (Fun fact: I have been a Star Trek fan even longer; I saw the first episode of Star Trek the first night it was broadcast. And the first time I heard the name Bilbo Baggins was when Leonard Nimoy sang "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins." At the time, I had no idea the song was a reference to a book; I thought it was a standalone story song, like "Puff, The Magic Dragon.") I read The Lord of the Rings in high school, and re-read it once a year for many years after that.

There was no such thing as a "Fantasy" section in the bookstore back then. Tolkien's four books (that's all there were at the time) were found in the "Science Fiction" section of the bookstore, as, more often than not, was I. (Usually they stuck it all the way in the back of the bookstore.)

Like many younger Tolkien fans of the time, I read and re-read the books and asked "What's next?" The only "next" at that time was Dungeons & Dragons, the tabletop roleplaying game. If you couldn't find more fantasy to read, the next best bet was to improvise your own.

I tried to read The Silmarillion when it was first published, but couldn't get through it. After a while, there was more fantasy appearing in the bookstore, and by the 1980's, dedicated "Fantasy" shelves began to appear.

I tried writing a fantasy story for the first time when I was in college. It was set in the southwestern United States (a place I have never visited), in an alternate universe where magic worked and the southwestern US was organized as a medieval feudal society, complete with royalty and earls and barons, for reasons I don't believe I explained in the story, or understood myself. The hero was on a quest to rescue a princess from a dragon, somewhere out in the desert.

Twenty-five years ago, a wrote a whole novel set in an alternate England during the reign of Henry VIII, in which magic works and is controlled by the Catholic Church, (which gives the Reformation a whole new dimension!).

I got tired of re-reading those four books after a while, but, like a lot of older Tolkien fans, my interest in The Lord of the Rings was rekindled by Peter Jackson's film version.

In 2010, I started listening to the podcast of Corey Olsen, the Tolkien Professor. I have been listening ever since. I have attended a couple of Corey's Mythmoot conferences, and have been fortunate enough to spend some time one-on-one with the professor, discussing our mutual interest in Tolkien's works.

Thanks to Corey Olsen, I finally got through The Silmarillion. Corey introduced me to Tolkien's essay "On Fairie Stories," which I sure wish someone had pointed me to before I wrote that Arizona story. Or the other fantasy stories I tried to write since then. It is both Tolkien's apology for fantasy fiction, as well as an analysis of what fantasy is and how and why it works.

Corey also taught me to appreciate Tolkien's use of language, and, in particular, his great love of English words with Anglo-Saxon roots and how he uses them to give Middle Earth its feel. I wish I had learned all this a long time ago, too.

So when I began to write The Sorcerer's Apprentice, I wanted to apply this new understanding of fantasy I had gotten from Corey Olsen to this novel, and I wanted--if this is not too presumptuous--to pay tribute to J.R.R. Tolkien. Not that Tolkien needs my tribute, or that no other fantasy writer ever tried to pay tribute to him, but still, I want to do it anyway.

As you might have guessed from my descriptions of my Arizona story and my English Reformation novel, I am fond of writing fantasy stories set in some variation of the real world, as opposed to making up a world out of whole cloth, as Tolkien did. I think it's fun to create a world that's like ours, but different. And I want to do it again.

A fitting tribute to Tolkien, as well as a great device for deploying my new understanding of Anglo-Saxon and its role in Tolkien's writing, would be to set The Sorcerer's Apprentice in Anglo-Saxon England. Besides the language, Tolkien was a great lover of Anglo-Saxon culture and history, and so much of modern fantasy owes an often-unacknowledged debt to Anglo-Saxon England. (Dragonslayer, for example, is set in an imagined land that looks an awful lot like Anglo-Saxon England.)

But this book isn't going to use indirect or unacknowledged borrowings from the Anglo-Saxons. It's going to be explicitly Anglo-Saxon.

That's a major decision, and now that it's been made, it's likely going to take several more blog posts to work through the consequences.

Today's word count is 55,171.

In Praise of Dragonslayer

I've always been fond of the 1981 film Dragonslayer, which came out when I was in graduate school. It is, as far as I can remember, the first mature high fantasy motion picture Hollywood ever released, and with an original story, to boot (although it owes something to the tale of St. George and the Dragon). I could write a lengthy essay about this film, but I'll stick to talking about how it relates to The Sorcerer's Apprentice.

When I had my April shower vision, I saw the young man in the tower as a sorcerer's apprentice. My mind went at once to this film. The film follows the adventures of young Galen (Peter MacNicol), apprentice to  the sorcerer Ulrich (Ralph Richardson). The film opens with a party of travelers arriving at Ulrich's secluded keep to ask his help in slaying a dragon. I wanted my novel to begin the same way. Our apprentice is looking out a window at the top of a keep, pondering his life, when a band of men comes into view in the distance, headed for the keep. They will ask the sorcerer to aid them on a quest, our apprentice will come along, and his life will dramatically change.

The sorcerer Ulrich in the film lives alone, apart from his apprentice Galen and a servant, Hodge. Hodge (Sydney Bromley) is as old as Ulrich, apparently (they both have gray hair), but I find it borderline implausible that a "keep" could be maintained (and defended!) by two old men and an apprentice. I like the idea of keeping the staff at the keep few in number, though, especially if the sorcerer and his apprentice are soon leaving on a quest. Why spend a lot of my time (and the reader's!) developing a set of characters to inhabit a keep we'll soon be leaving?

So, one servant it is. But a skinny old man like Hodge doesn't seem up to the job, so my sorcerer's servant will be a teenage boy, ill-educated, unlike our apprentice, but strong and energetic, more plausibly able to keep up with all the work that needs to be done. Probably a child of misfortune, someone who ended up at the keep because he had nowhere else to go and the sorcerer took pity on him. Good enough of a character sketch for someone who's only going to be appearing in a few scenes, right?

That's what I thought. It turned out the servant had other ideas. But that's a tale for another blog post.

If you are at all interested in fantasy fiction, you must see Dragonslayer. George R.R. Martin was fully correct when he said that the dragon in the film, Vermithrax Perjorative, is not only one of the best cinematic dragons ever, but has the coolest name.

 As of today, the word count is 54,996.

Beginning in the Middle

So, it's just after Christmas, 2015, as I write this. I was taking a shower one day last April, when an idea came to me for a novel, and with it a first line:

From a window atop a lonely tower, perched on a lonely rock at the edge of a lonely kingdom, a lonely man looked out upon a lonely land.

 There was more to it than that first line. I had an idea of who the man was. (He was the apprentice to a sorcerer.) I had an idea of what is missing in his life, even though at the beginning, he himself doesn't know. And I had an idea for an adventure he could go on in which he would find that thing which he was missing.

I also had another novel, that I was already working on. Over the next months, I began working on The Sorcerer's Apprentice (working title; maybe I should change it) As I went along, I got so caught up on it that the other project got set aside. I can't help it. I am so excited about The Sorcerer's Apprentice that I can't wait to find out all that happens and where the story goes.

As of today, my word count is 54,648, and the adventure has scarcely begun.

I have been doing a lot of research and reading. I've learned a lot. And my poor wife has had to listen to me talk about everything I have learned or discovered or created in the past seven months. Finally, I realized that what I should be doing is sharing all this out on the internet in the form of a blog, so that anyone who is interested can read what I'm doing and follow along on my exploration of this story.

Sadly, I didn't think of this seven months ago. It took until now. But it's going to be quite some time yet before the book(s) is/are ready, so there's plenty of journey still ahead. And if I can't think of anything new to blog about on a given day, I can always go back and tell you a story about something that I already discovered that went into the 54,648 words I already wrote.

So there's the project, there's the novel(s) and there's the opening line. How do you like it so far?