Poul Anderson's Broken Sword
[BONUS] Your weird is upon you...
Poul Anderson. The Broken Sword (1954). Open Road, 2014. 229 pp.
Nineteen-fifty-four. ‘Twas in the summer of this year that Tolkien published The Lord of the Rings.
But did you know there was another novel of epic fantasy that year, by an American of Danish extraction who studied physics at the University of Minnesota? This too was a tale of aristocratic warriors of the iron age, a fey world of elves, dwarfs, and giants. And an infamous blade of evil’s bane, now broken, must be restored to win a new war against evil.
It was early in his career as a pulp writer, but Poul Anderson whipped up a crackling narrative that — its most visible concession to science fiction — instead of building a secondary world like Middle Earth, takes place definitely on our planet. The gods and demons of the world’s cultures all literally and simultaneously exit: from the Norse Aesir to “the White Christ.”
The implications of this situation are effortlessly taken to their logical conclusion within the plot. Speaking of, as opposed to Tolkien’s scrupulous rendition of a military campaign, Anderson uses familiar tropes to build a handy adventure plot: a quest in the realm of frost giants to mend the broken sword, and grand medieval battles.
Swords and axes rose and fell and rose streaming again, metal cried out and sundered, a rain of spears and arrows clouded the sky — horses screamed and trampled the rolling corpses under their hoofs — warriors shouted and fought and sank to earth.
At the archetypal core is a tragic Sigfried-Brunhilde love story of incest. In this versions their names are Skafloc and Freda.
Best of all is the increasing moodiness, as the characters become more war-weary, more grief-stricken, hastened to face up to their fates. This is dark, grubby, squelching fantasy, laden with a sinister weird tales energy.
There is much else to tell, of the dragon and his gold hoard, of the burning mountain and the bottomless chasm and the quern of the elemental giantesses. It should be told of their fishing in the river that ran from hell, and of what they caught there. The story of the everlasting battle and of the witch in Iron Forest and of the song they once heard the aurora hissing to itself in the secret night —
If one had ever searched for a perfect halfway point between Robert E. Howard and postwar epic fantasy, it’s right here. And if contemporary science fiction and fantasy had even a granule of the zest, excitement, and quick polish of Anderson’s prose, we wouldn’t have a problem!
