Poul Anderson here reworks Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), although without the humour, and replacing Twain's satirical critique of the horrors of modern war with a reactionary valorisation of the heroic soldier and the Just War. Holger Carlsen a member of the Danish resistance fighting the German occupation of his country, tangles with strange Nazi technology in a battle at Elsinore (‘Hamlet’s home town’ the novel tells, in case we didn’t know) and finds himself transported to a parallel universe, a medievalised European realm. Carlsen must resume his combat on a more existentially prime level, as the forces of ‘Law’ battle the forces of ‘Chaos’—Anderson, who published the first short-story version of the novel in 1953, may claim precedence for establishing this as a concept of Fantasy, something Michael Moorcock, Sword and Sorcery more generally and especially ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ and other RPGs wholeheartedly took on.
Kitted-up as a chivalric knight, and accompanied by the dwarf Hugi and Alianora, a swan maiden, Holger goes on a series of peripatetic adventures and quests, aiming at once at victory in the fantasy war, to win the heart of the beautiful Alionara and to find a way home to ‘our’ world. The amalgam of tough-guy adventure narrative and medievalised cod-archaisms, especially of dialogue, makes for a sometimes tonally dissonant blend, and the latter in particular is not beyond mere ridiculousness:
“‘Tis Alianora, the swan-may.” Beer gurgled down the dwarf’s throat. “Hither and yon she flits throughout the wood and e’en into the Middle World sometimes, and the dwellers tell her their gossip. For she’s a dear friend to us. Aaaaah!” [29]The storytelling logic here is pastiche: the novel is perfectly upfront about recycling the Matter of France, Arthurian romance, Norse mythology, witchcraft—in this realm, with indiscriminate panache, all these myths and legends are ‘real’, as are the character of Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Eventually Holger comes to understand the intertextual primacy of Twain's book as the original upon which his own adventures are merely a midrash, and is able, by ‘taking a crib’ from the book, ‘from literature—the Connecticut Yankee’ [150], to triumph. Whether the explicit embracing of this notion, of Fantasy as a palimpsest of jumbled-together prior Fantasy, remits the novel from the pitfalls of mere cliché is the question. We could say it’s playful, a game of spot-the-source (Mirkwood is mentioned, as are Wargs—though with madcap adulteration of the Tolkienian source: ‘“there in Mirkwood do the Pharisee lairds hunt griffin and manticore,” whispered Hugi’ [44]). Then again, we might say its plagiaristic, tired and tiresome. Hugi, meeting Holger for the first time (after expressing himself indistinctly in what Anderson perhaps believed was attractively flavoursome Scots dialect: “oh, Ay git aroon, Ay do, we-un bin a-drayvin’ a new shaft thisaboots”) announces: “Thar’s gold in them thar hills.” [25]. Is this funny? Lame? It's not just stylistic. The gender politics of the novel are clichéd in a more substantively malign manner:
Holger decided he had troubles enough without a hysterical female on his hands. He pulled her around, shook her, and said between his teeth, “I have nothing to do with this. Hear? Now will you come along like a grown human being, or must I drag you?” [75]Alianora’s response? ‘She gulped, stared at him with wide wet eyes, and dropped her lashes. He noticed how long they were. “I'll come wi’ ye,” she said meekly.’ Those lashes are a major part of what perhaps we might call Alianora’s ‘characterisation’. They are what Holger first notices about her:
She approached shyly, fluttering long sooty lashes. Her only garment was a brief tunic, sleeveless and form-fitting, that seemed to be woven of white feathers; her bare feet were soundless in the grass. “Welcome,” she said, in her soft contralto. “Sir Knight, sith ye be a friend to my friend.” [30]And so on, passim (“please,” purred Alianora. She waved her lashes at him’ [117]). The novel ends as she finally declares her feelings (“I love ye, Holger”), although this moment is swamped, rather, by the fact that this is the precise time Holger finally understands who he is—a version of what Moorcock would later call ‘The Eternal Champion’—and so rides off into the dawn, abandoning her:
Holger Danske, whom the old French chronicles know as Ogier le Danois, mounted into the saddle. And this was the prince of Denmark who in his cradle was given strength and luck and love by such of Faerie as wish men well. He it was who came to serve Carl the Great and rose to be among the finest of his knights, the defender of Christendie and mankind. He it was who smote Carahue of Mauretania in battle, and became his friend, and wandered far with him. He it was whom Morgan le Fay held dear; and when he grew old, she bore him to Avalon and gave him back his youth. There he dwelt until the paynim again menaced France, a hundred years later, and thence he sallied forth to conquer them anew. Then in the hour of his triumph he was carried away from mortal men. [178]In an epilogue we learn that Holger is back in our world—sequels by Anderson and other writers detail his quest to return again to Alianora—and that he has converted to Catholicism. This final touch speaks, I suppose, to what Charles Taylor might call a ‘de-buffering’ of Holger’s sensibility: a return to the old religion and the enchanted world which it frames. I’m not convinced the novel, though it is lively, readable, full of incident—actually communicates this sense. There’s something pat, a strange combination of frantic and stale, about the texture. But that may just be my long, silky, waving lashes speaking.
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