Guest Post Series: Dennis Wilson Wise, "The New Poets of Rum-Ram-Ruf: Troubles in SF Poetry—Part III"

The excellent series of guest-posts from Dennis Wilson Wise, of which the most recent is here, continues looking at contemporary artists working with alliterative verse. Editorial intrusion remains minimal, mostly inserting relevant links.

Check back for the next post in the series soon!

---

[Last week in Part II of “Troubles in SF Poetry,” I discussed poems by Marcie Lynn Tentchoff and Math Jones. Here in Part III, we now discuss Rosemary Kirstein’s Steerswoman series for how it incorporates alliterative poetry into a science-fictional setting.]

𝔎irstein is one of those hidden gems of a writer who has flown, as sometimes happens, unfortunately, under the radar. For myself, I discovered her thanks to Paul Deane, but in addition to the alliterative verse in Kirstein’s Steerswoman series (1989-2004), she also published with Del Rey Books…a major second research interest of mine.

What to say about Del Rey? Well, if you—like me—grew up reading fantasy in the 1980s or 1990s, chances are that more than a few Del Rey titles lined your home bookshelves. These books were everywhere. Del Rey published big-name SF authors like Clarke, Heinlein, and Asimov, not to mention Alan Dean Foster’s ghostwritten novelization for Star Wars. And it was Del Rey who basically turned fantasy into a mass-market category of fiction. Through authors like Terry Brooks, David Eddings, and Stephen R. Donaldson (my own personal favorite,), they launched an entire generation of new fantasy readers.

That’s why, when some critics sneer about “commercial fantasy” or “Tolkien clones” between 1977 and 1990, I prefer to invoke, more simply, the “Del Rey Era”—although “Del Rey Hegemony” has a nice ring about it, too. During those fourteen years, Del Rey had more titles reach a Publisher’s Weekly or New York Times bestseller list than every other SFF publisher…combined.

The architects of this little empire were Judy-Lynn and Lester del Rey. The former ran the SF line (and seemingly inspired awe from every author with whom she worked), and the latter, Lester, did the fantasy side of things.

That’s important, because Kirstein’s first novel arrived at the tail end of Del Rey’s hegemony. Judy-Lynn had died a few years earlier, leaving Del Rey’s SF line to Owen Lock, and Lester himself had slowed down considerably. His bosses eventually tried to force him into retirement in 1991, although Lester being Lester, he chose to quit instead. So the waning of Del Rey’s glory days perhaps explains why The Steerswoman never quite found its audience, but even so, I can detect Lester’s impact in at least one tangible way.

Before I explain, though, take a gander at this cover for the British edition of Kirstein’s first novel. Tell me, what genre do you think this is?

Image provided by Wise

Gotta be fantasy, right?

And that makes total sense. The plot is all about evil wizards trying to murder Rowan, the steerswoman, and her only ally is a sword-wielding lady barbarian named Bel…a female Conan, basically, except she’s a sidekick and smells nicer (presumably).

Fantasy, then, all the way. Although this cover doesn’t depict Bel herself, the steerswoman Rowan is a smart, stylishly becloaked young woman standing in a shadow-filled woods laced with cobwebs. Quite mystical, quite intriguing. So if the Big Bad Wolf were suddenly to appear in this story, well, he’d better watch out, is all I’m saying.

Now check the American cover by Del Rey. Tell me if you can spot a difference. Careful, though—it’s subtle.

Image provided by Wise

Yep. Since Pan Books believed that fantasy was read mostly by women, their cover plays up Kirstein’s female protagonist, but Del Rey Books tended to gender its audience as male…heavily. Moreover, Lester himself strongly believed that fantasy readers abhorred anything that smacked of SF, whereas most SF readers didn’t mind the occasional fantasy element. Therefore every time Del Rey published a book that crossed traditional genre boundaries, they marketed it as straight SF.

That’s clearly what happened with this American edition; Del Rey even adds their special “vortex” colophon for SF titles. For all that Rowan is being chased by evil wizards in a pre-industrial society, Kirstein plants several clues that The Steerswoman is actually SF. All units of measurement are in miles or kilometers, for instance. Likewise, the Guidestars—a major plot point—are clearly just orbiting satellites. Finally, the wizards aren’t mystical magic-users. They just have access to advanced technologies unknown to the rest of Rowan’s society.

In fact, it slowly becomes apparent that Rowan’s world is an alien planet being terraformed by colonists who’ve long forgotten their origins. In that sense, Kirstein’s Steerswoman series reminds of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (1992-1996), which tackles terraforming more from a hard SF perspective. Another comparable series is N. K. Jemisin’s Hugo-Award winning Broken Earth trilogy (2015-2017), which, despite explicit references to magic in the text, I persist in thinking of as SF-coded. A major plot point for Jemisin, however, is the idea of a “missing moon,” and Rowan mentions that her world no longer has a moon, either.

So—science fiction to its bones. And readers with the Gift of Prophecy surely know where I’m going with all this: Alliterative poetry.

Here’s an example from the second book, (1992). The lady barbarian Bel is attempting to build support among her fellow Outskirters against the wizards, and uses their dominant metrical form:

Who will hear, or have the heart
To stand beside me, to stay, and strike?
Outskirters all now understand:
War will come. With weapons wielded
All as one must answer evil.
The call will come, and I shall call it.
The need will be known, by these three names—
      I am Bel, Margasdotter, Chanly.

Like Anderson in “The Scothan Queen,” Kirstein foregoes any explicit mention of SF tropes, and her metrics are highly impressionistic. Yet there’s clear alliterative patterning here, plus a caesura via mid-line punctuation in almost every line. Although this brief verse doesn’t work well as a standalone text, as prosimetrum, it adds several wonderful resonances to Kirstein’s novel’s SF themes.

For instance, whereas Marcie Lynn Tentchoff chooses to adopt—or more likely reinvent—Anderson’s device of a poetical barbarian people stealing interstellar technology, Kirstein goes in the opposite direction. Instead of an ancient medieval people catapulted into the Space Age, Kirstein has her galaxy-spanning colonists lose their technological sophistication. Although steerswomen as an institution retain a high degree of scientific rationalism, Kirstein inserts alliterative verse into her SF context by simply reversing historical progress.

Again, Kirstein plants several clues about this reversal. Bel’s alliterative poetry is obviously a big “Germanic” hint. In the Inner Lands, moreover, their major city is Wulfshaven. This name builds upon two Germanic root words, the Old English wulf (ON úlfr) and the Old English hæfen (ON hǫfn).

Coincidence? Then consider this. When the Outskirters present their lineage, as Bel does in her poem, she does so in a specifically Norse style: i.e., “Bel Margasdotter.” The menfolk do likewise. Their various patronymics include Karinson, Linson, and Kresson.

In fact, Kirstein’s Outskirters are a particularly fascinating people. In terms of terraforming, they’re something like advance scouts, destroying the alien landscape so that it might better support more Earth-friendly lifeforms in due time. They’re also heavily Germanic in the sense of being “barbarians” who are also, significantly, non-literate.

It makes no sense, after all, for a nomadic people without access to forests to develop a book culture. Hence they need oral poetry, and one seyoh or leader notes that their “true poetry” must be unrhymed, alliterative, and with a caesura in the middle.

Beyond this, though, the folk knowledge of the Outskirters contains vestiges of a once literate society. The most fascinating instance happens when Rowan is questioning a Face Person (a type of extreme Outskirter) about his people’s ancestors. He recites their names as a list, and Rowan realizes this list is in nearly perfect alphabetical order. Only one name, “Lessa,” is an exception. It appears in the m-group…but Rowan, with an intuitive leap to make any medievalist proud, quickly realizes that “Lessa” must be a shorted form of the name Melissa.

So there you have it. An excellent SF series which finds a novel, thematically appropriate way of introducing an archaic medieval meter into its far-future setting. It’s a deft variation on what Anderson and Tentchoff manage in their respective stories, but this is exactly the kind of creativity SF poets need for the Modern Revival.

Guest Post Series: Dennis Wilson Wise, "The New Poets of Rum-Ram-Ruf: Troubles in SF Poetry—Part II"

The excellent series of guest-posts from Dennis Wilson Wise, of which the most recent is here, continues looking at contemporary artists working with alliterative verse. Editorial intrusion remains minimal, mostly inserting relevant links.

Check back for the next post in the series soon!

---

[Last week in Part I of “Troubles in SF Poetry,” I discussed a poem by Poul Anderson and how he resolved the issue of creating a science-fictional context for a poem in an alliterative meter. Here in Part II, we now discuss Marcie Lynn Tentchoff’s “The Song of the Dragon-Prowed Ships,” with a brief excursion into a few lines from Math Jones’s “Lenctenlong.”]

𝔚hile researching Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival, when I first encountered “The Song of the Dragon-Prowed Ships,” I instantly knew that here was one of the most throat-catchingly good SF poems yet to appear in an alliterative meter.

Tentchoff herself is hardly new to verse-craft. Back in 2000, her long Arthurian poem, Surrendering the Blade, won Canada’s prestigious Aurora Award, but her love for all things Norse goes back even further. She’d grown up reading Poul Anderson, for instance, but at Simon Fraser University she also took classes in Middle English, Old English, and Old Norse literature…and there she learned the deft intricacies of skaldic meter, which she puts on virtuosic display in “The Song of the Dragon-Prowed Ships.”

It does rather forecast things...
Image provided by Wise.

From that title, you can probably guess our main protagonists will be Vikings, those notorious seafarers famed for their longships with dragon-headed prows, but these particular Vikings face a problem. Much like Alexander who wept because he had no more worlds to conquer, Tentchoff’s “red-grimed / reavers of doom’s grieving” have conquered nearly all the lands their terrifying longships can reach.

Yet here we encounter no half-hearted skaldic metrics such as those found in “The Scothan Queen” by Anderson. Here, Tentchoff is dróttkvætt meter’s master, and she marshals all the considerable power of that form to articulate the existential despair of her Vikings, their frustrated lust for great and dangerous deeds of glory.

As she says:

Dark-eyed, we sat drinking,
daunted by scalds’ taunting,
songs not worth the singing,
sighing for dreams dying…

More than anything else, the dróttkvætt form is best designed for praise. It excels when flattering kings, but aggressive marauding pirates need their own encomiums, too. Yet in a world where opportunities for such marauding have declined, we can readily imagine how Tentchoff’s poor, mocked Vikings are feeling quite sorry for themselves.

As is traditional.
Image provided by Wise.

Luckily, that’s when the aliens arrive.

Now, for anyone not previously aware that this is a SF poem, the sudden appearance of alien star-farers can seem as genre-jarring as From Dawn to Dusk (1996), the film that starts off as an excellent prison-break movie before inexplicably—and hilariously—turning into a gore-ridden vampire flick. Despite her suddenly materialized aliens, though, Tentchoff employs a more believable premise Poul Anderson. For example, in “Tiger by the Tail,” I can’t for the life of me figure out how any “barbarian” people can successfully steal interstellar technology. Simply using it would require vast educational and social resources the Scothani simply don’t have.

Anderson mostly punts on that problem, but Tentchoff finds something a little more workable even while borrowing his “steal alien technology” idea. As her Vikings sit at home, crying into their mead, an alien starship crash-lands into port. Other than “strange-made,” we’re offered no description of these aliens. Apparently, though, advanced technology hasn’t translated into robust physical fitness, so once Tentchoff’s bored Vikings get over their initial shock, they make quick violent work of the survivors.

A few aliens show some backbone during the fight, however, and, as a reward, instead of killing them, Tentchoff’s Vikings turn them into thralls…a perfectly normal Viking thing to do. But it’s these alien thralls who then build and staff a new starship capable of transporting the Viking victors to the stars. Thus Tentchoff ends her poem on a surprisingly upbeat note—at least if you’re a blood-thirsty reaver:

Seek we now the skypaths,
sailing till blades fail us,
raiders, star-ship riders,
red-drenched moonbeam treaders.

So if your friendly neighborhood skalds are making fun of you, the solution’s simple—capture a couple alien thralls capable of building you a few dragon-prowed ships of the interstellar variety. You’ll never need to weep for lack of worlds to conquer. The galaxy is a big place.

This little seven-stanza dróttkvætt poem is thus remarkable not only for Tentchoff’s dazzling use of skaldic meter, but also for how she combines our medieval past (Vikings) with a technological future (aliens) in a way both reasonable and that aligns thematically with her chosen form. “The Song of the Dragon-Prowed Ships” is a smart SF poem smartly handled.

At this point, I can’t resist mentioning one more excellent poem that, although not technically SF, still combines an ancient Norse past with folks leaving the cozy confines of our native planet. Although I’ll later dedicate an entire entry to Math Jones, whose “Mother’s Song” is one of the finest texts in the Modern Alliterative, his skaldic poem “Lenctenlong” deserves special praise in its own right.

Like Tentchoff, he’s writing in the dróttkvætt meter, and “Lenctenlong” praises a Yuletide present—a shield—given to him by Thorskegga Thorn, a friend. On this shield, Thorskegga has painted four scenes from Norse mythology, and the third depicts the comic tale of when Thor accidentally hooks the Midgard Serpent, Jörmungand, on a fishing trip gone awry.

The incident goes down like this. Thor and the jötun Hymir go out fishing, but Thor, not always the best of listeners (and holding a grudge again Hymir), disregards his companion’s advice by going farther and farther out to sea … where, conveniently, there are no witnesses. At any rate, Thor has baited his fishing hook with a bull’s head, and the Midgard Serpent decides to take a nibble. Determined to catch the monster at all costs, Thor then sets his feet on the ocean floor. This starts to split their boat asunder, which so terrifies poor Hymir that the jötun cuts Thor’s fishing line. According to Thorskegga’s image, Thor still manages to kill Jörmungand by splitting its head in half with Mjöllnir. Unfortunately, Thor is then so irritated by Hymir’s punk line-cutting move that he—incurable scamp that he is—pushes Hymir overboard. To his death. Ha ha. See, Norse mythology is hilarious.

What’s important about this tale for our purposes, however, is how this section of “Lenctenlong” ends. Jones writes,

…Now,
the heirs of Heimdall fare
o’er leagues with lifting steeds
to lands beyond Jörmungandr,
have e’en moored in the meres
of Mundilfari’s son.

Unless you know Norse mythology well, this passage will probably seem puzzling, but the three big references are that “heirs of Heimdall” is a kenning for mankind, “Mundilafari’s son” is a kenning for moon, and that Jörmungand—the world-encircling serpent—can also mean Earth. So just as Thor during his fishing trip has fared boldly on the world’s welkin, so someday, Math Jones hints, humanity will fare even more boldly into the lands beyond Earth, sailing on space-faring vessels to the seas of the moon—the Mare Humorum, the Mare Imbrium, and so on.

In other words, spaceflight.

Between Jones and Tentchoff, SF poetry therefore finds powerful expression through skaldic meter. Yet for a slightly different spin on how SF can meet the Modern Alliterative Revival, we must next turn to the incomparable Rosemary Kirstein.

[Here ends Part II of “Troubles in SF Poetry.” For my discussion of Kirstein in Part III, tune in next week.]

Guest Post Series: Dennis Wilson Wise, "The New Poets of Rum-Ram-Ruf: Troubles in SF Poetry—Part I"

This triumphant return of the series of guest-posts from Dennis Wilson Wise, of which the most recent is here, continues looking at contemporary artists working with alliterative verse. As before, editorial intrusion is minimal, mostly inserting relevant links.

Check back for the next post in the series soon!

---

𝔉or this entry, indulge me—I’d like to spend a moment on an alliterative poem that, at first glance, looks entirely humdrum. And at second glance too, in fact. Honestly, it’s a real snoozer of a poem. Still, if you remember, I once devoted a whole entry several months back to Poul Anderson, the second most prolific revivalist (after Tolkien) in the 20th century. Several poems from him do range between interesting and outstanding. Off the top of my head, I can name “Route Song of the Winged Folk,” “Autumn,” and his skaldic translations for the fanzine Amra.

Nonetheless, if you picked out any random poem by Anderson, I doubt most people would be impressed. One such “filler” poem is “The Scothan Queen.” This eight-liner appears in loose dróttkvætt meter, and it originated in a short story for the January 1951 issue of Planet Stories, “Tiger by the Tail,” the inaugural Dominic Flandry entry in Anderson’s Technic History series.

Source in image. Image provided by Wise.

Mr. Flandry is your prototypical dashing male pulp hero, and as an agent for the Terran Empire, he often does his best James Bond impression by wooing a new ladyfriend whenever possible. “Tiger by the Tail” is no exception. Here, Anderson’s Scothani are a barbarian tribe who had just recently stolen interstellar technology from another people, and to complete his mission, poor Flandry—always willing to take one for the team—must seduce the queen of the Scothani. (Duty, amiright?) Luckily, Queen Gunli is more of a poetry than a flowers kind of gal, so one measly verse is all Flandry requires to sweep the royal lady off her feet. And since the Scothani are barbarians, naturally he selects a meter in their native bardic form: the alliterative Old Norse court meter, dróttkvætt.

Only one thing, indeed, makes this dull little sexist romp of a poem worthwhile—the sheer fact that it counts as science fiction.

Granted, Anderson never invokes any SF tropes in these scant eight lines of text. Dominic Flandry, though, is clearly a science fiction protagonist dashing about in a science fiction magazine, so that largely determines our genre expectations for “The Scothan Queen.” And moreover, SF poems in the Modern Revival are remarkably rare. The revivalists’ most common genre is fantasy…and it’s not even close. Horror follows at a distant second, and non-genre speculative verse has a strong showing thanks to pagan poets and members of the Society for Creative Anachronism.

SF poetry, though? Not so much. That’s about as common as finding enlightened gender relations in pulp-era interplanetary adventure stories.

The main hurdle, I think, is how strongly most speculative poets associate medieval content with the Germanic alliterative meters. Now, obviously, there’s no strict, logical, or unbreakable connection between poetic form and historical period, but insofar as “fantasy=past” and “SF=future” in most people’s minds, yeah, most revivalist poems are going to be fantasy. Anderson’s solution to this little conundrum is to combine past with future in “The Scothan Queen.” He grants his barbarian people, the Scothani, just enough interstellar technology that an SF magazine could legitimately publish “Tiger by the Tail.” Yet that’s a very specific plot premise that can’t be utilized too often…and as it happens, Anderson’s second SF poem in an unmodified alliterative meter wouldn’t arrive until 38 years later in Boat of a Million Years.

Still, Anderson’s method of combining a poetic form linked to pre-industrial Europe with a technologically advanced far-future society, in due time, found two remarkable heirs. And it’s precisely Marcie Lynn Tentchoff and Rosemary Kirstein whom I would like to discuss next.

So, without further ado…

[Here ends Part I of “Troubles in SF Poetry.” For my discussion of Tentchoff in Part II, tune in next week.]