NEW POETS OF RUM RAM RUF: Poul Anderson

Entry #2 is up in the blog series .... see the original here. Or check out my posting below.

Last week, I mentioned Poul Anderson as the Modern Revival’s “most prolific and wide-ranging pulp poet.” Similarly, in my introduction to the anthology, I call him the leading figure of the Revival’s demotic branch, meaning that he didn’t learn his medievalism primarily from school or offer his work to venues traditionally designated for mainstream (non-genre) literature. Instead, Poul Anderson had fandom in his bones. Well, I promise not to turn this blog into a simple chronological survey of revivalist poets, but given the overall importance of Anderson, he’s simply too obscure to most medievalists for me to let such a golden opportunity slide by.

Luckily, for a quick cheat-sheet on Anderson’s style as poet, we have a few easy generalizations on hand. For one thing, although Anderson enjoyed writing verse, he did so merely as a hobby. His main job was prose fiction. He also generally prefers Norse meters to English ones, and his metrical fidelity ranges from modestly faithful to heavily impressionistic. In addition, Anderson frequently revised his poetry despite previous publications elsewhere, but these revisions rarely add much in the way of improvement. In fact, I cannot detect any consistent principle to how Anderson revises. Here’s an example. In his 1972 version of The Broken Sword, his revised poems are actually less historically faithful to medieval metrics than the original poems from his 1954 version. And neither does Anderson much care about experimenting or innovating on the alliterative meter. Mainly, his poetry aims to support his novels by adding some historical authenticity or medieval flavoring.

With all this in mind, let’s take a gander at two Andersonian poems in particular. The first – a short alliterative tribute called “J.R.R.T” in honor of Tolkien’s 100^th birthday – never actually made it into Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival. Instead, it can be found alongside other tributes in the Summer 1992 issue of Mythlore. Since it’s only four lines, I’ll repost it here: 

Just in his judgment but of gentle heart,

Readily ranging through realms unbounded,

Ruler of runecraft, he wrought for us

Tower-strong tales and the tenderest songs.

So – a few quick notes. Unusually for Anderson, “J.R.R.T” is in classic Old English style, a clear attempt to honor his subject’s greater affinity for that tradition. Also unusually for Anderson, each verse scans more or less perfectly as a Sievers type, and the acrostic is a nice tough. As tributes go, then, it’s quite decent. As poetry, however …. well, here’s the problem. Thanks to fan groups such as the Society for Creative Anachronism (of which Anderson was co-founder), the Modern Revival tends to have a lot of praise poetry, and most such verses tend to recycle the same old cliches and basic sentiments. Granted, the intended audiences for these verses don’t likely see these cliches as cliches. They’re generally recited orally on special occasions for friends and acquaintances, so these fan audiences have rarely had the chance, as I have, to read dozens and dozens of such praise poems in succession.

Still, the sentiments expressed by Anderson in “J.R.R.T” are thoroughly run of the mill. If we remove the title and overlook the acrostic, nobody would know who this poem was praising. It could apply literally to anyone. William Morris, maybe, or even Fletcher Pratt. So, beyond Anderson’s bare decision to dash off a quick poem in praise of Tolkien in particular, there’s not much here for readers to sink their teeth into.

But if you sense a “but” coming, hang on, because that brings us to our second poem. Remember how I said Anderson almost never chooses to innovate on the alliterative meter? Well, our next selection is one of the very few, and for my money it’s one of his absolute best. Generally speaking, Anderson writes traditional formal verse quite well – I personally think quite highly of “Ballade of an Artificial Satellite” – but his alliterative poetry tends, like “J.R.R.T.,” to be rather humdrum. “Route Song of the Winged Folk,” however, is a breath-taking exception.

For some background, this four-stanza poem appears in Anderson’s Hugo- and Nebula-nominated SF novel, The People of the Wind (1973), a “clash of cultures” type of story. One culture traces its ancestry back to Earth; the other is indigenous to the planet Avalon. These latter folks call themselves the Ythrians, and if the title for “Route Song of the Winged Folk” hasn’t given things away already, these Ythrians are a sentient avian species who have evolved self-powered flight. Well, Anderson presents “Route Song” as a traditional Ythrian carol, and since the Ythrians are an honor-driven tribal (read: medieval) society as well as a far-future alien species (read: SF), Anderson decides to change the core rules of his alliterative poetics.

For an example, take this first stanza:

Light that leaps from a sun still sunken

hails the hunter at hover,

washes his wings in molten morning,

startles the stars to cover.

Blue is the bell of hollow heaven,

rung by a risen blowing.

Wide lie woodlands and mountain meadows,

great and green with their growing.

            But—look, oh, look!—

            a red ray struck

            through tattered mist.

            A broadhorn buck

            stands traitor-kissed.

            The talons crook.

In simple narrative terms, the only thing happening here is that a bird of prey has spotted a rabbit outside its hole. Metrically, though, Anderson is pretty dazzling. There’s no Sievers types here, no clear caesuras, no verse-linking alliterations – nothing that suggests him as using an Old Norse, Old English, or Middle English meter. Instead, something entirely new arises. Ignoring the “wheel” for a moment (a term I’m deliberately taking from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight), a clear alliterative pattern emerges in “Route Song.” In odd-numbered lines, Anderson uses an aa/bb alliterative pattern: light/leaps and sun/sunken (l.1). In even-numbered lines, Anderson uses either aaa or aax. These patterns are maintained throughout all four stanzas, qualifying “Route Song” as an alliterative poem despite its deviations from any historical medieval meter.

Actually, “Route Song” does come somewhat close to at least one historical meter: ljoðaháttr. In this Old Norse form, odd lines utilize the standard two-verse structure separated by a caesura. Even lines, however, bear a single hypermetric verse with three heavy beats. Although “Route Song” avoids caesuras, strict Sievers types, and verse-linking alliteration, Anderson’s stanzas nevertheless follow ljoðaháttr’s full-line and hypermetric-verse format zealously. At the same time, he adds rhyme as one of several unhistorical innovations, and Anderson’s “wheels,” of course, don’t hail from Old Norse tradition at all – they most strongly resemble the bob-and-wheel technique from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a long poem from the Middle English alliterative tradition.

So there you have it: a strange metrical junction between multiple alliterative styles, plus several new techniques imported from the accentual-syllabic tradition, all of which Anderson has adapted to suit a far-future, highly advanced, avian culture. The end result is one of the most metrically skillful texts from Anderson’s revivalist oeuvre.