NEW POETS OF RUM RAM RUF: Paul Douglas Deane

When talking about original fan works of the Modern Revival, no discussion is complete without Paul Douglas Deane. If you’ve heard of him before, it’s no doubt thanks to his website founded in 1999, Forgotten Ground Regained – the largest and best collection of alliterative verse on the interwebz. Originally, Deane envisioned his site as a combination blog, fanzine, and content index, running things on that model for about a decade before life (as they say) intervened. But then Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival appeared, and this event motivated Deane to give his website a major overhaul. Now the layout is sleeker and snazzier than ever before, and Deane’s talent for finding new alliterative poets has been on full display. In the last few months alone, he’s discovered several new revivalists, and a few of them – Lancelot Schaubert, Amit Majmudar, Susan Edwards – have already been discussed in this series.

The thing is, Forgotten Ground Regained – as important a resource for the Modern Revival as there is – wouldn’t even exist without fandom. Contemporary revivalists, you see, share one thing in common with Marvel Comics superheroes: everyone has their own unique origin story. The alliterative meter enchanted the Inklings through its Englishness; Poul Anderson discovered it through Norse saga; and other poets have turned to the meter through a sincere religious devotion to Odin and the northern Germanic deities.

As for Paul Douglas Deane’s origin story, we can blame video games.

Well, maybe not video games exactly, but rather a single, text-based, fantasy roleplaying game called Elendor MUSH. Although basically a ghost town these days, at least since the obsolescence of telnet, their client-server protocol, Elendor still advertises itself as the oldest Tolkien-based RPG on the internet – it has run continuously since 1991. Over the decades, the Elendor gaming world has become quite massive. Players can explore twenty different cultures and over 5,000 distinct areas. Deane’s involvement began back in Elendor’s heyday in the 1990s, and he developed Rhunedhel – an Elvish bard from Rivendell – as his main character. As everyone knows, though, bards are apt to go a-barding, especially in Rivendell, so Deane also composed several long poems in a meter uniquely suited to a Tolkienian fantasy setting: the alliterative meter, of course. In due time, “Rhunedhel” would create a five-poem epic cycle called Tales of the Avari.

If your memory for The Silmarillion is a little rusty, here’s the backstory on Tolkien’s Elves. Calling themselves the Quendi, they first “awakened” at Cuiviénen in the east of Middle-earth. In due time, one of the Valar, Oromë, happened upon them and, after consulting with his fellow Valar, he summoned them westward to Valinor. Many Elves heeded this call. These became the Eldar, and during their journey they eventually separated into the Three Kindreds: the Vanyar, the Noldor, and the Teleri. But what about the Elves who didn’t obey Oromë’s summons to Valinor – the ones who stayed behind at Cuiviénen?

Well, Tolkien doesn’t tell us much, but these stay-at-home Elves became the Avari, aka the “Unwilling,” and this blank spot in the legendarium is where Deane enters the fray. His epic alliterative cycle shares as its connecting thread Cordil, son of Fithurin, an Avarin Elf who fled imprisonment in Angband in order to return home to Cuiviénen. There he meets and marries Féhaglin the Fair; eventually, they found a secret Avarin stronghold called Gonnmar.

The masterwork in Tales of the Avari, according to Deane, is “The Redemption of Daeron.” Cordil and Féhaglin appear briefly as Gonnmar’s rulers, but Deane’s story actually focuses on a minor character from The Silmarillion, Daeron, a Sindarin Elf who loves Lúthien and, jealous of her lover Beren, twice betrays her to her father, King Thingol. After Beren is captured by Morgoth and Lúthien vows to rescue him, Daeron almost betrays Lúthien a third time … but then refuses. Convinced that this forbearance means certain death for her, however, a guilt-wracked Daeron disappears into the east. In The Silmarillion, Tolkien never represents him as learning his unrequited love’s fate.

This is where Deane takes up the master’s mantle. Given that Tolkien’s character is a famed minstrel and linguist, Daeron’s situation is a natural one for an Elvish bard such as “Rhunedhel.” (Notably, Deane himself holds a doctorate in linguistics and has published or co-published dozens of papers in the field.) Metrically speaking, though, “Redemption” is most notable for developing what Deane calls his “Daeron stanza” – a four-stress accentual meter with an aa/bb alliterative pattern and a final rhyming couplet. Although the poem has several quotable passages, one of Deane’s more lyrical stanzas appears in Book IV where Daeron, grieving for Lúthien, says

If duty’s dark and love is loss

Our souls are storms where tempest-tossed

We spin uncertain webs whose warp

Unraveling

– we grasp in sudden –

– incandescence dazzling –

To me, these Daeron stanzas read like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in miniature: an alliterative body finished off by a bob-and-wheel. Nonetheless, whereas the alliterative meter traditionally confers an air of formality and slow elegance, Deane’s Daeron stanzas read much more quickly (and more musically) than in SGGK. Measured in total lines, the bob-and-wheels in Deane’s stanzas enjoy roughly equal weight to the truncated alliterative bodies, meaning that end-rhyme – not alliteration – tends to dominate the ear. This tendency, notably, creates an impact I more often associate with formal rhyming verse, and the ornamental rhyme here in Deane’s first two lines only reinforces that tendency.

Whereas alliteration, in other words, supplies the “bones” of a Daeron stanza, rhyme supplies the glitz and the glamor. This seems almost exactly opposite SGGK. There, the bob-and-wheels prevent the more substantial alliterative bodies (complete with traditional “long lines”) from becoming aurally monotonous. The Gawain-poet therefore uses rhyme not as the main show but as a metrical variant. For anyone used to reading alliterative verse from the Middle Ages, then, Deane’s Daeron stanzas produce an unusually rapid effect, but an intriguing one, too, especially as it seems so uniquely adapted to an English language greatly changed since the time of the Gawain-poet.

Deane gets good mileage out of this stanzaic form as well, despite its formal strictness. Probably my single favorite text is “The Song of Shadows.” Whereas “Redemption” is an introspective poem about grief and guilt, “Song” is a straightforward heroic fantasy where the good guys are good, the bad guys bad, and the hero becomes one wonderous MacGuffin richer. Alongside his wife Féhaglin, Cordil seeks to regain a family heirloom – a coronet called Mirloth – stored within the eastern stronghold of an evil supporter of “Annatar” (hint: Sauron). As many medievalists agree, the alliterative meter has always been well suited to narrative verse, and Deane heightens his brisk plotting through several deft allusions to Tolkien’s larger legendarium.

For instance, besides the reference to Annatar, Féhaglin wins their escape by singing a song that lulls everyone in the stronghold asleep – the exact method used by Lúthien when rescuing Beren from Sauron’s dungeons in Tol-in-Gaurhoth. Furthermore, Deane’s two heroes – the Beren and Lúthien of eastern Middle-earth – also found, as mentioned, the hidden city of Gonnmar. This Avarin city recalls Tolkien’s rich tradition of hidden realms in Beleriand. The special “unbreakable” armor that Cordil forges in exchange for Mirloth is another legendarium tie-in (and one I initially missed until Deane himself kindly pointed it out): it eventually becomes the armor worn by the Witch-King of Angmar whom Éowyn slays.

All in all, we have much to thank fandom and Elendor MUSH for – not only Forgotten Ground Regained, but also Deane’s robust epic cycle of alliterative fanfic poems. This cycle accomplishes much, and it does so while developing an innovative new type of alliterative stanza. Even if Deane’s website remains his ultimate legacy to the Modern Alliterative Revival, we owe online gaming communities and fandom a massive debt.