{"id":7690,"date":"2009-11-25T10:58:03","date_gmt":"2009-11-25T17:58:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/?p=7690"},"modified":"2009-12-11T13:10:10","modified_gmt":"2009-12-11T20:10:10","slug":"remembering-poul-anderson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/remembering-poul-anderson\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering Poul Anderson"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"anderson-photo\"<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Poul Anderson<\/a> would be eighty-three years old today. That means I’ve been reading his fiction for about thirty years now. The realization of that\u00a0would be even\u00a0more twinge-inducing if I didn’t constantly remind myself that I was \"anderson-vault-schomburg\"a mere thirteen years old when I started.<\/p>\n

My love for Poul’s writing began when I bought a first-edition copy (1952)\u00a0of Vault of the Ages<\/em><\/a>\u00a0from the Oswego Public Library (the same\u00a0institution from whence I purchased my first Harold Lamb<\/a> and Merritt books). Alex Schomburg<\/a>\u00a0dustjacket\/endpapers and everything. All for one shiny quarter (the library\u00a0ended up rebuying the book in paperback). The\u00a0second (or first?)\u00a0Anderson novel ever published.<\/p>\n

“Vault” was a pretty\u00a0good introduction to Poul Anderson for a thirteen year-old.\u00a0The book\u00a0was written for the “Young Adult” market, with a certain proportion of the sermonizing that genre usually requires. On the plus side, Poul based\u00a0his novel around a post-apocalytic setting, provided numerous great combat\/battle scenes and featured “northern\u00a0barbarians” as sympathetic antagonists whose narrative\u00a0purpose was to give a stagnant culture a shot in the arm.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Sound familiar? Robert E. Howard was a post-apocalyptic writer. Whether one is talking about Conan or James Allison’s past incarnations, let alone such yarns as “The Last Laugh<\/a>,” Howard\u00a0envisioned many of\u00a0his heroes as existing in a world that had gone through hell\/been rebooted.\u00a0Vigorous barbarians, relatively untainted by the past,\u00a0would then begin building a world based on principles more natural to the human psyche.<\/p>\n

\"fraz-swordsmen\"Poul Anderson (along with Leiber and Brackett) kept the freak flag of heroic fantasy flying in the 1950s.\u00a0Brackett took the “crypto-fantasist” route<\/a> exclusively (as Anderson sometimes\u00a0did in stories like “Swordsman of Lost Terra”), but Poul also\u00a0boldly\u00a0stepped further out into forbidden fantastic waters with novels like Three Hearts and Three Lions<\/em> and The Broken Sword<\/a><\/em>. While nominally toeing the sci-fi line with “plausible” explanations for magical phenomena, Poul served up some of the best fantasy the ’50s had to offer. The Broken Sword<\/em> would serve as inspiration to both Wagner and Moorcock, as well as innumerable other\u00a0fantasy\u00a0authors\u00a0of later generations.<\/p>\n

\"anderson-rogue\"Poul was well-versed in history, especially that\u00a0of the Middle Ages (another\u00a0trait he shared with REH). During the ’50s and early ’60s, he crafted a couple of\u00a0historical\u00a0novels that still stand the test of time. One was the nearly-forgotten Rogue Sword,\u00a0<\/em>which\u00a0is a swashbuckling, bloody classic (as REHupa<\/a> blogger, Morgan Holmes, will attest). The other is The Golden Slave<\/em>, which posits a historical basis for the Odin legend.<\/p>\n

As the markets for fantasy opened up, Anderson began writing more of the fiction that he obviously loved, beginning with the novel, Hrolf Kraki’s Saga<\/a><\/em>. His “Cappen Varra” tales (some of which were featured in the “Thieves’ World” anthologies) as well as his late-period novel, The War of the Gods<\/em>, kept\u00a0Anderson’s hand in play,\u00a0to the delight of fans of\u00a0hard-edged fantasy.<\/p>\n

Poul Anderson\u00a0died in 2001. This blog entry, intended as a short tribute to the man, merely touches on his contributions to fantasy. Poul contributed more quality work\u00a0to that genre than most, in my opinion. His science fiction works also\u00a0sounded numerous fantasy notes, at least from where I stand. All of that must wait for a later post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 Poul Anderson would be eighty-three years old today. That means I’ve been reading his fiction for about thirty years now. The realization of that\u00a0would be even\u00a0more twinge-inducing if I didn’t constantly remind myself that I was a mere thirteen years old when I started. My love for Poul’s writing began when I bought a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[81,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anderson","category-motifs-in-rehs-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7690"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7690\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8317,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7690\/revisions\/8317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}