Dr. Simon Reads Appendix N Part Nineteen: Andre Norton
Dr. Simon Reads Appendix N Part Nineteen: Andre Norton
This is an ongoing sporadic series, in which I explore classic fantasy and science fiction works. Appendix N is the bibliography of Gary Gygax's original Dungeon Masters Guide, and lists a range of classic SF and fantasy authors that influenced his interest in the fantastical. See the first part of this series for more information.
Andre Norton
Appendix N doesn’t suggest any particular titles, but the Fifth Edition suggests Witch World and Quag Keep. Witch World is actually part of a series, and being the completist that I am I got a Kindle edition that comprised the first three stories in the series – Witch World, Web of the Witch World, and The Year of the Unicorn.
Witch World
Witch World begins in familiar territory, going all the way back to the very first story in this series where Holger Palmgren is drawn into the realm of Christendie in Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions. Yes, it’s a person from our world entering a fantasy realm.
Here, the opening has a fun Robert Ludlum feel where our protagonist, former Colonel Simon Tregarth is on the run from some dangerous people, a shadowy Organisation for whom he did some shady work and then turned against them somehow (the details at first are left hinted at but not outright described, Norton gives us enough tantalising details to let us know what’s going without going into specifics). Tregarth meets the mysterious Dr Petronius, a man known within his circles as being able to “disappear” marked men and, as it transpires, Petronius’ method is a magical portal to another world.
And once Tregarth enters the new world, the sense of reading a thriller continues, although here it feels a little more like, say, John Buchan, as Tregarth meets a mysterious woman being hunted across desolate moorland. The woman is one of the eponymous witches who, in Norton’s setting, have powers akin to telepathy and the ability to influence others to their will, but safeguard these abilities by keeping their names secret, as well as their virginity intact. And thus we don’t learn until the end, when the witch woman inevitably falls in love with Tregarth, that her name is Jaelithe.
The general plot of both Witch World and its sequel Web of the Witch World is that the world of the witches is being menaced by strange invaders known as the Kolder. Norton deftly brings the reader up to speed with the immediate geo-politics, and why, say, the island of Gorm and the peninsular fortress of Sulcarkeep are strategically important, and the nature of the enemies besetting the witch-nation of Estcarp (our good guys for the story).
The action, for a while, switches to the point of view of the woman Loyse, daughter of a cruel lord who makes his fortunes from wrecking and plunder (remniscent of GRRM’s Iron Islanders), and her attempts to escape an arranged marriage to the leader of the land of Karsten. (Hard, too, to not be reminded a little of Du Maurier's Jamaica Inn).
All the while, the mysterious Kolder are stirring up trouble – like the witches, they too have psychic powers, that they use to control dominated soldiers, and their technological machines including flyers and submarines. The novel Witch World ends with a victory, of sorts, for our heroes, but it isn’t until Web of the Witch World where the Kolder are definitively defeated.
In both cases the victory feels somewhat hollow, and Web of the Witch World leaves the reader with the mystery of the strange skeletal humans that drove the Kolder from their world of origins, as well as unresolved plots concerning the political fallout of the Kolder machinations. Further, two of the four main protagonists – Loyse and her lover Koris, half swamp-folk captain of the Estcarp guard, are whereabouts unknown.
The Year of the Unicorn is part of Norton’s “High Hallack Cycle”, as opposed to the “Estcarp Cycle” of the previous two. It takes place on a continent to the west of the action from the previous two, linked only by the fact that the nation Alizond is an aggressor in both cases. The implication here is that Alizond has withdrawn because it has lost the support of Kolder in its wars overseas, but the events of Witch World are not directly mentioned here.
If Witch World was quite a manly novel, the Year of the Unicorn is very much more female point-of-view. It put me in mind of writers such as Mercedes Lackey, and it wasn’t perhaps a surprise to discover that Norton and Lackey worked together on later Witch World novels, and Norton was in inspiration to Lackey.
The heroine is Gillan, a spirited girl who secretly joins a group of maidens sworn in marriage to the mysterious Were-Riders, mercenaries who have helped against Alizond in return for brides. Gillan decides that this is a better fate than wasting away in the nunnery where she has been raised, but soon learns that she has entered a dangerous game. The Were-Riders are half-beast, half-man, and the whole story revolves around the web of illusions that they, and others, weave.
One could read a lot of metaphor into how her husband is outwardly a man, but can transform into a beast (and yet is both at the same time), how love can deceive the senses, and also how Gillan becomes torn into two different people living in different planes of existence, who must be reunited for her to survive. All in all a very different feeling tale, and Norton writes using a much more rarified idiom here, compared to the terse language of the thriller for Witch World.
Quag Keep
Norton is unique in the Appendix N authors for having actually played Dungeons and Dragons, with Gary Gygax no less, and so this book is one of the first (before there was Dragonlance, before there was Drizz’t) of being set in a D&D world. Not only that, it’s loosely about the game itself.
Our protagonist is Milo Jagon, a swordsman in the Free City of Greyhawk, who finds himself geased by a wizard to undertake a quest, alongside a ragtag bag of others including a bard, a cleric, a wereboar barbarian and a lizardman. But Milo also vaguely remembers being Martin, a man playing a game in another world, who had just picked up a strangely detailed new miniature....
This isn’t exactly, though, yet another person from our world thrown into a fantasy world. In fact, memories of Martin are dangerous to Milo, causing him to lose his sense of self. He and all of his companions wear a bracelet of dice around their wrists, symbol of a geas laid upon them binding them to the fate of the world, and the dice spin when danger threatens.
Although it touches on similar ground as, say Viva La Dirt League’s Epic NPC Man series of videos, and also on Norton’s previous ground of a person split into two worlds from Year of the Unicorn, for the most part it’s a series of encounters on a quest. And although set nominally inside a game of Dungeons and Dragons, the encounters are not really with recognisable D&D monsters – the catoblepas-like urghaunts, or the dusty undead liches, for example, and some very sinister whisps of shadow that can combine to form a more dangerous opponent. There’s some good ideas, not least the Sea of Dust (I see you, Dark Sun) with its ruined dust-sailing ship filled with the afore-mentioned undead, and a very nerve-wracking sequence where some frog-folk try to dislodge our heroes from the giant lily pads they are using to cross the quagmire from whence the title.
The ending, however, is somewhat disappointing. After an interesting set-up, it all feels a bit perfunctory, especially in light of Norton’s previous foray into dual worlds/personalities. There is a sequel, completed postumously, but overall it feels like an idea that needed more development before publication.
And I thought that this image by Clyde Caldwell was associated with Quag Keep, especially in light of the lizardman character, but it isn't.
Themes
One can definitely pick out gender politics going on in the Witch World stories. The Twilight-esque theme of special powers linked to virginity thankfully don’t come across like a preachy purity tract, and in fact we learn that Jaelithe doesn’t, in fact, entirely lose her powers just because she marries Tregarth (although it is strongly hinted that this is because he carries powers of his own). Likewise, I wonder if Gillan (who, it turns out, is also an Estcarpian witch), will manage to keep her powers since her husband is more fey than human. What are we to make of that? Marry somebody who is your equal so that they don’t crush your natural spirit, perhaps?
The stories featuring Gillan and Loyse are also strongly about a woman trying to find her own voice in a world where they are pawns to be used by men – pretty much like a lot of the women in A Song of Ice and Fire. It makes a refreshing change after all the macho sword-swinging of the previous books, but probably palls as much if I’d read as many of the romantic fantasy heroine stories as I have barbarian swordsman ones. It is nice, though, to finally get a bit of psychological depth.
The other theme that links Witch World, especially the High Hallack cycle story from the batch I read, with Quag Keep, is the idea of a person’s “fetch”, of living in two worlds at once, and what happens if these are forcibly separated (an idea explored in depth, albeit with a different slant by Philip Pullman, and somewhat by Fritz Leiber where Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser become bereft of their Jungian animas, leading them on a quest across the world). As I said above, it’s a pity that Quag Keep doesn’t explore this further. After making some fairly big noises early on about the protagonists trying to keep their own identity as, what they believe, beings with free will, despite being confronted by evidence that they are just characters in somebody else’s story, the climax is a bit of a fizzle.
As with the majority of the titles in this series so far, there’s nothing in Norton’s work that screams a direct influence, but there are plenty of ideas that could be mined. The invasion by a technologically advanced psionic race is a great campaign driver. The were-riders could easily be modified to be a character choice. Various cultural aspects could also be mined from the Witch World novels, and the encounters from Quag Keep would all work well dropped into a game – in that aspect at least Norton really manages to catch the feel of a D&D session.
I liked Norton’s style, she’s very readable even if sometimes the endings feel a little unsatisfying.
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