The Coy Talesman

A narrator who is only half objective

The well that is Bardelys has run dry! He has stopped passing on chapters to his old The Magic Key whilst he works on them.

In the meantime, I ran across the following passage from the old British translation of Fantomas as http://www.munseys.com has provided it. Notice what is odd about the point of view here:

With a mighty clatter and racket Bouzille came down the slope and stopped before old mother Chiquard’s cottage. He arrived in his own equipage, and an extraordinary one it was!

Bouzille was mounted upon a tricycle of prehistoric design, with two large wheels behind and a small steering wheel in front, and a rusty handle-bar from which all the plating was worn off. The solid rubber tyres which once had adorned the machine had worn out long ago, and were now replaced by twine twisted round the felloes of the wheels; this was for ever fraying away and the wheels were fringed with a veritable lace-work of string. Bouzille must have picked up this impossible machine for an old song at some local market, unless perhaps some charitable person gave it to him simply to get rid of it. He styled this tricycle his “engine,” and it was by no means the whole of his equipage. Attached to the tricycle by a stout rope was a kind of wicker perambulator on four wheels, which he called his “sleeping-car,” because he stored away in it all the bits of rag he picked up on his journeys, and also his very primitive bedding and the little piece of waterproof canvas under which he often slept in the open air. Behind the sleeping-car was a third vehicle, the restaurant-car, consisting of an old soap box mounted on four solid wooden wheels, which were fastened to the axles by huge conical bolts; in this he kept his provisions; lumps of bread and fat, bottles and vegetables, all mixed up in agreeable confusion. Bouzille made quite long journeys in this train of his, and was well known throughout the south-west of France. Often did the astonished population see him bent over his tricycle, with his pack on his back, pedalling with extraordinary rapidity down the hills, while the carriages behind him bumped and jumped over the inequalities in the surface of the road until it seemed impossible that they could retain their equilibrium.

This passage occurs about a third into the mystery. Now the arrangement and conveyance of information in a mystery differ from those in all other genres. The mystery is a sort of puzzle, and the narrator plays the part of an onstage magician challenging us to solve the puzzle on the basis of the clues he provides us – and no more.

Therefore the point of view in a mystery must be chosen with care – of course it is always chosen with care, but in a mystery the criteria used will be different from those of all other genres.

The easiest point of view for a mystery is first person. This is also the sliest, since not all narrators are ‘reliable.’ Second easiest is the third person limited: when we know almost everything one single character does (usually it is the detective who is the point of view character). We somehow trust the third person limited as somewhat more ‘reliable’ a witness than the first person, although nobody assumes that Mike Hammer or Dr Watson are lying to us or concealing anything.

What makes first person and third-limited narrators ‘easier’ is that the talesman can report what they know, honestly and fully (as fully as any narrative ever gets) without ‘withholding’ any information from us unfairly. We know what the detective knows, and find it out when he does, and thus we can match wits with him, although we can’t carry out any investigations he does not.

The talesmen of the Fantomas novel take an omniscient third person approach, although this point of view is heavily modified so as to appear as though it is objective.

What we are left with is something like an official report crossed with popular newspaper account of the proceedings: we know something of what is commonly known of the tramp Bouzille, we know what he calls his tricycle and the trailers attached to it, but we don’t know just how he acquired it; the narrator instead offers us a shrewd guess which we must take or leave:

Bouzille must have picked up this impossible machine for an old song at some local market, unless perhaps some charitable person gave it to him simply to get rid of it.

These guesses are crucial to this objective/omniscient point of view in the mystery. Because they are given us to as assumptions or guesses, these bits of information are explicitly provided to us by the talesman as unreliable: maybe it’s true, and maybe not. The Fantomas tale includes both a super-detective, Inspector Juve, and a diabolical super-villain, Fantomas him- (or her-) self, who adopt all manner of disguises and have various assistants and allies. Bouzille might be Juve, he might be Fantomas, he might be in league with either, or he might be the simple-minded country tramp the talesmen say he is. (In fact, the talesmen are careful never to say that so-and-so ‘is’ anyone, rather they simply give us his or her appearance: this is where the objective point of view serves the mystery so well.)

Fantomas is also constructed in such a way that the first-person or limited-third point of view would never be able to cover the events.

(Composed on keyboard Wednesday, 19 November 2008)

Words from Bardelys

Modifications and a warning from the talesman himself.

Yesterday’s chapter instalment of The Magic Key had a line that bothered me the more I thought on it. Hans is said to remember the remark he made to his Father, that ‘Six wins all tricks.’

No such line exists in the manuscript as Bardelys had given it to us. The closest to this line comes in an exchange between Hans and Father in the little attic room, early on the Dreadful Night:

Father: ‘One and seven make eight, and eight is late.’

Hans: ‘Eight is great, you mean.’

I asked Bardelys about this, and he confessed that he has been reading these posts and criticisms of mine, and it has inspired him to give another look over the old tale. That is when he found he made a mistake in these lines, he said.

For various reasons, Bardelys told me, he wished his tale to begin on Summer’s Eve (which is the eve of Hans’s birthday), and that this should be a night of a New Moon. At the same time, Bardelys had given much thought to how old his young hero ought to be, and settled on 18 as a fitting age.

And yet Bardelys had also found himself bound that Hans should have been born on a certain year.

When Bardelys consulted a calendar, he found that the only year that suited all his requirements was 1773 – and yet this broke his wish to make his hero 18. Instead, Hans would only have been 15 on Summer’s Day 1773.

Bardelys was faced with a choice: alter the calendar (after all, who would know? who would care?) or change Hans to 15. Bardelys chose to make his hero younger.

This then invalidated the exchange quoted above. Instead, Bardelys tells us, the exchange with Father really went as follows:

Father: ‘One and five make six, and six is hard to fix.’

Hans: ‘Six will win all tricks, you mean.’

Bardelys also has made other changes, he tells me. But he withholds them as yet.

On another note, I have presented today a Foreword to Part Two of The Magic Key which I negelected to include in the posts in its proper place. Bardelys tells me this Foreword will be included in the event that he publishes each part of the tale as a separate volume, slim though such volumes should be. In the event of an omnibus single volume, on the other hand, Forewords to each part would be suppressed.

(Composed on keyboard Monday, November 17, 2008)

Foreword to the Second Part of The Magic Key

We have heard, you and I, how young Hans Forester was awakened late on Old Man’s Night by a green crow rapping on his window-pane, and how many things befell him on that night. He saw the Charcoal Burners as they truly were, and he touched the Mankiller tree in the Devil’s Cathedral against the warning in his dreams. Then the trees sprang up about his house and tore it down and killed his family before his very eyes. He saw the White Lady and the strange boy Yellow Socks come to gloat over the wreckage. He followed Yellow Socks into the Charcoal Burners’ camp, but the wicken-soldiers caught Hans spying and chased him down Dimmerthal valley. They tried to burn him alive in a haystack, but dawn broke and Hans was saved by Farmer Groening and his men.

And we have heard how Hans swore to himself that he would fight the wicken-things and defend the valley against them.

But what could he do, a boy alone and fatherless? And how could he make the farmer and his folk believe him and understand the danger that hung over them all?

Here we will learn the answers to those questions and much else besides.

Critique of Part Two, Chapter Six

Three things strike me about this chapter:

1. Bardelys continues his practice of short chapters
2. The danger returns with magic
3. Bardelys shifts his hero’s character back around

Chapter Length. Bardelys has made a pattern of using short chapters. It will be interesting to see if he will keep this up or if he will vary the length of his chapters. In general it strikes me that over the past several chapters, he breaks whenever he comes to any significant ‘bump’ in the narrative.

Magic. Magic has come back into the tale, the closer we are to the Forest. This then might have been at the back of Bardelys’s mind when he made his Groening-stead chapters so un-magical: the closer the tale takes us to the Black Forest, the stronger the magic becomes. Only Edgar, Mother Groening’s half-mad brother, has smelled at all of magic back in the friendly house, and he seems to have been touched by the Forest, and might even be in league with it.

Once again Bardelys is trying here to overcome his earlier mistake of identifying the Forest, and wicken, as ‘wild but not evil.’ He makes a specific reference to this remark of Hans’s Father, and has Hans mentally correct his dead Father’s judgment. This is about as good a way as there is of undoing a mistake of this kind: talk about it openly. ‘I know I told you so-and-so, but in fact that was wrong, and the truth of the matter is this-and-that.’ An additional benefit may be wrought out of this technique or strategy: since the talesman has changed his story once, we readers cannot be sure that he will not change it again. Which is it, is the Schwarzwald only wild, or is it malevolent? It might even be the case that Bardelys himself is of two minds on this question, and means to leave this at the heart of his theme. Wilderness, the un-human, can certainly be dangerous to men, but is it a conscious, willful threat, or an ignorant, even ‘innocent’ one?

We will have to follow this thematic question closely as the tale carries on, and see whether the talesman definitely decides it one way or the other.

Character. Hans recalls his banter with Father and his own words, ‘Six wins all tricks.’ This is more like the shifty coal-biter than the more-innocent and innocuous stay-at-home character type. It further suggests that Hans will fall into the archetype of the Trickster, a type that makes sense for a youth who has not shown any great physical prowess. Hans is not big for his age, he is not overly strong – at least Bardelys has not made mention of any such thing, and the omission seems deliberate: Hans never acts as though he is a strong lad, except for the one point when he breaks out of the wicken-army camp by bumping up against one of a knot of soldiers – and even then Bardelys stresses not the strength and size of his hero, but his knowledge of how to attack an opponent in the childish game he knows.

Knowledge is the Trickster’s forte.

Thus we have now been offered three different character types for the hero:

1. Coal-biter
2. Stay-at-home
3. Trickster

Maybe Bardelys is unable to make up his mind here. (Although it is true that the Trickster often wears many hats, and can appear to play the part of other archetypes when it suits his purpose.)

The final image of this chapter is the most gruesome yet in the tale. Bardelys drew a veil over the deaths of Hans’s family, and left them offstage; we only heard with Hans his Mother’s dying scream, but we saw none of the corpses, nor how the dreadful trees disposed of them. Young Bertie Groening, on the other hand, is left (literally) twisting in the wind.

(Composed on keyboard Sunday, November 16, 2008)

Part 2, Chapter 6: A New Victim

The grinding, growing sounds of the trees filled the darkness. For hours Hans sat and listened with growing dread. The ground fogs wrapped about the haystack, hemming them in with dampness and a chill that crept into their bones, their hearts. It was a chill that went beyond the body. There was an odd tang about the fog also, something that Hans could only consider unwholesome and unnatural.

First light came seeping, like dishwater in a dirty rag, through the fog. It was as though the haystack were an island in the middle of the Ocean, and all around it was nothing but the fog.

Hans looked at his companion. The farmhand was sitting quietly on the tightly-stacked brown hay, blinking and looking at nothing. He seemed calm and gentle, his old foolish self. Hans wondered if it had been nothing but a fit that had taken the man in the night, some sending of the wicken-things out of the Schwarzwald.

‘Herr Hans,’ the man said, ‘look there—’

The fog was breaking. Through the clumps of white branches showed, and tree-trunks. In a little while the fog was so thin that Hans could see the trees.

They stood all about the haystack. The roots dug into the earth almost at the foot of the stack.

‘It has come after us,’ said the farmhand, ‘all the way … and yet we came back so far before we found this haystack…’

Hans turned about. He saw that the trees did not wholly cut them off. In the first place, just to the North of them a great boulder shoved its shoulder up out of the ground. There the tree-growth parted, as the furrows would about a ploughshare. The gap between the trees widened on either side of their haystack, and formed a sort of path or opening to the South.

Hans slid down the haystack and stood between it and the boulder. The dark firs, oaks, and birches towered over him. They looked just as old as the trees in the Devil’s Cathedral. They might have grown there for a hundred years.

Behind him Hans could hear the gangly farmhand scrambling down. The man crouched on all fours, craning his neck up and about, squinting up at the tree-growth. His tongue lolled out of his open mouth like a dog’s.

‘Does it move still?’

‘No, not now,’ answered Hans. ‘I think it only grows possessed in the dark of night.’ Hans knew something of the same feeling, for it had been three nights now he had not been able to sleep except during the day.

‘What shall we do, Herr Hans?’

Hans had been thinking hard through the last hours of the night, about what he could do about Otto. He knew the man could overpower him if he wanted to; even if Hans had been as quick and nimble as ever, and not hobbled by the twisted ankle, he doubted he would have been able to slip the man’s long arms and strong hands. ‘One and five make six, and six wins all tricks,’ he had told Father, and now he made up his mind that this should be his byword with Otto.

‘There are two paths forward for us, Otto,’ he said, looking at the man with care. ‘We can go back to Groening-stead and tell them what we’ve found. If you will back my words, even Farmer Groening will have to pay heed. And if Bertie has gotten back before us, his words will be trusted. Or,’ he said, ‘we can do as you counseled — and go into the Schwarzwald.’

‘What,’ whined the gangly man, swallowing so that his throat bobbed. ‘Just the two of us, alone?’

‘Isn’t that what you said? Last night you told me it was my place to go into the Black Forest. I should go, you said, I must go, and go there I would.’

The farmhand looked at him. He blinked.

‘Don’t you remember what you said?’

Otto shook his head. ‘Sometimes,’ he said slowly, ‘strange words come out of my mouth like toads and bugs from a rotten log, Herr Hans. The Groenings know to pay them no mind.’

‘All the same, you said it. I’ve a mind to do it, too.’ He reached down and gripped the farmhand by his collar. ‘Come along.’

‘No, Herr Hans — you mustn’t!’ The farmhand dug in his heels and scrabbled at the hay-stubble with his long fingers.

‘Come on, I say!’ Hans tugged at him, but the man twisted free, and scampered back half behind the haystack. There was no mistaking the dread that was making his limbs tremble.

Hans leaned on the staff. He stared at the farmhand. What was he to make of him? Not to trust him ever — that much was clear.

‘We shall go back to Groening-stead, then,’ he said. Otto’s eyes brightened, and he nodded sharply. ‘Come and help me,’ Hans added, for his ankle was burning again.

They rounded the haystack and trudged down the middle of the lane the trees had made. Hans found himself looking up to either side, unable to shake the feeling that the tall trees with their mantles of leaves were watching him in every move.

Father had said the wicken in the Schwarzwald was old and wild but not evil. Hans knew better now. He wished that Father had known it too. If only he had, he might still be alive.

The thought brought a lump to his throat, and he fought back tears. He shook his head. No more childish wishing for him! Mother and Father and Granny and the girls were no more — they were all of them dead and gone. Hans had to think of himself now. He had to pay back the things that had murdered them. It all lay up to him now.

Far ahead, the misty air brightened, and the gap between the trees seemed to widen. Otto pointed, but Hans had already seen it.

‘A cart,’ he said, and thought straightaway of the carts of the Sooty Prince’s soldiers.

‘It’s the master,’ said Otto. ‘He’s come for us.’

They came closer, and Hans saw that the farmhand’s words were true: it was indeed Farmer Groening, the foreman Anton, and one or two other men. They stood before their hay-wain and looked and pointed up above them. The look on their faces was one Hans would never forget. This was the first time he saw such a look in his life, but it wouldn’t be the last. The farmers were staring up with a look of sick horror.

When they reached the hay-wain, Hans and Otto could see the sight for themselves. And then Hans was sure the same look took hold of his own face.

High overhead, the branches of three trees came together, and wreathed round one another in a kind of knot or noose. This noose wrapped tight about the throat of young Bertie Groening, whose body hung twenty yards above the ground, and swayed a little as the early morning breeze turned the branches back and forth.

Critique of Part Two, Chapter Five

Fear returns; how to redefine terms

In this chapter, Bardelys focuses on Otto, the ‘gangly farmhand’ and his seeming threat to Hans. The man seems mad – at least that’s the conclusion Hans reaches at the chapter-break. Otto insists that Hans must go into the Black Forest. His reasons are murky at best, something about being ‘the Forester now.’ A fit or frenzy overtakes Otto, and Hans fears they must come to blows. However the farmhand lapses into weird mutterings, and Hans is left on his guard, unable to sleep, trapped on the haystack in utter blackness beside a madman, while the grinding sounds of the wild-growing trees grow louder and louder in his ears…

This kind of fear is quite different from that of the traditional folk or fairy tale. In those tales, even monsters were reasonable beasts. Take a monster such as the Gian in the tale of Jack and the Beanstalk. This Giant wants to catch Jack and eat him because men (particularly Englishmen, according to the rhyme the Giant chants) are one of the things he eats. Though beastly and horrible it may be for man to eat man, the Giant looks upon Jack as a man might look upon a fat mouse in his house.

The muttering and fit of Otto partakes of madness. There may be reason enough behind what he wants of Hans, but the way Otto expresses it is classic madness: the gaping, pale eyes, the insistence without reason, the sudden mounting into frenzy, the lapse into muttering ‘sounds that were not proper words’ all are traits of the madman.

Now I wonder how familiar common folk were with madmen say 500 years ago. Schizophrenia must have existed then, but ‘Tom O’Bedlam’ was not surely someone the average person knew. I might say that today there are few enough of us who actually know people who are out of control in the way Otto the farmhand is – but we have seen them depicted in fiction and television and above all in horror movies so often, it is as if we had known such folk. Enough to make them a kind of cliché to any follower of the horror tale.

The creature Gollum, in Professor Tolkien’s The Hobbit, by contrast, is at first more like the Giant in Jack’s tale. It is a sneaking wretch, anthropoid but not, seemingly, human (or Hobbit), not quite a troll either. It is quite capable of throttling and eating just about any living thing that might fall into its clutches. But Gollum is not mad.

In the final line in the chapter, Bardelys equates this madness that has overtaken Otto with wicken. This is good: where a talesman does choose to create his own terms for creatures and aspects of his magic world, he must avail himself of every chance he finds to ‘charge’ these terms with the emotions he wishes us to associate with them. This is especially true in the beginning stages of the tale. ‘Wicken’ has been wild and magical, inhuman, vaguely threatening – and yet in its most extensive use thus far, the term is made into something similar to ‘Nature’ as a whole. This takes place in the scene when Hans and Father play chess in the small attic room. Hans wonders if ‘wicken’ is the same thing as ‘evil,’ and Father tells him No. Father goes farther, and tries to explain that the wicken-things in the Black Forest have something like their own rules, and are not to be feared by any man who knows his place in the natural order. Thus we might have begun to think of ‘wicken-things’ as something like big bears, extremely dangerous if threatened or attacked, but if we just avoid them, they won’t harm us.

This explanation takes the fangs out of the term, and Bardelys was mistaken to do that so early on: it affects how we will think of ‘wicken’ from then on. I suppose that since this was the last scene in which Father would appear before he dies, Bardelys wanted to plant this notion of wicken – probably Hans will come around to realizing the wisdom of such a position much later in the tale.

The problem is that having then explained to us that ‘wicken’ is not so terrible after all, Bardelys can’t just call the Sooty Prince, or the White Lady, ‘wicken-things’ and expect it to send shivers up and down our spines. He has placed ‘wicken’ into a ‘dangerous but not overly so’ box, and if now he wants us to think of ‘wicken’ as belonging to the box of those things ‘malevolent and dangerous,’ he is going to have to go twice as far as he would have if he had started us off with that view.

(Composed on keyboard Saturday 15 November 2008)

Part Two, Chapter Five: The Voice in the Dark

‘Herr Hans!’

The gangly man’s shout filled his ears. Hans felt hands dragging him, and he stumbled back. Otto pulled him off the side of the Road. Hans felt his head burning, but the bird didn’t attack again. At length they found a haystack, and the farmhand helped Hans clamber up to the top.

They lay upon the haystack and caught their breath.

Otto sat up and began hugging his knees. He looked up and down the Road. Tears were bleeding from the man’s eyes and he was shivering.

‘So, Herr Hans,’ he said, and his voice was breaking, ‘what you said back at Groening-stead — the trees, the trees from the Black Forest … they grew so fast … they pulled down the Forester’s house?’

‘I told you.’

The gangly man put his head between his knees and rocked back and forth on the haystack. He was moaning all the while, ‘Ah no … no, please no…’

Hans felt his head. Part of the scalp was sore and hot and sticky. The bird’s talons had opened it. But Hans knew the bird could have done far worse. He would have liked to think that he had been quick enough to duck but he knew the bird could have swooped lower quite easily and taken out his eyes, or even half his face. ‘No,’ Hans thought, ‘it only meant to give me warning of some kind. But of what, I wonder?’

His stomach growled, and he recalled he had eaten nothing for hours. ‘Otto,’ he said. He tugged on the gangly man’s shoulder until Otto turned his head around and faced Hans with great tormented eyes. ‘Otto, let’s eat.’

The fool only shook his head. Again he moaned, and Hans gave up.

‘If you aren’t hungry, I am,’ he said, and he rummaged in his pack for the good things Mother Groening had given him. He laid them out on a kerchief on the hay: bottle and bread and cheese and sausages and cake.

Hans ate, but the gangly man went on moaning and carrying on until Hans felt it gnawing at his nerves. ‘Can’t you be quiet for two shakes?’ he asked, and he put a crust of bread into his hands. ‘Eat that and stop your groans.’

Like a child the gangly man brought the crust before his mouth and chewed on it. All the while his eyes stared at Hans. They cast back the light of the new moon hanging low just over the treetops, and the light in the farmhand’s eyes struck Hans as wicken in its own right. Was the fellow mad? Or did the wild things in the woods stake a claim over his soul now that he sat so close to them and the darkness overtook the Earth?

Hans moved away from him as far as he could get on the haystack. He thought about getting down, but his ankle was stiff again and sore, and Hans feared the ground and the trees even more than the strange man before him.

The gangly man finished the bread and took up the bottle. He drank the wine off with a few loud gulps. Hans watched the man’s throat bobbing up and down as he drank the bottle dry; then the farmhand looked at the empty bottle in his hands, and mumbled some words of a song:

‘A pittle, a pottle,
My only friend’s the bottle,
Though dogs desert me
And women will hurt me
And men cut my throat for gold,
The bottle will feed me
And stand by if need be,
All my life until I grow old.’

There were other verses. On and on the gangly man chanted it, in a drunken mumbling way, in a way that made Hans feel his hair stand on end. The gangly man seemed to be drifting away into madness, into a sort of wicken-spell, and beneath the words Hans heard a rising tone of despair and fever, a working-up to some fearsome deed – maybe even murder.

‘Oh be quiet, can’t you shut up?’ he shouted at last at the farmhand. And Hans was surprised that the man did stop his tongue and turn his pale round eyes to Hans.

It was then that Hans became aware of another sound in the night. It came on the breeze that blew the ground fogs up in long streams from the direction of the woods. It was a grinding, scraping sound.

‘Ah!’ shouted the gangly man. ‘What’s that? What is it?’

‘Shut up! Don’t tell it where we are!’ Hans said, and he was so overwhelmed with panic he took hold of the farmhand and wrestled him down. Hans covered the man’s mouth with his hands and lay on top of him, panting and listening.

The grinding, tearing sound grew louder. It grew closer. Hans could feel his heart knocking on his ribs.

‘It’s the trees,’ he whispered in the farmhand’s ear. ‘Just like on the other night. They are–’ he swallowed hard. ‘They are growing again.’

The gangly man’s eyes grew even bigger with fear. Hans could see them reflecting the starlight like broad beast’s eyes.

‘You should go into the Schwarzwald, Herr Hans.’ The farmhand’s voice was steady now, but it sounded oddly hollow.

Hans got off the man and backed away. ‘What are you saying?’ he asked.

The big eyes blinked. ‘Your father is dead, Herr Hans. You are the Forester now. It’s right for you in the Schwarzwald. It is your place.’

The grinding of the trees was like a roaring wind now. It filled the black night air around them.

‘The Schwarzwald is wicken,’ said Hans. ‘Wicken and bad. It’s no place for men, can’t you hear the gnawing and gnashing of the trees?’

‘I tell you, you should go, you must go! And go you shall!’ The gangly man’s limbs thrashed about and for a moment Hans feared he would attack him. Otto started up and Hans raised his staff, his only weapon. But the gangly man saw the gesture, or sensed it, and Hans heard him plop back down on the hay. For a time he went on muttering, strange sounds, not proper words at all. At last he was quiet.

Hans sat and stared into the blackness. There was nothing he could see. His ears pricked up for the smallest sound that should warn him if the gangly man tried to creep toward him.

He knew surely now the man was wicken, and mad.

Critique of Part 2, Chapter 4

Comments on short chapters and long

This chapter finishes the journey Hans makes to see what is left of his home. No sooner does he find that his remembrance of the dreadful night is truth, than he is attacked and the chapter ends. It ends somewhat abruptly and unsatisfactorily, but evidently Bardelys considers this sort of short chapter with a jagged ending to be a good way to force us to read on through the chapter breaks.

This makes me consider the whole question of short chapters vs. long ones.

Short chapters are like hors d’oeuvres, small and tasty, designed to whet the appetite rather than satisfy it. I suppose the theory is that we will just go on reading and reading and ignore the chapter breaks altogether.

Long chapters, on the other hand, mark significant progress in the logical development of the tale. For the purpose of this discussion, I will consider this the main distinction between short and long chapters: a short chapter takes us only half a step down the tale’s road, or less; a long chapter takes a full step.

Bardelys has given us one such step here: Hans leaves the Groening-stead and along with the farmhand Otto, he goes back to where his home used to stand. There he sees that his home is no more. The realization will presumably force Hans (and Otto, who is looking more and more like a major character at this point) to take up a new course of action – go back to Groening-stead and tell them what they saw, or fall prey to the things that lurk among the trees, or go into the Schwarzwald itself in search of Bertie Groening, or encounter more wicken-creatures like Yellow Socks or the White Lady. Or something else will occur to them. In all events, the course of the action Hans has been taking has now hit a wall: there is no going home for him! Where shall he then go, and what shall he do? The answers to these questions form the next step in his journey through the tale, and will take a new chapter if it is long.

But Bardelys has divided the journey back to the Forester’s House between two chapters, though it is less than one day’s march even for the hobbling Hans. Somehow the two chapters don’t seem to equal a ‘full’ chapter, a ‘decent-sized’ chapter.

But a talesman surely doesn’t want to tire his audience out waiting for a chapter to end. Getting many small, ‘bite-sized’ chapters allows us to put down the book every four or five pages – we know we can always read on, and a new break will be offered to us shortly.

(Composed on keyboard Friday 14 November 2008)

Part 2, Chapter 4: Home Again

He unbound the rags, and a new pain gripped him as the swollen flesh puffed out beneath the wrapping. It was bigger than it had been that morning, redder and more tender. And now along with the redness the flesh was mottled blue and black.

The farmhand’s steps came up. A shadow fell down the Road across his leg. Hans wouldn’t look up. He felt close to tears.

‘The ankle, is it? Here, let me see.’

‘Don’t,’ said Hans, ‘it hurts–’

The gangly man reached out and felt the ankle. His hands were worn and rough, but their touch was gentle as lamb’s fleece. They felt the foot, ankle, and up the leg to the knee. There was no threat in the grip. The farmhand held the ankle with one hand and the knee with the other and then in a sudden move Hans felt the thumbs tighten, and the thumb under the knee slid down his shin and around to the back of his ankle. And the burning pain burst out and died away.

‘Ah!’ Hans cried out and straightened and pushed the farmhand back. He sat there rubbing his calf above the ankle.

‘It feels better now,’ he said.

‘A trick they use on the horses,’ said the gangly man. ‘They showed me how at Groening-stead.’

Hans began to wind the linen up again but the farmhand took it from him. ‘Let me,’ he said. In a few moments the ankle was bound up tight again.

‘Can you stand?’

‘I think so,’ answered Hans. He pushed on the staff, rose up a little and sat back down again. ‘No.’

‘Here take my hand.’ Hans gripped the man’s hand and pulled himself up. He stood, a little dizzy, and leaned against the farmhand’s shoulder.

‘Step by step now, lean on me,’ said the man. Hans tried a few steps. He was aware of his ankle with every step. It pained him, but much less than before. He found an easy pace, leaning on the staff and the farmhand, and the going was slow but steady. Hans found he was sweating from the pain, and wiped his brow.

‘Thank you,’ he said.

‘Oh, it’s little enough beside all I owe your father,’ said the man.

Hans looked across at the fool’s face. ‘You knew my father?’

‘Ah, but who in the Dimmerthal doesn’t know the Forester? But I guess I know him better than most, seeing we lived as neighbors all those years.’

‘But you live at Groening-stead.’

‘Yes, now – and before. But in between I lived with my wife in a cabin quite near your father’s house. It stood right under the dark trees, and every day I went into the Schwarzwald to work.’

‘You were a woodcutter?’

‘Yes, well, I called myself one. Little enough I knew of the work. I grew up with the Groenings most of my life. So the woods were new to me. Many a time I felled a tree across my leg, or got my cart mired in mud, and only the Forester could help me.’

‘I never knew it. I don’t remember you at all.’

‘Well, it was a long time ago, before you were born, I guess.’

‘And how did you end up back at Farmer Groening’s?’

A shadow fell across the gangly man’s face and he looked away. ‘Oh, I was alone then, and grew tired of it all,’ he said, and he tried to make his voice sound easy, but Hans caught bitterness and pain underneath the tones. ‘I asked Farmer Groening if I could come back to him, and he said yes, seeing that the cause of the quarrel between us had ended. That was years ago, just about the time you were born, Herr Hans.’

‘What happened to your wife?’

‘But who said I had a wife?’

‘You did, you fool.’

The gangly man shook his head. ‘Oh no, Herr Hans, I never said that. You must not have heard me right.’

‘Well then, what was the quarrel you had with the farmer?’

‘Ah, that’s a long tale, for another time,’ he said and Hans knew he would hear no more about it.

Hans thought over what the man had told him. He was sure Otto had said he had a wife. Why did he now lie and say he hadn’t? And if he lied about this, what else in his tale was untrue? There was no trusting the man, fool or liar, either way. And yet what he had said about Father tugged at the boy’s heart.

Hans had always known there were other woodcutters who lived along the edges of the Black Forest. Many times they had come to the house seeking help from Father. Hans had thought nothing of it, for it had seemed like good help for neighbors as Mother called it. Now he wondered. It seemed as though all the help had gone from Father to the other men, and Father had needed none of their help for himself. Hans had never before thought of Father as a leader among them, or in any way a man better than most.

‘Your father, Herr Hans, is the finest man in the Dimmerthal,’ said the farmhand, looking at Hans as though he could read his very thoughts. ‘The best maybe in all Mutterbad too, outside the town and the knights who rule there.’

‘But he was only a woodcutter,’ said Hans. He felt now a kind of wrench inside his heart at these thoughts. It seemed to him he had a hundred questions now for Father, and a great yearning to know more about him and his life. But it was too late for that.

He went in silence, staring at the ground. He watched the staff pitch into and push the ground away and he thought about Father. He didn’t notice how the shadows filled the ground and the blue light of evening swallowed everything. Until all at once he felt the farmhand pull up sharp, and Hans stopped alongside him.

There was a stiffness about the farmhand’s body where Hans leaned against him. The man was trembling. And now Hans looked back over the past hours and knew that all that way, the gangly man had shown a growing fear as they neared the Schwarzwald. It was as though he knew more than he had let on about the woods.

Now Hans looked where the farmhand looked, and saw for himself.

In front of them the Charcoal Burners Road ran dead against the trees of the Schwarzwald. It was just as Hans remembered from the dreadful night. There beside the Road’s end rose the great birch-tree as if it had grown there for a hundred years.

‘It was true, then,’ said the farmhand. His voice quavered. ‘What you said, what you told us … it was all true?’

‘All true,’ breathed Hans.

A sick feeling hit him in the stomach, like a punch from a hard fist. He had known it, yes … but all the same he doubted it, too … and he had hoped. Oh how he had hoped that it was all a dream!

A movement high in the birch tree caught his eye.

On a branch something perched.

It was the green crow.

Hans stared at the bird’s black eyes. They seemed to pierce his brain. Then the bird scrawed and leapt off the branch.

‘Herr Hans! Look out!’ yelled the farmhand.

The green crow swooped straight at Hans. The green feathers and black eyes filled his sight. Claws opened and reached for him. He tried to duck out of the way but then the claws struck against his head.

Critique of Part Two Chapter Three

Alone again – almost

This chapter is something of a delaying stretch. Hans is left to himself at the farm, and begins to understand how much he has changed in two days. He makes up his mind to go back home and see for himself the truth, for he has begun to doubt his memory. He lies to Mother Groening to comfort him, and in this we can see how he has softened from the coal-biter brat he was with his own Mother. (Or maybe Bardelys has begun to shift back to the conception of Hans as a stay-at-home rather than a true coal-biter.)

He starts back, but is accompanied by Otto, the dubious farmhand. And he can’t shake him, and his physical weakness, the sprained ankle, betrays him. In the end he is forced to accept the farmhand's company on the rest of the way back.

Overhanging all this is something of a mystery. Bertie Groening set out the day before to visit the Foresters’ house and let them know Hans was well. He should have been back last night, or this forenoon at the earliest, it seems. Mother Groening seems worried over him. This small bit of darkness, which Bardelys doesn't dwell on enough, I think, casts a bit of a pall over the future.

We already know that Hans is right when he feels that ‘all the bad was true, and all his hopes were false.’ Or at least we hope that is so, because we want the magic and the danger to arise to give us an entertaining tale. Bertie’s failure to return seems to bolster our hopes in the evil that will greet Hans when he finds his home again.

And yet, for the little of moment that happens in this chapter, it runs on awfully long. Bardelys has let his feet drag in the mire again.

(Composed on keyboard Thursday, November 13, 2008)

Part Two, Chapter Three: The Road Back

Hans went back in on the trundle-bed, eyeing the door and wondering if the farmhand would come after him. What did the fellow want, anyway? Could it be that he was the harmless fool the Groenings took him for? At last his eyes closed.

Far away he saw his sisters. They were leaning out a window and elbowing each other and giggling. Then Gerta looked right at him and said,

‘Oh Hans, there you are! Why do you stay away?’

‘Come back, Hans, come back please,’ said Guda.

‘Hans come back, we’re missing you!’

‘Hans, Hans … wake up!’

Mother Groening was shaking him. He looked past her around the kitchen in the main house in Groening-stead. It could be only moments since he had fallen asleep.

‘It was a nightmare, Hans.’

He nodded. He sat up and rubbed his face. ‘Yes,’ he said.

The farmers ate their first-light meal with few words. Most ate standing. They took a few bites, drank a cup of milk and cream, and went out. Candles burned on the long table. Out the door and windows it was yet as dark as night.

Hans yawned and stretched, sleepy-eyed on the bench. Farmer Groening measured Hans with a look both scornful and cold. He seemed to begrudge Hans every bite of bread and sup of milk he took. At length the farmer stood up, put on his hat, and stormed out. The last of the other men hastened after him.

Now Hans found himself left in the big house with the women, the girls and the children, and he wandered about, and so came to sit out on the front porch where Mother Groening and the other women of the house did their daily work, in the fresh air and bright sunlight.

In the yard the children played, the sons and daughters of the Groenings’ children, and the sons and daughters of the workers on the farm. Hans watched the children at their games. Only two days before, he would have joined into such games with his sisters. Now he felt how much older he was than those children, and bigger – almost as big as a full-grown man. And he felt ashamed, and turned in his chair and looked away.

He sat at the end of the porch and kept to himself. Darkness seemed to have risen over him like a shadow, and cold like the winds that come before a thunderstorm. He felt lost and unable to make up his mind.

‘What is it, what is happening to me?’ he wondered, and could find no answer.

His thoughts turned to his loss and his grief, and he looked back down the Charcoal Burners Road past the dead house. ‘Soon Bertie will come up the Road, and he will tell them that my tale wasn’t untrue, and that the Forest has moved.’ Or would he?

The memory of the dreadful night was already faded in his mind. He had wandered in and out of dreams so much over the past day and a half, that he no longer knew what was true and what false.

And yet when he looked to the North, where the sky darkened above the Schwarzwald, he knew in his heart that every evil thing he had dreamt was true, and only his hopes were false.

The workmen and Farmer Groening came back for the mid-morning meal. In the middle of the day they sat for dinner. And still Bertie Groening did not come back.

The men went out again, and the women cleared the table and washed the dishes, and tended the soups for the last meal of the day. Hans helped the women in their chores, hobbling about the kitchen and back hall, until he could find nothing else to do, and he went out onto the porch.

Mother Groening sat there at her knitting, alone with a pained look about her face. Hans sat beside her.

‘Mother Groening, I must thank you for all you’ve done for me, you and Farmer Groening both,’ he said. ‘But now I think, if you could only lend me a staff or crutch, I will leave you now.’

She turned to him, and he saw that her eyes were red, as if she had been weeping, or fighting back the tears. ‘Ah, Hans, and will you forgive your parents and go home again?’

‘But how can I? They are dead,’ were the words that sprang up in his throat. But he bit them back. And then he thought he would tell her whatever it was she wanted to hear, for she was such a good, kindly old woman, it would be cruel to hurt her in any way. But how could he lie to her after her many kindnesses?

So then he thought about what she asked, and what might lie behind it. And he knew that Mother Groening too fretted over Bertie, and wondered where he was and what could have befallen him. In truth, Hans couldn’t even guess. Here was a way to repay the Groenings. But also it rose up strong inside him, a longing, even a need, to go back down the Road to see where his home had stood.

He knew it had fallen, he knew what had happened before his eyes. And yet, and yet… The others spoke so surely against it. They had sown doubt in his heart and made him wonder about his own memories. He had to go back, if only for this one thing: he had to make sure. He had to see in the full open light of day where the trees now stood, and whether his home was standing, or if it lay as broken boards and splinters crushed under the roots. If he went back, he would no doubt meet Bertie on the way, and help him home. And last of all Hans felt a tiny hope worming through his breast. If they were right, and he was wrong! If his house still stood! If Father and Mother still lived!

Mother Groening clutched his hand. Hans swallowed, and nodded.

‘Yes, that’s right,’ he said. ‘I forgive them. I want to go home again.’

Mother Groening beamed and hugged him, dragging him off his seat. ‘Wait, wait!’ she told him, and turned back inside the great house.

Hans felt his ankle, and wondered if it was fit for a long day’s hike. He unbound the strips of linen, and was aghast at how much the flesh had puffed up, and how tender, red and sore it was. He took the rags and wrapped them back around the ankle as tightly as he could, glad for every wince and hot stab of pain. ‘I will wrap you up tighter than a shoe could hold you, you won’t be able to wobble or twist a finger’s breadth.’

Soon enough Mother Groening came forth, with a stout staff and a hunter’s wallet.

‘Here are some cheeses and dried sausages for your Mother, Hans, and some bread and cakes for your journey. And I put in a small jug of wine for your thirst. Ah Hans! You make an old woman very glad. And if you happen to see Bertie along the way, be a good fellow and tell him to hurry home before nightfall, will you?’

‘I will.’

‘Oh, where is that fellow, you’re ready to set out, and the day is waning – ah! Here he is at last, Otto, what took you so long?’

The gangly, wicken-eyed farmhand leaned out of the door. ‘Well, Mother Groening, but you said,’ he began but she shook her head and pulled him out.

‘Never mind, never mind! Otto will go with you, Hans, and see that all is well. And now, I wish you God speed and good luck on your way.’ She bent and kissed him on the cheek.

Hans stared over her shoulder at the farmhand.

‘But, Mother,’ he said, ‘I can find my own way home.’

‘But the Road is long, and your ankle is hurting. Otto will help you on the way. And also he will give Bertie some company on his way back home, when you meet him.’

Hans could think of no answer to that. And so he found himself trudging up the Road with the gangly man beside him. They came to the dead house and waved farewell to Mother Groening and the other women of Groening-stead. Then Hans leaned upon the staff with both hands and started down the Road toward the bottom of the Dimmerthal.

But as he crossed under the shadow of the dead house Hans felt feelings of unease rising in his breast. He stopped. The farmhand came to a stop alongside him. Hans squinted at the man, who looked back at him foolishly.

‘I thank you for your offer to come along with me,’ said Hans. ‘But truly I need no help. My ankle is strong again and I can find my own way home. Please go back to the farmhouse. There must be many chores for you to do.’

The farmhand pushed back his cap and scratched his head. ‘But Mother Groening,’ he said, ‘she told me to go with you.’

‘Thank Mother Groening for me, and tell her I don’t need help.’

Hans gave the man no time to answer. He turned and started back down the Road, hobbling on the staff. Along he went, and after a few minutes he looked back over his shoulder. The farmhand stood where Hans had left him, looking after Hans as if unsure what to do. Hans gave him no more than a glance, and went on his way.

The day was a fine one, and Hans felt his spirits rising as he left the odd man and the dark wreck of a house behind him. His ankle burned softly, but as he fell into the easy pace of walking with the staff, he found it bothered him less and less.

But then something came to him and he looked back.

The gangly man was following him down the Road.

Hans halted until the man caught up to him.

‘Why are you following me?’ asked Hans. ‘Didn’t I make myself clear to you? I don’t need your help, and I don’t want it. Now go back to the Groening-stead.’

The farmhand scratched his head as before. ‘But Mother Groening, she told me to go with you.’

‘And I tell you not to.’

Once more Hans swung on the staff and marched away. He was feeling angry now. So he went for a time; but when he looked back again, there was the farmhand following after him at the same distance as before.

Hans pounded the staff into the ground. ‘Why do you hound me so? I tell you, go back and begone! Or we will come to blows!’

The gangly man halted. He scratched his head. He looked back toward the rise that marked Groening-stead and he looked back to Hans.

‘I wouldn’t want that,’ he said.

‘Then go!’ Hans went on. He walked as fast as he could, digging the staff into the ground with each step. But he found the farmhand trailing him once more.

‘Pay him no heed, he will tire of the game and give up,’ Hans told himself. But his feeling of unease was rising even as the Sun wheeled into the West and the shadows lengthened. And now his ankle began to burn and bother him. He tried other ways to lean upon the staff, now to right and now to left, now forward and now back. Each shift helped a little, for awhile, and then the ankle fired again, and worse than before. Soon it was an agony, and Hans had to sit on the side of the Road, staring at his foot with a black ruinous gaze.

Critique of Part Two, Chapter Two

Building a mood

Hans spends his first day at Groening-stead, but it is an odd one. After breakfast, he sleeps all day, and begins a nightlong vigil. Already his experiences have placed him far from his fellow-men.

Here we find some traces of Magic reappearing in Bardelys’s tale. The chapter has little enough overt action, and yet builds a strangeness about Hans and his experience, like a veil that swings between him and the common, everyday actions of the men and women of the farm. Even though Hans seems to sink back for a time into childhood, and even begins to accept that the events of the Dreadful Night were in truth no more than his nightmare, we can see that going back to what he was is no longer any choice for him. He can try, but the effort will fail – we can see it, even if Hans himself still can’t.

A new character is introduced, Wendel, Mother Groening’s brother. From his remarks, we can believe he is not quite sane, or that he too has glimpsed the evil acts of the wicken-things in the Black Forest. He seems to know only too well what Hans has spoken about, and his final words regarding the ground fog echo the warning Hans got from his Granny.

It seems Hans feels a bit relieved when the household goes to bed, leaving him alone. He can’t sleep, as though he is now becoming a creature of the night himself. He goes outside, breathes in the cool dark air, and encounters again Otto, who seems to be waiting for him.

It is on this moment of the encounter that the chapter ends, begging us to read on and discover what business Otto has with Hans.

The effect of the periods of sleep and waking, the hypnotic firelight, and the mix of dreams and mundane activities, create a mood that is somewhat dreamlike in itself, and seems to me better-drawn than the actual nightmare when the trees tore down the house. It leaves us, along with Hans himself, separated from the common men and women of Groening-stead, somewhat adrift, and expectant. It is as though we felt the farmstead might suffer an attack any moment of the weird wicken-things – as though we would welcome such an attack.

And indeed, who wouldn’t? We are reading a dark fairytale, after all, and mundane activities must begin to bore us, unless they appear under the lens of such atmosphere and strange mood as we find here. Like the audiences watching Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Birds, we are complicit in the evil, for we long for the excitement and terror and weirdness of the rising wicken-creatures.

(Composed on keyboard Wednesday 12 November 2008)

Chapter Two: Warning Words

‘Hans!’

Mother Groening looked shocked. The talk along the table died, and all eyes turned on Hans.

Hans tried to swallow. But the ham caught in his throat and his hunger fell away.

‘I didn’t tell you the whole truth,’ he said. He could feel his face blushing hot.

So he told them how he had first seen the Charcoal Burners in their wicken-shapes, and how the trees in the Black Forest had torn down his home. But something held his tongue when he came to tell about the magic glove, the deadly fair White Lady, and the strange boy with yellow socks. The words wouldn’t come out. Nor did he tell them how he blamed himself for it all.

As Hans spoke, he could see the doubt growing in the faces about the table. He faltered and almost stopped when he reached the part where he had heard his Mother’s death-cry. From there he rushed on, biting back sobs, up until Farmer Groening pulled him out of the haystack.

A somber, uneasy silence followed. At last Farmer Groening said, ‘Now if that isn’t the deepest pile of manure I ever–’

‘Hush, Father, the boy doesn’t know what he’s saying,’ Mother Groening said. She pressed her palm on Hans, feeling his brow. ‘Hans, are you sure you’re feeling well?’

‘I’m fine,’ he answered, putting off her hand.

‘Don't be wishing death on anyone, Hans. No matter how mad you may feel, no matter any unfairness that made you run away.’

Hans pushed himself off the bench. Somehow Mother Groening’s pity was worse than the old farmer’s scoffing. He could feel his face flushing and burning, but this time it wasn’t for any bashfulness.

‘It’s no good telling tales, little Hans,’ said Farmer Groening. ‘Leave that to townsfolk and those with too many hours and not enough work. On farms there’s more work than hours, and tale-telling only brings trouble. I expect it’s the same among woodcutters.’

Hans stared back at him, at all the smiling, pitying, scoffing faces.

‘You don’t know,’ he told them. ‘You don’t know anything at all.’

He turned and banged through the first door he came to, which took him into the kitchen. It was blessedly empty, for as soon as he was through it his ankle gave out from under him and he pitched forward onto a bench by the hearth, staring into the low flames and embers, blinking back tears, as mad as he had ever been.

For awhile they left him alone. He heard voices from the main hall and he was glad that he couldn’t make out what they said, for he could guess it well enough. ‘Very good then,’ he thought. ‘If they think I’m just a runaway child, I’ve no use for them, I’ll take myself elsewhere.’

But where could he go? He remembered his resolve of only an hour ago, that he would hunt down the wicken-things and do battle against them, that he would single-handed roam the Dimmerthal against them. It seemed so empty now. He couldn’t even talk Mother Groening into believing the threat was real. Would anyone else believe him?

His ankle angrily reminded him that he would do no roaming on this day.

He yawned a great cracking yawn. He hadn’t slept much the night before last, and not at all last night. Every time he blinked, his eyelids didn’t seem to want to open again.

‘I’ll close my eyes to rest them a moment,’ he said, ‘then I’ll thank Mother Groening. If only they will lend me a staff to lean on, I can go.’

He closed his eyes. He curled against the stones in the wall by the hearth, counting the aches his ankle gave him.

He fell asleep.

Folk were bustling about the kitchen when he woke. He stole a look about and saw the farmstead women cleaning up after breakfast and starting on the mid-day meal. Everything looked common and every-day. Hans wondered if maybe all the happenings of last night were not a dream after all. When he thought about wicken-things and leaping, house-eating trees, and he looked at the girls of Groening-stead cooking and washing, well, he didn’t know what to think.

Then one girl spoke of ‘the poor lad, the Forester’s son,’ and their eyes turned on him. He closed his eyes all the way, and soon enough drifted back to sleep.

When Hans woke next, the pots were clattering and the girls were rushing in and out of the kitchen. ‘It must be supper-time,’ thought Hans. The smell of roasting meat and gravy bubbling in the pan made his stomach ache with hunger. And yet his mind swam with dreams half-remembered. His neck ached and he shifted on the bench a little.

His dream came back to him. In it he found himself walking up the Road in Dimmerthal, when Father caught up to him. ‘Come,’ said Father, ‘you took it too hard when I said you had to go into the woods with me. It was a joke, Hans, you needn’t run away. Come back home, and everything will be as it was before.’

The door into the main hall opened and he caught some words from the master of the farm.

‘But it makes no sense,’ said one man. Hans thought he knew Bertie Groening’s voice.

‘No real sense, no,’ said the voice of Uncle Groening. ‘Back in Mutterbad town we would laugh at such undertakings. But out here, so nigh unto the forest… Many things appear at twilight that remain unseen in the sun.’

The foreman’s voice said, ‘Weird sights have been seen in the heavens, shooting stars and falling stars and stars with long forked tails. This Winter was a bad one all around, and Spring was wet and wild. The ice shut down the passes for a full month longer than I ever knew, and then floods swept down the main valley. But none of that touched us here in the Dimmerthal. Even the storm of two nights back, the lightning and thunder deep in the Black Forest, never touched us. Here all was dry and calm. It doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t feel natural or good.’

‘That’s true enough,’ said Uncle Groening’s voice. ‘Something fired that haystack.’

‘It’s as if our valley were wicken-cast with good luck,’ said the foreman’s voice. ‘Or else all our bad luck is being withheld from us, and stored against a later day when it will all be let loose on our heads.’

‘News that is too good will always turn bad,’ quoted Farmer Groening. Hans could see the old man’s stern face as he would say such a thing.

‘Charcoal Burners!’ spat another man, his voice heavy with loathing.

‘See you come back as quick as you can,’ said Farmer Groening. ‘But do not risk the darkness, Bertie. I have a bad feeling here, that–’

But then the door was closed again and Hans heard no more of what they said. He turned on the bench and found that someone had lain a woolen blanket over him, and put a pillow beneath his head. ‘Mother Groening, no doubt,’ he thought, and fell once more asleep.

Some time later, he was sitting by the fire. A bowl of porridge lay in his lap. Mother Groening tended to the pots over the fire. Hans watched her, but she didn’t look up. When she did turn, he saw it wasn’t Mother Groening at all, but his own Mother. She smiled at him, took his hand and kissed him. ‘Why won’t you come back to us, Hans?’ she asked.

He woke up with a jolt.

This time he could find no reason why he had awakened. The kitchen was quiet. The fire in the hearth had fallen into a low happy glow of embers and ash. Most of the candles were out and the windows were quite dark. The whole house seemed to be asleep.

Then Hans heard whispers and furtive murmurs from the far corner of the kitchen near the back door. He could not at first make out what they were saying. One voice he thought was Mother Groening’s and the other was a man’s. All at once the man’s voice grew louder and broke into laughter.

‘The boy’s tale is not so far-fetched as your good Farmer thinks,’ it said. ‘I have walked in Schwarzwald, sister, and seen what you have never dreamed.’

‘Hush now, you’ll wake the whole house,’ answered Mother Groening. Hans heard the back door open and felt the cool night air flood the frowsy kitchen. ‘Go home, Wendel, do not say such things, you know Farmer Groening has banned you from our house for it.’

‘Very good, sister dear, I’ll go. But mark my words, the Farmer and his folk are not long for this world, and you must look for me to save you. I can, you know. Only look out for the ground fogs. The ground fogs are coming!’

‘Yes, Wendel, very good, they are coming, now good-night to you.’ And Hans heard her shut the door.

After that the kitchen was still but for the hissing from the embers. Mother Groening did not stir from the door. Hans lifted his head a little and saw beyond the cutting-table and the iron cauldron before the fire, where Mother Groening’s shadow loomed against the wall. He saw her shadow-shoulders rise and fall and fancied he heard her sigh. She came back into the kitchen, fingering her bunch of keys in the way his own Mother always had when she had too much worry on her mind.

This gesture, so well-known, made his heart ache. He sat up in the blanket and rubbed his eyes.

‘Mother Groening?’

‘Hans!’ She came to him right away and he dropped his head into her arms. ‘How are you, child? My, how you have slept! I saved you out some supper there on the side table, some cold soup and bread and meat. And there in the corner is Bertie’s trundle-bed, you will find it easier to sleep on.’

‘Where is Bertie, then?’

‘Oh, the Farmer sent him to your house, to let your Father and Mother know you’re all right. I expect they gave him supper and he’ll be sleeping in your bed tonight, so you may rightly take his.’

Hans shook his head but could not bear to quarrel. He rose, leaning against the hearth. His ankle burned and would only take a little part of his weight. He leaned against Mother Groening, and she bore him to the table and sat him down. He ate all that she put before him and drank cool well-water from a glass beaker. It was like being home again only very much nicer, the way he didn’t quarrel, and Mother Groening petted him and gave him whatever he wanted without being asked.

Then she bound up his ankle in some rags and tucked him into the little trundle-bed and kissed him good-night, and she went upstairs to her own bed. But she left the candle burning, and Hans felt glad for it.

He lay thinking for awhile. Sleep wouldn’t come, and no wonder, he thought, for he had slept all day. He sat on the edge of the bed, leaning his elbows on his knees. Then he got up and hopped to the back door.

He felt a strong need to go out into the night, why he didn’t know. And yet at the same time he felt an almost-equal unwillingness that bordered upon dread.

‘Don’t be a baby,’ he told himself, and wrenched open the door.

He went out onto the back porch among the work-tables and storing-bins. He leaned upon the rail and looked about.

The night was huge and empty and dark. The sky was spattered with stars peeping through the rents in the clouds. There was no moon for it had sunk at dusk tonight. Everything was quiet and still, there was no wind.

Hans found his thoughts turning back to the fair White Lady, the wicken-lady he had spied upon in the wreckage of his house. In the deep night she no longer seemed part of his dream, but all too real. She lurked somewhere in the night, Hans knew, along the edge of the woods, haunting strong men’s nightmares. He shuddered. And the strange boy Yellow Socks was abroad as well, with Corbluncz the Prince of the Charcoal Burners. How was it the farmers hadn’t seen them? Somehow it made it worse that they hadn’t. It seemed proof to Hans that the Sooty Folk were up to no good, that they must hide where they went and what they did.

He stretched and yawned. He turned to go back inside but then he stopped.

At the end of the porch someone was leaning up against the post and watching him. The way the man held himself, it seemed he had stood there all this time, waiting for Hans to come out, knowing that sooner or later Hans would have to come out.

In the cold starlight Hans knew the man’s face.

It was the gangly, odd-eyed farmhand Otto.

For a moment they stared at each other. Then the farmhand leapt over the porch-rail and ran off.

‘Hey!’ shouted Hans, but the gangly man vanished in the dark.

Critique of Part Two, Chapter 1

Questions on part-breaks and character introductions

Bardelys has begun a new Part to his tale, The Magic Key. This, the second part, he calls ‘Darkness over Dimmerthal.’ So let’s look at this chapter with the broader question of part-breaks in mind. Since Bardelys has also introduced several new characters, we can ask about character introductions in general as well.

The Parts of a Book

A ‘Book’ is a specific way of presenting a Tale. Over the centuries various divisions of a book have been used. There are the ‘books’ of a ‘volume’ and the ‘parts’ of a ‘book’ as well as ‘chapters’ and ‘sections’ of chapters and ‘subsections’ of ‘sections.’ Of course these are all artificial and arbitrary, and often (as in the case of the original ‘books’ which were the division of Homer’s epic poems into separate scrolls) done for technical reasons having more to do with the means of reproduction rather than any organic or logical grouping of the scenes and movements of the tale itself. It remains true, however, that most editors and publishers and authors will try to make the divisions of their books coincide with organic and logical divisions of the tales printed therein. And we can also say that almost all the great and conscientious editors, publishers, and authors do so.

With that in mind, let’s look at where Bardelys has broken his tale here.

The first strictly organic distinction between parts one and two involves location. Hans in part one lives at home. His home life is destroyed, he runs for his life, and is rescued. Part two has him going to the homestead of the Groening family, and so it seems as though part two will show us how Hans lives with the Groenings. The title of the part, ‘Darkness over Dimmerthal,’ also indicates that the part is organized around the setting of its scenes, which will broaden our perspective and show us more of the Dimmerthal valley, and not just the Groening family and folk.

Another possible logical distinction we might want to draw between parts one and two involves the basic logical movements of this or any tale. It could be that Bardelys considers (consciously or intuitively) that the end of part one coincides with his First Curtain, when the conflict is set and fully engaged-in by both parties. Or it could be that Bardelys looks on the end of part one as the end of the Summoning – maybe he looks on this whole Dreadful Night as the Inciting Incident that upends the world Hans lives in (it certainly does that) but that Hans may still withdraw from the lists and not take on his enemies to the full. Maybe Bardelys thinks his young hero still has some growing-up to do, or some hardening of his heart, or needs to commit further to this war.

(Bardelys has sketched out the further outlines of his tale to me enough so that I could make a case for either alternative.)

Character Introductions

Bardelys in this short chapter gives us several new faces to learn. Some of these may be more important than others. There are:

1. Farmer Groening, the patriarch
2. Mother Groening, his wife
3. Bertie Groening their young son
4. A fat, jolly fellow-farmer
5. Anton, the foreman of the farmhands
6. Otto, a slightly suspect farmhand, maybe a simpleton, maybe more dangerous, and maybe allied with the enemy

From the way Bardelys has treated these introductions, I would guess that Farmer Groening, Mother Groening, Bertie Groening, and Otto will all prove to be major characters. Anton the foreman is probably minor. The fat, jolly farmer may or may not be significant; it’s hard to tell. Oddly enough, the fact that Bardelys does not tell us what this man’s name is has me leaning toward betting that he will be a major character – but I can’t say why I lean that way, for normally the anonymous characters are minor all the way.

Otto has the best introduction. Bardelys shows us what he looks like and what he does before he lets us know what his name is. We wonder about him, along with Hans. And Otto seems ambiguous, and someone to watch out for. He may turn out to be a minor villain, but it seems that he has an important role to play at least in this Dimmerthal part of the tale.

Second to Otto stands Mother Groening’s introduction. She appears as a replacement for the Mother Hans has lost, right down to the smell of her apron. She offers Hans love, and it is only in her presence that he can feel vulnerable and weak. Thus it seems her part here will be to tempt Hans away from the Hero’s path, and encourage his desire to shrink back into childish dependency. We know, if we know anything about stories (and about stories of adventure most of all) that this is a bad thing! The Hero who shrinks from the Call flirts with disaster, and risks losing the entire struggle!

Farmer Groening (and Otto, oddly enough) are offered as replacements for the lost Father. Farmer Groening seems to stand in for the Father who was going to drag Hans against his will into the Black Forest. (And thus maybe Bardelys means the ‘fat, jolly’ farmer to be the other half of the missing Father, the more indulgent father-figure, and a complement to Mother Groening in excusing Hans from joining battle.) Otto might be a Father-replacement only because of the rather odd remark that Hans makes, in comparing the relative ages of Otto and Father. Only Otto is compared to Father at all, and since in all other ways the two are quite unlike, we must wonder. If Bardelys knows his business, this chance remark indicates more such comparisons to come.

(Composed on keyboard Tuesday 11 November 2008)

Darkness over Dimmerthal, Chapter One: Groening-stead

And so on the Summer’s Day that marked his seventeenth birthday, Hans Forester limped up Dimmerthal valley to Groening-stead, that was the foremost farm in the Lower Dimmerthal.

The morning sun dazzled his eyes and heated his head, for he had no cap. His bare feet and twisted ankle throbbed with every step. He had lost on that night his home, his family, and all his belongings. He owned nothing now except for the tattered, torn and bloody nightshirt that clung to his back. He was alone in the world.

And yet as he went on, his anguish faded. Grief and fear, anger and hate drifted apart from him at arm’s length. They left behind only a dull nothing in his heart. He followed Farmer Groening and his men with no more feeling, no more hope, and no more thought than you find in a cow that walks behind its master to the chopping-block.

From time to time, he saw, one farm-hand in particular would duck his head back and sneak a look at Hans.

‘What are you gawking at, badger-eyes?’

The man seemed startled to be caught. He touched his cap. ‘Beg your pardon, Herr Master.’

‘Well, don’t gape at me like a fool.’

‘No, Herr Master, thank you, sir.’

‘Never mind Otto,’ said a bright-faced boy of 12 or 13 summers. Hans recognized him as one of the farmer’s sons, little Bertie Groening. ‘He wouldn’t hurt a soul, would you, Otto?’

‘Otto was once a clever young fellow,’ said an older man who wore the bright red kerchief of the farm foreman. ‘But then he went into the Schwarzwald once too often and his brains got addled. Didn’t they, Otto old chap?’ He spoke of the man to his face the way a man would of his hound.

‘Yes, Master Anton, thank you, sir.’

Hans kept his eye on the farm-hand after that, but the man didn’t look back again.

This man Otto, Hans deemed, was almost as old as Father had been. He was tall and lanky, even gangly, and this gave him an odd way of walking. He had a fool’s open face. Surely there could be no threat from him. And yet Hans felt there was something about the man that gave the lie to his simple looks. He had the smell of something wicken-like.

Hans walked on the far side of the road from him after that.

Soon upon a swelling of the land ahead there rose a great dark mass that Hans thought could only be the main house of the Groening-stead. But when they were near enough to make it out clearly, Hans felt his heart quail to look upon it.

For the house was a wreck. Its roof had fallen in, there were no panes in its windows, its paint was cracked and peeling. It reminded Hans of the fate of his own home and he said, not thinking,

‘We don’t have to go in there, do we?’

Farmer Groening halted and glared back at Hans. The other men fell silent. The old farmer’s squint boded ill for Hans and he was sorry he’d spoken.

Then Bertie Groening laughed and said, ‘No Hans, what are you dreaming? Our house lies on ahead.’

Hans flushed. The boy had spoken to him as though it were himself, Hans, who was the younger. They walked up the Road around the dead house and saw stretching out beyond it the rest of the Groening-stead buildings. There were half-a-dozen houses, a score of sheds and outbuildings, some barns, fenced-in yards where goats and chickens and geese and pigs were feeding. All this stood in a shallow bowl in the valley ground. The Charcoal Burners Road ran down the middle of it, alongside the biggest house that stood up shining and new. Upon its porch several women were sitting and working and gossiping. One woman stopped her work and stepped to the forepart of the porch, staring up at the band of men walking toward her. She waved and called to them,

‘Who do you have there?’

‘Hullo, Mother,’ answered Bertie. ‘It’s Hans, the Forester’s son. We found him inside a burning haystack!’

The woman stepped down off the porch and came to Hans. Mother Groening was not so old as her husband. She was broad and red-faced and her eyes were as blue as the sky. Laugh-lines wrinkled her cheeks. She bent and kissed Hans. ‘Oh you poor boy, however did that happen?’

When Mother Groening’s arms enfolded Hans, all his numbness went away and his grief and fear came flooding back into his heart. Tears filled his eyes. He pressed his face into her apron, which smelled of sugar, flour, and cocoa – like Mother’s had the day she died, only yesterday, only last night. And his throat choked and he could say nothing.

‘There now, come inside,’ she said in his ear. ‘We’ll get you clean and combed and give you a bite to eat, it’s breakfast-time at Groening-stead!’

She held him at arm’s length. Hans wiped at his face, ashamed to be seen weeping like a child.

‘Wouldn’t you like some porridge, Hans?’ asked Mother Groening.

He nodded. She held him beside her and led him up the steps.

It took Hans half an hour to get good and clean. The soot-smuts on his arms seemed they would never come out. And when at last he scrubbed away the dirt, he found many cuts and scrapes he didn’t know he had. ‘From the trees I suppose,’ he thought. His right shoulder was bruised blue where he had crashed into the wicken-soldier in breaking free from the wicken-camp. Now at last he could take time to feel his ankle properly. Hans had sprained his ankles before many times, jumping off the wood-pile and racing up the valley. It did not bother him so much now, but he knew it would be worst on the morrow as these things always were.

He dressed himself in some clothing Mother Groening had given him. It hung on him well enough and he stood without leaning too far onto his right foot.

And so at last he found himself at the long pine table of Farmer Groening’s house with the rest of the family, eating porridge and eggs and hot black bread with cream, and the cheese and sausages for which the Groening-stead was well-known up and down the Dimmerthal.

Hans had never in his life seen so much food brought together all at once. Groening-stead was the biggest holding in the Lower Dimmerthal and this mid-morning meal was the first main meal of the day here.

‘Now Hans,’ said Mother Groening, filling his bowl for the third time, ‘We must get you back home, your Father and Mother must be missing you.’

‘No they aren’t,’ he said through a mouthful of ham. ‘They’re dead.’

Review of The Magic Key part 1: The Dread Night

A doubt arises over the advisability of a talesman using his own terms

We have now read and criticised Part One of The Magic Key. Before going on to Part Two (which Bardelys tells me is in much rougher shape than Part One, and he’ll be glad of a bit of extra time to start serialising it) I thought it would be a good idea to look back on Part One with a special eye towards two aspects of the tale, the hero’s characterization and the terminology of Faëry.

Stay-at-home or coal-biter?

Bardelys has offered us Hans with aspects of both the stay-at-home and the coal-biter. The difference is two-fold. First, the stay-at-home doesn’t leave his comfy paternal nest for reasons of fear – he’s scared of the big bad World and clings to Mother’s apron-strings. But the coal-biter stays at home mostly out of laziness. The stay-at-home will usually be a ‘good lad’ and do what Mother and Father (if Father is around) tell him. The coal-biter snaps and snarls, talks big, talks tough, is arrogant, and won’t do anything he’s told.

These are the archetypes of the characters, and as you see, they are quite at odds with each other.

Second, the pattern of the typical stay-at-home hero’s story has him leaving home, at last, when the home itself collapses. Father goes bankrupt, the family loses the house, Father dies and Mother is forced off the property, Father and Mother agree that they can’t make ends meet and need to get rid of the kids (think of Hansel and Gretel here). But the coal-biter leaves home because his arrogant behavior has gotten him into trouble locally.

(Since the coal-biter is not well-known as a story pattern, I’ll lay out a modern version: one day, while playing football with the local guys on the high school field, the coal-biter quarrels, as he does with everyone he meets, with the kid playing quarterback on the opposing team. On the next play the coal-biter trips the lineman blocking him, and sacks the quarterback, driving him into the ground so hard he breaks the kid’s neck and kills him. Hauled before the local court on charges, the coal-biter sneers without any repentance, but his father pleads for him, and the judge offers the coal-biter the choice of going to juvenile prison, or enlisting in the army. The coal-biter shrugs and with a contemptuous joke says he’ll take the army because it’s one prison or another. In the army he distinguishes himself for bravery and insane, reckless courage, but is denied the appropriate medals and honors because he is so insubordinate … he goes on to be dishonorably discharged, becomes a mercenary, and ends badly.)

The first that we see of Hans fits the coal-biter in character and behavior. But the next night we see he is afraid of bad dreams, and on the next morning he is afraid of going into the woods. This fits the stay-at-home, not the coal-biter. Finally, he leaves home when his home collapses (literally) and his family is killed. So what starts off as coal-biter ends as stay-at-home, leaving us a bit confused.

It is possible of course to blend the archetypes, which makes Hans a more complex character. But Bardelys has given us what is mainly an archetypal tale, at least in the way he presents it to us. It strikes me as strange, and wrong, to have ‘once upon a time’ lead into a psychological study in realism – the two just don’t fit together.

The Terms of the Tale’s World

I have criticised Bardelys through chapters 7–9 for the lack of Magic, and how the tale seems to have ‘down-shifted’ into a mere adventure tale rather than a tale of the Fantastic. I compared it unfavorably to Professor Tolkien’s The Hobbit in this regard. But I noted, too, that in The Hobbit, Tolkien’s Elves were decidedly unmagical. We regard them as magical simply because, well, they’re elves, aren’t they?

That set me wondering whether Bardelys might not have given these chapters of his a lot more magical feeling, had he named his Charcoal Burners with a traditional name of creatures out of fairyland. What if he had said the wretched poor charcoal burners had been transformed, in the eyes of his young hero, into ‘ghouls’ or ‘demons’ or ‘vampires’ or ‘trolls’? Then every single line that refers to them could be fraught, if not with magic per se, at least with the expectation and anticipation of magic in the minds of us in the audience. ‘They look like Charcoal Burners, but really, they’re demons!’ Hans could tell Farmer Groening, and we might even shiver. But we react quite differently when we hear him say, ‘but really, they’re wicken-things!’ For Bardelys has not yet, at this point in the tale, sufficiently ‘charged’ his invented term of wicken with the same awful supernatural portents.

Thus we see in this instance the advantages for the talesman in using his own terminology for his fantastical creations, and the disadvantages. When we hear or read of ‘ghouls’ or ‘vampires’ or ‘trolls’ we shudder, if we find the terms fresh, but we roll our eyes if we are inveterate readers in the genre, and we think, ‘Oh not the trolls again!’ or we yawn and think, ‘Yeah, I know all about vampires and all their tribes … which kind of vampire is it this time?’ But all the same, we do know that trolls and vampires are not of this Earth. As for ‘wicken’ (or any other newly-coined talesman’s term) we just wonder what the heck it is, and until we get settled into the tale, we have to pause a moment and wonder whether we missed some earlier scene in which the term was set forth and defined.

(Composed on keyboard Monday 10 November 2008)

Critique of Chapter Nine

Is this even a fantasy tale?

One more chapter, no more magic.

This is getting ridiculous. Or tiresome.

Compare this tale to how Professor Tolkien arranged The Hobbit. From the very first paragraph he introduces us to a ‘hobbit,’ a small creature with its own homely magic of disappearing in a lane whenever a Big Folk clumsy oaf like you or me blunders along. (This talent Tolkien promptly forgets, although later in the tale it is formalized when Bilbo finds the Ring.)

Another page and Tolkien gives us a wizard (Gandalf) who quarrels with Bilbo and then puts a spell upon his door. Then along come a dozen dwarfs to invite themselves to a feast at Bilbo’s expense. Even though the dwarfs seem to have no magical powers or talismans, they are themselves creatures of folklore, and whenever we find them in a tale, we know we are wandering through fairyland. The dwarfs propose robbing a dragon of its gold. Dragons of course are even more magical creatures than dwarfs.

The wizard goes along with the band, and they encounter all sorts of magical creatures along the way. Without checking, I would venture to say that there is not a single chapter in the book that has no magic. Indeed, and properly I would say, the magical incidence (or ‘intensity’ or ‘density’ if you will) increases as the book goes on. Bilbo and the dwarfs encounter more and more strange creatures, and the only Man they meet turns out to be a wolf-shifter who can talk to his magical animals. Only at the very end, do Men appear, and they are no more than Men as we find them, except that their leader has a bow and an arrow that are lucky at the very least (and in fairyland luck is a kind of magic) and magical at best, for it brings down the dragon. And how does Bard the bowman know where to aim? A crow tells him, a crow that has overheard Bilbo and the dwarfs talking.

It is true (and a weakness of the tale) that Tolkien’s elves are not very elvish, and hardly seem more magical than Men. No more his dwarfs. And yet as noted, merely by virtue of being called ‘elf’ and ‘dwarf’ the creatures are of Faëry and out of the folklore of our bedtime tales, and enchanted enough to satisfy most children.

Modern talesmen, steeped in reason and the mundane existence of cars and smog and tubes and computers and television, seem on the whole to have lost their sense of wonder. They grasp for it, as we see by the mere fact that Bardelys and his fellows even attempt to tell tales of fantasy at all. And yet it is like a foreign tongue to them that they speak but haltingly, it chafes at them, and their normal tendency is to revert to banal mundane matters, and at best tell us tales of boyish adventure.

(Composed on keyboard Sunday 9 November 2008)

Chapter Nine: Fists

Hans crawled out through the burning hay. The flames singed his hair and burned his fingers. Ash stung his eyes. He rolled out onto the hard ground, coughing and sputtering.

Dark shapes gathered over him.

‘That’s the one,’ said a voice.

‘Go on,’ said another. ‘It’s only a boy in his nightshirt.’

‘You see anybody else here?’

‘Ah, do you really think this lad did it all himself and then stuck himself into the midst of it?’

Hans beat the flames out of his nightshirt. He clawed back his hair and wiped at his face, full of ash and snot. His whole body ached and itched and burned. His ankle throbbed. But the men let him alone.

‘Don’t play the fool. ’Course that ain’t what I think. The others left him, that’s what. They must’ve held a grudge. But he was part of it. Here, you!’ A boot nudged Hans in his side. ‘Where are they, eh? Where are the rest of them?’

Hans blinked up at the men dark against the sky. It was day, and the dreadful night was past.

‘I don’t know what you mean. Rest of who?’

‘Don’t play games, boy. The rest of your fellow pranksters. The ones who burned the haystack.’

‘The soldiers, you mean? But aren’t you them?’

But now, as he rubbed the ash-tears from his eyes, Hans saw they weren’t the wicken-soldiers at all. They were tall straight men in plain work-clothes and boots. They held pitch-forks and mowing-scythes. They looked like farmers. Hans even thought he had met one of them before, an older man with a full gray beard and scowling bushy brows. He was the foremost farmer in the Upper Dimmerthal. His name was Groening and he had the sternest face that Hans had every seen.

‘Farmer Groening, don’t you know me?’

The man’s sharp eyes peered down at Hans. He made Hans feel wretched and ragged and ashamed so that he shivered and had to look away.

‘You’re the Forester’s boy, unless my eyes play me tricks,’ said Farmer Groening. ‘What’s your name, boy? Is it not Johannes?’

‘They call me Hans.’

Another man stepped forward, full-bellied with red cheeks and merry blue eyes. He winked and pulled Hans to his feet. The pain in his ankle almost made Hans faint but the fat man caught hold of him. ‘Whoa, now, steady lad! How did this haystack catch fire, Hans? Do you know who did it?’

‘Yes, sir. They were chasing me.’

‘Who were?’

‘The Charcoal Burners. Or rather, they looked like Charcoal Burners at first, but like soldiers later on. They seemed like wicken-things to me.’

The fat farmer laughed. Farmer Groening’s stare was more like flint. The other men shifted on their feet and looked one another in the eye. Hans read their scoffing looks quite well.

‘It’s true!’ he said.

Farmer Groening turned away. ‘Charcoal Burners!’ he muttered in his beard. ‘See the fire’s put out, lads. As for you, Hans Forester, you’d best come with us.’

‘I don’t think he can go far, brother,’ said the fat man. But Hans eased his weight from the man’s arms and took a step or two.

‘I’m all right,’ he said.

Farmer Groening turned on his heel and strode away. Two of his men followed after. The fat man and the others stayed behind to watch the burning haystack and see the fire didn’t spread.

Hans struggled to keep pace with them.

‘You must send to hunt the wicken-men,’ he told them, but nobody answered him or even looked at him. He felt his spirits dragging.

They reached the Road and began to follow it. The farmers quickened their steps and left Hans trailing a stone’s throw behind.

It came home to him that he was alone now in the world. Father was dead. Mother was dead. Granny and his sisters were all dead. And he had killed them.

‘What have I done?’ he wondered. ‘Dear God in Heaven, what have I done?’

He had laid hold on the Mankiller tree, and fulfilled the evil destiny of his nightmare. It had been there warning him and waiting for him ever since he was little. Now he had done it. His home, the house he had grown up in and lived in all his life, was no more. A new evil marched upon the Dimmerthal.

‘Why?’ he wondered. ‘And why me and my family?’

The farmers walked up the Road with easy strides. The woodcutter’s son limped after them. The Sun was already high and the last of the fogs were burned away. The day was bright and warm. It looked to be fair and splendid.

But Hans felt the bitterness of his loss, of his life gone forever, and the emptiness that would abide with him forever.

He felt weak and weary and all alone. ‘But I won’t cry,’ he told himself. ‘There will be no more tears for me.’

He knew the others were tied up in it, too. Whatever it was that he himself had done, those others – the boy with the yellow socks, the Charcoal Burners, the green crow and even the fair White Lady – they had played their parts as well.

He saw his hands drooping from his wrists. He stared at them as they swung with his steps. He made the fingers bunch up into fists and he squeezed his fists tighter so that the flesh went pale and bloodless and he felt his fingernails digging into the flesh of his palms and the pangs pushed back even the aching from his ankle. ‘Not tears but fists are what I’m in need of now,’ he thought.

The only way that he could think to make up for the one thing he had done and for the many other things that he had not done, was to defend other homes against what had happened to his own. So he made up his mind to fight those wicken-things for as long as he lived, and make them pay for what they’d done.

And in that hour, Hans Forester grew up at last.

Critique of Chapter Eight

No magic at all…

Chapters Seven and Eight of The Magic Key: The Dread Night by Bardelys are really one episode: caught by the soldiers, Hans tries to escape. He manages to make his way out of the camp and runs some way up the valley, only to sprain his ankle, whereupon he hides in a haystack; the soldiers track him there and burn down the haystack.

The chapter ends with a cliff-hanger as Hans goes out into their clutches.

There is not a whit of magic to be sniffed out here. No fairy godmother rescues Hans, and the soldiers don’t seem to use any magic to track him. (They might use magic, but we don’t see any hint of it. This to my mind equals no magic at all.)

So we have here a standard bit of boy’s own adventure fiction, direct descendent to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island episode where Jim Hawkins falls into the apple barrel and overhears the mutineers.

Where Bardelys seems to have gone wrong is in the level of detail, or granularity, with which he tells this tale.

Let us consider this movement through the tale, as if we in the audience, along with the hero, were traversing an unknown land. I can say that there are three broad paths we could follow:

1. flying
2. riding
3. slogging

The Brothers Grimm, and most traditional talesmen, chose to fly. They soared high above the events of their tales, swooping down for the occasional episode or scene of heightened suspense or emotion, winging higher to cover transitions of great distance or time.

The nineteenth-century master novelists rode down the King’s highways, or took us in coaches, stopping along the way to observe some especially scenic outlook, racing onwards now and then, and enjoying a nice meal at a roadside inn.

Modern talesmen slog through the bogs and mires cross-country, and make us feel every midge-bite, smell every outburst of marsh-gas, and struggle through the mud of every single moment.

Bardelys, though he began his tale in imitation of the traditional flying talesmen, has slipped, as though by default, into the modern manner of slogging with young Hans over every step of his flight, asking us to share every tortured breath, the feel of the new-mown hay stubble upon bare feet, the chill of the night fogs, and the fear of discovery.

If as seems likely, Hans begins the next chapter in the hands of the soldiers, he will find himself in precisely the same position he was in at the head of Chapter Seven, and these two chapters will have been wasted.

On the other hand, these flights have been an attempt by the author to make us share in the fortunes of the hero, to feel grief (not enough of that), anger, desire, fear alongside Hans. Maybe he has deemed this necessary to enforce identification (sympathy + empathy) with Hans; and maybe now, or at some point soon to come in the tale, he will consider that it has been enough of this, that we do now identify with Hans (or we never will) and thus Bardelys can go back to riding or, we hope, even flying.

We shall see.

(Composed on keyboard Saturday 8 November 2008)