The Enemy takes the stage
Songs Rhymes & Verse
In this chapter, the second in a row, Bardelys shows his hand at … well, ‘doggerel’ would be the best word for it. Why is it that fantasy and folk tales use rhyme so freely? I suspect it goes back a long, long way, to the beginning when such tales, handed down through generations, used the mnemonics of verse to help talesmen remember them. Many epics were remembered only in verse. We can point to the Scottish Ballads and several nursery rhymes that recorded actual events, coded in symbols to ‘scape whipping,’ as Hamlet says.
Professor Tolkien (who must be accounted the Father of the Fantasy epic in the last half-century) employed verse quite well. But not even he matched the tale of Tam Lin, which has the interpolated rhymes actually advance the plot. Nor does Bardelys do so here, but rather he takes the ‘Warner Brothers back-stage musical’ approach, by having his characters sing songs, for specific purposes: the Charcoal Burners sing a marching-song to shorten their road, and the White Lady here sings a sort of spell of allurement to snare someone; Hans, because he happens to stand within ear-shot of the song, feels the spell creep over him as well, and he is on the brink of surrendering himself to her fatal glamor, when she disappears into the ruins, and he feels free once more
The New End of the Wood
Bardelys means to show us that the Black Forest has grown out from its former boundaries, and now has swallowed up the end of the Road along with the house where Hans grew up. I fear this is not well handled, and I wonder if it makes sense to a reader who has not had it explained to him in other words.
He manages to creep under the shadow of the Black Forest, while still remaining technically outside it. Bardelys is at some pains to make this distinction, but what difference does it make? We can only hope he will tell us later on. Right now it doesn’t make a lot of sense, so the question arises, does this add to the mystery and make us want to read on to learn the Why of it, or does it merely confuse us more? The answer I will leave to all of you.
Boy & Lady
Two characters are introduced, both wicken-things: the White Lady and a boy Hans’s age who wears the Yellow Socks by which Hans names him. Hans experiences first deep grief over the loss of his family (and this might have been developed a bit more at this point; saving it for later seems an error), then hatred for the boy in Yellow Socks, and then a ‘fatal attraction’ for the mysterious, utterly beautiful Lady in white.
There seems some distinction between these two creatures: the White Lady is wicken through and through, to a greater extent than the boy. Yellow Socks calls the White Lady ‘Mother,’ but her treatment of him is hardly maternal, more the way a cruel mistress treats one of her servants or slaves.
A third creature, and a fourth, make indirect appearances here: the White Lady speaks of the ‘Sooty Prince’ and the ‘King.’ In addition there are magical objects (Bardelys tells me the tale is full of magical talismans, and this I fear may be a mistake: better to have only one Talisman, I feel, instead of a litter and a clutter of them) mentioned:
- the silver falconer’s glove Clutchfast
- the Needle
Up the Road Again
It’s interesting that this chapter ends where Chapter Four did, with Hans running up the Road into the valley of Dimmerthal away from where his home lay. Does this doubling annoy you? Maybe Bardelys would have done better to have Hans faint, or lie in a tangle of briers at the edge of the woods, while the Lady and Yellow Socks arrived. The thorns could have held Hans from obeying the summoning chant, and then he might have torn loose to follow Yellow Socks, if the briers on the outer edge of the woods were looser or more open than those on the inner edge; to do this all Bardelys had to tell us was that his hero was caught up in the outer margin of a wall of thorns – then to go to the White Lady Hans would’ve needed to work through the thorns, but to chase after Yellow Socks all he’d need do is tear out the edge of them
(Composed on keyboard Wednesday 5 November 2008)
