Wholly retrospective, The Broken Sword is also as mythic
as fantasy gets. Were the book written
500 years ago, it would be part of the Western canon. Plot and outcome the focus, setting,
dialogue, and philosophical exposition are kept to the barest minimum telling
of the ill-fated mortal Skafloc, his evil twin, Valard, and their lives among
the elves and trolls of North Sea yesteryear.
Not the immortal angels of Tolkien, Anderson’s elves maintain the grace
yet act with impunity. For the most selfish
of reasons, they steal Skafloc from his mother the night he is born, replacing him
with the changeling born of an ugly troll, Valard. One raised by elves, the other humans, trolls,
and a witch, their paths to adulthood take two different routes. Their fate, however, lies in the same
place.
Both being works of epic fantasy published in the mid ‘50s;
both using Nordic myth as story foundation; both having trolls, elves, songs
and poetry, quests, broken swords, lost kingdoms, and epic battles, the comparison
of the The Broken Sword to Tolkien’s masterpiece The Lord of the Rings is
inevitable. One technically a comedy and
the other tragedy, there are, however, a far larger number of differences. Tolkien extrapolates heavily on Volsung
Saga and Poetic Edda until the resemblance is minimal. Anderson, however, tells a story whose blood
flows in the same veins as the two famous Nordic myths. Tolkien’s epic is divided into three lengthy
volumes, while Anderson tells his tale in a succinct 274 pages, not a detail amiss. And while Tolkien manipulates characters to
avoid confronting loss and tragedy, Anderson embraces the fates of the people
in his world, death happening early and often to any and all. Both are romances, but only Anderson’s ends
in tears.
The prose plucked from yesteryear, The Broken Sword’s grand,
effortless language is like stepping into the past to read of Achilles battling
Hector, or Beowulf, Grendel. Arcane in syntax
and style, readers who dislike “fancy” sentence structure should look
elsewhere. For those who revel in formal
yet keen description and dialogue, the book will be a real treat. Moreover, the distance Anderson maintains
from the characters allows the reader to view events with insouciance. Room for the imagination to color events as
it pleases, the author’s spare yet incisive style provides a certain degree of
freedom to better participate in the story while being guided effortlessly
forward.
In the end, The Broken Sword is a well crafted epic of
mythic proportions written in high-quality prose. Beowulf meets the Iliad, characters are
larger than life yet retain an innate connection to humanity so as to remain empathetic. Power, glory, hubris, the cycle of violence, honor,
love, and fate—the main staples of myth—are thus the major themes. As the classic tales of the Nords is the
source medium, a host of related works exist: Guy Gavriel Kay’s Last Light ofthe Sun, Nancy Farmer’s Sea of Trolls series, David Drake’s Northworld,
and Gene Wolfe's The Wizard Knight to name a few. But when it comes to style, readers will find
book has more in common with Lord Dunsany, William Morris, and E.R. Eddison. Fans of Moorcock’s Elric will find the seed
idea for Stormbringer while readers who think The Lord of the Rings pretentious
and bloated will enjoy Anderson’s Spartan prose and decisive movement of events. A well crafted story, The Broken Sword is
worthy of being a fantasy masterwork and defines dark fantasy.
No comments:
Post a Comment