D and I watched Lured(1947). It was watchable, maybe even rewatchable. With a script by Leo Rosten (of Joys of Yiddish fame), I expected it to be wittier than it was. But, given that it’s about the hunt for a serial killer, maybe it’s too light-hearted as it is. The mystery was pretty transparent, even though the red herrings in the story kept getting larger and neon-luminous. But the story moved pretty quickly, took some interesting turns, and made sense more often than not.
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A very strong cast: Lucille Ball as the lead (as much as a woman is usually allowed to be the lead in a mid-century crime movie) was likable and convincing. George Sanders did his George-Sanders thing which works equally well if he’s a suave hero, a shifty spy, or a man-eating tiger. Borith Karloff chewed holes in the scenery in a wonderfully weird if small role. The secondary cast was full of character actors who appeared as murderers, crooks and third bananas in Universal’s Sherlock Holmes series (e.g. George Zucco, Alan Mowbray, Gerald Hamer).
Ball plays Sandra Carpenter, a taxi-dancer who becomes involved in the hunt for the serial killer after her friend becomes his latest victim. She clues the police into the fact that the killer is contacting his victims via the personals. She’s hired by the police to answer suspicious personal ads and keep the police informed. (I know this would never happen. Please direct all inquiries and comments to Messrs. Sirk & Rosten, who are dead and won’t mind so much.)
The joke, if it’s a joke, is that she’s constantly running into schemes to exploit young women in various ways. Only one of them is a serial killer, but they’re all creeps, and the movie implies that their name is legion. It’s the most realistic note in this not-very-realistic movie.
The murderer turns out to be the guy you knew the producers didn’t hire just to say two lines in three scenes. In the end, he’s caught red-handed. And true love triumphs over all, which is a weird feature of these softer-edged midcentury crime stories.
A painless 100 minutes for me, and a decent nap for D. Not quite up to the level of Sirk’s Thunder on the Hill(1951), which I saw for the first time recently and was deeply impressed by. But good enough to keep working my way through his filmography.
I’m always a little bemused that Lucille Ball didn’t have a bigger career in film. She was beautiful, had an expressive face and voice, projected intelligence, and (I’ll go out on a limb here) she was a gifted comic actress. But maybe that was the problem: comedy was the kids’ table in the studio system, and most of the seats were reserved for men.
Also: #EverythingIsStarTrek. In case you thought I’d forgotten that.
Artist unknown, but I’m pretty sure this image predates generative-AI boom. Anyway, she has the right number of fingers.
I reread more than I read. This has certain bad effects; e.g., the towering stacks of TBR books that constantly threaten to topple over and crush me, which are always growing taller, more numerous, and (if I’m not misreading their expressions) more angry.
I’d like to say rereading has compensating benefits, e.g. a deeper understanding of the texts I obsessively reread. But often my rereads just make me more confused.
Take Beowulf, a text that would be on my always-reread list even if I didn’t teach it twice a year.
Woody Allen was one of my heroes as a kid, but this line from Annie Hall should’ve been my first warning that there was something wrong with him.
Beowulf is already a hero when he lies down in Heorot, King Hrothgar’s famous mead-hall, to await the arrival of Grendel, the manslaying monster. Beowulf has come with his Geatish pals to Denmark specifically so that he can defeat Grendel. He discusses in advance his plans to engage in hand-to-hand combat with the monster, putting aside weapons and armor.
So: why doesn’t he wait by the door?
Beowulf may want to draw Grendel into the hall, not warn him off from the door. But that doesn’t explain what happens next. I’m not trying to roast Beowulf here, by the way, just trying to wrap my head around the scene.
Grendel bursts in, slamming the door of the hall open. He’s come to kill and eat, as he has so many times before.
Beowulf does nothing.
Grendel goes to one of Beowulf’s band of Geatish warriors, a guy (we will later learn) named Hondsciō (“glove”; compare modern German Handschuh “hand-shoe; glove”).
Beowulf does nothing.
Grendel kills Hondsciō and rips him to pieces.
Beowulf does nothing.
Grendel goes to where Beowulf is lying.
Beowulf does nothing.
Grendel grabs Beowulf, and then the fight is on. It’s WWE Raw Is War.
The (surviving) Geats leap up from where they’re lying and try to attack the monster but their swords have no effect. The Grendelkin seem to be immune to ordinary weapons.
Grendel soon realizes he’s out of his depth and tries to flee, but Beowulf won’t let go. Finally Beowulf rips Grendel’s arm off (hand, arm, shoulder), dealing him a mortal wound. Grendel flees back to his underwater lair to die.
The question that constantly bedevils me when rereading this passage is: why does Beowulf wait so long to start doing what he came there to do?
So far, my answer to this question (spoilers: I cannot really answer this question) comes in multiple parts.
The first part is geographical, and hinges on the design of these medieval Germanic halls like Heorot. They’re long buildings with a peaked roof, and a firepit running down the middle.
image above: a reconstructed Viking-era meadhall at Trelleborg in Sweden. image below: artist’s conception of such a hall’s interior from Gudmundson, Den islandske Bolig i Fristats-Tiden (1894)
After the feast, the tables etc would be stacked away (or used as beds?) and the henchmen would sleep in the hall by the firepit.
So the Geats come to Heorot, make a big deal about it being occupied again. (Grendel has been attacking it at night for twelve years, and people had given up sleeping there, lest they wake up dead.) The Geats lie down as if to sleep on either side of the firepit. Maybe Hondscio is on one side of the firepit and Beowulf is on the other. Grendel, like Buridan’s donkey, could go in one direction or the other. Unlike Buridan’s donkey, he’s not going to starve to death while making a decision. He launches himself against Hondscio, and then turns to the guy on the other side, who is Beowulf.
Professionally drawn graphic by a professional graphic-drawing guy.
Okay. But this still doesn’t explain why Beowulf takes so long to act. He’s not asleep and he’s not scared (according to the poet). It’s almost as if this is a turn-based game, like chess, and Beowulf has sacrificed a pawn to put the opposing player in an untenable position. That seems to conflict with the magnanimous nature of the hero as the poet represents him, though.
A bookish sort of explanation: Hondsciō’s death is necessary because it prefigures Grendel’s own death. In reparation for the loss of Hondsciō, Grendel loses his hand (along with his arm and shoulder), suffering a fatal wound.
A slide from my Norse myth class.
If this seems too academic and tweedy a reading for so savage a poem, I should add that Beowulf himself makes the connection when he’s retelling the tale to his uncle and king, Higelac, back in Geatland (line 2069b-2100). He talks about the hond-rǣs hæleða (“the hand-battle of heroes”) and goes on to describe the death of Hondciō, naming him for the first time in the poem. He mentions for the first time a weird glove (glōf) made of dragon-hide that Grendel had. Beowulf seems to describe Grendel’s habit of putting dead men into the glove. Which is really weird, does not clarify the situation, but does remind me of another mythological situation, where Thor and friends find themselves in a giant’s glove.
Beowulf concludes this part of his humblebrag by mentioning how Grendel’s right hand (swīðre… hand) remained behind in Heorot.
That line from hand to hand connects a lot of dots in the narrative. And maybe that’s enough. Beowulf describes Hondsciō as fey (“doomed”; fǣgum), and maybe that’s enough.
But maybe it’s not. It still doesn’t give a motivation for Beowulf’s odd stillness until he himself is attacked.
I wonder if the answer isn’t hidden inside Grendel’s identity. The Beowulf-poet famously or infamously grafts the Grendelkin onto the family tree of Adam and Eve, tracing their line of descent from Cain the murderer. But the Beowulf-poet is Christian, and this story probably pre-existed the arrival of Christianity in northwest Europe. So what was the pre-Christian identity of Grendel and his mother?
I think they were the restless dead, a perennial affliction in these Nordic stories. (Think of the Barrow Wights from The Lord of the Rings.) Glám, Grendel’s analogue in Grettir’s Saga (chs. 33-35), is one of the walking dead. And Grendel is repeatedly described as a ghost (ellengǣst “bold ghost”, 86a; se grimma gǣst “the cruel ghost”, 102a; wergan gāstes “accursed ghost” 133a).
But Beowulf kills Grendel. Killing someone who’s already dead seems like a definitional impossibility. But it is something that comes up a lot in these stories, and the answer is frequently some kind of mutilation, a practice known as “arm-pitting” (Greek μασχαλισμός). It’s precisely this kind of thing that Beowulf inflicts on Grendel.
But (not to beat a dead horse or monster here) why does it take Beowulf so long to act?
This is where I came in and this is where I go out, I guess, asking the same question. The only answer I can come up with is personal and has to do with nightmares. I don’t know if you’ve ever been attacked by a ghost or a sinister shadow in a dream. It used to happen to me pretty frequently, back when I was able to get a decent night’s sleep. (Deep sleep is a luxury old people have to learn how to do without. If you wonder why the old people in your life are increasingly crazy, that might be one of the reasons.)
When the ghost is coming for you in the dark, it seems to get the first move. You may see it; you may know it’s coming for you. But you can’t do anything about it. There’s a whole branch of magic in Morlock’s world devoted to stuff you can do in these situations. (See “A Stranger Comes to Town” for some practical applications.)
It may be that in the Ur-myth of Beowulf, he was in that nightmare state, watching the ghost approach and unable to stop it.
That’s not the the answer; as is common in myth and storytelling, there isn’t just one answer. But that’s the best I’ve got from this most recent reread.
I’m not a big fan of literary criticism in any field (although I have committed some), but one of my big books from my late teens onward was Le Guin’s The Language of the Night (1979), especially for the essays “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie” and “A Citizen of Mondath”.
Le Guin has some great passages in “Citizen” about what she liked to read as a kid, and how she liked it.
We kids read science fiction in the early forties: Thrilling Wonder, and Astounding in that giant format it had for a while, and so on. I liked “Lewis Padgett” best, and looked for his stories, but we looked for the trashiest magazines, mostly, because we liked trash. I recall one story that began “In the beginning was the Bird.” We really dug that bird. And the closing line from another (or the same?)—“Back to the saurian ooze from whence it sprung!” Karl made that into a useful chant: The saurian ooze from which it sprung / Unwept, unhonor’d, and unsung. I wonder how many hack writers who think they are writing down to “naive kids” and “teenagers” realize the kind of pleasure they sometimes give their readers. If they did, they would sink back into the saurian ooze from whence they sprung.
I’m pretty sure the first story she refers to is “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag” by Heinlein inUnknown (Oct 1942). It appeared under the false whiskers of “John Riverside” because at the time the Heinlein byline was reserved by John W. Campbell for RAH’s “future history” stories.
I never figured I’d find the source of the mysterious “saurian ooze”–except that maybe I just did. In looking for Henry Kuttner stories online I found this opus in Strange Tales (Aug, 1939). The appearance is pseudonymous, because he had a “Prince Raynor” novelette in the issue under his own name. And the crucial phrase was from the editorial blurb rather than the story itself.
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Kuttner, of course, was roughly half of “Lewis Padgett”, along with C.L. Moore. And most of their work, whatever name it appeared under, seems to have been collaborative from the time they met and married, so Moore may have exuded some of that saurian ooze herself.
Le Guin’s accounts don’t exactly match up with these texts: “In the Beginning was the Bird” is a ritual phrase used by the Sons of the Bird in Heinlein’s story (one of his best fantasies, by the way), but it’s not the opener of the story. And the saurian ooze springs out at the reader at the Kuttner story’s beginning, not its end (and with a shift of ablaut at that). But given that Le Guin was writing about these stories 20-30 years after she’d read them, I’d say the shoes fit the footnotes pretty well.
I’m rereading Beowulf, preparatory to teaching it in a couple weeks to my Norse Myth class. This kind of thing always involves falling into the dictionary and getting swept away by a tide of weird words.
This afternoon’s discovery is morðcrundel. Morð means “death”; it’s the root of murder and Mordor (a linguistic fact that Asimov used in one of his stories of the Black Widowers), and is cognate with Latin mors, mortis “death”. (It occurs to me that this probably affects the spelling of Mordred’s name in Arthurian legend. The older spelling is Medraut/Modred, but it was changed in the Old French versions, maybe because storytellers associated Mordred with death and destruction—of his uncle-father Arthur in particular.)
Crundel (to my ear) sounds too friendly to be linked up with doomful morð, but Clark Hall & Merrit say it means “ravine”. (None of my dictionaries gave me an etymology for crundel, but I wonder if it’s cognate somehow with ground.) Hence morðcrundel “death-ravine”: the pit under a barrow where the dead are buried.
I expect morðcrundel (the word) and death-ravines (the phenomenon) will appear in my stories in the near future.
I’m reading Beowulf in stereo this time, comparing the Old English original to Heaney’s translation (which is the one I’ve been assigning to my classes for the past few years).
There’s no translation like no translation. Or, as they say in Italian: traduttore, traditore (“translator = traitor”). This kind of passage-by-passage comparison is the kind of reading that is most likely to make one unhappy with almost any translation. Heaney’s translation is clear and eloquent, a good match for the modern reader. They didn’t give this guy the Nobel Prize for nothing.
But in a couple passages he munges the meaning of things that (to my fantasy-oriented mind) are important.
One of the praise-songs about Beowulf in the text of Beowulf is about Sigmund the Dragonslayer. I particularly want to bring this passage to the attention of my students, because we’re also going to be reading the Volsunga Saga and the Eddic poetry about the screwed-up family of the Volsungs (and the screwed-up families they become entangled with). In those better-known versions, it’s Sigurð, son of Sigmund, who kills the dragon.
“Myth is multform” is the ritual incantation I always invoke on these occasions. Myth isn’t history; it’s more like quantum physics, where Schrödinger’s cat is both alive and dead until you open the box. Sigmund both is and is not the slayer or Fafnir, until you begin telling (or reading) a particular story. At that point the storyteller usually (not always) picks a version and sticks with it, a process analogous to wave-form collapse in quantum physics. Audiences of myths have the luxury of enjoying, even insisting on, particular versions (like toxic Star Wars fans). Students of mythology have to be sensitive to multiple versions and beware the temptations to over-historicize a particular rendition of a myth.
Anyway, in the story of Beowulf, it makes sense for the praise-singer to associate Sigmund with Beowulf. Sigmund famously killed a monster; Beowulf has just earned fame by killing a monster (Grendel). And the Beowulf-poet can use this celebration of young Beowulf’s victory to foreshadow old Beowulf’s final battle where he kills and is killed by a dragon. In fact, the Sigmund story might help explain old King Beowulf’s strange behavior toward his last enemy, how he insists on going alone against the dragon (just as Sigmund did) to earn treasure (just as Sigmund did).
I mostly like what Heaney does in his translation, but there was one part of this passage that I wasn’t crazy about.
The Beowulf-poet, describing how Sigmund slew the dragon says this:
hwæþre him gesǣlde, ðæt þæt swurd þurhwōd wrǣtlīcne wyrm, þæt hit on wealle æstōd, dryhtlīc īren; draca morðre swealt.
—Beowulf 890-892
“Nevertheless it befell him that the sword passed through the wondrous worm so that it on the wall stood fixed the illustrious iron; the deadly dragon died.”
Here’s what Heaney does with it.
“But it came to pass that his sword plunged right through those radiant scales and drove into the wall. The dragon died of it.”
Better than my dry literal version, certainly. But here’s Raffel’s (1963) version.
“Siegmund had gone down to the dragon alone, Entered the hole where it hid and swung His sword so savagely that it slit the creature Through, pierced its flesh and pinned it To a wall, hung it where his bright blade rested.”
Because Raffel is not binding himself to translate line by line (as Heaney does), his version rocks a little better, I think.
I’ll probably stick with Heaney. It’s still fresh, represents the original pretty well, and has a couple of different editions with distinctive advantages: one accompanied by the Old English text, another illustrated with copious images of the physical culture of northwest Europe in the early Middle Ages–weapons, jewelry, manuscript paintings of monsters, etc.
Still, I always try to keep the alternatives in mind. Myth is multiform, and every translator is a traitor. I can only be faithful to the original if I at least flirt with alternative translations.
Saw the article below on Bluesky and felt the irritation that almost always accrues when scrolling through social media. But this irritation was really specific. Demanding a historically accurate version of a myth is like trying to find the zip code of Ásgarð. It misconceives the whole enterprise of storytelling. It Must Be Stopped.
This got me thinking about maps in fantasy novels, because that was one way to avoid useful work.
Maps are really not as necessary for fantasy novels as people sometimes pretend, although I sympathize with readers who want to know how you get from the Lantern Waste to Ettinsmoor, etc. As a rather shifty storyteller, I’d prefer not to be pinned down if I can avoid it. (I always cite Melville on this point: “It is not down on any map. True places never are.”)
But I really resist the modern tendency to make fantasy maps follow modern standards of cartography and geology. That’s like insisting that the Fellowship of the Ring should have taken public transit from Rivendell to Mordor.
Conventions of maps vary from culture to culture, and they often don’t look familiar to us at all. In this context I often have occasion to think of this medieval model:
Plus, there’s no reason to suppose that a fantasy world was formed along scientific principles. Imposing contemporary standards of geology onto fantasy worlds makes fantasy into a subgenre of science fiction, whereas the reverse is obviously true.
If people want to write a kind of mundane fantasy with low or no magic, that can obviously be done and has been done with great success. Pratt’s The Well of the Unicorn is a celebrated example. (Magic exists in the world of the book, but it reads like a historical novel for an imaginary world.)
Rafael Palacios’ map for Pratt’s The Well of the Unicorn “Are mountains really distributed like that on a real landscape? How big are those ships, really? Are we supposed to believe there’s really a giant disembodied head blowing up a gale over that sea?”
This isn’t an obligation built into the genre, though. Like everything in an imaginary world, maps, the type of maps, or even the mappability of the world should be a deliberate choice on the part of the worldmaker, not something just thrown in because that’s the way it’s done, or to satisfy specious notions of accuracy.
Let us close with a hymn from the sacred texts.
“What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators, Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?” So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply “They are merely conventional signs!” —Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark
I was thinking the other day about Hengist and Horsa, the two Saxon chieftains/gangsters who show up to assist and then overpower the usurper Vortigern in the run-up to King Arthur’s origin story. Horsa (Horsus in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin) clearly means “horse” in modern English, but WTF is a hengist? Turns out that also means “horse” (going back to Proto-Germanic *xanxistaz; so says Orel). Horsa doesn’t really do much in the story; Hengist always takes the lead, bringing in Saxon goons and becoming Vortigern’s father-in-law, and in general making V’s life a living hell.
I wonder if “Horsa” didn’t start life as a more-transparent translation of Hengist’s name (“Hengist–i.e. Horse”), and then the name got promoted to full personhood by a storyteller who didn’t know the two words meant effectively the same thing.
Vortigern’s situation with the Saxons reminds me of a “bust out”, where organized crime infiltrates a business and then runs it into the ground (e.g. the Sopranos episode 2.10 “Bust Out”). Fortunately that situation could never happen to the U.S. govt. I guess.
Another thing I found out while horsing around was that English horse is cognate with Latin currere “to run” (going back to PIE *kers- “run”). Which makes sense, since initial k sound in Latin often corresponds to initial h in English (cf English horn and Latin cornu).
Gervasio Gallado’s cover painting for the Ballantine edition of Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn.
The h/k correspondence got me thinking about Hermóðr, Ódin and Frigg’s son who borrows Sleipnir, his dad’s eight-legged horse. The -óðr is pretty clearly the same root as in Óðin’s name, but what would *kerm- mean in Proto-Germanic or PIE? I looked it up in Orel’s Handbook of Germanic Etymology and it sort of snapped into focus.
Maybe there is no Hermóðr really. Maybe it’s just another name of Óðin that Snorri hypostasized into a son of Óðin. That’s explain why he’s riding Slepnir, among other things.
So my Norse Myth students got a generous side-portion of Germanic philology yesterday.
I liked this book a lot, but for me the most distinctive feature of this series is the one that I like least: the stories are a mixture of early & late. I’d prefer a chronological ordering, or an ordering by series, or some kind of order. (The ebook only edition of the complete short fiction of Clifford Simak had the same unprinciple, and I didn’t like it there, either.)
On the other hand, you could get hold of all the volumes and use ISFDb to go through them in your preferred order. The “Collected Poul Anderson” volumes are all available pretty cheaply as ebooks from NESFA, so that’s not as flippant a suggestion as it may seem.
I’ve often wished for a single volume “Best of Poul Anderson” I could hand to or recommend to people. But The old Pocket Book “Best of PA” didn’t really fit the bill; the DAW “BOOK of PA” was a little closer, but was light on fantasy as I recall. And of course they’ve all been out of print forever.
I realized this weekend that one of the pleasures of inventing a Martian language was coining new names for all the planets. (Including ones that don’t really exist, like Vulcan, Antichthon, and the Lost Planet that was once supposed to be the precursor for the asteroids.)
I think this version of the Solar System will have 12 planets, including Pluto & a trans-Plutonian planet. 12 is a magic number & if I end up wanting to add a 13th or even a 14th planet, that’s still a dozen (cf the baker’s dozen, the “12” Olympians, tribes of Israel, apostles, Labors of Herc, etc).
This made me nostalgic to read Rocklynne’s The Men and the Mirror (Ace, 1973), which includes one of the few stories written about Vulcan (not Spock’s planet, but the planet that was briefly believed to exist closer to the sun than Mercury). My sword-and-planet version of Vulcan will have to be different–possibly an invisible and/or dirigible planet.
The cover for the 1973 Ace edition of The Men in the Mirror; artist unknown.
Typos of the day, from trying to type Batgirl in a hurry on a small screen: Vatgirl and Gatgirl. Both of these sound like they belong to the Legion of Regrettable Supervillains.
I was posting on a corporate social media site this AM and I blithely wrote something like, “My New Year’s resolution this year is to blog more and post on corporate social media less.” This was kind of a lie, because I don’t really make New Year’s resolutions. But it was another kind of lie, because I’ve been posting on Bluesky daily but I haven’t updated my blog in more than two weeks. So here I am doing that.
I also have some news: two new stories slated to come out this year–neither of them, oddly, Morlock stories. One is for a still-secret sword-and-sorcery anthology which will come upon you like a thief in the night, but the other is a sword-and-planet story set on Mars. It’ll appear in issue 7 of New Edge Sword & Sorcery, a special sword-&-planet issue.
