Appendix E

Note on Ambrosian Legend and Its Sources, Lost and Found

Readers of these collections of Ambrosian myth and legend are already aware that Morlock’s exploits beyond the northern edge of the world were not the end of his career as a hero. It took centuries for that to be evident to his contemporaries, however—or even to Morlock himself, and in that time his path took a number of severe turns, some sinister, some comic, many disgraceful.

The dwarves of Thrymhaiam cultivated his legend (as they are wont to do for their kin, whether harven or ruthen), but as far as they were concerned this was its final episode, and the various verse retellings of his deeds in the struggle against the Sunkillers apparently took the tone of an obituary, with one famous exception. We know that Defender Dervanion wrote up an account for the Graith of Guardians, although we don’t know if it went into general circulation, and the anonymous Seventh Scribe of New Moorhope wrote an alliterative epic of the entire matter, including the Balancer of the Two Powers.

All of these sources have been lost. What we have is a series of verse plays in Late Ontilian, which may have been based on one of the talkier Dwarvish song cycles, and an epic, if that’s not too strong a word, in rhyming verse by the pseudonymous Ninth Scribe of New Moorhope, and the Khroic ekshalva about Morlock, which purport to be based on direct visionary contact with the events they narrate.

I am not going to discuss the issue of whether the Ontilian plays are based on Dwarvish sources or whether they derive from a lost Mandragoric account of Morlock’s life. First, because Dr. Gabriel McNally and Reverend L. G. Handschuh have debated the matter at length in the columns of the Journal of Exoplenic Folklore, and their total inability to reach any kind of agreement indicates the matter is undecidable at our current state of knowledge. Second, because I don’t care.

I don’t care about the overly solemn lost Dwarvish song cycles, and I don’t care if there were any Mandragoric analogues or parallels, and I don’t care about the lost epic of the Seventh Scribe, and I really have no interest in daydreaming about the papers that may or may not be filed in the distant and inaccessible archives of the Graith of Guardians.

The only one of these lost sources that I regret is a version that is supposed to have been made in old age by Deortheorn for the benefit of his last son, Wyrththeorn. It would be good to have because Deor was a witness of and participant in many of these events, and someone who knew Morlock well enough not to idealize him. And it must have been Wyrth’s first real introduction to the career of his harven-kinsman Morlock. It must have had a great influence, and the time would come when Wyrth had a great influence over Morlock, both drunk and sober.

Some have questioned my attempt to re-create Deor’s lost account using the Khroic ekshalva as sources. Dr. McNally, indeed, has warned me that he will count me with the dead if I continue: he’ll never speak to me, write to me, or mention my name again on Facebook. That’s too much to hope for, but it would be reason enough to forge ahead on a task which has sometimes proved difficult.

Other reasons include the fact that I have a contract and have already banked the advance. But, though satisfyingly cynical, that doesn’t really account for my intermittent but persistent thirty-year quest to tell this particular story.

I think one reason I kept at it was an attempt to understand why: why the young hero Morlock syr Theorn became the old, embittered wonderworker and part-time monster Morlock Ambrosius. Maybe this is misguided: myth is multiform, and there’s no reason that characters have to be consistent between different versions. But if there was a Morlock, he took some particular path from his alpha to his omega, and this is my attempt to trace that path.

This reminds me of something Reverend Handschuh says about the Ambrosian cycle. He’s one of its most severe critics and considers it mere romance, not true epic. Like his hero W. P. Ker, and like many another gentle well-read scholar, he prefers the harsh, unforgiving world of classical or Germanic epic. In that tragic vision of life, heroes face their fate without hope of redemption or escape, and Reverend Handschuh rather scorns Ambrosian legend for its lack of tragic doom. “There is always hope,” he writes. “There is always hope.”

He means it as a criticism, but I don’t think it is a criticism.