The previous chapters discussed divisions that are, in one way or another, mainly peculiar to fantasy—either because they do not exist in the actual world, such as polder boundaries, or because, as in the case of the nature–culture division, they can be constructed differently in a fantasy world. This chapter addresses a division that a contemporary reader would generally take to exist in the actual world but that fantasy frequently bridges: the division between people and their environment. Michael Moorcock points out that “our oneness with nature” is a constant theme in epic fantasy and that “[m]any of the writers emphasize the existence of a deep bond between humans and their world. It is the persistent element in a large proportion of modern work.”1 That “deep bond” may actually be even deeper than Moorcock suggests. While a person can act upon, and be acted upon by, his or her surroundings, the actual world requires some sort of physical intermediary for the action to have any effect. In a fantasy setting, a change in someone’s state (physical or otherwise) may result in, or from, a corresponding change in the surroundings. This is the case with various nature spirits, for instance; a dryad would suffer and eventually die from the axe blows that felled her tree far away (in C. S. Lewis’s The Last Battle [1956]), and a water god’s body would be begrimed by all the trash that is dumped into its river (vividly illustrated in Hayao Miyazaki’s film Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi [2001; Spirited Away]). There is an implied identity between the spirit and its natural abode, even if they may be physically parted. Other connections do not necessarily imply such identity, even if a direct link is present. A frequent connection between land and people is expressed in the direct links that exist between many fantasy rulers and their realms, and it is this connection that is explored here.
This chapter consists of four parts. It opens with an overview of how rulers may be connected both politically and directly to their realms. Then follow two examples of ruler–realm relationships that provide central themes for their respective novels. The first example is the Fisher King figure, the wounded king who is linked to a land that has somehow been laid waste—a common motif in fantasy fiction and, in many ways, a typical way of presenting the direct link between ruler and realm. The application of wasted lands and wounded kings varies from the obvious to the oblique—as exemplified by Malebron of Elidor in Alan Garner’s Elidor (1965) and Théoden of Rohan in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954–55).2 Tim Powers uses this trope as a major plot element in Last Call (1992), placing it at the center of a complex of related myths in a primary world where the mythical controls the mundane. The second example demonstrates how the ruler–realm link can be used in a more idiosyncratic manner. In Tourists (1989), Lisa Goldstein uses the connection between ruler and realm to inscribe a conflict between two kings, and their supporters, on a country. In her novel, the kings are symbolized by different shapes, and the power struggle is expressed in terms of various kinds of palimpsests, turning the physical landscape into a kind of writing.
The fourth and largest part of the chapter examines the landscape connected to Dark Lords. The “landscapes of evil” do not constitute the most common example of direct links between rulers and realms; but especially in portal–quest fantasy, the Dark Lord and the dismal land that surrounds him3 offer the most evident connection. After an overview of early instances of evil landscapes that capture the main characteristics of the typical Dark Lords’ realms, three such realms are discussed in detail: Sauron’s Mordor from The Lord of the Rings is set in relation to Stephen R. Donaldson’s Lord Foul and Robert Jordan’s Shai’tan, and their respective lands, to illustrate how the link between ruler and realm can also provide a useful focus in a comparative reading of presentations of evil in fantasy.
LINKING RULERS TO REALMS: AN OVERVIEW
Whether by finding the rightful heir, identifying a suitable candidate for the empty throne, or curing the ailing king, the restoration of the sovereign is a ubiquitous motif in fantasy literature, particularly that of the portal–quest variety. It may be the object of a quest or simply an unintended result; it may even be a minor side effect of the story’s general resolution. Whether central or peripheral to the story, whether a recurring theme or a final twist, restoring the ruler—the proper ruler, the ruler who will make everything well—is part of many fantasy stories’ happy ending. While little has been written about the proper rulers themselves, scholarship paying attention to the happy ending has often included them as a matter of course, so critical thoughts about the ending provide a natural starting point for the ensuing discussion of fantasy rulers and their realms.
Tolkien considered it near compulsory for “complete fairy-stories” to end happily after a eucatastrophe (an unexpected turn for the better),4 and the fourth and final part of John Clute’s model of “the grammar of discourse of fantasy” is “healing/return.”5 The happy ending is only part of a larger framework that fantasy literature shares with folktales, or Märchen, as Brian Attebery points out in The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature.6 He introduces Vladímir Propp’s analysis of the folktale as a possible means of understanding the structural organization of fantasy stories.7 A point Attebery does not make, but that is worth observing in the current context, is that although Propp never discusses his hero in terms of being the rightful ruler, the final event—or “function”—of his morphology is the hero’s wedding and award, for instance of a large portion of the kingdom.8 The restored ruler in a fantasy story does not have to be the hero, but weddings and coronations are certainly common (although, as in Propp’s morphology, not mandatory); Clute describes the eucatastrophic ending as being “where marriage may occur, just governance fertilize the barren land, and there is a healing.”9
The above begs one fairly obvious question: what is so “happy” about an ending in which the proper ruler is restored? Clute’s description, in all its brevity, offers an answer. With the proper ruler follows healing: the worst is over and things will get better.10 The restored sovereign promises an end to tyranny and suffering. Marriage, just governance, healing: we find all three elements in the final volume of The Lord of the Rings (with the revealing title The Return of the King). Aragorn is the true heir who emerges to claim a throne that has remained empty for centuries; his governance promises to be nothing but just, and he heals the land by removing enmity and banditry, as well as by repairing the environmental damage done by Sauron.11 Despite having won the throne primarily by virtue of his bloodline, Aragorn proves to be an able and just monarch with great political acumen.
There is something more to the relation between the sovereign and his land than political skill, however, and this something, this mysterious link between ruler and realm, explains why the restoration of the sovereign heals the land. That kingship entails more than politics has been noted by other critics. “Most portal-quest fantasies associate the king with the well-being of the land, and the condition of the land with the morality of the place,” Farah Mendlesohn claims in Rhetorics of Fantasy;12 and in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, Diana Wynne Jones offers examples, proposing that
many Kings have a curious relationship with the patch of land they happen to be entitled to rule. If they are absent too long or failing in their duties, crops will not grow, cattle will die, and there will be general bad luck. Countries where a formerly good King develops a serious personality problem will in sympathy evolve a malign microclimate, entailing drought in winter, snow in summer, and rain during the harvest.13
The nature of the “curious relationship” is not restricted to the cases brought up by Mendlesohn and Jones; but no matter what form it takes, it is different from the political rulership of, for instance, Aragorn. The sovereign is in one way or another connected directly to the land and affects it immediately rather than through intermediaries. I have therefore chosen to call this association, this “curious relationship,” the ruler’s direct link to the realm.14 Fantasy plots can be constructed around variations in direct links and their combinations with the political power (or lack thereof) of the rulers, as can be seen from the examples that follow.
The political aspect of a ruler’s rule is different from his or her direct link to the realm, which becomes evident when Aragorn is compared to Arren, from Ursula K. Le Guin’s third Earthsea novel, The Farthest Shore.15 At a first glance, the two characters have a great deal in common: they are distant relatives of the previous kings; they ascend the throne after the threat against the world has been removed; and their rule is supposed to heal conflict-torn societies. Both characters are brave and noble enough to carry out various heroic exploits (including a trip through a realm of death), and in both cases, the restoration is not the novel’s central quest but an immediate result of it. Despite all their similarities, however, there is at least one major difference: while Aragorn takes the throne by virtue of his royal ancestry, Arren is crowned because he fulfills an ancient prophecy. Arren thus becomes king by historical necessity, by predestination rather than inheritance.
Despite being destined to become king, Arren is predominantly a political leader. Like Aragorn, he heals his land by just governance, primarily introducing social stability rather than fertilizing the barren land. In this way, he is the almost total opposite of the Childlike Empress of Fantastica in Michael Ende’s Die unendliche Geschichte (1979; transl. The Neverending Story [1983]), a story that revolves around the restoration first of the ruler and then of the realm. The Empress is directly connected to her realm to such an extent that discussing ruler and realm as separate concepts is almost meaningless; ruler and realm are metonyms for each other. Her disease and the Nothing that destroys Fantastica are aspects of the same affliction and have the same source; both also have the same cure. When Bastian gives the Childlike Empress a new name, Fantastica is saved along with her. At the same time, she is not a political leader.
The Childlike Empress—as her title indicates—was looked upon as the ruler over all the innumerable provinces of the [boundless] Fantastican Empire, but in reality she was far more than a ruler; [rather] she was something entirely different. […] She was simply there in a special way. She was the center of all life in Fantastica.16
The Empress never exercises any political or military power; her governance is not just or unjust, it is nonexistent. Bastian (and the other people who have attempted to make themselves Emperors of Fantastica) cannot understand this metonymic relation, cannot realize that while the provinces of Fantastica can be conquered, it is impossible to become Emperor. The Childlike Empress and her realm are two sides of the same coin; each is the other, the two always linked. Bastian can rule politically, but the Empress does not rule her realm, she is her realm. She is as closely tied to Fantastica as is imaginable. A similar unity between ruler and realm is found—on a smaller scale—in Patricia A. McKillip’s Riddle-master series (1976–79), where rulership, or “land-rule,” comes with a total awareness of the realm, if only for a moment. When the land-rule is passed on to Prince Morgon of Hed, he briefly sees “every leaf, every seed, every root in Hed”; he even feels himself to be every leaf and seed.17
Metonymic relations between realm and ruler are uncommon, however; political power is generally combined with some direct link to the realm. For instance, despite the insistence of the murdered king Verence of Lancre that the land and the king are one,18 the sovereign in Terry Pratchett’s Wyrd Sisters is quite clearly a political figure. Lancre is explicitly divided into people and “kingdom” (meaning not only the geography but also all its animals and plants, as well as its history),19 political power first and foremost meaning power over the people. The direct link between realm and ruler only means that the king of Lancre must care for his kingdom; it is, as the witch Granny Weatherwax explains, like a dog, which “doesn’t care if its master’s good or bad, just so long as it likes the dog.”20 The usurper, Felmet, might not be popular with his subjects owing to his policy of killing people and burning down their cottages; but the kingdom takes offense only when he cuts down its forests out of sheer dislike for them. (Wyrd Sisters draws heavily on the life and plays of William Shakespeare, in particular Macbeth.) Feeling unloved by its king, the kingdom seeks help from the witches to have him removed. The happy ending is achieved when Felmet is replaced by the Fool, who clearly favors just governance and a healing of the land (even the possibility of a wedding is hinted at). The importance of caring for the kingdom above any political claim to the throne is emphasized when it is revealed to the reader that the Fool has no actual right to the throne, although this is only known to the witches.21 Political power might be more visible; but throughout the story, the direct link remains a vital plot element and is, ultimately, what being Lancre’s ruler is largely about.
In Wyrd Sisters, the kingdom is unhappy without a king; in other fantasy stories, the realm’s need for a ruler is more pronounced, with countries lacking a sovereign somehow incomplete. One such example is Terry Brooks’s Kingdom of Landover, which is first presented in Magic Kingdom for Sale/Sold!22 Devoid of a king, the kingdom experiences social breakdown, environmental degradation, and failing magic. Ben, the buyer of the magic kingdom, realizes how king, land, and magic go together; that the king is more than a figurehead. To become the king that Landover needs, Ben has to do more than buy it and its throne; he has to be recognized as king by his subjects, and in order for them to grant this recognition, Ben must commit himself fully to the kingdom. Like Lancre, Landover needs a king to care for it, but it also needs a king to care for its people. Thus, before the magical healing of the land can commence, the king must use his political skill to heal society. Only by fulfilling his duty to his subjects and showing his commitment to the realm can Ben defeat Landover’s enemies, cleanse its environment, bring its magic back, and give new life to its magical royal castle. In Landover, the realm is incomplete without its ruler; political power and the direct link to the land are interwoven.
In Brooks’s novel, as in Ende’s and Pratchett’s, the plot mainly concerns restoring the proper ruler and thus saving the realm. All three novels combine the ruler’s direct link to the land with political power, although in various ways—Bastian comes to assume a combination when there is none. My final example demonstrates how the process of separating these two elements of rulership can serve to bring out a story’s core theme. Tad Williams’s War of the Flowers is set in a modernized Faerie whose class society is ruled by a number of powerful Flower families.23 The novel describes the internal power struggle of these families as well as an uprising of the discontented masses, ending with the transition from a tyrannical oligarchy to a new political order. (Democracy is hinted at but not confirmed.) The world’s backstory also tells of an earlier coup, during which a cabal of Flower fairies imprisons Oberon and Titania, the original king and queen of Faerie, and seize power. The coup separates the political power of the rulers from their direct link to the realm. Despite being imprisoned, Oberon and Titania, like Fantastica’s Childlike Empress, represent the essence of their realm; and like Ben in Landover, they are needed to bring magic into the land. In Williams’s novel, these traits prove to be individual rather than connected to the office of the monarchs. The Flower fairy oligarchs cannot put the dethroned sovereigns to death because such an act would destroy the realm, but they can seize political power. When the oligarchy is finally overthrown, the former king and queen are not restored to power, however; instead they disappear, although the protagonist is told that they are in all probability still alive. The original rulers’ refusal to make a bid for the throne underscores the separation of power and direct link to the land, showing the latter to be a personal trait rather than a political issue. In Williams’s highly politicized version of Faerie, a direct link to the land may be required to channel magic, but it does not guarantee that the ruler will provide just governance. As in any modern democracy, the political power belongs to the people, no matter who happens to constitute the essence of the realm.24
The examples just provided suggest some of the many possibilities afforded by a direct link between ruler and realm. The following two sections examine examples of the relationship between ruler and realm, before moving on to Dark Lords and Dark Lands.
RULING THE MYTHICAL LANDSCAPE: THE FISHER KING IN LAST CALL25
The first of the books in what Tim Powers refers to as his “Fisher King trilogy,”26 Last Call has a plot that revolves around the mythical King who, unbeknownst to the population in general, rules over the western United States. Powers’s name for the three books indicates the centrality of the Fisher King motif, and the author’s treatment of it is intimately tied to how he has constructed the world of the novels. Last Call is set solely in the primary world, but it is a primary world where, under the surface of the everyday, nonmagical domain of mundanity, there exists a domain of mythical forces. Gary K. Wolfe observes “a genuine mythic sensibility at work in [Powers’s] fiction. […] It’s an almost totally paranoid universe, where nothing is quite as it seems—in other words, a universe of myth.”27 I would add that the sense of paranoia observed by Wolfe derives from the fact that the mythical is obscured from everyday life; the reasons underlying the mundane events remain mysterious to the protagonists. The mythical causes behind everything that befalls the protagonists only slowly become apparent. The novel’s two domains, of mundanity and myth, are thus kept separate yet intimately connected. Mundane events that have their causes in the mythical domain simply lead to incomprehension in those who are unaware of that domain—they understand what happens but not why (and invented causes and coincidence only take them so far). Rather than insistent explanations, it is leaps of faith in the face of too incredible coincidences that ultimately make the protagonists—Crane, Mavranos, and Diana—accept the mythical domain and the meaning it provides.
In the mythical domain reside “the eternal and terribly potent figures that secretly animated and drove humanity, the figures that the psychologist Carl Jung had called archetypes and that primitive peoples, in fear, had called gods” (26). These mythical forces are represented through symbols in myths, belief systems, rituals, and stories, and are connected to mundanity through such symbols. Each particular force is surrounded by, and defined through, a cluster of symbols shared by and linking those various myths that make up the mosaic of the mythical domain. Each symbol captures a trait or an aspect of the force with which it is associated and can be found in any number of myths and stories: one example would be how the Queen is also the Moon Goddess, both virgin and mother; Pallas Athena and Artemis, Isis and Ishtar, Demeter and the Virgin Mary all symbolize this force, and her traits are captured in the Empress Tarot card (see 273).
Through the symbolism of the mythical forces, the mythical domain interacts with mundanity. An understanding of the symbols imparts meaning to seemingly meaningless events. Wildly blooming rosebushes become an omen of impending demise when they are understood as a powerful symbol of death; by keeping them tamed, their owner symbolically tames death (24). Putting one’s tie and sunglasses on one’s friend’s decapitated head makes it, symbolically, one’s own head (199–200). To enter the mythic domain is to understand this domain of symbols, to learn to see the world—to employ Wolfe’s expression—as a universe of myth. In Last Call, the two domains are not separated by a physical boundary, nor do they exist in parallel. They are separated by knowledge, different in terms of how the world is understood. Symbols provide mundane events with an added layer of causality through the mythical forces they represent, but they also afford means to affect these forces. Rituals are, in Powers’s novel, a symbolic manipulation of the forces, but impromptu use of symbols works in a similar manner, such as when the protagonists “psychically camouflage” their car as a bus by adding to it symbols for a great number of personalities (141–42, 169).
Powers draws on a great number of sources for the symbol complexes of the mythical domain and its forces. Four of the most central sources, and most relevant to the mythical King figure on which the plot centers, are Tarot cards, James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890–1915), Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1920), and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). The most explicit collection of symbols related to the forces of the mythic domain are the Tarot cards. In the novel, the Lombardy Zeroth deck is portrayed as having particularly great powers, the symbols employed on the cards tapping the depths of the human collective unconscious. It is a card from the Lombardy Zeroth deck that destroys Crane’s eye, and in a poker game played with the deck, he unknowingly sells his body to the incumbent King. The cards are even described as having a life of their own, if only in the mind of the person handling them. By association, however, other Tarot decks and even the modern playing cards derived from them are also powerful symbols in the mythical domain. Buying a hand of cards is thus of great mythical importance. “Fortune-telling by cards [is] prescriptive rather than descriptive,” Crane and Mavranos are told. “[A] hand of Poker is a number of qualities,” so if “you pay money, you’ve bought […] those qualities.” (113) By their nature, however, the playing cards represent the most random aspect of the mythic forces, chance rather than fortune or destiny.
Where the cards portray the forces of the mythical domain through their symbolism, other myths and stories offer descriptions of these forces and how to relate to them in their various guises. Apart from a few references to King Arthur, Powers’s King character recalls Weston’s treatment of the Fisher King figure in the Grail myths and her linking him to nature cults and vegetation gods, such as Tammuz and Adonis. The King character is also associated with the many symbols of the vegetation gods and fertility rites described by Frazer, to the point where any discussion of the King figure in Last Call must take these works into account.
The fourth source that Powers has mined for King symbolism, Eliot’s The Waste Land, resonates powerfully in the novel through numerous quotations, allusions, and explicit references ranging from the obvious (chapter 17 is called “The Sound of Horns and Motors” and contains extensive quotations from “The Fire Sermon”) to the oblique (apart from its poker allusion, the novel’s title could be taken to allude to the pub closing in “A Game of Chess”). Rather than only using references to the Fisher King figure from Eliot’s poem,28 however, Powers has brought the poem’s imagery into the cluster of mythical symbols that surrounds his King, thus facilitating a Fisher King–oriented reading of The Waste Land from the perspective of Last Call. Many of the Eliot lines quoted in chapter 17, for instance, follow almost immediately after the passage in which the person “fishing in the dull canal” muses “upon the king my brother’s wreck / And on the king my father’s death before him.”29 In the novel, the quoting is done by the King (associated with the Fisher King figure), which confers Fisher King characteristics on Eliot’s fishing royalty regardless of other possible interpretations.30 Frequently, Last Call explicitly demonstrates how to read The Waste Land’s symbols in terms of the King. Thus, the “Fire Sermon” line “Old man with wrinkled female breasts” (163; l. 219) becomes an obvious description of the King, who is a man inhabiting the body of an old woman. Less obviously, the end of The Waste Land (line 430 translates as “the Aquitanian Prince with his ruined tower”) also recalls Powers’s King: in the novel, the King’s tower is symbolically destroyed, and whereas Last Call only tells us that he hails from France, Earthquake Weather reveals the King to come from the Bordeaux region in Aquitaine.31
With these sources in mind, we can address the question of how the King in Last Call is related to his realm through the mythical domain, turning first to Weston’s opinion of the Fisher King figure of the Grail texts. Like other characters that have come down to us through medieval romances, the Fisher King lacks a definitive source. Instead, he appears under various names and in various guises in a number of medieval texts. Comparing several of these medieval texts, Weston finds that
the presentment of this central figure is much confused; generally termed Le Roi Pescheur, he is sometimes described as in middle life, and in full possession of his bodily powers. Sometimes while still comparatively young he is incapacitated by the effects of a wound, and is known also by the title of Roi Mehaigné, or Maimed King. Sometimes he is in extreme old age, and in certain closely connected versions the two ideas are combined, and we have a wounded Fisher King, and an aged father, or grandfather. But […] in no case is the Fisher King a youthful character; that distinction is reserved for his Healer, and successor.32
This summary of the Fisher King’s characteristics also covers the basic traits of the Kings in Last Call. The reader meets a succession of three Kings: the gangster Benjamin Siegel is King during part of the back-story; Georges Leon rules for most of the narrative; and Scott Crane takes the throne in the denouement. All three Kings are associated with fishing, and Leon and Crane are wounded if not incapacitated. Leon most clearly matches Weston’s description, even combining apparently contradictory versions: through his ability to take over others’ bodies, he is simultaneously in “middle life” and “extreme old age,” both father and son—one of the bodies he has taken is that of his son, Richard. Crane is the “youthful” successor, healer of the land if not of his predecessor. In Last Call, the land is not healed by healing the King, however, but by having a King of sterility replaced by one of fertility.
All three Kings have traits that associate them with the Fisher King figure, most notably related to fishing and various wounds. For Siegel and Leon, fishing is described as part of their struggle over the King-ship (17, 20); Crane has sustained a number of fishing-related wounds when growing up (69, 93) and is, notably, given a nonhealing wound in his side by a fishing spear, thus adding to the notional link between the Fisher King and Christ already established by the fish symbolism. Apart from their association with fishing, Crane’s injuries offer symbolic connections to the (nonhealing) wound that the Fisher King figure, as Roi Mehaigné, has in several versions. In Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval, ou Le Conte du Graal (c. 1182), for instance, the Fisher King has a leg wound; the same goes for the later Fisher King figure, King Pelles, in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur (1485)33—and Crane suffers throughout the story from a self-inflicted stab wound in the leg. Leon’s original body, the ninety-one-year-old “Doctor Leaky,” is wounded in a manner similar to the Fisher King Anfortas in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival (c. 1210). Anfortas suffers a nonhealing and evil-smelling wound from a spear thrust through his testicles;34 “Doctor Leaky” has had his genitals shot off, leaving the body sterile and accompanied by a pervasive smell of leaking urine.
The link between the King and his realm in Last Call is understandable through his mythical identity with the Fisher King figure and, through this figure, with the gods of resurrection and vegetation.35 This identity is visible in many symbols found in the various rituals required to remain or become King. Weston observes how “the personality of the King, the nature of the disability under which he is suffering, and the reflex effect exercised upon his folk and his land, correspond […] to the intimate relation at one time held to exist between the ruler and his land.”36 This “reflex effect” may not be relevant to the Fisher King figure in the medieval romances,37 but it certainly describes the “curious relationship” (to recall Jones’s expression) between King and realm in Last Call. The well-being of the ruler affects the well-being of the realm; his death, injury, or sterility affects the land adversely.
Pogue, another contender for the Las Vegas throne, focuses on the importance of perfection. His belief that “[t]he man who takes the throne can have no flaws” (199) echoes the old Celtic idea that “a blemished king [is] unsuitable to reign.”38 These flaws need not be of a physical nature (as in the case of Nuadu of the Silver Hand, who relinquished his king-ship temporarily after having lost his right arm in battle39); kings who were “deficient in character or conduct” would also bring misfortune, and usurpers would bring famine and drought.40 These “reflex effects” parallel those in Last Call but, in his focus on perfection, Pogue errs on one count: the rightful ruler is made flawless by becoming king, as Crane eventually discovers (521–22). Powers’s novel takes the “reflex effect” further: even the physical features of the King and Queen are imprinted on the landscape, allowing characters to gain insight into the mythical rulership by studying maps where seemingly random roads and terrain features sketch a portrait of the sovereign (see 357, but also 21).
In Last Call, the realm not only reflects the King; the King also reflects the realm, as illustrated by the complex of mythical symbols surrounding his stronghold. The Flamingo Hotel, built by Siegel in Las Vegas, is the defensive focus of the King’s realm, and the various myth fragments associated with it are part of the relation between ruler and realm. Its construction is guided by numerous symbols intended to exploit the powers of various myths. By strategically opening, closing, and reopening the Flamingo at Christmas, New Year’s, and Easter, Siegel symbolically identifies the hotel with himself as “the modern avatar of Dionysus and Tammuz and Attis and Osiris and the Fisher King and every other god and king who died in the winter and was reborn in the spring” (22). At the base of the hotel, Siegel places an upside-down Tower card, a symbol of “foolishly prideful ambition” which “[r]eversed […] could permit a King to build an intimidating castle, and keep it” (22). Situated in the Nevada desert, the Flamingo also becomes a symbol of the Grail castle in the wasteland, linking the King’s stronghold, and thus the King identified with it, to the sterility of the surroundings. This sterility, the non-healing wound of the maimed king, and the groin injury suggested by the Emperor card (5) all reflect back on Leon when he usurps the throne, eventually leading to the gunshot that emasculates him (9–12), and his sterility is then—again—reflected back on the realm.
With a sterile King on the throne, the realm remains a wasteland. Crane muses on how the land has changed during Leon’s reign: “It was an Orange County with no orange trees anymore, a region conquered by developers, who had made it sterile even as they had made it fabulously valuable” (105). Fertility has given way to sterility, making the land dead but financially attractive. Death and wealth are linked through Pluto, a force closely associated with both Leon and Siegel (21). Las Vegas, too, is kept in dusty, dry sterility because of Leon. “Wild,” uncontrolled water is associated with the Goddess, a force Leon fears (which is why he has its avatar, Diana’s mother, killed). The result is dried-out water tables under the city, a conflict over water rights, and the use of “tame water” from the artificial Lake Mead.
A sterile realm is against the nature of things, however. Leon’s king-ship is not that of a fertility king. Even his henchman, Trumbill, cannot help thinking that in the past, “Fisher Kings would just have children, not kill their children’s minds and steal their bodies—and […] such a King would reign over a fertile green land and not a sterile desert—and […] he would share his power with a Queen” (258–59). Trumbill’s sentiments foreshadow the rule of Crane and Diana. As fertility King and Goddess Queen, they plan not only marriage but also children (the mythically important incest being neatly sidestepped by their status as siblings in symbolical terms only—both are adopted). Restoration of both land and King commences, healing Crane’s wounds (apart from the one in his side that symbolizes his kingship) as well as giving him a new eye. As the couple drives through the Mojave Desert, the land is no longer described through images of death and emptiness but in terms that indicate healing. The sterile wasteland is no longer dry and dead:
And the old truck sped on up the highway in the morning sun. And in the desert all around, the Joshua trees were heavy with cream-colored blossoms, and the glowing cholla branches shaded the flowering lupine and sundrops, and in the mountains the desert bighorn sheep leaped agilely down to the fresh streams to drink. (535)
With the new rulers, the desert has become a place of life, verdant and flourishing, recalling Trumbill’s “fertile green land.” Instead of sterility, fertility; instead of arid wastes, fresh streams. The departure from the wasteland into life promised by this final paragraph also suggests a departure from mundanity into the domain of myth; Crane and Diana drive off into the sunrise, leaving their mundane lives behind and taking up their mantles as mythical rulers.
Crane’s departure is, in fact, an inversion of King Arthur’s departure for Avalon. As if in confirmation of his right to the throne, Crane manages to pull a knife from the cement under the Flamingo Hotel. His last action, after having defeated his father and before departing from Lake Mead, is to throw the knife into the lake where he sees it caught, Excalibur-like, by a hand (417–18, 534). Where Arthur defeats his son but is mortally wounded, Crane wins the throne from his father, his wounds healed. Significantly, he rids himself of the weapon of war before the start of his reign rather than making it his mark, entering a reign of peace, not war. His relationship to the realm promises to differ from Leon’s, suggesting that the King figure need not be a Fisher King trapped in a wasteland, but could instead be a healer offering fertility and rebirth.
SHAPING THE REALM: PALIMPSESTS IN TOURISTS41
Lisa Goldstein’s Tourists is set in the city of Amaz, which, Wolfe observes, “is vaguely reminiscent of Borges’s Tlön, with its odd language, nameless streets, mysterious ruins, and ubiquitous decks of cards which serve as newspapers.”42 In this bizarre place, the American anthropologist Mitchell Parmenter, his wife, Claire, and his teenage daughters, Angie and Casey, find themselves involved in a centuries-old feud between the supporters of two ancient kings. Rather than the interdependency displayed by king and land in the Fisher King legend, as shown clearly in Powers’s Last Call, Goldstein’s novel illustrates how topography can be used to express a conflict between two rulers and their supporters, and how the shape of the land can change in relation to which side is in control. The most prevalent and explicit symbol for the conflict in Tourists is the letters of one king written over those of his enemy. Two related concepts are embodied in this overwriting: the palimpsest and the Roman process called damnatio memoriae.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a palimpsest is a “parchment or other writing surface on which the original text has been effaced or partially erased, and then overwritten by another” or, in extended use, “a thing likened to such a writing surface […]; a multilayered record.”43 All kinds of inscriptions, from Egyptian cartouches to engraved brass plates, may constitute palimpsests if they are in some way erased and reinscribed. Sometimes the palimpsest simply represents a case of economic expediency: expensive material (such as parchment or vellum) was washed clean and reused for a more relevant text. Accordingly, the topmost (thus most recent) inscription in a palimpsest is considered in some way more deserving of the writing surface. Ultimately, the reinscription is an expression of power—a case of the winner writing the history book. This expression of power becomes most obvious when the palimpsest is a result not of economic but of political expediency. The written traces of one’s enemy are obliterated, whether that enemy is a previous pharaoh with the wrong ideas, the persona non grata of a totalitarian regime, or the holy text of another religion.44 Palimpsests have been used not only to purge someone from history but also to preserve the memory of the purge. Historian Charles W. Hedrick, Jr., argues that this was the purpose of the Roman repertoire of penalties known, in a modern coinage, as damnatio memoriae. “Despite pretensions to the contrary,” Hedrick explains, “Roman political attacks on memory were not intended to destroy recollection of an individual […] but created gestures that served to dishonor the record of the person and so, in an oblique way, to confirm memory.”45
The most conspicuous palimpsests in Tourists are writing on top of writing, expressing a power struggle in which the enemy is supplanted by being overwritten. As with the damnatio memoriae, traces of the previous script are left to ensure that the memory of the deposition remains. Each member of the Parmenter family notices the ubiquitous graffiti that expresses the feud between supporters of the Jewel King and his predecessor, Sozran, although they do not grasp its relevance at first—and Claire, blinkered by alcoholism and culture shock, fails to grasp its palimpsestic nature (15, 42, 49, 78, respectively). The phrase The King lives is written twice: first, in the jagged letters of Sozran; then, almost covering them, in the rounded letters of the Jewel King (203). In fact, the graffiti is only a recent expression of a damnatio memoriae that goes back twelve centuries to the Jewel King’s ascension to the throne. When Mitchell and his Amaz colleague Jara stumble over the Jewel King’s old palace in their search for the King’s sword, Mitchell finds the remnants of a mosaic along the base of a wall, a mosaic that palimpsestically affirms the Jewel King’s superiority over Sozran. The tiles form writing in jagged letters, but “[f]arther on along the wall the letters looked as though they had been pried up, and another mosaic, of newer, more rounded letters, had been put in their place” (89). The Sozranis have employed the same tactic in the mosaic that covers a floor in their house, except that here the jagged writing covers the round one. More observant than her father, Casey makes the connection to the graffiti she has seen, reflecting that it was almost as if “whoever had done the second mosaic had wanted people to know they had desecrated the original” (168).
The damnatio memoriae palimpsests are only the most obvious aspects of the feud between the two ancient kings’ supporters, however, and once their meaning is made clear to Casey, she realizes that the puzzling Amaz proverb “Jagged and curved things can never marry” (77) is a summary description of how the conflict has affected the city’s society as well as its topography:
The store ahead of her had sharp gables over the windows and a door shaped like a triangle. The store next to that one was rounder, a scallop design on the roof, circular windows and a large arch over the front door. Did the feud extend even to their architecture? […] In twelve hundred years the entire city could have been made over into angles and curves. You’d want to know whom you were dealing with when you went into a store, whether the proprietor was a follower of Sozran or of the Jewel King. (175)
Angles and curves are found everywhere, in cars, driveways, even the shape of the streets. Casey realizes that depending on allegiance, a person would move through the city along curved or jagged streets. Even the map appears vaguely palimpsestic, the very layout of the streets forming a palimpsest with one set of streets superimposed on another.
The influence of the feud on the physical environment of Amaz not only results in bus routes that “snake through every part of the city” (130) and streets that “[loop] like string back and forth and finally [seem] to turn in on [themselves]” (132); the feud also shifts the shape and location of the streets. That the streets move about is suggested already in the directions to the university that Mitchell is given by his Amaz colleague. Although brought up repeatedly, the notion is generally rejected by the rational protagonists. Mitchell and Jara are forced to accept the moving streets for a fact only when they follow a route that spells out the word sword on the map. As they have written the word with the Jewel King’s rounded script on jagged streets declaring for Sozran, they witness how the city changes shape before their eyes as they walk: “[Mitchell] thought he saw houses jumbled together in front of them, a chimney here, a front door there, a car sticking out of a second-story window. And as they passed the houses re-formed themselves, moved over politely to create new streets” (205).
In this palimpsestic city, moving through the streets is a form of writing. A taxi ride has the car “writing [its] own calligraphy on the streets of the city” (44). Mitchell sees how the streets on the map write sword with the jagged letters of Sozran, and Jara changes the word into the Jewel King’s script (202–3). The new writing is an expression of power that changes the streets’ allegiance, reforges their shape. Writing is necessary to navigate the streets of Amaz. The city’s streets are (for the most part) nameless, and there are almost no addresses (14, 21). Mitchell has to rely on written directions to find his way to the university, as well as back home after an excursion through unknown parts of the city. To send a letter, “he’d had to write a whole series of complex instructions on the front of the envelope, instructions that seemed to be directions from the post office to the house” (21). A street map is itself likened to the written manuscript that Mitchell and Jara use as they try to find their way to the Jewel King’s legendary sword. The city is truly topography—a written place constantly expressed in terms of writing.
Amaz is more than a written palimpsest, however; it is a multilayered material record, a palimpsest in an archaeological or architectural sense.46 The notion of layer upon layer informs the descriptions of the city. History has left palimpsestic traces, with a new layer for each colonial power and foreign occupation (64–65), and other layers are added when parts of the city are erased by fire and earthquake (14). This layering process is so clearly visible that Casey eventually supposes the city as a whole to be like a large version of the damnatio memoriae mosaic, repeatedly knocked down and rebuilt over the centuries since the two kings’ war (176). Each new layer reflects a new winner in control of the city’s physical environment, a new ruler to determine the topography.
The winner determines the present but also the past. The story of the Jewel King competes with the story of Sozran, each version traditionally casting the enemy in an unfavorable light. The dominant story of the Jewel King (the country’s national epic) maintains the damnatio memoriae policy indicated by the graffiti and mosaic palimpsests, generally refusing Sozran even a name and referring to him simply as “the corrupt king.” In palimpsests, however, traces of the suppressed text remain; and in the Jewel King tale, Sozran’s name does occur but is mentioned only once (188). Other stories also overlie, superimpose, and leak into each other: the fictive world of the Two Kingdoms, into which Angie has retreated and which she creates through her writing, ends up as a layer over Amaz when she ventures out (41–42, 156–57). Amaz, for its part, leaks into Angie’s creation, changing her perceptions and causing her to recreate, in the Two Kingdoms, the old epic of the Jewel King without having read or heard it (165, 236). Even when the Parmenters finally manage to escape from Amaz, the superimposition of stories continues. As Mitchell and the girls tell one another of their adventures, “[t]heir voices overlapped” (235).
Jagged or curved becomes the ultimate question in Goldstein’s novel, whether applied to a street, a piece of writing, or a legendary sword. Jagged or curved determines, and is determined by, allegiance, and the ancient feud between the two rulers’ supporters shapes and reshapes the city’s topography. Amaz thus becomes a place where the outsider is hopelessly lost—sides have to be taken in order to maneuver through the palimpsestic urban landscape and negotiate the stories it tells. It is certainly not a good place for tourists.
WHERE DARK LORDS LIVE: LANDSCAPES OF EVIL IN TOLKIEN, DONALDSON, AND JORDAN
The worst tourist spot that a fantasy world can offer is the territory that surrounds the stronghold, or prison, of the resident Dark Lord. Such a realm reflects the evil of its ruler through highly unpleasant living conditions, being too hot, too cold, or simply too poisonous for normal life to thrive; and like the Dark Lords themselves, their lands share some general characteristics but are on the whole distinctly individual. Although a thorough exploration of the Dark Lord character is beyond the scope of this book,47 we may note how the genre presents Dark Lords as anything from evil gods and semidivine beings (the three examples in this chapter belong to this end of the scale) to “ordinary” mortals who have turned to evil,48 and other evil lords are best described as being somewhere between these extremes.49 Regardless of origin, the lords’ association with dark powers invariably turns them into the epitome of evil, frequently reduced to destructive forces with only a single motivating goal50—and they all seem to share a predilection for inhospitable dwellings.
I would like to clarify that by using the expressions landscape of evil and evil landscape, I do not mean that the landscape itself is necessarily evil. That would imply a volition that the land does not generally have; to the contrary, the land is commonly portrayed as a victim of its ruler’s evil. (Tolkien provides a clear example of this.) Rather, the land is an expression, through its physical characteristics as well as through its flora and fauna, of the evil that resides there, mainly in terms of a Dark Lord. For this reason, I have refrained from using a (possibly) less ambiguous term such as cacotopia or maletopia (bad or evil place), as such a term removes the focus from the connection between the moral nature of, in particular, the evil rulers and the landscape of their realm. Furthermore, while the fantasy genre tends to favor a realm ruled by a Dark Lord, an evil landscape may well be constructed as a prison for its denizens (as in the case of Shai’tan). Although there is a fundamental difference between a terrible place created for oneself and one intended for someone else, I have treated these types similarly, focusing primarily on how the evil place is described.
“Such Starved Ignoble Nature”: Portrayals of Evil Lands
The idea that certain types of landscapes come with a peculiar, all but built-in, moral character is so widespread in the fantasy genre that when authors avoid it, they do so with an almost palpable self-consciousness. In her section on subversions of the portal–quest fantasy, Mendlesohn cites Barbara Hambly’s novel The Magicians of Night (1992), observing how Hambly “[severs] the link between landscape and morality. The hills that are splashed with golden sunlight, covered in wild ivy and buttercups, shelter evil, not elves.”51 Mendlesohn and Hambly both recognize that portal–quest fantasy expects places of evil to be ugly and unpleasant.
The conception of what an evil landscape should look like goes far back among the genre’s taproot texts,52 including any number of dismal hells and realms of the dead. An early example is provided by the “d
gel lond” (secret, mysterious, or dark land) around Grendel’s snake-infested mere in Beowulf.53 With its windswept cliffs, perilous fens, and dark woods full of wolves, it bears more than a passing resemblance to the mountains and the dark, disquieting lake near Moria’s western gate (cf. FR, II, iv). Hell (Christian or otherwise), of course, is one of our most typical evil landscapes, Dante Alighieri providing Western literature’s most influential depiction of the infernal regions. Dante’s Inferno notwithstanding, lakes of fire and smoking brimstone tend to appear as the centerpiece of the majority of Christian Hells, but John Milton has some of his fallen angels explore beyond the fiery center and the surrounding cold, where they find other doleful landscapes, places of evil “Where all life dies, death lives, and nature breeds, / Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things, / Abominable, inutterable.”54 One of the most vivid descriptions of an evil landscape in English literature occurs in Robert Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” (1855). Roland explains how he has never seen “Such starved ignoble nature; nothing throve: / For flowers—as well expect a cedar grove!”55 Plants are scarce no matter how hardy or prolific normally; even grass grows “as scant as hair / In leprosy” (st. 13:1–2). Two stanzas are worth quoting in full, as their echoes appear in the fantasy texts I discuss afterward:
No! penury, inertness and grimace,
In some strange sort, were the land’s portion. “See
Or shut your eyes,” said Nature peevishly,
“It nothing skills: I cannot help my case:
’T is the Last Judgment’s fire must cure this place,
Calcine its clods and set my prisoners free.” (st. 11)
Places like this, lifeless landscapes of which Nature itself is ashamed and that can (implicitly or explicitly) be redeemed by nothing less than the end of the world, can be found in fantasy’s many realms of evil. Browning took the title for his poem from King Lear (1623), and according to Tom Shippey, Edgar’s snatch of song “Child Rowland to the dark tower came” is also part of the genesis of The Lord of the Rings;56 but it is certainly Browning’s grim landscape rather than Shakespeare’s line that anticipates Mordor and its Dark Tower. Other early fantasy writers make use of similar landscapes of evil: Sir Kato’s Outer Land in Astrid Lindgren’s Mio, min Mio (1954; transl. Mio, My Son 1956) is also a dark, stony, dead realm.57 Its dreary, dim daylight reminds us of Browning’s poem and of the gloom in Dante’s Inferno, whereas the blackness of its night is more akin to the “darkness visible” in Milton’s Hell.58 The gloom of the evil landscape may, in fact, be a legacy bequeathed by the lands of the dead. The realms of Hades into which Odysseus and Æneas descend are certainly dark, at least on the outskirts; but they also offer groves and quite pleasant fields, making them appear almost cheerful compared to Childe Roland’s plain.59
It is worth noting that the landscape in Browning’s poem changes. While still nightmarish, it does not remain sterile:
Now blotches rankling, coloured gay and grim,
Now patches where some leanness of the soil’s
Broke into moss or substances like boils;
Then came some palsied oak, a cleft in him
Like a distorted mouth that splits its rim
Gaping at death, and dies while it recoils. (st. 26)
This diseased landscape recalls Milton’s perverse nature and “inutterable abominations”; rather than offering an image of death, it portrays the process of dying and decay. While less common in fantasy literature, this image still anticipates a number of evil landscapes, places where putrefaction destroys natural beauty.
As Mendlesohn’s example from Hambly demonstrates, however, there is also an awareness of this traditional evil landscape among fantasy writers, and attempts have been made to vary the concept. Among the texts most explicitly conscious of the tradition is Glen Cook’s The Black Company, wherein the Dark Lord is a Dark Lady:
We sprawled on the flank of a grassy hill. The Tower rose above the horizon due south. That basaltic cube was intimidating even from ten miles away—and implausible in its setting. Emotion demanded a surround of fiery waste, or at best a land perpetually locked in winter. Instead, this country was a vast green pasture, gentle hills with small farms dotting their southern hips. Trees lined the deep, slow brooks snaking between.
Nearer the Tower the land became less pastoral, but never reflected the gloom Rebel propagandists placed around the Lady’s stronghold. No brimstone and barren, broken plains. No bizarre, evil creatures strutting over scattered human bones. No dark clouds ever rolling and grumbling in the sky.60
Cook’s narrator (a mercenary who finds himself fighting on the side of evil) cannot quite believe that this is the Evil Land, partly because Evil, he feels, is neither fertile nor pleasant. Feels, yes; but a reader well acquainted with the fantasy genre would realize that not only emotion but also tradition demands a wasted land of evil, including allusions to wintry Narnia under the White Witch as well as to the volcanic plains around Mount Doom in Mordor. Indeed, the Mordor allusion is reinforced in the second paragraph by references to (the absence of) “brimstone and barren, broken plains” and “dark clouds ever rolling and grumbling in the sky.” Even the word gloom brings us echoes from Sauron’s realm, given that continuous gloom is, as Matthew Dickerson and Jonathan Evans point out, a recurrent image in descriptions of Mordor.61
These images of the second paragraph are attributed to a source much more distinct than “emotion”: Rebel propaganda. The Rebels are the opposing side; that is, they would be the protagonists of a typical quest fantasy—the forces of Good fighting the Evil Lady. In Cook’s novel, they are only good by default, not because they occupy any moral high ground, something that is clear from their willingness to spread lies to vilify their enemy. By invalidating the Rebel propaganda version of the evil land, a version that fits traditional fantasy expectations nicely, Cook also calls into question the goodness of any number of “good guys” throughout especially portal–quest fantasy, suggesting that the black-and-white-ness of the form results from the victors writing the history book.62
Nevertheless, the general conception of the evil landscape in fantasy is brought to us through focal characters on the side of Good, and the various realms they describe are everything that the pastoral land of Cook’s Lady is not. The three locations explored in the section that follows, from The Lord of the Rings, the First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, and the Wheel of Time, demonstrate how traditional images of landscapes of evil may be used to reflect the individual characteristics of various Dark Lords and portray evil in different ways. While any number of portal–quest fantasies could provide examples, the two latter Dark Lords and realms have been chosen for their distinct similarities and differences vis-à-vis Sauron and Mordor. Donaldson offers a quite similar landscape sprung from a different view of evil and its workings; Jordan’s fairly Tolkienesque portrayal of evil results in a (superficially) different evil landscape.
Mordor
Sauron is of the lesser order of the Ainur, the angelic beings once involved in the creation of the world who entered it as its stewards. Along with many others, he was swayed by the evil Melkor; and when his master was defeated, Sauron assumed the position of supreme evil being in Middle-earth. The dead lands of Mordor have obvious precursors in Tolkien’s earlier work, most plainly in the Desolation of Smaug in The Hobbit, a “bleak and barren” land with “neither bush nor tree, and only broken and blackened stumps to speak of ones long vanished.”63 But even before he began writing about Mr. Baggins’s adventures, Tolkien had included a burned, desolate plain outside Morgoth’s stronghold. In The Silmarillion (1977), the plain is called Anfauglith, the Gasping Dust, “full of a choking dust, barren and lifeless”;64 but it is mentioned in a previous synopsis (“Sketch of Mythology”) from the late 1920s, as well as in the even earlier Lay of the Children of Húrin (early 1920s), under the name Dor-na-Fauglith, the Plain of Thirst.65 To what extent the landscapes surrounding the antagonists of Tolkien’s previous writing actually influenced Mordor is impossible to determine, but Sauron’s Dark Land certainly outdoes its precursors in terms of barren gloominess.
It is unclear at what point Sam and Frodo enter Sauron’s realm. The Dead Marshes, with their slimy ooze, clammy mists, and spirits of the dead visible in the treacherous pools, are an obvious contender. Gollum, however, claims not to know whether the visages of the dead are Sauron’s doing (TT, IV, ii, 614); and as the barrow wights demonstrate in The Fellowship of the Ring, old graves, no matter whose, can become the haunt of evil spirits far away from the Dark Land. Randel Helms suggests that the hobbits pass into Sauron’s realm once they have traversed the Marshes,66 but I would argue that they must walk for two more nights, through the Noman-lands and into Dagorlad, the desolation that lies before the Black Gates, before they truly experience the Dark Lord’s land.67 Dagorlad’s desolate plain is clearly related to Anfauglith and the Desolation of Smaug, and the description of it is among Tolkien’s most chilling:
Here nothing lived, not even the leprous growths that feed on rottenness. The gasping pools were choked with ash and crawling muds, sickly white and grey, as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails upon the lands about. High mounds of crushed and powdered rock, great cones of earth fire-blasted and poison-stained, stood like an obscene graveyard in endless rows, slowly revealed in the reluctant light. […] [T]he lasting monument to the dark labor of [Mordor’s] slaves that should endure when all their purposes were made void; a land defiled, diseased beyond all healing—unless the Great Sea should enter in and wash it with oblivion. (TT, IV, ii, 617)
Despite the added details, the dead land before Childe Roland’s Dark Tower is clearly recognizable, down to the need for a cleansing cataclysm in order to cure the land—by fire in Browning’s case, by flood in Tolkien’s. Sauron’s forecourt displays the Dark Lord’s complete disregard for any sanctity of life or beauty. The totality of the ecocide brings into sharp focus how the pits and forges of Isengard are indeed “only a little copy, a child’s model or a slave’s flattery” of the evil that Sauron is capable of inflicting on the land itself (FR, II, ii, 254; TT, III, viii, 542). The first encounter, for the hobbits as well as the reader, with the Dark Lord’s realm illustrates the three main ways in which his evil is portrayed as affecting the land: mediated through the actions of others, as a force of decay or destruction, and through emotive language. These ways interlace with and amplify one another but are covered separately in the discussion that follows.
John Garth calls the description of Dagorlad an expression of Tolkien’s “anti-industrial animus,”68 which he also finds in Tolkien’s notes for the description of the Marshes. (“Describe the pools as they get nearer to Mordor as like green pools and rivers fouled by modern chemical works.”69) “Anti-industrial animus,” if anything, puts it mildly: Dagorlad is the most striking image of industrial environmental degradation in The Lord of the Rings.70 That the evil of Mordor lies in environmental destruction and lack of respect for the natural world is obvious from the chapter “The Scouring of the Shire” (RK, VI, viii). When the hobbits return to find the Shire tyrannized and ravaged by Saruman, Sam and Frodo see how Saruman has simply done Sauron’s work, although the devastation feels much worse “because it is home, and you remember it before it was all ruined” (RK, VI, viii, 994). Ann Swinfen briefly notes the destruction and exploitation of nature carried out by “Sauron and his imitator Saruman” through machinery and slaves;71 and that is indeed one of the three ways in which the Dark Lord’s evil affects the land. Through minions (including “his imitator Saruman”) and other agents, such as the volcano, Mount Doom, and even weather, Sauron affects the world; and in his own realm, these agents can carry out his evil deeds unopposed and unfettered by any regard for the natural environment.
This mediated evil, clearly visible in the poisonous slag heaps and waste pits of Dagorlad, is most conspicuously expressed through the random felling of trees. That misdeed enrages the ents of Fangorn and brings Sam to tears on his return to the Shire, and it is the first sign of Sauron’s evil power in the recently conquered Ithilien. Despite the loveliness of the land, Sam and Frodo come across “trees hewn down wantonly and left to die,” which reminds them that they are in enemy territory (TT, IV, iv, 637).72 However, although industrial production and the environmental destruction associated with it might lie wholly within the purview of evil, the Dagorlad waste is not totally gratuitous. Apparently, advanced mining and chemical operations are going on in Mordor, suggested by the slag heaps with their noxious fumes, the poisoned soil, and the multicolored ooze in the pits (TT, IV, ii, 618). From the passage quoted before, the reader can tell that slave labor is used in this industry, and the origin of the slag heaps is hinted at later, when the narrator explains that Mordor’s mines and forges are found in the northern parts of the country—conveniently located close to the Black Gates and Dagorlad (RK, VI, ii, 902).
The location is convenient because depositing these dangerous by-products outside the entrance to Mordor gives Sauron a strategic advantage. The presence of a vast, lifeless area greatly strengthens the defense of the Black Gates, preventing any invading army, such as Aragorn’s, from foraging for food, water, or firewood. As Dagorlad was the “battle plain” where Sauron was previously defeated (FR, II, ii, 236–37; see also Appx B, 1059), improving its defensive qualities makes sense.
The Dark Lord does not rely solely on a poisoned and desolate wasteland for his defense, however, nor does he rely only on agents to exert his influence on the land. The second way in which his evil affects the land is more direct: as a destructive force, an invisible energy that works on living things, perverting and ultimately killing them. This falls under what Helms refers to as the fourth internal law of Middle-earth: “[w]ill and states of mind, both evil and good, can have objective reality and physical energy.”73 He illustrates this law with the terror spread by the Ringwraiths. Sauron’s evil similarly affects people, but it also affects the very land. Like an invisible poison or ionizing radiation, it slowly destroys life in his realm without the need for any agents. When the hobbits leave Dagorlad and move south into Ithilien, it becomes clear to the reader how Sauron’s evil takes effect over time. A night’s walk away from the Black Gates, they find themselves “in a land that had only been for a few years under the dominion of the Dark Lord and was not yet fallen wholly into decay” (TT, IV, iv, 635). While not as verdant as Ithilien (which has been under Sauron’s control for an even briefer period of time), it is by no means as horrifying as Dagorlad. It is important to note how being “under the dominion of the Dark Lord” is enough to cause a land to fall into decay, but also that this process occurs over time—his evil corrupts vegetation slowly. This point is corroborated by the glens of the Morgai, on the outer edges of the Dark Land, where “Mordor was a dying land, but it was not yet dead” (RK, VI, ii, 900). What grows there is “harsh, twisted, bitter, struggling for life”—stunted, gray, withered—but apparently not even it has been under the dominion of Sauron long enough to have died.
Not only time but also distance determines the effect of Sauron’s evil force. As Sam and Frodo journey through Mordor toward the Dark Tower, they find the land to be completely dead. It is a dark, arid, lifeless place of sharp rocks, dry riverbeds, and broken plains, where what little water they find is as bitter as the air. In their chapter on “The Three Faces of Mordor,” Dickerson and Evans point out how Sauron’s evil kills even the memory of living nature in Frodo.74 Other parts of Mordor, farther away from the Dark Tower and the volcano, are comparatively fertile, however. The narrator tells the reader about “the great slave-worked fields away south in this wide realm […] by the dark sad waters of Lake Núrnen,” an area that Aragorn later bestows upon Sauron’s freed slaves and that apparently cannot be too dreadful (RK, VI, ii, 902; v, 947).75
The force of Sauron’s evil does not necessarily kill vegetation; it may only stunt or corrupt it. In some cases, the plants themselves are portrayed as turning to evil, like the brambles of Mordor, with their long, piercing thorns and hooked, sharp barbs (RK, VI, ii, 896; 900). While annoying and painful, they are not dangerous, as contrasted with the flowers of the meadows in Morgul Vale. These pale, luminous flowers are “beautiful and yet horrible of shape,” with a sickening, corpselike odor (TT, IV, viii, 689). The juxtaposition of beautiful and horrible signals the perverting effect of evil, just as the juxtaposing of beautiful and terrible does (twice) when Galadriel warns Frodo of the consequences were she to take the Ring (FR, II, vii, 356). The wrongness of something both beautiful and horrible is made plain by the description of the flowers’ shapes as “like the demented forms in an uneasy dream” (TT, IV, viii, 689).
The nightmarish quality of the evil landscape is emphasized even more strongly with the Dagorlad desolation. Frodo and Sam find themselves at the edge of the dead land “like men on the edge of a sleep where nightmare lurks,” and some of Aragorn’s troops suffer from the same sensation on their arrival; they walk “like men in a hideous dream made true” (TT, IV, ii, 617; RK, V, x, 868). The dream similes illustrate the third way in which a landscape becomes that of evil: through a language that warps the reader’s impression of the landscape. Returning to the Dagorlad quotation, we find a number of attributes that intensify the image of the dead landscape, for instance “gasping pools,” “sickly white,” “reluctant light.” Together with another pair of striking similes (“as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails” and “like an obscene graveyard”), they associate the landscape with sickness and death so forcefully that the reader easily accepts that the land is “diseased beyond all healing.”
Imagery is used to tie the evil landscape to certain concepts. Nightmares and darkness, disease and death are all typical, but more active characteristics occur as well, which personify the landscape and turn the realm into an extension of its ruler: it is a tormented land of shadows and blind darkness where mountains and cliff faces loom and frown. When Sauron broods, so does the land (iii, 914). In the three chapters in which the hobbits travel through the Dark Land (RK, VI, i–iii), there are numerous examples of anything from dead metaphors to vivid similes: when Sam first gazes out over Mordor, he sees a hard, cruel, and bitter land (i, 879), and toward the end of their trek, the landscape is “rough and hostile,” even evil (iii, 917; 914). The Morgai mountain ridge is “grim,” with “crags like fangs,” air and water are “sad,” and roads and pinnacles are “cruel” (i, 879; ii, 900, 902; iii, 914, 921). Mount Doom vomits lava and belches fumes, the entrance in its side gazing toward the Dark Tower, and although it sleeps, it does so “uneasily” (i, 879; ii, 899; iii, 921–22; 918). Despite the personifying imagery, the land remains lifeless; it is a barren landscape, constantly stressing that the Dark Lord’s power is never one of life. To enter the wasteland of Dagorlad is to leave “the living lands” (RK, V, x, 868), and the wind that blows into Mordor from the West comes “out of the living world” (RK, VI, ii, 898). Although not a land of the dead, it is a land that has died.
The Spoiled Plains and Ridjeck Thome76
Lord Foul is a spiritual being and the enemy of the world’s Creator. His attempts to destroy the world in which he is imprisoned stem from his desire to escape it and confront his enemy. In The Power That Preserves, the third book in Donaldson’s first trilogy about Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, the final confrontation between Covenant and the Dark Lord takes place in Foul’s Creche. Before Covenant makes his way there, Foul’s realm is described to him and his Giant friend, Foamfollower: “There the Landrider [River] becomes the Ruinwash, and flows polluted toward the Sea. It is a murky and repelling water, unfit for use by any but its own unfit denizens” (390). The land is then described in more detail:
[T]he Spoiled Plains form a wide deadland around the promontory of Ridjeck Thome, where Foul’s Creche juts into the Sea. Within that deadland lies Kurash Qwellinir, the Shattered Hills. Some say that these Hills were formed by the breaking of a mountain—others, that they were shaped from the slag and refuse of [Foul’s] war caverns, furnaces, breeding dens. However they were made, they are a maze to bewilder the approach of any foe. And within them lies Gorak Krembal—Hotash Slay. From Sea-cliff to Sea-cliff about the promontory, it defends [Foul’s] seat with lava, so that none may pass that way to gain the one gateless maw of the Creche. (390)
Despite the dispassionate voice, which belongs to Covenant’s friend Bannor, and a description that is basically a list of features, we can see how Foul’s realm parallels that of Sauron: pollution, deadlands, hills of slag and refuse as a line of defense, even volcanic activity on the doorstep to the stronghold. The apparent similarity is so great that it is tempting to translate directly between the two evil realms: Kurash Qwellinir = Dagorlad, Gorak Krembal = Orodruin, Ridjeck Thome = Gorgoroth, and so on. Apart from highlighting the authors’ respective preferences in creating names, however, such one-to-one translations would only stress superficial features while drawing attention away from the radical differences.
W. A. Senior argues that the “similarities between Frodo and Covenant can be traced easily to the paradigm of the fantasy hero […] their parallels are functions of form and plot, not of character and motive.” He proceeds to outline these parallels, including the dangerous quest to confront evil each protagonist embarks upon; both Mordor and Foul’s Creche are even situated in the southeast.77 Although Senior carries out a detailed and highly fascinating examination of parallels and differences between Donaldson and Tolkien, including the role of the ring at the center of each work, he says very little about the evil lands as such.78 The discussion that follows explores the relationship between character and motives of the respective Dark Lords and how they affect the characteristics of their lands.
When the hobbits arrive in Mordor, the dead land horrifies them. The Middle-earth they have traveled through has not necessarily offered constant vistas of natural beauty, but the utter lifelessness they encounter here is beyond anything they could have imagined. Covenant and Foam-follower, on the other hand, have journeyed through a Land in which Foul has delayed spring by several months. They, and the reader, are also aware that Foul has already once contrived to kill every living thing in the Land. The dead landscape of the Spoiled Plains comes not as a shock but as an expectation fulfilled. This difference in how the evil land is perceived both originates in and is indicative of the distinctive character and motive of the Dark Lord who rules it. Understanding how Foul differs from Sauron helps us understand how his realm differs from Mordor, despite the obvious similarities.
Senior subjects the two Dark Lords to a thorough comparison, observing a number of central distinctions: Sauron as a representation of evil is abstract, universal, and generic, evil as a symbolic force that wants to bind all in darkness. Lord Foul, for his part, is concrete, particular, and specific, wishing to twist and corrupt. He is the ills of leprosy inflicted on the Land.79 Whereas Sauron may wish to bind all in darkness, he only demands tribute and dominion (RK, V, x, 872). Lord Foul’s goals and nature, on the other hand, are spelled out plainly from the very beginning: Foul explains how he was behind the Ritual of Desecration that reduced all life in the Land to dust a millennium ago, lists his various sobriquets (which capture aspects of his character), and warns Covenant that he will eradicate hope from the Earth. His final words are: “Think on that, and be dismayed!”80
Dismay and hopelessness: invoking despair is one of Foul’s main motives, as may also be inferred from the Giants’ name for him, Soulcrusher. Much of Foul’s realm appears incomprehensible unless this aspect of him is taken into account. The journey of Covenant and Foam-follower through the Spoiled Plains is a series of exercises in despair, often through the dashing of hope or the marring of relief. (Christine Barkley refers to this as Foul’s “psychological torture” and describes its use against Covenant.81) Torrential rain and absence of food sources leave them hungry, wet, and cold. Any escape from a threat lands them in a comparatively more difficult situation. Such oscillations between relief and dismay are particularly intense in the eerie “orchard,” where every perceived advantage quickly proves to have an even greater disadvantage (400–404). The land thus causes the protagonists to swing between hope and despair, between relief and despondency, and each disappointment erodes their hope further.
The erosion of hope is also the purpose of the last points of defense. The maze of the Shattered Hills (which, contrary to Bannor’s description, are not slag and refuse but forms carved from black, igneous rock) is constructed to take people in the opposite of their desired direction. Only by moving away from the fiery glow of the lava at Hotash Slay at each junction do the Giant and his friend reach the river of molten rock (424). Next, the lava river understandably ruins any hope Covenant has of crossing, since he has forgotten about the Giant’s ability to endure fire (425). Finally, even once Foamfollower has managed to get Covenant across, during the final stretch along the promontory to the entrance into Foul’s Creche, and down to the Dark Lord’s thronehall, the protagonists oscillate between hope and despair; and the closer they get to their ultimate goal, the more plain it is that these oscillations spring from Foul himself—that his realm’s purpose is his own: the eradication of hope.
Foul’s second purpose, evident from his nickname “Corruption” as well as from the delight he takes in explaining his involvement in the Ritual of Desecration, is the destruction of life. Senior points out that “[o]ne obvious lesson of the Chronicles addresses the spoliation of our land in stark contrast to the maintenance of the Land by its peoples. There people worship the environment which, in our world, is often no more than a natural resource to be exploited.”82 To this should be added the point that the contrast is not simply between Covenant’s primary (and our actual) world and the Land but also between the people of the Land and their archenemy. Yet Lord Foul does not display Tolkien’s “anti-industrial animus”; Donaldson’s Dark Lord may be a polluter, but his evil power aims for wholesale corruption through any means available. According to Senior, Foul’s desire is “to twist and deprave,” but also to call attention to how twisted and depraved he has caused things to become;83 and although Senior does not mention it, the turning of the clean Landrider River into the polluted, murky, repellent Ruinwash certainly exemplifies this desire.
The ruined landscapes of Tolkien and Donaldson thus appear similar, but they result from different attitudes to the natural environment. Sauron’s destruction is secondary to his other goals of defense and (military) production; the desolation of Dagorlad is the result of mines and forges—of industry—operated without regard for the environment, just as the darkness is necessary for his troops of nocturnal orcs and trolls to fight during the day. Orcs may enjoy the occasional, arbitrary felling of trees, but it is not their master’s main purpose. Conversely, Foul cares very much about nature: twisting and destroying it is a primary objective for him. The “scattering of tough trees and brush had eked out a bare existence until Lord Foul’s preternatural winter had blasted them,” so that now they stand gray, brittle, and dead (395). The “bare existence” no doubt left the trees just as twisted and bitter as the scrubby trees of the glens of the Morgai in Mordor and all the more pleasing for Foul.
As environmental destruction per se is Foul’s motive, there is no need to elaborate on how the land is destroyed. The Landrider is suddenly polluted, likewise the soil. Bannor suggests that there are reasons behind the pollution (“the slag and refuse of [Foul’s] war caverns, furnaces, breeding dens”), but no evidence corroborates this claim. As in Sauron’s case, Foul’s evil is itself a poisonous force or energy—if anything, it is more tangible than Sauron’s. On Ridjeck Thome, the force of evil is so powerful that Covenant “felt muffled ill beating up through the rock” (432). It is there, near the very heart of Lord Foul’s realm, that the land suffers the worst damage, not (as in Mordor) on the doorstep, because the destruction springs first and foremost from Foul’s desire to destroy life. The dead landscape is easily recognizable from Tolkien, and from Browning before that—“a cracked, bare lowland of dead soil and rock, a place which had lain wrecked and riven for so long that it had forgotten even the possibility of life” (431). But here, nothing hints that poisonous waste or volcanic activity lies behind this destruction. Whether the force of Foul’s ill is as clearly delimited as Sauron’s evil, which stays within the land he controls, or whether, in Foul’s case, evil diminishes with distance from its source (like, for instance, electromagnetic radiation) is unclear. There is a fringe of “un-Spoiled flatlands” through which Covenant and Foamfollower pass (395), but whether the Spoiling is gradual is not mentioned. In any case, the landscape of Ridjeck Thome is the type of landscape that Lord Foul desires. Around his stronghold, he has created this landscape—not through his minions, but through the force of his evil alone.
The connection between the Dark Lord and his realm is thus central to understanding Lord Foul’s land. By understanding the differences in character and motive between Foul and Sauron, we can see how there can be radical differences between two superficially similar landscapes that evil has turned into places of disease and death. The next example, however, from Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time, entails a turn to an evil landscape that combines life and death, fecundity and disease.
The Blight84
The realms of evil discussed thus far are characterized by being dead or dying. Like the grim plain traversed by Childe Roland, they represent a sterile land where the exceedingly sparse vegetation is diseased, corrupted, moribund. The lands affected by the evil of the Dark Lord Shai’tan, or the Dark One, in Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World also produce diseased and corrupted vegetation. Rather than dying, however, these plants are deadly, subjected to Shai’tan’s carcinogenic evil. Even so, Shai’tan—the protagonists erroneously refer to him as Ba’alzamon during the first three novels in the series, before realizing their error—echoes both Sauron and Lord Foul: he is the opponent of the Creator, bound at the beginning of time; the embodiment of chaos; and the destroyer of reason.
As in The Lord of the Rings and The Power That Preserves, the goal of the protagonists’ quest lies within the realm of the Dark Lord, and Rand al’Thor and his companions venture into the area under Shai’tan’s influence called the Blight. Unlike Sauron and Lord Foul, however, the Dark Lord in The Eye of the World is imprisoned and only has limited power over the physical world (see 726). The effect Shai’tan’s evil has on the landscape even far away from his prison is clearly noticeable, however:
As the mountains drew closer, so did the true Blight. Where a leaf had been spotted black and mottled yellow before, now foliage fell wetly while [Rand] watched, breaking apart from the weight of its own corruption. The trees themselves were tortured, crippled things, twisted branches clawing at the sky as if begging mercy from some power that refused to hear. Ooze slid like pus from bark cracked and split. (734)
This disease-ridden place is far from the sterility and death of Mordor and Foul’s Creche, as well as from the dead landscape Childe Roland first encounters, but it recalls the second stanza quoted from Browning’s poem. The tortured trees also echo Dante’s Wood of Suicides, where tormented souls have been transformed into twisted trees and bushes.85 The Blight is a cancer in Rand’s world, a slowly growing zone of diseased vegetation. Unchecked growth, the mark of cancer, applies to more than the area of the Blight. The very plants grow impossibly. Along with the humidity and heat of the Blight, this fecundity suggests a tropical jungle, a place where vegetation hides dangers of all sizes. The traveler dares not touch anything without careful scrutiny, as deadly surprises may hide behind a branch or leaf. In the Blight, it is equally wise not to touch the leaves (as Rand is cautioned) for the very same reason.
The further into the Blight the companions journey, the less attractive the idea of touching anything becomes. Like any cancer, the growth is not healthy. In the earlier quotation, the black spots and mottled yellow, along with the unnatural heat and humidity, suggest fungal attacks, decomposition that sets in even as the leaves are growing. The deeper Rand and his companions venture into the Blight, the more pronounced the decay becomes, until leafing and rotting occur simultaneously. The disease does not kill the vegetation, however. As in Milton’s Hell, this is a place where nature breeds perverse, monstrous things:
[Rand] could not say what kind [of tree] it was, or had been, so gnarled and tormented was its shape. As he watched, the tree suddenly whipped back and forth again, then bent down, flailing at the ground. Something screamed, shrill and piercing. The tree sprang back straight; its limbs entwined around a dark mass that writhed and spat and screamed. (734–35)
The cancer of evil corrupts the trees into new forms of life, life that is unnatural, abominable, transgressing boundaries between species, even between the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Trees that are completely overcome by the Blight’s cancer are no longer just trees; they bear no relation to any kind of tree in the world outside. They have taken on traits of the animal kingdom, such as moving and catching prey, and when Rand lops off a branch, he “almost thought he heard them scream” (736), again recalling the Wood of Suicides and how a bush cries out in pain when having a twig broken off.86 Nor are trees alone in transgressing the boundaries of taxonomy. “Flowers can kill in the Blight, and leaves maim,” Rand is warned, and he is told of “a little thing called a Stick” that looks like its name and will bite anyone who touches it, with disastrous results (724). Whether the Stick is an animal or a plant is never specified; the “little thing” is another transgression, a hybrid impossible outside the Blight.
The boundary between plants and animals is violated in the Blight, as are the boundaries between species. Rand cannot identify which kinds of trees he sees. When he and his companions are attacked by a host of monstrous creatures, the first of these is described thus: “Stiff hair like long bristles covered it, and it had too many legs, joining a body as big as a bear at odd angles. Some of them at least, those coming out of its back, had to be useless for walking, but the finger-long claws at their ends tore the earth in its death agony” (736). The description is one of a mutation beyond any divine creation or natural selection. Body parts from various animals appear to have been thrown together randomly, resulting in the “too many” legs that are strangely joined to the body, with some appearing to have no purpose. The being described is an abomination, clearly diseased, yet alive and ferocious. The arbitrariness of the attacking creatures’ shape is emphasized by the fact that no two are alike (737) and none has shapes recognizable to Rand (or the reader).
The focus on cancer and transgressions distinguishes Shai’tan’s evil from that of Sauron and Lord Foul, but to fully understand the nature of this evil, some similarities should be considered. Where Tolkien’s and Donaldson’s Dark Lords destroy the natural environment, leaving a dead, sterile landscape, Jordan’s Dark One causes nature to turn into another kind of nightmare. The Blight is nature gone bad, a corruption not only of its plants and animals, but of the very laws that govern the ecosystem. Two important parallels can be drawn between his emanation of evil and those of Foul and Sauron, though. First, as in the case of Sauron, land that has fallen under the control of Shai’tan’s troops is also swallowed by the Blight, as in the case of the kingdom of Malkier (711). Yet the degree of corruption of the land, which in Sauron’s case mainly appears to depend on how long a land has been under the Dark Lord’s control, is related to the distance from the Blight’s edge, more along the lines of Foul’s evil. To enter the Blight is gradually to enter the corruption wrought by Shai’tan’s evil. Rand wonders when the party will move into the Blight, not realizing that the slight change in temperature and the wrongness that this change makes him feel are the first signs (721). This association of the Dark Lord’s evil with radiation effects (in that the evil decreases relative to the distance from its source, dying away gradually), as well as with military control of an area, proves relevant somewhat later in this discussion.
The second parallel between the evil force of mainly Foul and Shai’tan, but to some extent also Sauron, is the lifeless lands surrounding Shai’tan’s prison. In a dream, Rand sees this place to which “spring had never come […] and never would come. Nothing grew in the cold soil that crunched under his boots, not so much as a bit of lichen. […] [D]ust coated the stone as if never a drop of rain had touched it” (119). This land obviously shares some characteristics with both Mordor and Ridjeck Thome: it is dry, dusty, and dead. Appropriately called the Blasted Lands, it calls to mind a radioactive desert close to a massive radioactive source, as well as the long cold of nuclear winter. In fact, that appears to be the (symbolic) nature of the Dark Lord’s evil in Jordan’s book: where Sauron represents the ills of industrialization and Lord Foul represents the ills of leprosy, Shai’tan represents the ills of nuclear war and radioactivity.
Quite apart from its association with military control, Shai’tan’s evil in The Eye of the World shares numerous traits with ionizing radiation. As noted before, it decreases with distance, a tendency that also explains the sterility of the Blasted Lands: Close to its source, nuclear radiation kills and sterilizes. As its effect decreases farther away, it does not kill directly but changes the cellular structures, thus causing cancer and mutations, as well as damage to the immune system—and fungal infections are among the first to take advantage of a compromised immune system. In other words, Shai’tan’s evil—as a force—affects the Blight in a manner similar to nuclear radiation: it turns living things into diseased, cancer-ridden wrecks, eventually causing plants and animals to mutate into new, corrupted forms of life. This interpretation is indicated already in the book’s prologue, when Lews Therin takes his life with magic tainted by evil: the air turns to fire and the light “would have seared and blinded any eye that glimpsed it, even for an instant.” Stone is vaporized, the ground convulses, molten rock is cast into the air, and “[f]rom north and south, from east and west, the wind howled in” (xiv). The image closely resembles the blinding light, shock wave, and mushroom cloud that we have learned to associate with a nuclear explosion.87
Examining the relation between the Dark Lord and his realm, we find that the cancer and mutations, the sterile Blasted Lands and the military control not only explain how ruler and realm affect each other. By understanding the nature of evil through the character of the evil land, a central theme of the novel emerges, with evil representing the ills of nuclear war and the misuse of nuclear power.
Evil Landscapes: The Personal Touch
Although the landscape of evil has developed into a fairly traditional trope only occasionally challenged by writers of portal–quest (and some immersive) fantasy, the similarities among the many accounts are largely superficial. As the three evil realms presented in this chapter illustrate, these characteristics include a land where little lives, especially plant life, or where existing life is in some way corrupted, diseased, and dying—traits shared with the genre’s taproot texts, in particular Robert Browning’s “Childe Roland” poem. Other similarities may be found: the occurrence of temperature extremes, which we recognize from Hell in The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost and which is a motif alluded to in Cook’s ironic reversal of the evil realm: Sauron has a volcano at the center of his realm but is able to create a snowstorm in the Misty Mountains;88 Lord Foul protects his stronghold with a river of lava, but the stronghold itself is icy cold, and he afflicts the Land with a preternatural winter; Shai’tan has also prolonged the natural winter, and his realm is unnaturally hot in the Blight, but the Blasted Lands near his prison lacks hope for spring, just like the desolate plains outside Mordor.
Looking beyond such parallels, the relationship between the evil rulers and their realms offers valuable suggestions as to central themes in the stories, not least because the Dark Lords are the principal antagonists—the main obstacles of the heroes’ quests. No evil is merely generic, even in fantasy; and the nature of evil is mirrored in the nature of the evil landscape—morality puts its stamp on the land. To Tolkien, industrialization is evil, while Donaldson creates evil by projecting the despair and destruction of leprosy on the Land, and Jordan demonstrates the radioactive evil of nuclear devices. Each theme goes far beyond the dark realms to permeate the entire story.89
The three readings here have also presented three alternative ways of exploring Dark Lords and Dark Lands. Each approach uses a somewhat different starting point in discussing the subject: three aspects of Sauron’s evil in Tolkien, the nature of Shai’tan’s evil influence in Jordan, and the character and motive of Lord Foul in Donaldson. Regardless of point of departure, however, they all demonstrate a connection between ruler and realm and show that exploring that connection yields interesting critical insights.
• • •
The land and the king are one, we are told by Terry Pratchett’s king Verence, an assertion that quickly loses some of its edge when Nanny Ogg wonders, “One what?”90 The witch’s question raises a valid point. A direct link between ruler and realm is a common element in fantasy literature, but the various works display little consensus as to the nature of that link. Perhaps the direct link is merely a stylistic device? If, as Mendlesohn suggests, the king is associated “with the well-being of the land, and the condition of the land with the morality of the place,”91 does this imply that the morality of the king is reflected in the condition of the land? Ought we only to consider the realm as a metonym for its ruler and the land’s condition as an emblematic correlative of the sovereign’s morals or health?
From the cases discussed in chapter 5, we can see how variation rather than conformity best describes how sovereigns are linked to their countries. The direct link can be central to the plot and of great importance to the protagonists, or it can flash by, all but ignored by the story. Being one with the land may mean that ruler and realm are all but identical, or it could mean that a country without a leader is simply prone to political anarchy. Even when the sovereign acts as a conduit for power, that power can involve a combination of politics, magic, and fertility—or it can keep them separate. An explanation for the direct link may be offered, or the link may be left totally inexplicable. The influence may run from ruler to realm or from realm to ruler, and may even work in both directions at once.
These differences are not binary, they exist on a scale; nor is this an exhaustive list. In other words, each direct link that we find between a fantasy king or queen and his or her country is in all probability unique. What these links have in common is merely that they tell the reader something about the rulers by describing the realm that surrounds them. Is that, perhaps, all these direct links do? Peter Barry remarks that it is “a common literary-critical ploy” to read the external as internal;92 and a critic could, presumably, read the state of the realm—good or bad—as just a metaphor for the state of the ruler. If the pouring rain outside is a metaphor for the grief of the man in the car, and the sunny day and lush greenery is a metaphor for the happiness of the young couple on the picnic blanket, why not read the sterile land as a metaphor for the sterility of a castrated king?
The problem with such an approach is that it is reductive as well as denying fantasy’s characteristic ability to create, within its fictive worlds, new rules for how things work. Treating the realm as a metonym for its ruler also implies that the realm is, somehow, less important than the ruler. The land is reduced to a mere setting, a backdrop that at best provides clues for the protagonists (and the reader) and sets an appropriate mood for the story, at worst only allowing us to see the flaws of a sovereign writ large. Implicit in such a reading is the assumption that characters are more important than setting and people more important than place, as if the characters (and people in general) were somehow more “relevant” than settings (and places). As I pointed out in the introduction to this book, I am wary of these attitudes in general; and when it comes to fantasy, whose environments are often radically different from the actual world, there is a distinct risk of misunderstanding a story if its setting is read simply as a metaphor for some internal aspects of the character in charge. In their fantasy worlds, authors are free to set up any rules they like; failing to take such rules into account ignores one of the genre’s most fundamental features.
Despite their many differences, the various “curious relationships” examined in this chapter also demonstrate the problem with a metaphoric/metonymic reading of the direct link between ruler and realm. Even in cases in which the state of the land suggests a metaphor, as in Jordan’s The Eye of the World, it is not necessarily a metaphor for the ruler’s mental or moral condition. The effects produced by Shai’tan’s evil force suggest that it is possible to read this force, or indeed evil itself, as a metaphor for nuclear radiation—but this tells us nothing about the Dark One himself. Similarly, the palimpsest and the related damnatio memoriae that dominate the changing topography of Goldstein’s Amaz offer a metaphor for the kings’ conflict, but the shapes associated with each king tells us little about either kings or supporters. The rounded shapes associated with the Jewel King are not an external representation of his well-rounded ideas, for instance.
Even when it is possible to read the external landscape in terms of the ruler’s internal traits, such a reading is reductive rather than expansive. Sauron’s and Foul’s realms are superficially alike, to the point where a list of correspondences could be drawn up. These similarities in realms are only superficial, however, and adhere to a long tradition of what evil landscapes ought to look like. The structure of those landscapes derives from two rather different characters, however. Were we to assume that outward resemblance implied internal similarity in the Dark Lords, we would fail to understand not only Sauron and Foul but also the nature of evil in Tolkien’s and Donaldson’s works. Given how central evil and the battle against it are to the respective plots, we would also risk misunderstanding the plots themselves. Although the ruler–realm relationship is marginalized in some works, it is of central importance in others. If the nature of the direct link is of immediate concern for the protagonists, whether they aspire to the throne themselves (e.g., in Brooks’s Magic Kingdom for Sale/Sold!) or are in some way involved with a sovereign and a land suffering from the same affliction (e.g., in Ende’s The Never-ending Story), an attempt to read the realm as the ruler writ large would make the story well-nigh incomprehensible.
The case is especially pronounced with The Neverending Story, in which the direct link allows the realm to affect the ruler: the illness of the Childlike Empress is a direct result of Fantastica being devoured by the Nothing. If anything, the Empress is a version of Fantastica writ small, her illness a metaphor for the land’s destruction. Yet, for all their metonymic relationship, Fantastica and the Empress—as well as any other ruler and realm in the genre—are also two separate entities; and a special and curious relationship exists between them. When discussing rulers and realms in a fantasy work, we must also understand the nature of the link—direct or indirect—that connects them. It is not enough to realize that ruler and realm are one—the question we need to ask ourselves is: “One what?”