Notes for "although you know the snow will follow"
Notes on although you know the snow will follow
This story contains a number of references to mythology, herbalism, music, and less comprehensible things. If you’re the sort of person who finds it interesting to know what the author was thinking (or what the hell she’s talking about) read on.
(and feel free to ask if you want to know something that’s not covered here.)
Sabine Baring-Gould (who, despite the female-sounding first name, was in fact a dude) was a scholar, folklorist, composer, and all-around very interesting guy. To my knowledge, he never visited Blest, but here in our version of England he collected a vast body of folk songs from Devon and Cornwall.
Gingerbread is super-tasty and not hard to make, although if you find yourself running out of black treacle [molasses to us Americans] I wouldn’t recommend improvising with other ingredients.
Lavender is a common herbal remedy for anxiety and tension headaches, among other things.
Liar’s Dice is a catch-all name for a family of dice games in which the player(s) rolling the dice keep their dice hidden from all the other players.
The city of Manchester is in Northwest England. In The Merlin Conspiracy, we meet the human-looking personifications of the city of Salisbury and some other places. Near the end of the book, Roddy sees the history of Blest rebuilding itself at super-high-speed, and she mentions seeing Manchester ‘in a red dress, frantically building walls’. Based on that, I imagined the spirit of the city of Manchester as a woman who evolves her persona with the changing times, currently appearing to reflect the aesthetics of Manchester’s vibrant punk music scene.
The town of Glastonbury is in Somerset, Southwest England. In our world, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and others, made a connection between Glastonbury Abbey and the island of Avalon, which is said to be where King Arthur is buried. In Blest, this may or may not be more true than it is here.
My image of the spirit of Glastonbury/Avalon as a young man with leaves in his hair is somewhat connected to the traditional image of Puck, who in Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill (see below) describes himself as ‘the oldest Old Thing in England’. Archaeological explorations have found evidence of an Iron Age village about 3 miles away from what would later become the town of Glastonbury. He may not be the actual oldest thing in England, but Glastonbury is pretty darn old.
Ambrose, the name Grundo was born with, is a very old name that has variants in many languages. Mythology (although not necessarily history-Geoffrey of Monmouth again) gives the name of King Arthur’s wizard advisor as Merlin Ambrosius.
Laverstock is a village near Salisbury.
Salisbury Market: The city of Salisbury really does hold a weekly open-air market. In our world, it dates back to at least 1307; Wikipedia gives an uncited date of 1227. I decided to split the difference and declare Blest’s Salisbury Market to be older than ours (not to mention held on different days).
Puck of Pook’s Hill is a novel by Rudyard Kipling (the Jungle Book guy). It’s a set of short stories, framed as stories told by Puck to two children living near Burwash, East Sussex. As described above, I made a mental connection between Puck and the spirit of Glastonbury. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Puck uses a magic herb to dispel the enchantments he’s placed on the four young Athenians who wandered into the forest. Why shouldn’t he find other, similar, uses for the herb afterwards?
(Although it does rather beg the question of whether Nick actually paid him for it, and, if so, in what coin. If he didn’t pay for it, Nick could be in trouble; receiving a gift from the Fair Folk without clarifying the terms of exchange has a tradition of turning out badly for the recipient.)
And, finally:
The title, and the quote about the heart in the story summary, are lyrics from ”Try To Remember”, the song which opens the musical The Fantasticks by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt. (No, not “It’s Not Unusual”/”What’s New Pussycat” Tom Jones, although it wouldn’t surprise me if he’d recorded “Try To Remember” at some point-nearly every crooner has taken a crack at it).
The Fantasticks is a remarkable and beyond-groundbreaking musical play about a boy, a girl, the conventions of storytelling, and the rituals of adulthood and becoming an adult. The play includes the line “The boy will go. The girl will stay. And so runs the world away.” Alert readers will recognize this as a twist on a line from Hamlet, at the end of the play-within-a-play: “For some must watch, while some must sleep. So runs the world away.”
In fact, nearly everything in The Fantasticks is a reference to something else. It’s all very meta, and all very elemental, and all very much a celebration of ritual theater. You can read more about it here.
(I wrote this story while under the influence of rehearsals for a powerful work of ritual theater myself. Someday, I may write another Roddy story about the Mummers’ Plays and ritual theater in Blest. For that matter, someday I may write a The Fantasticks story about Nick and Roddy.)
Moving on.
The quotes that begin each of the story’s three sections are taken from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Riddle Of Strider, as is the quote about deep roots in the story summary. If you follow that link, you’ll note that the section headings are the first three lines of the second stanza, and that I’ve pointedly omitted the fourth and last line: The crownless again shall be king.
I’m drawing a connection here between the mythology I’ve created for the Lady of Governance and the myth of the Fisher King. (Forgive me for linking to the wretched hive of scum and villainy non-scholarly source that is Wikipedia; the overview is of more use here than the level of detail found in the external links.) There are a number of different versions of the Fisher King story.
Loosely speaking, the Fisher King myth is a story that we enter in the middle. When the story begins, the King has been injured for a long time, and the physical/metaphysical connection between the King and his kingdom means that his kingdom is now a wasteland. With nothing else to do, and no way to change his situation, the King passes the time by fishing in the lake/pond/river near his castle.
The stories differ as to what happens next. At least two versions (Chretien de Troyes’ Perceval and Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, which is an adaptation of de Troyes and influenced Wagner’s opera) tell a story of a young knight who visits the Fisher King. At the King’s castle, Perceval sees several strange sights, but (having been warned against asking too many questions) doesn’t ask questions about them.
Later, he’s told that he screwed up: If he’d asked the questions, the King would have immediately been healed. Since he didn’t ask, now he’s going to have to complete his quest (healing the King) the hard way. This mostly involves finding the Holy Grail, which takes us back to the Glastonbury and Avalon myths. See how this all hangs together?
Anyways. Diana Wynne Jones drew on British mythology, among other things, to create her stories. To me, both the King of Blest’s duty/geas to constantly travel over his country, and the Lady of Governance’s connection to the natural magic of Blest, are clear reflections of the Fisher King myth. However, no one seems to know anything about the Lady of Governance, until her existence is suddenly dropped on us as a bombshell halfway through an already dense novel.
The explanation I came up with is that the Lady of Governance’s existence, and her power, are hidden due to a magical accident. To me, this suggested an immediate parallel with the story of the Fisher King, whose power is neutralized due to a (possibly magical) injury.
Confession time: Once I made this connection, not only did I want to expand the canon, but I also wanted to do something about the element of the Perceval myth that relates to not questioning authority. He’s told by one of his teachers not to ask questions, so he doesn’t, and then he finds out that if he’d asked questions (i.e. tried to find something out, i.e. made an effort to do something!) then that would have been the ‘easy’ solution. So, instead, he has to complete another, longer, harder quest. What’s up with that? Do I dare disturb the universe diverge from Chretien de Troyes?
Sure, why the hell not. In my story, Roddy, as Perceval, never doubts her right to ask questions about the path she’s agreeing to follow. Asking the questions isn’t easy for her-certainly it’s not the ‘easy solution’/quick end to her quest that it would have been for Perceval-but she does it, twice.
In the end, her willingness to ask questions, and to cope with the answers she receives, is what breaks the spell. The Lady of Governance’s power, no longer concealed, can openly take its place as one-half of the magical balance of Blest. The Fisher King is restored to his throne; the crownless again shall be king.
tl;dr: Question Everything!
Happy Yuletide :)
--greenlily