The Bride of War - an Explanation
crossposted from Lee Edward McIlmoyle's blog
I checked my stats today and found that people are still reading yesterday’s album review, which is nice. However, I also got an interesting search term that piqued my curiosity: ‘why was the bride of war written’. Well, I don’t know who asked it or why, but it occurs to me that I can’t remember ever telling anyone why I wrote it. I may have explained it to some close friends via IM, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never actually posted about it… or if I have, it was longer than a few weeks ago, so it’s completely slipped my aged mind. So here it is:
WHO?
The protagonists are Martin Gorman of Bohmen (think Bohemia), by way of Portucalense (an older name for Portugal); Cassandra Goethe, daughter of the richest, most powerful man in Aachen; and Leanna Casel (I’m pretty sure that’s how I spelled it), daughter of the blacksmith and sister to Maria, the last Bride of the Winter Roses, the traditional sacrifice to the Dragon, Odovacar. Odovacar is an ancient, eerily prescient dragon who reads the minds of all who travel through the Cloven Lands. In this way, the Dragon controls the villagers (and all who visit) with an iron claw, so to speak. The Dragon also has a mystical ability to control the weather in the Cloven Lands, making Winter only come during the season of the sacrifice.
WHERE?
The Bride of War: a Tale of Euroboros is a medieval alternate reality of a smallish village locked in both time and space by a pair of conjoined mountain ranges, forming a valley called the Cloven Lands. The village itself is known as Aachen, which is an actual placename of a German city, but that’s not the place I used. I actually used an early drawing of an Irish village called Armagh as the basic map for my Aachen, but I wanted it to be a continental village, rather than an Irish village, because Ireland is a little short on mountain ranges that collide.
As well, I didn’t want to get caught up in setting my story in our actual world with all of our known placenames, because I knew from the start that it had to take place in the Link Continuum, where a lot of the rules we take for granted aren’t as set in stone. However, the rough location of the Cloven Lands would be somewhere around Moravia or Bohemia, approximately.
WHY?
BRIDE was written as a light introduction to the worlds of the Link Continuum, a cosmology and series of stories and games I have been tinkering with for so long, it’s stupid. I kept trying to introduce the series through different means and mediums, and kept coming up short or losing focus.
The story of Martin, Cassandra and Leanna, the principle protagonists of the novel, seemed to be the simplest story I had that had enough depth and imagination to warrant an entire novel to tell it. But it was also a bit of an accident that it turned out to be a novel, rather than a short story or novella.
WHEN?
The origins of BRIDE actually go back to a notion I picked up somewhere inthe mid-90s, after watching a documentary* that posited the theory that the symbolism of the dragon in classic heroic fiction was that the dragon represented a man imprisoned within himself.
The novel itself was started several years later, in about 2005 or 2006, after a LiveJournal poll indicated people wanted me to write The Devil’s Cabinet Maker, a completely different Link Continuum-based novel, which The Bride of War accidentally sprang from.
WHAT?
I have a friend named Derrick, who has been my friend since high school, and who also has been the drummer in our band off and on for the last almost-twenty years. When I heard that, I thought of Derrick’s situation and how he is trapped within his identity as a man and as an artist, musician and lover of the kinds of women he gravitates towards. It occurred to me that he is trapped inside the very totem he has taken upon himself at various times in his life; that of the dragon. Dragon was even his stage name for a time. So it occurred to me at the time that I would one day have to write a story that utilized a man trapped in the guise of a dragon.
I don’t want to spoil the novel if you’ve never read it, but suffice to say, if you have read it, you no doubt can see what I did there.
HOW?
As mentioned before, BRIDE was born from another novel, which I STILL haven’t finished (really got to get on that some day), called The Devil’s Cabinet Maker. That story features a carpenter of some small repute who also tells fairie tales to entertain his family and loved ones… until one day he gets himself banished for defending the honour of a young maiden who worked in his home as a nanny to his children. The Bride of War was actually one of the many stories he tells in that novel, but I had to actually write it out in full to figure out how to condense it properly for the novel. I also got a short story called ‘Beyond Winter’s Edge’ from that novel; WINTER is now a short story in The Back Roads of Limbo, for anyone interested.
THE END(S)?
It should be said that my wife was never fond of the ending, as it functions as a traditional epilogue, briefly addressing a number of subplots, including the eventual fate of the three protagonists, whose relationships become considerably more complex. I’ve been working on a short story** to help embellish that particular ending, to give more weight to the result and hopefully convince others that it was the right ending. Perhaps not my wife, though. She’s fussy about these things.
And that’s that. Tank you for reading.
Lee.
* Probably a Bill Moyers special on PBS, analyzing the works of Joseph Campbell. It sounds like one of those things, though I can’t confirm it. I feel secure giving some credit to Campbell. Everyone else post-Star Wars has to, so why not me?
** the short story will be included in the upcoming LinkTales Volume Two.
I checked my stats today and found that people are still reading yesterday’s album review, which is nice. However, I also got an interesting search term that piqued my curiosity: ‘why was the bride of war written’. Well, I don’t know who asked it or why, but it occurs to me that I can’t remember ever telling anyone why I wrote it. I may have explained it to some close friends via IM, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never actually posted about it… or if I have, it was longer than a few weeks ago, so it’s completely slipped my aged mind. So here it is:
WHO?
The protagonists are Martin Gorman of Bohmen (think Bohemia), by way of Portucalense (an older name for Portugal); Cassandra Goethe, daughter of the richest, most powerful man in Aachen; and Leanna Casel (I’m pretty sure that’s how I spelled it), daughter of the blacksmith and sister to Maria, the last Bride of the Winter Roses, the traditional sacrifice to the Dragon, Odovacar. Odovacar is an ancient, eerily prescient dragon who reads the minds of all who travel through the Cloven Lands. In this way, the Dragon controls the villagers (and all who visit) with an iron claw, so to speak. The Dragon also has a mystical ability to control the weather in the Cloven Lands, making Winter only come during the season of the sacrifice.
WHERE?
The Bride of War: a Tale of Euroboros is a medieval alternate reality of a smallish village locked in both time and space by a pair of conjoined mountain ranges, forming a valley called the Cloven Lands. The village itself is known as Aachen, which is an actual placename of a German city, but that’s not the place I used. I actually used an early drawing of an Irish village called Armagh as the basic map for my Aachen, but I wanted it to be a continental village, rather than an Irish village, because Ireland is a little short on mountain ranges that collide.
As well, I didn’t want to get caught up in setting my story in our actual world with all of our known placenames, because I knew from the start that it had to take place in the Link Continuum, where a lot of the rules we take for granted aren’t as set in stone. However, the rough location of the Cloven Lands would be somewhere around Moravia or Bohemia, approximately.
WHY?
BRIDE was written as a light introduction to the worlds of the Link Continuum, a cosmology and series of stories and games I have been tinkering with for so long, it’s stupid. I kept trying to introduce the series through different means and mediums, and kept coming up short or losing focus.
The story of Martin, Cassandra and Leanna, the principle protagonists of the novel, seemed to be the simplest story I had that had enough depth and imagination to warrant an entire novel to tell it. But it was also a bit of an accident that it turned out to be a novel, rather than a short story or novella.
WHEN?
The origins of BRIDE actually go back to a notion I picked up somewhere inthe mid-90s, after watching a documentary* that posited the theory that the symbolism of the dragon in classic heroic fiction was that the dragon represented a man imprisoned within himself.
The novel itself was started several years later, in about 2005 or 2006, after a LiveJournal poll indicated people wanted me to write The Devil’s Cabinet Maker, a completely different Link Continuum-based novel, which The Bride of War accidentally sprang from.
WHAT?
I have a friend named Derrick, who has been my friend since high school, and who also has been the drummer in our band off and on for the last almost-twenty years. When I heard that, I thought of Derrick’s situation and how he is trapped within his identity as a man and as an artist, musician and lover of the kinds of women he gravitates towards. It occurred to me that he is trapped inside the very totem he has taken upon himself at various times in his life; that of the dragon. Dragon was even his stage name for a time. So it occurred to me at the time that I would one day have to write a story that utilized a man trapped in the guise of a dragon.
I don’t want to spoil the novel if you’ve never read it, but suffice to say, if you have read it, you no doubt can see what I did there.
HOW?
As mentioned before, BRIDE was born from another novel, which I STILL haven’t finished (really got to get on that some day), called The Devil’s Cabinet Maker. That story features a carpenter of some small repute who also tells fairie tales to entertain his family and loved ones… until one day he gets himself banished for defending the honour of a young maiden who worked in his home as a nanny to his children. The Bride of War was actually one of the many stories he tells in that novel, but I had to actually write it out in full to figure out how to condense it properly for the novel. I also got a short story called ‘Beyond Winter’s Edge’ from that novel; WINTER is now a short story in The Back Roads of Limbo, for anyone interested.
THE END(S)?
It should be said that my wife was never fond of the ending, as it functions as a traditional epilogue, briefly addressing a number of subplots, including the eventual fate of the three protagonists, whose relationships become considerably more complex. I’ve been working on a short story** to help embellish that particular ending, to give more weight to the result and hopefully convince others that it was the right ending. Perhaps not my wife, though. She’s fussy about these things.
And that’s that. Tank you for reading.
Lee.
* Probably a Bill Moyers special on PBS, analyzing the works of Joseph Campbell. It sounds like one of those things, though I can’t confirm it. I feel secure giving some credit to Campbell. Everyone else post-Star Wars has to, so why not me?
** the short story will be included in the upcoming LinkTales Volume Two.