“But the Ring was lost.  It fell into the Great River, Anduin, and vanished.  For Isildur was marching north along the east banks of the River, and near the Gladden Fields he was waylaid by the Orcs of the Mountains, and almost all his folk were slain.”  (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 2, “The Shadow of the Past”)

(Here’s a map to help you to orient yourself.)

Welcome, as ever, dear readers.  Gandalf is about to tell Frodo—and us–about what, in the orthography of the Pooh books, might be written as What Happened Next (although that “next” is relative, there being over 2400 years between the Ring’s loss and Deagol’s finding it, about which Gandalf is going to speak).  As interesting and important as his explanation is, however, in this post we are going to stop right here, at that word “waylaid”, meaning “ambushed”.

In Unfinished Tales, edited by Christopher Tolkien, there is much more detail about this event, beginning with:

“To their right the Forest loomed above them at the top of steep slopes running down to their path, below which the descent into the valley-bottom was gentler.”

Suddenly as the sun plunged into cloud they heard the hideous cries of Orcs, and saw them issuing from the Forest and moving down the slopes, yelling their war-cries.”  (Unfinished Tales, 284 in the Ballentine paperback edition)

Even though it’s clear from Gandalf’s narrative that this part of the story of the Ring was not common knowledge (“And there in the dark pools amid the Gladden Fields…the Ring passed out of knowledge and legend, and even so much of its history is known now to only a few…” he says to Frodo), this ambush was a major moment in the history of Middle-earth.  Thinking about it and where Isildur and his men were waylaid—a body of water to one side, steep, wooded ground to the other—immediately reminded us of two important ambushes from the distant past of our Middle-earth.

Hannibal, the great Carthaginian general, in order to force Rome to break off its second war with his country, had invaded Italy, crossing the Alps with his army—and one surviving elephant—in 218BC.

Having defeated one Roman army at the Trebbia in the same year, Hannibal was the target of new Roman efforts the next (217BC).  Unfortunately for the Romans, Hannibal was a more skillful general than his opponent, Gaius Flaminius, and lured the Romans into a terrible trap.

Hannibal very ostentatiously pitched his camp at the far end of the northern shore of Lake Trasimene, but concealed his troops in the wooded hills above the road.  The Romans, believing that they had a good chance of pinning the usually wily Carthaginian general, marched along the lake road, making for the camp.  When it was clear that the Romans had so far advanced that their rear guard was under the shadow of the hills, Hannibal gave the signal, the trap was closed at both ends, and the battle began with the unsuspecting Romans slammed into from three directions at once.

As the fourth direction was the lake, many Romans were driven into it and were drowned,

their general, Flaminius was killed, and only about a third of his army managed to escape, mainly by pushing through the troops in front of Hannibal’s camp.

Although there was no river or lake in our second ancient ambush, there was a huge bog—in northwestern Germany, in 9AD.

Since the days of Julius Caesar in the last century BC, the Romans had pushed to extend their control eastward from their possessions in Gaul.  Celtic Gaul, with its towns and its centuries of contact with Greek traders and trade goods, was relatively easy to conquer (reading Caesar’s account of his campaigns in Gaul, “relatively” is definitely a relative word, however).  Germania, heavily wooded, with no large settlements, only farms here and there in clearings, and bands of tribal warriors

 

was much less promising, but the Romans had made progress since Augustus had become emperor (30BC)—or thought that they had.

In their earlier struggles, they had defeated the leader, Segimer, (Segimerus, in Latin) of a powerful western tribe, the Cherusci, and, according to Roman practice, had forced him to turn over several of his children as hostages.  One of these, whom we know as Arminius (we don’t know what his family called him, just what the Romans did), given high status and military training, seemed to be a promising addition to the Romanification of German lands.  Seemed, however, is the correct verb as, once he returned to his homeland as a Roman officer, he used his family’s connections to create a league of tribes for the purpose of driving his adopted people from his native country.

His plan fell into place when he tricked the local Roman commander, P. Quinctilius Varus, into believing that there was a local uprising and that he should march to suppress it as soon as possible.  Varus took the major part of the Roman garrison—at least 20,000 men—on local paths (no paved Roman roads in this part of the world) deep into the forests

where thousands of warriors were waiting, many on a wooded hillside to the south of the narrow Roman march route.

In open country, when Romans were attacked, their training allowed them to snap into defensive formations which, if necessary, could protect them from any direction.

With their soldiers strung out for miles along a forest path, a hillside to one side, a swamp to the other, their training was of little help, however,

and the majority of the Romans—nearly all 20,000, it is thought—were killed or taken prisoner, to be sold as slaves or perhaps sacrificed as thank-offerings.

After this disaster, the Romans never seriously attempted to march deeper into Germanic lands, but contented themselves with constructing a long defensive line to their south, the so-called Limes Germanicus (“German Frontier”—literally, “German threshold”).

We’ve mentioned Isildur’s fatal ambush, from long before The Lord of the Rings, but there is another ambush within the text itself:  the attack by Faramir’s men upon a unit of Southrons, in the chapter entitled “Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit”.  It’s where Sam gets to see his “oliphaunt”, of course,

but, for us, the more moving moment is something else which Sam sees:

“Then suddenly straight over the rim of their sheltering bank, a man fell, crashing through the slender trees, nearly on top of them.  He came to rest in the fern a few feet away, face downward, green arrow-feathers sticking from his neck below a golden collar…It was Sam’s first view of a battle of Men against Men, and he did not like it much.  He was glad that he could not see the dead face.  He wondered what the man’s name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace…” (The Two Towers, Book Four, Chapter 4, “Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit”)

As we linked the ambush at the Gladden Fields to those at Lake Trasimene and the Teutoburg Forest, so we link this, presumed to be a sad response to what happened in Germany in 9AD, to Sam’s reaction.

It’s what’s called a cenotaph, Greek for “empty tomb”.  In the Greco-Roman world, everyone who was not buried properly would suffer in the afterlife, and so, even if it were only a token, like Antigone scattering dust over her dead brother in Sophocles’ play, the dead had to be given some kind of burial.  The inscription says that Publius Caelius erected this stone to his brother, Marcus Caelius, a senior officer in the 18^th Legion, from Bologna in northern Italy, who, at 53-and-a-half, died in the “Varian War”, meaning what was hardly a war, but more like a massacre, in the Teutoburg Forest.

Sam’s Southron was just an anonymous soldier in an anonymous unit.  Marcus Caelius was a career military man, high up in a well-known unit.  Still, we wonder, like Sam, what led him from his home and whether he would like to have stayed there in peace.

As always, thanks for reading.

Stay well

And

MTCIDC

 

CD

Welcome, as ever, dear readers!

 

This posting is a first:  a guest contribution.  It’s from our excellent friend, Erik, who is the man working on the map of Middle-earth (stay tuned, as always, for more on this in the future).  We don’t claim to be JRRT experts, being more generalists of adventure, so this is a more detailed look at something about which we wrote a few weeks ago.  We hope that you enjoy it as much as we did.

 

CD’s post of 22 July titled “How do we get there?” explores the use and non-use of maps at the end of the Third Age in Middle-earth, concluding from evidence in The Hobbit that small-scale maps (that is, maps that show a great deal of territory) may not have existed to any appreciable extent, and that the few far-ranging travellers must have relied primarily upon their own memories.

While it’s certainly true that — notwithstanding Gandalf’s temporary setback at one particular intersection of passages in Moria — widely travelled characters in both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings seem indeed to have prodigious mental models of territories that they have crossed years or even decades earlier, maps constitute a larger portion of the cultural fabric of late Third-Age Middle-earth than is apparent at first blush.

DC’s students quite naturally brought up Thror’s map in The Hobbit as one example, but quickly shot it down again as “not useful” — which is fair enough in terms of making the nearly thousand-mile journey from the Shire to the Lonely Mountain, given that it could be used as a guide only on the last stage of their journey: from the easternmost fringe of Mirkwood.

The other obvious map in The Hobbit is Tolkien’s map of Wilderland — roughly, the area from just west of Rivendell east through the River Running, and from the Grey Mountains in the north down through two-thirds of Mirkwood. This map too, though, should be discounted — albeit for a different reason altogether. At first look, this would be a very useful map for the Dwarves and Bilbo to follow. Looking more closely, though, one can see that it’s almost too useful. Elrond? Beorn? [Eagle’s] Eyrie? And Hobbiton‽ No Middle-earthly map other than those from the Shire would include Hobbiton, and none at all would include the Eyrie. We can conclude that this is a map from our own world: it’s not meant to be a reproduction of a Middle-earth map — and to corroborate this, we can find an early form of Tolkien’s own JRRT monogram in the lower right corner.

But there are other maps hidden in the text of The Hobbit. The Dwarves complain, for example, on the road to Rivendell that “the old maps are no use: things have changed for the worse and the road is unguarded.” Their grumbling about the old maps implies either that there are no new maps to be had or perhaps that there are new maps but that the Dwarves didn’t have them.

I don’t remember any mention of maps in Rivendell within The Hobbit, but they’re mentioned quite clearly in The Lord of the Rings.

“Aragorn and Gandalf walked together or sat speaking of their road and the perils they would meet; and they pondered the storied and figured maps and books of lore that were in the house of Elrond. Sometimes Frodo was with them; but he was content to lean on their guidance….” [LRC 2.03.050]

So Gandalf and Bilbo (and remember, we are told near both the beginning and the end of The Hobbit that Bilbo “loved maps”), and perhaps some of the Dwarves, would have had the chance to consult maps in Rivendell. And in fact, the narrator reports at the close of “A Short Rest” (the Rivendell chapter of The Hobbit) that the company

“rode away … with a knowledge of the road they must follow over the Misty Mountains to the land beyond.”

Since we’ve brought up The Lord of the Rings, this might be a good moment to mention some of the Hobbits other than Bilbo. Was Bilbo unusual in his love of maps?

After Bilbo left Bag End, Frodo “looked at maps, and wondered what lay beyond their edges: maps made in the Shire showed mostly white spaces beyond its borders.” [LRC 1.02.008] This tells us, of course, that there were at least local maps made in the Shire, and that Frodo enjoyed looking at them — so in this he appears to take after Bilbo.

As the new Fellowship travelled south from Rivendell, Gandalf asked Pippin (who had a good enough sense of direction and geography that he knew to be puzzled when the Misty Mountains were seen ahead of them when they were ostensibly heading south):

“‘There are many maps in Elrond’s house, but I suppose you never thought to look at them?’

“‘Yes I did, sometimes,’ said Pippin, ‘but I don’t remember them. Frodo has a better head for that sort of thing.’” [LRC 2.3.101–102]

And here we can see both further corroboration that Frodo shared Bilbo’s (and, implicitly, Gandalf’s) facility with maps, and also an indication that Pippin probably didn’t. But perhaps more interestingly, we’re made aware that maps were important enough that Pippin looked at them — more than once — even though he didn’t have a head “for that sort of thing.”

After their defeat by Caradhras — yet before they enter Moria — comes my favorite map reference, in the voice of the narrator just after Sam expressed his hope of their imminent arrival at Mount Doom:

“Maps conveyed nothing to Sam’s mind, and all distances in these strange lands seemed so vast that he was quite out of his reckoning.” [LRC 2.03.128]

Of course, when you get right down to it, the route that Bilbo, Gandalf, and the Dwarves would’ve planned to take was actually incredibly simple — rather like taking Interstate 70 across the United States; no map should really have been needed for the vast majority of the journey “there and back again,” for the East Road led right from the front door of Bag End all the way to the River Running, as Frodo quoted Bilbo as often saying:

“Do you realize that this is the very path that goes through Mirkwood, and that if you let it, it might take you to the Lonely Mountain…?” [LRC 1.03.075]

The path didn’t go quite that far — though it was indeed the same path as the “Mountain Path” through the Misty Mountains pictured above, and also as the “Old Forest Road” through Mirkwood. It ended at the River Running, which could easily be followed upstream past Esgaroth directly to Erebor (the Lonely Mountain).

And this may well have been the party’s original plan — but of course Beorn

“had warned them that that way was now often used by the goblins, while the forest-road itself, he had heard, was overgrown and disused at the eastern end and led to impassable marshes where the paths had long been lost. Its eastern opening had also always been far to the south of the Lonely Mountain, and would have left them still with a long and difficult northward march when they got to the other side.”

Instead, “north of the Carrock the edge of Mirkwood drew closer to the borders of the Great River, and though here the Mountains too drew down nearer, Beorn advised them to take this way; for at a place a few days’ ride due north of the Carrock was the gate of a little-known pathway through Mirkwood that led almost straight towards the Lonely Mountain.

Presumably this “little-known” path was not on the “old maps” in Rivendell, or they would have had that as their plan from the get-go. And this brings up the question of where the map-makers had got to. Why were “old maps” the only ones around?

CD has written before about the deterioration, diminution, and dwindling of the North Kingdom and indeed of most of the west of Middle-earth at the end of the Third Age. Without a thriving population and state, both the demand and the industrial and cultural infrastructure required for creating up-to-date small-scale maps would be lacking.

I’ll leave you with a final puzzlement that I’ll be thinking about: just why was the Old Forest Road built to reach the River Running at a place where we have no map evidence for any settlement or population center? Who built it? When? And whom was it built to serve?

Thank you, Erik, and, as always, thank you, good readers!

Stay well, and be assured of

MTCIDC

CD

As ever, welcome, dear readers.

If you regularly follow us, you know that we reread the “Alice” books some weeks ago, beginning with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865).

In that first volume, we meet the Red Queen,

whose favorite command is “Off with his/her/their head/s!”

Looking at Tenniel’s original illustration, we see what appears to be a small, plump woman perhaps of middle age? with a large mouth and a dictatorial manner.   Tenniel (1820-1914) was famous as a political cartoonist for the satirical magazine Punch   (here’s a sample, called “Dropping the Pilot”—local pilots being used to guide ships outside harbors into ports—

in which we see the new Kaiser Wilhelm II—at the top of the picture–getting rid of Otto von Bismarck, the statesman whose work had turned Prussia from the junior partner in the German-speaking world in 1860 to the center of the new German Empire in 1871.).

(That’s Bismarck, in the white uniform.)

Tenniel’s reputation then made us wonder:  was his choice of how to depict the Red Queen just fantasy, or was he having fun with someone?  We had a look at what we thought might be a typical deck of Victorian playing cards.

There’s the Queen of Hearts, lower left.  Comparing her with the Tenniel, other than the clothing, there doesn’t appear to be much similarity.  Perhaps, we thought, Tenniel used another deck—or perhaps he had a different model?

In any event, the Red Queen’s favorite sentence (in both senses) made us think where the cutting off of heads turns up in our favorite fiction beyond Alice.  After a few moments, here were the first examples which came to mind.

We begin with the 14^th-century Middle English poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight—and there’s a Tolkien connection with this, as he collaborated with E.V. Gordon to publish a critical edition of the poem in 1925.

In the poem, a mysterious figure, dressed all in green, appears at King Arthur’s court on New Year’s Day  and offers a wager:  he will allow one of Arthur’s knights to take a whack at him with his axe if, in a year and a day, that knight will come to him and allow him to do the same to that knight.  After some hesitation, Sir Gawain agrees and, with one blow, beheads the figure—who then picks up his head, mounts his horse, and reminds Sir Gawain that they have a date.

What happens in a year and a day?  If you want to know more, you might read it in the original, using the Gordon/Tolkien (revised and republished in 1967).  If you’ve already enjoyed Chaucer in Middle English, you’ve got a good start, but this is written not in the London area dialect.  Instead, it’s in a northern dialect and is a bit tougher (there is a very useful glossary with the Gordon/Tolkien).  If you’d like to try it in translation, we came upon this free one which, if it can’t give you the rather chewy original–it really was meant to be read aloud—here’s Chaucer himself reading from his poem, “Troilus and Cressida” in an early 15^th century illustration—

the translator, A.S. Kline, has made a very good attempt to suggest the rhymes and sound patterns of the original (being, we believe, influenced by Tennyson and Idylls of the King when it comes to “feel”).   Here’s a LINK so that you can see for yourself:  https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/English/GawainAndTheGreenKnight.php

Heading on (and we promise not to litter our text with head puns after this, although we may have to remind ourselves to keep a cool head, as we go), there is Washington Irving (1783-1839)

and his collection of short stories, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-1820).

(This is the first British edition of 1820.)

Included in this volume are “Rip Van Winkle”, about a man who goes hunting, encounters spirits, drinks spirits, and wakes up an old man, 20 years later,

(An Arthur Rackham illustration, from his 1905 edition.  Here’s a LINK, if you’d like to see more:  https://www.gutenberg.org/files/60976/60976-h/60976-h.htm )

and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”.  We first encountered this story in childhood in a Disney short film,

which, since we were small and easily spooked (no, no pun here!), scared us silly.

In Irving’s story, an itinerant schoolmaster appears in a tiny village along the Hudson River at the beginning of the 19^th century.  He is very successful at slipping into local society, but goes one step too far when he appears to be on his way to gaining the hand of the daughter of a rich landowner.   Her previous suitor, deciding to scare him off, tells the story of the “Headless Horseman” to the gullible schoolmaster, then impersonates the Horseman

and the schoolmaster—heads for the hills.  (To make up for that last pun—sorry!—here’s a LINK so that you can read both of these stories and more for yourself—it’s the 1820 London edition, in two volumes:

https://archive.org/details/sketchbookgeoff15irvigoog/page/n6/mode/2up   vol.1

https://archive.org/details/sketchbookgeoff00murrgoog/page/n7/mode/2up  vol.2  )

 

The Green Knight in the poem is able to deal with decapitation because he is (medieval spoiler alert!) under a protective spell.   The Headless Horseman in “Sleepy Hollow” isn’t (early American Romantic spoiler alert!) actually headless, but a young man playing a vicious prank to rid himself of a rival.  Our third fictional example, however, is based not upon the world of Faery or practical joking, but upon a horrible piece of real history:  the violence of the French Revolution.

Our author here is the Baroness Emma Orczy (1865-1947)

and our main character is an heroic one, who works to save people from decapitation, Sir Percy Blakeney, aka, “The Scarlet Pimpernel”.  Originally a wildly popular play, the story was then published in novel form in 1905.

(This is the 1908 edition.)

Sir Percy is an English nobleman who fights against the French revolutionary government and its agents, slipping in and out of Paris to rescue noblefolk from public execution.  He sometimes does this in disguise, but, in fact, to do what he does, he turns his whole life into a charade, in public being what is recognized as the first “incredibly competent hero who disguises himself as weak/cowardly/inept”, a figure we all would recognize as everyone from Zorro to Batman.  (If you would like to sample his adventures, here’s a LINK to that first book:  http://www.gutenberg.org/files/60/60-h/60-h.htm  We will put a small warning label on this, though:  the Baroness was a real noblewoman of the 19^th century.  Her view of ordinary people and of the real reasons for the Revolution will not be those of us who live in the 21^st century.  If you can suspend modern beliefs, she can tell a good adventure story.)

Films about the Pimpernel–which is a small wayside flower—

begin all the way back to 1917, but our favorite is this, with the English actor, Anthony Andrews, as Sir Percy, from 1982.

(For those of us who are Gandalf fans, we can also see a young Ian McKellen as the villainous Chauvelin.)

But how shall we head away from this subject?  Perhaps with another quotation from the Red Queen?  In Chapter IX, “The Mock Turtle’s Story”, Alice and the Duchess, while at a very strange croquet match,

meet Her Violent Majesty, who says to the out-of-favor Duchess:

“Now, I will give you fair warning…either you or your head must be off, and that in about half no time!  Take your choice!”

And so we will.

Stay well and know that there is

MTCIDC

CD

“And, having plucked a branch of luxuriant laurel,

They gave me a staff, a wonderful thing,

And they breathed into me a divine voice,

So that I might tell of the things of the present,

And those before.” (Hesiod, Theogony, 30-32—our translation)

In In the opening lines of the ancient Greek poem, Theogony (“The Genesis of the Gods”), “Hesiod” (we put this name in quotation marks because it’s impossible to know if he actually existed), tells us how the Muses, magical figures who patronized all of the arts,

visited him when he was minding his flock on Mt Helicon and inspired him to become a maker of songs.

The word which we just used, “inspire”, is a Latin one and, in Latin, it literally means “to breathe into”, which perfectly matches the Greek verb used in the poem: enepneusan.

This posting is rather special, as it’s number 312, the final posting for the sixth year of doubtfulsea.com, and so we thought that, to commemorate the years we’ve written and uploaded all of these illustrated mini-essays, we would talk a little about what has inspired us to love adventure literature, to write about it, and even to write it, ourselves. Oh—and welcome, dear readers, as always.

We begin with another quotation, this by H. Rider Haggard (1856-1925),

a later Victorian writer famous for such works as King Solomon’s Mines (1885),

among others:

“The really needful things are adventure—how impossible it matters not at all, provided that it is made to appear possible—and imagination, together with a clever use of coincidence and an ordered development of plot, which should, if possible, have a happy ending, since few people like to be saddened by what they read.” (The Days of My Life, Vol.2, page 90)

We’ve come to adventure from several directions.

When we were very small, we began to see a popular comic strip in the Sunday newspapers (it’s still there). It was set in an imaginary very late Roman/early medieval world and featured King Arthur and his knights and, in particular, Prince Valiant, a kind of displaced Viking.

The vivid drawings, the knights, and Val’s struggles, first to become a knight and then across the western world (combat with Huns and Goths and he even comes to North America, long before the Vikings) not only kept us reading, week after week, but also gave us a taste—no, a thirst—for history as adventure, even if that history was mixed with magic and dragons, among other marvels.

Real history appeared a little later, in the form of a series called Landmark, with books which ranged from Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo

to the American Civil War battle of Gettysburg

to a book we read over and over, on the French and Indian War.

Then we discovered science fiction. It was a book in our school library.

The author’s name was Andre Norton, which we soon learned was a pen name for Alice Mary Norton (1912-2005),

who wrote a large number of fantasy/science fiction novels and whose gifts included a great ability to depict aliens and alien worlds. We especially liked her series about a group of agents who first travel back in time to locate a crashed alien space ship, are then accidentally carried off in one on an intergalactic journey, then the knowledge they bring back leads to further adventures.

Along with history in various forms and science fiction, there were also films. Walt Disney made versions of stories we came to read after seeing them on the tv screen, things like Treasure Island

and Kidnapped

and, of course, Zorro.

As well, there were old adventure films, like The Charge of the Light Brigade

and The Adventures of Robin Hood.

Our formal education gave us Homer

and Vergil

and Beowulf,

and then, one day, in a bookstore, we found these—

We read them and reread them, found

and then this,

along with the letters and all of those volumes edited by Christopher Tolkien.

Science fiction has never left us, but took on a new form with these—

As we’ve been writing, we’ve felt all sorts of other sources tug at our sleeve: what about Westerns, for instance? There is everything from the director, John Ford’s, Stage Coach

and Fort Apache,

to the most recent The Lone Ranger.

And there are all of those samurai movies by Kurosawa, like Sanjuro,

Yojimbo,

and our favorite of all, The Seven Samurai.

But wait—look what we’ve left out—

and there are a number in the series called “Young Indiana Jones” which we’ve watched and rewatched.

As we began writing this post, we admit that we surprised ourselves: there certainly were a lot of influences—and we’re sure that those aren’t all. We hope that we’ve always been careful not to overload our postings, however, so we’ll stop here, but we couldn’t resist (if you follow us regularly, you know that we rarely can!) attaching a list of works which we’ve enjoyed—usually more than once. When the author has written many works, we’ve limited ourselves to our favorite or a selection. There are, for instance, more Lloyd Alexander books, like The Rope Trick and The Iron Ring, and The Wizard in the Tree, as well as two more Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes novels—and 56 short stories. This list includes contemporary works, a few foreign favorites, and some traditional material, as well, all of it recommended.

 

Lloyd Alexander, The Chronicles of Prydain

Anonymous, Tain Bo Cuailgne (in Thomas Kinsella’s translation)

Gillian Bradshaw, The Sand-Reckoner, Island of Ghosts, Cleopatra’s Heir

Mikhail Bulgakov, The White Guard, The Master and Margarita, Heart of a Dog

Erskine Childers, The Riddle of the Sands

Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet, The Hound of the Baskervilles

Alexander Dumas, The Three Musketeers

Esther Forbes, Johnny Tremain

CS Forester, the Hornblower novels

George Macdonald Fraser, the “Flashman” novels

ETA Hoffmann, short stories like “The King’s Betrothed” and “Mademoiselle de Scudery”

Rudyard Kipling, Kim

CS Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia

Elias Lonnrot (editor), The Kalevala

George RR Martin, A Game of Thrones

Terry Pratchett, Going Postal

Philip Pullman, the His Dark Materials series

Walter Scott, Waverley

Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island, Kidnapped

SM Stirling, the series of novels devoted to “The Change”

Bram Stoker, Dracula

Rosemary Sutcliff, The Eagle of the Ninth and many others

WW Tarn, The Treasure of the Isle of Mist

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

Harry Turtledove, The Guns of the South, the various novels set in “Videssos”

Valmiki, Ramayana

 

We thank you, as ever, for reading—some of you since our beginning, six years ago—and we close by saying

Stay well

And

MTCIDC

 

CD