How Do Portals Really Work?

 

In my last post I looked at the two very different ways in which the characters of Philip Pullman’s trilogy ‘His Dark Materials’ pass between worlds. ‘If light can cross the barrier between the universes,’ says Lord Asriel in ‘The Golden Compass’, ‘if Dust can … then we can build a bridge and cross. It needs a phenomenal burst of energy.’ He obtains this energy by severing the link between child and daemon, sacrificing Roger and using wires to ‘harness’ the power of Dust in the Aurora. Asriel’s bridge is the result of a single, dynamic, explosive (and emotionally charged) event. Then in ‘The Subtle Knife’ and ‘The Amber Spyglass’ we learn of innumerable windows linking the universes, opened by a knife forged centuries before by ‘learned men’ in the city/world of Cittágazze: the product of an unexplained otherworld science, ‘subtle’ in effect as well as in nature. Each method on its own is impressive, but I’ve always been slightly uneasy about their co-existence in the same world – that is, ‘the fictional world of the three books’. Maybe that’s just me.

            Even though Pullman’s trilogy contains ghosts, witches, angels, harpies and Spectres, ‘His Dark Materials’ isn’t a world of magic, and so the portals don’t work by magic either. The energy released by severance of child from daemon is 'explained' by analogies with electro-magnetism and atomic fission, and since most of us have at best a hazy grasp of such things (me included), we accept it.

 

            Susan Price uses a similar method in ‘The Sterkarm Handshake’, the first book of her magnificent ‘Sterkarm Trilogy’ set in the reiver borderlands between England and Scotland. A 21^st century British corporation called the FUP has invented a Time Tube which takes people not just into the 16^th century, but into the 16^th century of closely parallel universes and the lands owned by the wild Sterkarm clan, who quite reasonably pigeon-hole their 21^st century visitors as Elves. Despising the  Sterkarms as naïve, primitive and ignorant, the company sets out to exploit them, trading small numbers of aspirins for valuable products like the locally produced ‘organic’ beef. However, the Sterkarms are not in the least naïve, as the FUP discovers to its cost.

            The world of the ‘Sterkarm Trilogy’ contains no magic. The Tube is powered by a ‘cold fusion reactor’ ‘no bigger than a small family car’, and is a huge piece of ‘industrial concrete piping’ supported by a framework of steel girders. Here it is, seen through the eyes of a 21^st century character called Bryce:

In front of each round mouth was a platform big enough for a truck… The mouths of the Tube, at both ends, were masked by hanging fringes of plastic strips.

            From each platform a ramp with a surface of textured rubber sloped down to the ground. The one nearer Bryce touched the gravel drive. The one that sloped down from the rear platform didn’t quite touch the grass of the lawn, and concrete blocks had been placed to support it, when it was present. […] That end of the Tube spent a lot of time in the 16th century. It was easy to tell which was which, because the end that spent all its time in the 21^st was dirty. The concrete was grey and streaked, and stained where it touched its supporting girders. The concrete of the half that spent much of its time in the 16^th was still white and unstained. The rain of the 16^th century wasn’t full of dirt, and it wasn’t acid.

            The Sterkarm Handshake, 5

We don’t need to be told how it works, because the viewpoint character, Bryce, isn't a scientist, so he doesn’t know either. He simply marvels at it in operation.

You heard the noise of the Tube spinning – some part of it, hidden inside the concret pipe, spun, so he was told. A roar, increasing in pitch to a whine, and then passing almost out of hearing. And then one end of the Tube vanished. … As fast as light switching off, it blinked out of sight.

The Tube is so well thought through and clearly described out that we accept it just as Bryce does: 

[He] tried to think about the Tube as he did about his fridge, and his multi-media console. He wasn’t sure how any of them worked. He just expected they would, was glad when they did, and got on with his life.

That's a masterly piece of writing... The Time Tube is a machine, a piece of technology: and ‘The Sterkarm Trilogy’ is the least fantastical of the fantasies I’ve looked at in these essays. The story inhabits the debatable lands between fantasy and sci-fi, where much good fiction resides, for though there is no magic, ghosts or witches or fairies, there are many references to border ballads and folktales. If you haven’t read them yet, do! The first book won the Guardian Fiction prize and was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal. They are wonderful, witty and bloody – and not for children.

 

            The portal in Stephen King’s novel ‘From a Buick 8’ is totally unexplained and (spoiler alert)  remains so. One day in 1979, two decades before the ‘present’, a car rolls up at a small filling station in rural Pennsylvania. It’s an old-style, dark blue Buick Roadmaster, in mint condition. A man or what looks to be a man gets out, dressed in a black trenchcoat and black hat, and heading in the direction of the toilet cabin tells the youngster who mans the pumps to ‘Fill ‘er up’ in a voice ‘that sounded like he was talking through a mouthful of jelly’. He is never seen again. The Buick – if that’s what it is – sits on the tarmac until the youngster gets worried and calls the local cops. And when Troopers Ennis Rafferty and Curtis Wilcox check the car over, they realise the whole thing is impossible.

‘It’s got a radiator, but so far as I can tell there’s nothing inside it. No water and no antifreeze. There’s no fanbelt, which makes sense, because there’s no fan.’

            ‘Oil?’

            ‘There’s a crankcase and a dipstick, but there’s no markings on the stick. There’s a battery, a Delco, but Ennis, dig this, it’s not hooked up to anything. There are no battery cables.’

            ‘You’re describing a car that couldn’t possibly run,’ said Ennis flatly.

                        From a Buick 8, 52

There’s a lot more than this that’s wrong with the car – and after Ennis mysteriously disappears, the vehicle becomes the hidden secret of the police barracks in Statler, PA – shut away in Shed B and unwillingly protected by the fascinated yet instinctively repelled men and women of Troop D, who have no way of explaining or disposing of the monster they guard. Gradually it becomes clear that the Buick is itself a portal. It does weird things, generates blinding lightstorms: here, Sandy, one of the patrolmen, witnesses one:

[T]he whole world went purple-white. His first thought was that, clear sky overhead or no, he had been struck by lightning. Then he saw Shed B lit up like…

            But there was no way to finish the simile. Shed B, a solid enough wooden structure, seem[ed] as insubstantial as a tent made of gauze. Light shot through every crack and unoccupied nail-hole; it flashed out from beneath the eaves through a small cavity that might have been gnawed by a squirrel; it blazed at ground-level, where a board had fallen off, in a great brilliant bar. There was a ventilator stack on the roof, and it shot the glare skyward in irregular bursts, like smoke-signals made of pure violet light.

            From a Buick 8, 118

King takes his time over this description. We don’t even see the Buick in this passage, merely the shed surrounding it: a solid, tactile structure which the phenomenon within renders ‘insubstantial as a tent made of gauze’...  Fabulous writing. ‘From a Buick 8’ is the only book I know which is entirely about the portal, not what’s beyond it – and about how the characters manage to live alongside this inexplicable and unknowable thing as, over the next twenty years, peculiar creatures – beetles, bats, fish, all alien – flop half-dead out of the trunk.

 

            The portal in King’s more recent book ’11.22.63’ is part of another vehicle. Al’s Diner is a stationary silver trailer standing ‘across the tracks from Main Street, in the shadow of the old Worumbo Mill.’ It so happens that the pantry at the back of the cramped kitchen has a set of invisible steps which will take you into September 9, 1958. No matter how many times you visit it will always be 9/9/58: the same day, with the same people, doing the same things. If you wish to get to a different time – to 11/22/63 for example, to prevent the assassination of John F Kennedy – you will have to live through the intervening years. No matter how long you remain in the past, when you return up the steps of the diner you will find exactly two minutes of ‘present’ time have elapsed. (Though you will have aged.) Again, we are never told the hows and whys, but the ‘rules’ and the way they work in practice are convincing and clear, along with the sensory and psychological experience of doing it. Here is Jake, the main character, trying the steps to the past for the first time.

I did as Al asked, feeling like the world’s biggest dope. One step … lowering my head to keep it from scraping on the aluminum ceiling … two steps … now actually crouching a little. A few more steps and I’d have to get on my knees. That I had no intention of doing, dying man’s request or not.

            ‘Al, this is stupid. Unless you want me to bring you a carton of fruit cocktail or some of these little jelly packets there’s nothing I can do in h– ’

            That was when my foot went down, the way your foot does when you’re starting down a flight of steps. Except my foot was still firmly on the dark gray linoleum floor. I could see it.

            ‘11.22.63’, 25

Even in fantasies which acknowledge the existence of magic, portals between worlds still need to be fully established in the reader’s imagination. When Alice runs down a rabbit hole we are already in fantasy- or dream-land: children don’t fit down rabbit holes. When the rabbit hole leads into a well, surreally lined with maps, pictures, cupboards and shelves, there might be a moment of disbelief – until Alice plucks a jar of marmalade from one of the shelves as she falls past. That jar of marmalade, with Alice’s anxiety about dropping it on someone’s head before she manages to replace it on a shelf further down, is solid and utterly convincing. 

 

In his Old Kingdom series, Garth Nix has a Wall which divides Ancelstierre, an unmagical world resembling 1920s Europe, from the Old Kingdom where Charter Magic rules, Free Magic creatures roam and the Dead can rise. On the Ancelstierre side, the Wall is guarded by the Perimeter: ‘parallel to the Wall and perhaps half a mile from it’: a liminal zone filled with concertina wire, trenches and concrete pillboxes for the use of the soldiers whose difficult job it is to prevent unwanted magical intruders. The Wall itself appears medieval:

It was stone and old, about forty feet high and crenellated. Nothing remarkable, until the realisation set in that it was in a perfect state of preservation. And for those with the sight, the very stones crawled with Charter marks – marks in constant motion, twisting and turning, sliding and re-arranging themselves under a skin of stone.

            The final confirmation of strangeness lay beyond the Wall. It was clear and cool on the Ancelstierre side, and the sun was shining – but Sabriel could see snow falling steadily behind the Wall, and snow-heavy clouds clustered right up to the Wall, where they suddenly stopped, as if some mighty weather-knife had simply sheared through the sky.

Sabriel, 29

This differential is rather like Susan Price’s Time Tube which is dirty on the end in our world, but clean and white on the end that spends most of its time in the past. We don’t know why things are so different on either side of the Wall, but since neither side is ‘our’ world, we can accept this arrangement as simply the way things are. And the Old Kingdom offers another series of portals in the Nine Gates of the river of Death, which necromancers and the Abhorsons can enter in spirit, though not without risk. The precincts between the Gates, made tricky by the insistent pull of the current and the presence of desperate spirits that lurk there, are vividly realised.

The crossing into Death was made easy – far too easy – by the presence of the broken stones.  Sabriel felt them near her, like two yawning gates, proclaiming easy entry to Life for any Dead nearby. Fortunately the other effect of the stones – the sickening illness – disappeared in Death. There was only the chill and tug of the river.

            Sabriel started forward immediately, carefully scanning the grey expanse before her. Things moved at the edge of her vision; she heard movement in the cold waters. But nothing came towards her, nothing attacked, save the constant twining and gripping of the current.

            She came to the First Gate, halting just beyond the wall of mist that stretched out as far as she could see from side to side. The river roared beyond that mist, turbulent rapids going through to the Second Precinct and on to the Second Gate.

… Sabriel spoke words of power. Free Magic, that shook her mouth as she spoke, jarring her teeth, burning her tongue with raw power.

            The veil of mist parted, revealing a series of waterfalls that appeared to drop into an unending blackness.

                                    Sabriel, 260/1

           

Alan Garner’s ‘Elidor’ is based on the fairy tale ballad Childe Rowland, first published in 1814 by Robert Jamieson, who remembered it imperfectly as it was told to him by a tailor in his childhood around 1770.  It was reprinted in the 1890s by Joseph Jacobs in ‘English Fairy Tales’, although it’s actually Scots. The other clue to its antiquity is that it’s referenced in King Lear, when Edgar is pretending to be mad:

Childe Rowland to the Dark Tower came,

His word was still: ‘Fie, foh and fum,

I smell the blood of a British man’  

The last two lines refer to the dread cry of the King of Elfland on discovering Childe Rowland within his halls. The tale tells how young Childe Rowland kicks a ball over a church; how his sister Helen runs around the church widdershins to retrieve it and vanishes into elfland, how Rowland’s two elder brothers set out to rescue her, with advice from the Warlock Merlin to cut off the heads of anyone who speaks to them, and not to eat or drink anything in elfland – advice they forget to follow, and fail to return. Finally Rowland himself sets out, but he remembers and follows Merlin’s advice and is able to revive his dead brothers and bring his sister home.

            In Garner’s book four children, Nicholas, David, Roland and Helen wander bored and penniless around Manchester, keeping out of the fuss at home while their parents move house. They find a demolition area of bomb damage and slums, where ‘black in the wasteland stood a church. It was a plain Victorian building with buttresses and lancet windows, a steep roof, but no spire. And beside it were a mechanical excavator and a lorry’ – left by a demolition gang.

            The church is sharply delineated in those few short sentences, but the important words are ‘black in the wasteland’: this is a dangerous, between-worlds space. As the children begin playing with a football fished out from under the lorry, someone starts a high thin tune on a fiddle across the street – and Roland kicks the ball straight through the church window. Helen goes to look for it and doesn’t come back. After her goes David, and then Nick, who assumes the pair are ‘trying to have us on.’ On his own, Roland is restless. The music comes again, and fades. No one answers his calls.

The wasteland was bigger in the late afternoon light; the air quiet; and the houses seemed to be painted with dusk. They were as alien as a coastline, from the sea. A long way off, a woman pushed a pram.

It emphasises Roland’s isolation, as well as a sense of mystery and possible threat. He finds a broken side door and climbs into the church. It ‘smells of soot and cat’ and there’s no sign of his sister or brothers.

Everything movable had been ripped out down to the brick. The church was a cavern. Above Roland’s head the three lancets of the west window glowed like orange candles against the failing light. The middle lancet, the tallest, was shattered, and the glass lay on the earth. But there was no ball.

None of this description is wasted: it’s not just scene-painting; it’s imbued with gathering menace. Garner really makes us feel we’re clambering into the church with Roland, more and more worried and puzzled, like him, about where his sister and brothers have gone. And because it’s so vivid, we’ll be willing to believe what happens next as he meets the fiddler and is drawn into the fairy world of Elidor where he discovers – in a nightmarish moment – the empty fingers of his sister’s woollen glove embedded in the turf of the Mound of Vanwy. To rescue her and his brothers, he needs to get into the doorless Mound, and the fiddler Malebron tells him that he can ‘find’ the door by visualising it, forcing it to be. ‘Think of the door you know best,’ he says.

Roland thought of the door at the new house. He saw the blisters in the paint, and the brass flap with ‘Letters’ outlined in dry metal polish. He had been cleaning it only yesterday. It was a queer door to be stuck in the side of a hill.

            ‘I can see it.’

            ‘Is it there? Is it firm? Could you touch it?’ said Malebron.

            ‘I think so,’ said Roland.

            ‘Then open your eyes. It is still there.’

            ‘No. It’s just a hill.’

            ‘It is still there!’cried Malebron. ‘It is real! You have made it with your mind! Your mind is real! You can see the door!’

            Roland shut his eyes again. The door had a brick porch, and there was a house leek growing on the stone roof. His eyes were so tightly closed that he began to see coloured lights floating behind his lids and they were all shaped like the porch entrance […] and behind them all, unmoving, the true porch, square-cut, solid.

            ‘Yes,’ said Roland. ‘It’s there. The door. It’s real.’

                                    Elidor, 39

And by setting the front door of his new house in the side of the Mound, Roland connects two worlds. His everyday front door is now a portal into this fairy world, and its power begins leaching through. This is not only brilliant descriptive writing: it is the blueprint of how to create fantasy. Roland’s effort to place that door in the side of the Mound – to make it real, tactile, functional, to make it work – is precisely the effort a writer must bring to her or his work. ‘It is real! You have made it with your mind! Your mind is real! You can see the door!’

Portals in fantasy come in all forms, shapes and sizes, and pose three questions for writers: How are they supposed to work, what do they look like, and how does it feel to use them? All three need to be carefully thought through. The answer to how a portal works is always sleight-of-hand. It may be by magic or the power of Aslan, or some pseudo-scientific jiggery-pokery such as Lord Asriel’s rigging of wires to connect the severance machine to the Aurora in ‘His Dark Materials'. It may be the potent remnant of long-forgotten science like the 'subtle knife' – ‘long-forgotten’ implying ‘no need to explain’. Like Garth Nix, a writer may ask us to assume a known history – ‘it’s always been this way’ – which nobody questions. The origin of some portals are left utterly mysterious, as with Stephen King’s Buick, and the invisible steps at the back of Al’s Diner. It doesn’t matter! None of it matters, so long as a writer can make the reader see and feel what is happening. The old wardrobe, the smell of mothballs, the fur-coats, the unexpected depth – where’s the back? – the softness of fur changing to prickly pinebranches – the cold, the crunch of snow underfoot. Then and only then the reader will believe: 

‘It is real! You have made it with your mind! Your mind is real! You can see the door!’

 

Witch Queens and Women's Power

If as I suggested in my last post, the ‘wickedness’ of the witch is derived from a male fear and rejection of female power that goes back a very, very long way, Ursula K Le Guin embarked on a long-term exploration of that idea in her Earthsea novels. In the first of the series, A Wizard of Earthsea, whether wizards are old scholars or young students, they are men. Women need not apply, and those who show aptitude or an interest in magic are not to be trusted. While only a boy on Gont, Ged is tempted by a girl to try a spell beyond his skill. Disaster almost follows and his master Ogion rebukes him:

‘You do not remember what I told you, that that girl’s mother, the Lord’s wife, is an enchantress? … The girl herself is half a witch already. It may be the mother who sent the girl to talk to you. It may be she who opened the book to the page you read. The powers she serves are not the powers I serve: I do not know her will, but I know she does not will me well.’

Later in the book, Ged meets the girl again. Dressed in stylish witch queen garb of ‘white and silver, with a net of silver crowning her hair that fell straight down like a fall of black water’, she is now lady of the Court of the Terrenon, which is an evil spirit imprisoned in a foundation stone. Telling Ged that ‘only darkness can defeat the dark,’ she uses her beauty and apparent helplessness to tempt him into trying to bend the spirit to his will, knowing it will enslave him. (‘The beauty of the lady of the Keep confused his mind.’) In reality she’s a dangerous, double-crossing witch who comes to a sticky end. In this book magic, that is to say power, is best left to men: women have no business with it, since ‘the powers they serve’ are likely to be evil. A couple of Gontish proverbs express this well: Weak as women’s magic, and wicked as women’s magic. ‘Good’ women in A Wizard of Earthsea are unlearned and domestic. 

In next book, The Tombs of Atuan, the fourteen year-old Kargish heroine Arha (‘the Eaten One’) is High Priestess of these ancient Tombs and the labryrinthine tunnels beneath them. The Tombs are dedicated to the Nameless Ones: chthonic forces of darkness whose guardians are priestesses or eunuch slaves, all dressed in black, who form a society as barren of joy or purpose as the desert that surrounds them. When Arha encounters Ged as he explores the Undertomb in search of the broken half of the Ring of Erreth-Akbe, she traps him down there in the dark – triggering a moral and emotional struggle within herself as to what his fate shall be. 

Initially cruel out of fear and anger, Arha moves to the decision to save Ged, and by doing so saves herself, reconnecting with her true identity and her childhood name, Tenar. Each needs the other: to be whole, we need both halves of the Ring of Erreth-Akbe, Le Guin is saying; but it must be said that the Priestesses of the Tombs are a discouraging example of an all-female society. Not until the fourth book of the series, Tehanu, did Le Guin begin exploring the dark, abusive aspect of male power, and the love and strength of women. Moss, the village witch on Re Albi, is the very picture of a wicked crone who lures little children away to cook them: but in fact she helps Tenar look after the burned and voiceless child Tehanu. 

Moss] took the child into the fields and showed her a lark’s nest in the green hay, or into the marshes to gather white hallows, wild mint and blueberries. She did not have to shut the child in an oven, or change her into a monster, or seal her in stone. That had all been done already. 

And done by men.

Le Guin abandoned the witch queen stereotype to explore positive possibilities for female agency, but there still are plenty of witch queens in fantasy fiction. Following in the old Jezebel tradition, these are usually beautiful sexual women of great power, selfishness and cruelty. The first time we meet T.H. White’s Queen Morgause of Orkney, she is boiling a live catm and all for nothing: nearing the end of the spell she loses interest and can’t be bothered to continue. Morgause is adored by her sons Gawaine, Agravaine, Gaheris and Gareth, but she alternately neglects, torments and smothers them. She uses everyone she meets and is the ruin of most. The title of the book in which she appears, The Queen of Air and Darkness, comes from the well known poem by A.E. Housman, worth quoting in full: 
 

Her strong enchantments failing,

Her towers of fear in wreck,

Her limbecks dried of poisons

And the knife at her neck

The Queen of air and darkness

Begins to shrill and cry,

'O young man, O my slayer.

Tomorrow you shall die.'

O Queen of air and darkness,

I think 'tis truth you say,

And I shall die tomorrow,

But you shall die today.

This is an extraordinary conjuration of fear and violence, of antagonism not only between the sexes but between generations. Housman allows no sympathy, no possibility of mercy towards this Queen. She is to be destroyed as one might kill a snake. White was a man tormented by his own sexuality and suppressed sado-masochistic tendencies. He had a terrible relationship with his own mother and once wrote to his friend David Garnett (asking him to call on her): ‘She is a witch, so look out, if you go.’ Elisabeth Brewer, in her critical work, T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, 1993, quotes White describing Morgause thus:

She should have all the frightful power and mystery of women. Yet she should be quite shallow, cruel, selfish…One important thing is her Celtic blood. Let her be the worst West-of-Ireland type: the one with cunning bred in the bone. Let her be mealy-mouthed: butter would not melt in it. Yet also she must be full of blood and power.

Blood, frightful mystery, power (and racism): White is clearly very frightened of this woman, who both fascinates and repels him. He didn’t find her in Malory, whose Queen Morgawse isn’t even an enchantress like her half-sister Morgan Le Fay (seen above wearing a come-on-if-you-dare look and seemingly seven feet tall), but a great lady whose sins are adulterous rather than sorcerous. No: White created his Morgause out of his own fears and loathings. 

Whether or not The Once and Future King is really a book for children – I first read it in my teens – the Narnia books are, and they contain two excellent examples of the witch queen: Jadis of The Magician’s Nephew, who reappears as the White Witch in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (or the other way around, depending which you read first) – and the Green Lady of The Silver Chair, who shares many characteristics with fairy queens of the Unseelie Court. And I have to remark in passing that the Unseelie fairy queens of modern YA fiction have very much moved across into witch queen territory. In the wake of Holly Black’s Ironside and Melissa Marr’s Wicked Lovely we've been introduced to an entire generation of sexy, cruel, powerful fairy queens whose penchant for sadism, in spite of the teenage heroines who combat them, I find disturbingly retrograde. Most of these books are written by women. But is this really the way we still wish to depict female power? 

Lewis’s White Witch owes much to Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen: both are tall, striking, wintry figures wrapped in furs who drive sleighs and lure little boys away. Both are cold. The White Witch is ruthless and cruel, and in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe we are told she descends from Lilith – a demon for whom Raphael Patai has provided an entertaining resumé: 

No she-demon has ever achieved as fantastic a career as Lilith, who started out from the lowliest of origins, was a failure as Adam’s intended wife, became the paramour of lascivious spirits, rose to be the bride of Samael the Demon King, ruled as Queen of Zermagad and Sheba, and ended up [in Kabbalistic legend] as the consort of God himself. 

        The Hebrew Goddess, p221

Lilith supposedly spent her time seducing men and killing children, and was sometimes described as a beautiful woman from the waist up and flaming fire from the waist down. I do not know whether a demon can be a witch (or a witch, a demon) but whatever else she is, Lilith is Unmistakably Bad. (Lewis of course knew George Macdonald's rather creepy fantasy novel, Lilith.) No child could possibly know any of this, and I think Lewis made Lilith the White Witch’s ancestor mainly to add a little exoticism to the story, and to make the point that the Witch isn’t human. At least that’s how I took it, aged nine; children are often more intrigued than baffled by this kind of esoteric reference. 

Jadis ‘is’ the same person as the White Witch, but her character is more carefully drawn. And the comedy of the chapter in which she riots through London on top of a hansom cab (the episode is borrowed from E. Nesbit's The Story of the Amulet) expresses the author's delight in her sheer wicked energy. Jadis has all the style and magnificence a witch queen could desire, but in spite of her having caused the (offstage) destruction of the whole world of Charn, nothing she does in The Magician’s Nephew has the emotional impact of the White Witch’s killing of Aslan. The Green Lady of The Silver Chair is certainly a witch, but she is derived from the fairy queens of medieval romances like Marie de France’s Lanval, and of border ballads like True Thomas. Softly spoken, charming, ‘feminine’, she is also sly, dangerous and deceitful. Grown women, Lewis clearly feels, should be neither domineering nor manipulative, but he darkly suspects they may be both.

Under the dubious influence of Robert Graves’ The White Goddess, Celtic legends provide the attributes of many a 20^th century witch queen. For me the front runner must be Alan Garner’s Morrigan: it's the name of an Irish battle goddess who could transform into a crow, variously translated as Great Queen or Phantom Queen. Some of the Morrigan’s best lines come from Irish and Scottish tales: the sinister threat to Colin – ‘nothing of you shall escape from the place into which you have come, save what birds will carry away in their claws’ is a quotation from the Irish Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel while the curse, ‘The wish of my heart to you, dwarf!’ which she shrieks at Uthecar in The Moon of Gomrath and the dwarf nimbly averts by crying, ‘The wish of your heart, carlin, be on yonder grey stone!’ comes from a folk tale, ‘Ewen and the Carlin Wife’ in J G Campbell’s The Gaelic Otherworld. In both cases the witch in question is a cailleach or a gruagach: an old woman with supernatural powers. 

The Morrigan appears in The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath as the death or crone aspect of the triple Moon Goddess – the roles of maiden and mother being taken respectively by Colin’s sister Susan, and Angharad Goldenhand, Lady of the Lake. Dividing up the feminine in this way allows the author to approve maiden and mother on the time-honoured Madonna pattern, while disapproving of the crone. In fact the Morrigan isn’t all that old, but she seems so to the children, and for a witch queen she is physically unattractive: 

She looked about forty-five years old, was powerfully built (“fat” was the word Susan used to describe her), and her head rested firmly upon her shoulders without appearing to have much of a neck at all. Two deep lines ran from either side of her nose to the corners of her wide, thin-lipped mouth, and her eyes were rather too small for her broad head. Strangely enough her legs were long and spindly, so that in outline she resembled a well-fed sparrow, but again that was Susan’s description… Her eyes rolled upwards and the lids came down till only an unpleasant white line showed; and then she began to whisper to herself.

‘Fat was the word Susan used’ – ‘but again that was Susan's description' – this is oddly arch, for Garner. He manages to make the Morrigan sound sinister while at the same time disassociating himself from Susan's opinion; the subtext is that you might not want to believe her – but why? Because Susan may be jealous? Because you can never really trust what one female says about another? Anyway. Frightening, powerful, ruthless, the Morrigan wastes no time in trying to conjure the children into her car so that she can take the ‘Bridestone’. In the second book, The Moon of Gomrath, the Morrigan is revealed in her full strength, and even after years of re-reading my spine still prickles as Susan faces her outside the ruined house which is only ‘there’ in moonlight:

Now Susan felt the true weight of her danger, when she looked into eyes that were as luminous as an owl’s with blackness swirling in their depths. The moon charged the Morrigan with such power that when she lifted her hand even the voice of the stream died, and the air was sweet with fear. 

Susan and the Morrigan vie with one another, black and silver lances of power jetting from their mirror-opposite bracelets, and when at last Susan wins by blowing the horn of Angharad Goldenhand, it’s an all-female victory by which the world is unsettlingly changed. Susan’s brother Colin hears a sound ‘so beautiful he never found rest again’, and ‘the Old Magic was free for ever, and the moon was new.’ Is this a good thing or a bad thing? It’s left unresolved. 

In fact, Garner is forced into an awkward distinction between the Black Magic practised by the Morrigan, and the Old Magic of the elemental Wild Hunt and the moon maidens Susan and Angharad. It seems a little awkward to brand the Old Moon as bad while the New and Full Moons are good. I’m not sure quite where the Morrigan’s evil really resides; Le Guin would say that we need the darkness as well as the light. In his 2012 adult novel Boneland, which wows me although I don’t pretend to understand it, the character of Meg appears to unite these identities while the adult Colin is haunted by the childhood loss of his twin sister Susan (the other half of his nature?) although we’re left uncertain if indeed she ever existed. The ageing Colin split from his sister is a lonely, damaged figure, and the book seems to look for personal and cosmic union and wholeness.  

Blodeuwedd in The Owl Service is also a divided figure. In the Fourth Branch of The Mabinogion she was made from flowers for a man’s use, then punished for her unfaithfulness by being changed into an owl. The pressure of this old tragic legend penned up in a Welsh valley compels those who live there to repeat it over and over. Blodeuwedd/Alison can only be one thing or the other, claws or petals, owls or flowers. But she can’t choose which. Her frightening power – ‘She is coming and will use what she finds, and you have only hate in you,’ says Huw to his son Gwyn – is all derived from men. Only when Roger exercises tenderness and compassion does the endless cycle turn to flowers again. We’re left with the image of Alison lying on the kitchen table, just opening her eyes perhaps, for Roger says ‘Hello Ali’ – while the room fills with gently-falling petals. It’s a beautiful ending but it’s also very Sleeping Beauty and I find it hard to imagine what Alison is going to say or do when she sits up. Who is she really? Who is she?

Who is the woman of power and how does she discover herself? Returning to Earthsea, there’s a (longish) short story Ursula le Guin wrote after Tehanu and published in Tales of Earthsea – before The Other Wind. It’s called ‘Dragonfly’ and tells of a young girl, the only child of a proud, bitter man, the Master of Old Iria on the island of Way. The motherless girl grows up neglected and half wild, and when it’s time for her to be given her true name, her father rages that there’s no one to do it but Rose, the village witch, whom he rules is unfit. But Dragonfly persuades the witch to do it secretly that night, at the spring under Iria Hill. ‘How do you know what name to say, Rose?’ she asks. ‘It comes,’ the witch tells her. ‘You take away the child name, and then you wait’:

‘In the water there. You open your mind up, like. Like opening the doors of a house to the wind. So it comes. Your tongue speaks it, the name. Your breath makes it… That’s the power, the way it works. It’s all like that. It’s not a thing you do. You have to know how to let it do. That’s all the mastery.’

            ‘Mages can do more than that,’ the girl said after a while.

            ‘Nobody can do more than that,’ said Rose.

The witch gives her the name Irian, which angers the girl as it is connected to her father: she feels she is something more. When a young sorcerer tells her tales of the wizards’ school on the Island of Roke, she goes there with him to find out what power is within her. He tries to to trick her into sleeping with him, but is ashamed when she trusts him with her name. He enspells her to look like a man so she can be admitted to the Great House. His illusion fools no one, but the Doorkeeper lets her in, calling her ‘daughter’, and the Master Patterner gives her the freedom of the Immanent Grove. Others, under the leadership of Thorion the Master Summoner, think it sacrilege for a woman – a witch! – to come among them. 

‘Lord Thorion has returned from death to save us all,’ Windkey said, clearly and fiercely. ‘He will be Archmage. Under his rule Roke will be as it was. The king will receive the true crown from his head and rule with his guidance… No witches will defile sacred ground. No dragons will threaten the Inmost Sea. There will be order, safety and peace.’ 

This nostalgic appeal to a past order is doomed. ‘I am not a witch,’ says Irian in a ‘high, metallic’ voice, ‘I have no art. No knowledge. I come to learn.’ She adds, facing him, ‘Tell me who I am.’

‘Learn your place, woman,’ the mage said with cold passion.

‘My place,’ she said, slowly, the words dragging – ‘my place is on the hill. Where things as as they are. Tell the dead man I will meet him there.’

Their dialogue reveals that Windkey has no notion what Irian is, or what a woman is, and since all magic in the world of Earthsea is the true naming of things – learning the true name and true nature – we can see that this ignorance is a great flaw in his power. Windkey cannot not even see, as Irian sees, that Thorion the Summoner is literally the walking dead. From this crucial point we cease to be given insights into Irian’s mind: Le Guin makes us onlookers like the rest. As evening comes, Irian leads the four Masters who taken her side to Roke Knoll, the holiest place on the island, to meet Thorion. He commands her to leave or be banished: she commands him to climb the hill with her, and he cannot.

She left him standing at the waymeet, on level ground, and walked up the hill for a little way, and few strides. ‘What keeps you from the hill?’ she said.

            The air was darkening around them. The west was only a dull red line, the eastern sky was shadowy above the sea.

Thorion tries to control her in the Language of the Making: ‘Irian, by your name, I summon you and bind you to obey me!’ But because he does not know who or what she is, he has no power over her. Crying, ‘I am not only Irian!’ she towers over him in flames and vast wings, and ‘bowing down before her, bowing slowly down to earth’, Thorion is revealed as he truly is – dry bones, long dead.

The business of the wise in the world of Earthsea has been to preserve its balance, the Equilibrium, but the story show that the world cannot be in balance, when only the power of men is valued. As she goes on up the hill in the gathering darkness, the onlookers see Irian’s nature revealed, as, ‘with a rattle like the shaking of sheets of brass’, she springs into the air in dragon form and flies beyond the west to seek her mother’s people and her other name. If women can be dragons…! ‘What must we do now?’ asks the Patterner, who loves her. And echoing the words of Rose, the witch who named Irian and told her that power was like ‘opening the doors of a house to the wind’, the Doorkeeper suggests that the next duty of the Masters of Roke should be to ‘go to our house, and open its doors’. To welcome whoever comes, to let in the fiery breath of truth, the other wind.

Picture credits;

Medea by Frederick Sandys

Morgan le Fay by John Spencer Stanhope c. 1880 

The White Witch by Pauline Baynes

Jadis by Pauline Baynes

The White Goddess by Leonora Carrington

The Owl Service endpapers: the plates can be either owls or flowers

Detail from 'The Scroll of Nine Dragons', hand-copied by me many years ago...