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...

Imagined Afterlives: Death in Classic Fantasy

What – if anything – happens after death? A fantasy world, no matter how beautifully constructed, lacks something if there’s no thought given to what happens when characters die, or at least to what beliefs they hold about what may happen. We live not only in the physical universe but in our mental construction of it. Death is a huge subject for humanity, and so not unnaturally Life and Death are recurrent themes in some of the fantasies I love best – The Lord of the Rings, the Narnia stories, Ursula K Le Guin’s Earthsea books, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, and the Old Kingdom novels of Garth Nix. 

To begin with Tolkien: though mortal, Hobbits don’t seem to have a theory of the afterlife. Innocent, rural, physical, they thoroughly enjoy this life’s pleasures and die with a sense of fulfilment: a long life well lived. Can Bilbo outlive the Old Took? He will if he can. We are told nothing of Hobbit funerals except at the very end of The Return of the King where the hobbits who fell at the Battle of Bywater are laid together ‘in a grave on the hillside, where later a great stone was set up with a garden around it.’ Their names live on in memory, but there’s no speculation about a hobbit heaven, just a practical disposal of the mortal remains – and an equally practical interest in inheritance.

Dwarves are mortal too. From the evidence of Balin’s tomb in Moria they build, as you’d expect, good solid stone monuments to commorate their dead. Again there’s little evidence of a dwarfish belief in an afterlife, but a mystical streak is apparent in Gimli’s hints about their creator-ancestor Durin, a hero-king asleep under the stone, who will one day awake – and who, according to Appendix A, is occasionally reincarnated in a child of his line.  Then there are the Ents. Though some, like Treebeard, are immensely ancient, Ents are probably not immortal. Since they have lost the Entwives there can be no more Entlings and their race will dwindle. Some Ents become more and more like trees, and even the oldest tree eventually dies, though a truly tree-ish Ent may hardly notice. The Elves are immortal unless killed in battle, or unless like Lùthien and Arwen they choose mortality – but the trees of Lothlorien are in eternal autumn, their springtime long passed, and more and more of the Fair Folk are heading for the Grey Havens.  

The point about Mortal Men in Middle-earth is that they are mortal. The Riders of Rohan view death as a feasting-hall of the brave, like the Norse Valhalla; their poetry is full of Anglo-Saxon melancholy, laden as Legolas says, ‘with the sadness of Mortal Men’: 

‘Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?  Where is the helm and the hauberk and the bright hair flowing? Where is the hand on the harpstring and the red fire glowing?’

In accordance with the Norse heroic code, Théoden on the Field of Pelennor dies contented, knowing he leaves behind him a good name: ‘I go to my fathers. And even in their mighty company I shall not now be ashamed. I felled the black serpent.’ Sad though it is, his death makes sense as part of a fitting and seamless succession which is emphasised by the stretcher-bearers’ response to Prince Imrahil:

‘What burden do you bear, Men of Rohan?’ he cried.

‘Théoden King,’ they answered. ‘He is dead. But Éomer King now rides in the battle: he with the white crest in the wind.’           

When the Men of Gondor die, or at least their kings and stewards, they are laid to rest in tombs of stone in Rath Dínen, the Silent Street under Mount Mindolluin. It appears from Denethor’s words that they think of death as a long solitary sleep rather than ancestral companionship in an eternal feasting hall – but this may not always have been so:

‘No tomb for Denethor and Faramir!  No tomb!  No long slow sleep of death embalmed.  We will burn like heathen kings before ever a ship sailed hither from the West…’

One way or another, Mortal Men must accept death. Clinging on to this world may lead to the worst possible thing that can happen: they may become wraiths like the Barrow-wights on the Barrow-Downs, or like the Ringwraiths. 

Finally, for the Ring-bearers Frodo and Bilbo (and possibly later for Sam) there’s the unusual opportunity to go bodily into the West on an Elven ship. Unlike the film, in which Gandalf comforts Pippin with a description of Eressëa or possibly Valinor, the book makes clear that this is a special privilege. As Frodo’s ship passes into the West, 

… it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.

But to Sam the evening deepened into darkness as he stood at the Haven, and as he looked at the grey sea he saw only a shadow on the waters that was soon lost in the West. 

A deep vein of nostalgic sadness runs through the heart of The Lord of the Rings. Except for Men, all of the different races are doomed either to fade or pass from Middle-earth. And in the process of his journey, Frodo leaves behind not only the comfortable rural beauty of the Shire, but the very person he was. Suffering, and his immense struggle with the Ring change him into someone different – nobler, wiser maybe, but maimed, changed, sadder. We can only hope that the West will heal him. We will never know. 

The Narnia books contain little of this nostalgia. C.S. Lewis is very clear about life after death: it’s Aslan’s country, and several of his characters actually go there in life – Jill and Eustace start out for Narnia from Aslan’s holy Eastern mountain, for example, and the heroic Reepicheep sails there in his coracle. 

Remarkably, through the first six books of the Chronicles this certainty does not negate the sorrow of mortality.  Death, when it occurs, is given emotional weight. Aslan’s death in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe is genuinely moving, partly because of the depth of grief of Lucy and Susan, and so is Caspian’s death in The Silver Chair, witnessed from a distance by Jill and Eustace. The very old King lifts his hand to bless his long-lost son, then falls back –

The Prince, kneeling by the the King’s bed, laid down his head upon it, and wept. There were whisperings and goings to and fro. Then Jill noticed that all who wore hats, bonnets, helmets or hoods were taking them off – Eustace included. Then she heard a rustling and flapping noise up above the castle; when she looked up she saw that the great banner with the golden Lion on it was being brought down to half-mast. And after that, slowly, mercilessly, with wailing strings and disconsolate blowings of horns, the music began again: this time, a tune to break your heart. 

Aslan blows all these things away ‘like wreaths of smoke’ and the children find themselves once more in Aslan’s country ‘among mighty trees and beside a fair, fresh stream’. But the funeral music continues.

And there, on the golden gravel of the bed of the stream lay King Caspian, dead, with the water flowing over him like liquid glass. His long beard swayed in it like water weed. And all three stood and wept.

Their tears are shed, it seems to me, as much for age and feebleness and the sorrows of life, as they are for the fact of death. The deliberate parallel is with the New Testament story of Jesus weeping over Lazarus’s tomb: even though he knows he is about to bring Lazarus back to life. So too here. Caspian’s death is about to be reversed by a drop of Aslan’s blood. For me, this works. It’s not a facile trick. To obtain the blood, Eustace must drive a thorn ‘a foot long and as sharp as a rapier’ into the great pad of Aslan’s paw: we feel the cost and the pain. But at the end of The Last Battle, where Narnia itself is replaced by what we are meant to believe is a  greater and better Kingdom, Lewis’s attempt is an artistic failure. The Christian agenda takes over; he tries to do too much: heaven isn’t Aslan’s holy mountain any more, it’s Narnia and Archenland and Calormen and England combined. It’s messy. I far prefer that numinous glimpse of mountains behind the rising sun at the eastern rim of the world, in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. 

Heaven, a place of reward for a good life or of union with a good God, is not quite the same thing as the ‘land of the dead’ – that twilight place where ever since classical times the shades of the departed have swarmed in voiceless, strengthess hordes, unable to speak unless given a drink of sacrificial blood. (The notion that a blood sacrifice gives life to the dead must be one of the most ancient of beliefs.) Visiting Persephone’s kingdom beyond the Stream of Ocean, Odysseus attempts to embrace his mother’s shade, but she flutters out of his arms like a shadow and ‘sorrow sharpened at the heart within me’. This is what happens to everyone, his mother tells him, for once

‘the sinews no longer hold the flesh and the bones together,

and once the spirit has left the white bones, all the rest

of the body is made subject to the fire’s strong fury,

but the soul flitters out like a dream and flies away.’

The Odyssey, XI, 219-223, tr. Richmond Lattimore

Famous too is the rebuke of the dead hero Achilles when Odysseus tries to console him by telling him of the fame he has won among the living. 

‘O shining Odysseus, never try to console me for dying.

I would rather follow the plough as thrall to another

man, one with no land allotted to him and not much to live on

than be a king of all the perished dead.’ 

                        The Odyssey, XI, 488-491, tr. Richmond Lattimore

Odysseus in the Underworld, Johannes Stradanus

This type of afterlife, a shadow-life devoid of human meaning, is found in Ursula K Le Guin’s Earthsea books. In A Wizard of Earthsea the young wizard Ged splits open the fabric of his world in arrogant anger to summon the spirit of the beautiful Elfarran, a thousand years dead. Through the gap he has made scrambles a ‘clot of black shadow’ which leaps at him and rips his face. It hunts him from one side of the Archipelago to the other, and not until Ged learns to confront his own darkness can he undo his deed. 

The Earthsea books are deeply concerned with the interdependence of light and darkness, life and death, and in the early titles the land of the dead is conceived as a necessary counterweight to the world of the living. It’s a place of dust, darkness and silence, divided from life by a low wall of stones ‘no higher than a man’s knee’. The dead are passive, passionless:

No marks of illness were on them. They were whole, and healed. They were healed of pain, and of life. They were not loathsome as Arren had feared they would be, not frightening… Quiet were their faces, freed from anger and desire, and there was in their shadowed eyes no hope. 

Instead of fear, then, great pity rose up in Arren, and if fear underlay it, it was not for himself, but for us all. For he saw the mother and child who had died together, and they were in the dark land together; but the child did not run, nor did it cry, and the mother did not hold it, nor even look at it. And those who had died for love passed each other in the street.

The Farthest Shore

Terrible as this is, it possesses a poignancy reminiscent of the Odyssey. In the three early Earthsea books you can’t have life without death:

Only in dark the light, only in dying life:

bright the hawk’s flight on the empty sky.

The message of The Farthest Shore is that death is a natural and necessary end. The mage Cob is so terrified of dying that he tries to put an end to it, ‘to find what you cowards could never find – the way back from death.’ In doing so he threatens the balance of Earthsea and himself becomes an eyeless, nameless sorceror who belongs to neither life nor death.  Mere continued existence, it turns out, is a curse. ‘You cannot see the light of day, you cannot see the dark,’ Ged tells him. ‘You sold the green earth and the sun and stars to save yourself. But you have no self.’

In the two later books, Tehanu and The Other Wind, Le Guin revisits Earthsea and remakes some of what she has done. Dragons and their relationship with humankind become important, and the very nature of the land of death is re-examined. In The Other Wind Alder, a young sorceror whose wife has died, is tormented by dreams in which she and others of the dead come to the wall of stones and beg to be set free. He tells Ged, 

I thought if I called her by her true name maybe I could free her, bring her across the wall, and I said, ‘Come with me, Mevre!’  But she said, ‘That’s not my name, Hara, that’s not my name any more.’ And she let go my hands, though I tried to hold her. She cried, ‘Set me free, Hara!’  But she was going down into the dark.

These dead are neither passive nor passionless, and they recognise and commune with the living man Alder. Instead of maintaining the mystical equilibrium of Earthsea, the land of the dead is now seen to be upsetting it. Humankind and dragons were once one race which divided the world between them. Humans chose to own and make things; dragons chose freedom to fly ‘on the other wind’ in a timeless realm beyond the west. However, ‘the ancient mages craved everlasting life’ and used ‘true names to keep men from dying’. And – so the dragon Irian cries – 

‘by the spells and wizardries of those oath-breakers, you stole half our realm from us, walled it away from life and light, so that you could live there forever.  Thieves, traitors!’

It now seems the land of death is a dreadful compromise, an everlasting trap. It divorces those in it from the universe, which is the only life. The solution is to pull down the wall of stones and let the dead go free. Some rise up ‘flickering into dragons’ on the wind, but most come ‘walking with unhurried certainty’ to step across the ruined wall and vanish, ‘a wisp of dust, a breath that shone an instant in the ever-brightening light.’ And where have they  gone?  As Alder said, ‘It is not life they yearn for. It is death. To be one with the earth again. To rejoin it.’ 

It’s lovely, but I don’t think it quite works. It’s too complicated, too different from the earlier books. It takes a lot to undo the quietly terrible beauty of the dead land in A Wizard of Earthsea, its inhabitants ‘healed of life’. The dying child whom Ged fails to heal in A Wizard of Earthsea runs ‘fast and far away from him down a dark slope, the side of some vast hill’ – and that eagerness feels right. In these early books, the dead are shadows with no internal life. They feel no pain because they are already gone. It seems to me a mistake to reinvent this metaphor, and the events of The Other Wind make nonsense of the rebuke Ged delivers to Cob in The Farthest Shore. 

The impulse to harrow hell and bring out the souls is felt also by Philip Pullman in The Amber Spyglass, the final book in the trilogy His Dark Materials.  Like Lewis, Pullman has an agenda (Darwinian and anti-religious) and like Le Guin he turns to what one might call the Wordsworthian ‘back to nature’ view of death – the dissolution of personality and the blending of the body and its atoms with the physical universe. 

No motion has she now, no force,

She neither hears nor sees,

Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course

With rocks, and stones, and trees.

‘A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal’, William Wordsworth

The problem is to convince the reader that this is an acceptable personal outcome. Does that sound frivolous? My own belief, if you want it, is that Wordsworth and Pullman and Darwin are right. I don’t think there’s a life after death. I don’t find that scary, but neither does it give me joy. Only life can do that. In fiction, paradoxically, it seems the best way to make the no-afterlife option appear positive is to contrast it with an afterlife, but an unpleasant one – thus making the point via a sort of authorial sleight-of-hand. (‘You can have an afterlife, but you won’t enjoy it.’)

Aeneas and the Sibyl in Hades

Pullman’s land of the dead is a considerably less attractive proposition even than Le Guin’s. It is modelled on the Hades of Virgil’s Aeneid, rather than on Homer’s Odyssey. In the Aeneid, after sacrificing to Night, Earth, Proserpina and Hades, Aeneas ventures underground guided by the Sibyl. He passes gates guarded by monsters and crosses the river Styx with the ferryman Charon, who at first refuses to carry a living man over:

‘… This

is a realm of shadows, sleep and drowsy night.

The law forbids me to carry living bodies across

in my Stygian boat…’

The Aeneid, tr. Robert Fagles

In The Amber Spyglass, there are perhaps rather too many stages to death. Lyra and her friends begin their exodus from life via a farmhouse kitchen of the recently slain, following their shocked ghosts into a grey and ever-darkening landscape, ‘thousands of men and women and children … drifting over the plain’, drawn onwards and down to shantytown suburbs of death on the shores of a mist-bound lake. In my opinion the refugee metaphor gets away from Pullman and over-complicates the narrative. Living officials – I’m not sure why they’re alive – demand to see papers, and direct the travellers to ‘holding areas’ past ‘pools of sewage’. Taking shelter in a shanty, Lyra learns that each ghost must wait until his or her personified ‘death’ gives them leave to cross over the lake, so Lyra must call up her own death before she can continue.  She does, but there is a further complexity. Returning to the classical norm, the ferryman refuses to carry Lyra across the lake unless she leaves behind her beloved daemon, spirit-self and other half, Pan:

‘It’s not a rule you can break. It’s a law like this one…’ [The ferryman] leaned over the side and cupped a handful of water, and then tilted his hand so it ran out again. ‘The law that makes the water run back into the lake, it’s a law like that.’ 

The Amber Spyglass   

After this anguished parting Lyra, Will and the dragonfly-borne Gallivespians cross the river to land at a wharf and rampart. They pass through a great gate guarded by screaming harpies and find beyond it a vast and dismal plain crowded with listless, voiceless ghosts who, as ever, require blood.

They crammed forward, light and lifeless, to warm themselves at the flowing blood and the strong-beating hearts of the two travellers…

Once they can communicate, Lyra asks to be led to her friend Roger (for whose death she feels responsible), but when she finds him ‘he passe[s] like cold smoke through her arms’.  Determining to release all the dead from this Hades, Lyra consults the alethiometer and explains to the ghosts what will happen to them:

‘… it’s true, perfectly true. When you go out of here, all the particles that make you up will loosen and float apart, just like your daemons did. … But your daemons en’t just nothing now; they’re part of everything. … You’ll drift apart, it’s true, but you’ll be out in the open, part of everything alive again.’ 

‘It’s true, perfectly true’. Here Pullman himself speaks through Lyra, pleading and passionate, promising no lies, no deceit. The science-based truth of this account of death is indisputable. The body does indeed return to the earth that gave it. The difficulty is that these ghosts’ bodies must – most of them – already have disintegrated, yet here their spirits inhabit an afterlife in which personality and personal memories survive as some form of post-mortem energy. Accepting Lyra’s offer, one of the ghosts says, 

‘… the land of the dead isn’t a place of reward or a place of punishment. It’s a place of nothing...’

But is this true?  Compared with Le Guin’s dark, neutral world under the unchanging stars, Pullman’s land of the dead is a place of punishment. As Roger’s ghost tells Lyra:

Them bird-things… You know what they do? They wait till you’re resting – you can’t never sleep properly, you just sort of doze – and they come up quiet beside you and they whisper all the bad things you ever did when you was alive … They know how to make you feel horrible … But you can’t get away from them. 

The harpies have been set by the Authority ‘to see the worst in everyone’ and to feed on them. Lyra and her companions come up with a solution. From now on, instead of lies, each person who dies must nourish the harpies with a truthful account of all the things they’ve seen and heard, touched and learned. Experience of life, in other words, trumps death. I like this, a lot: and Roger’s final release into the physical universe, with a laugh of surprise and a ‘vivid little burst of happiness’ is moving.  Nevertheless the effect of this joyful annihilation very much depends on Pullman’s depiction of the afterlife as a distinctly worse option.

Garth Nix, in his series of ‘Old Kingdom’ novels beginning with Sabriel, has so far as I can tell no particular religious or scientific points to make, and his fantasy has a corresponding air of freshness and freedom – even playfulness – all of its own. Life and Death are of paramount interest, since the Old Kingdom is a magical land under continuous threat of necromancy. It is divided by a Wall (perhaps suggested by Le Guin’s, though this is not a Life/Death boundary) from the non-magical southern land of Ancelstierre.  I don’t know what happens to Ancelstierrans when they die, but those who die in the Old Kingdom cross an unseen border into the state of Death itself, a coldly flowing river without banks which sweeps them away through a series of nine Gates.  In the stretches of river between these Gates – the Precincts – it’s possible for some Dead to cling on or even retrace their steps:

It had been human once, or human-like at least, in the years it had lived under the sun. That humanity had been lost in the centuries the thing spent in the chill waters of Death, ferociously holding its own against the current, demonstrating an incredible will to live again. ... Its chance finally came when a mighty spirit erupted from beyond the Seventh Gate, smashing through each of the Upper Gates in turn, till it went ravening into Life. Hundreds of the Dead had followed and this particular spirit… had managed to squirm triumphantly into Life. 

Sabriel

The Lesser Dead, such as this one, need to take over human or animal bodies for their use. The Greater Dead who come from beyond the Fifth Gate are sufficiently powerful to exist in Life without a physical body. (A further danger are Free Magic Creatures, perilous elemental beings outside the ordered power of the Charter, but these are not the Dead.)

The returning Dead are uniformly malevolent, and it’s the job of the Abhorson – Sabriel herself – to return them to Death and send them down the River and past the Ninth Gate.  This she does by means of a set of seven enspelled bells, infused with beneficent Charter Magic created – or perhaps discovered or formalised? – long ago by the immortal Seven Bright Shiners, each one of which is represented by a named bell. 

The idea of a River of Death is hardly a new one; it goes back to ferryman Charon rowing souls across the Styx, and further still to the boatman Ur-shanabi in the Epic of Gilgamesh – but what Garth Nix has done with it is different: instead of a boundary which must be crossed, his River of Death is a dynamic process – a progression, a vivid natural force which grasps the dying soul and sweeps it away. As such there is a ‘rightness’ about consenting to its power and a corresponding ‘wrongness’ when the dead struggle literally to swim against the stream. More than that, as a metaphor for death a river is nothing like the static, dusty dead lands which so trouble Ursula K Le Guin and Philip Pullman. A river is about motion, exhilaration and strength. A river has a direction and a purpose.

Not until the third book in the series, Abhorson, do we really learn the geography of Death as Nix takes the reader all the way down the River through every Gate with Lirael, the Abhorson-in-Waiting, along with her inseparable companion the Disreputable Dog.  Each Gate has its own character, each Precinct its own perils, not only sneaking souls and monstrous foes but the River itself:

The Second Gate was an enormous hole, into which the river sank like sinkwater down a drain, creating a whirlpool of terrible strength. 

Abhorson

While beyond it in the Third Precinct –

The river there was only ankle deep, and little warmer. The light was better too. Brighter and less fuzzy, though still a pallid grey. Even the current wasn’t much more than a trickle around the ankles. All in all, it was a much more attractive place than the First or Second Precincts. Somewhere ill-trained or foolish necromancers might be tempted to tarry or rest.

If they did, it wouldn’t be for long – because the Third Precinct had waves…

Lirael and the Dog battle through mists, waterfalls, metamorphic waters, a ‘waterclimb’, floating flames – and finally the Ninth Gate, where the River finally does what rivers always do. It flows out into something greater than itself, ‘a great flat stretch of sparkling water’ – along with the souls it carries. Overhead is an immense sky ‘so thick with stars that they overlapped and merged to form one unimaginably vast and luminous cloud.’

Lirael felt the stars call to her and a yearning rose in her heart to answer. She sheathed bell and sword and stretched her arms out, up to the brilliant sky. She felt herself lifted up, and her feet came out of the river with a soft ripple and a sigh from the waters. 

Dead rose too, she saw. Dead of all shapes and sizes, all rising up to the sea of stars.

This at last is the ‘final death from which there could be no return.’

For me, this is inexpressibly moving. There’s no judgement. Whatever has happened before, whatever the dead may have done during Life and after it, from this perspective looks insignificant. The journey through Death may be full of terrors; a spirit may go kicking and screaming all the way down the River, struggling to turn around and go back to Life. But once beyond the Ninth Gate the sight of the stars is revelatory and transformative. Letting go of Life at last, the dead fall serenely upwards into a tranquil universe. 

All the classic fantasies I’ve looked at in this essay engage with the fact of death and what happens after, and all attempt answers. Tolkien and Lewis were both Christians, but their answers are very different. Tolkien’s Mortal Men have no assurance of an afterlife, for the immortality of Middle-earth is in the Undying Lands, and passage there is in the gift of the Elves.  Gondor’s dead pass to an eternal sleep; the Rohirrim feast with their ancestors. For Narnians, there’s the happy certainty of Aslan’s country, a place which Lewis wishes to assure us is not less but more real than life: the Platonic solid of which the mortal Narnia is but a shadow.  In Ursula K Le Guin’s early Earthsea books, the land of the dead is the darkness which is the other half of light: you can’t have one without the other. She rethought that in the last book, turning the duality into a unity from which the spirits of the dead evanesce into light. No more darkness.  For Philip Pullman, passionately concerned to do away with what he considers to be the lies of heaven and hell, Lyra’s journey through the land of the dead becomes a sort of allegorical exposition in which the afterlife is shown to be a cruel and hollow sham and the truth of dissolution is the best happiness. And in Garth Nix’s metaphor of the river – with all its adventures, snags, gates, rapids and waterfalls – death is a natural force, to resist which is to become unnatural. In the end, the river will always win and sweep us on into vastness. 

My final thought: we cannot think about death without making pictures. 

Picture credits:

Digory and the Tree of Life, from 'The Magician's Nephew', Pauline Baynes

Night Falls on Narnia, from 'The Last Battle', Pauline Baynes

Odysseus in the Underworld, by Johannes Stradanus, 1523-1605

Aeneas and the Sybil in Hades, Anon, Wikimedia Commons

Charon, by Gustave Dore

Crossing the Styx, by Gustave Dore