Book review – Vows and Honor Trilogy

Mercedes Lackey is an interesting writer. An author of fantasy, she has written over fifty books, set in a variety of well-conceived, imaginative worlds. She’s retold classic fairy tales, setting them in a magic-ridden Victorian and Edwardian England, as well as high fantasy full of quests, nobility and Striving Against the Evil Hordes. A great number of her books are set in Valedmar, a world of magical spirits, active deities and late Middle Ages – early Rennaissance cultures.

Three of her best books are collectively called the Vows and Honor series. Oathbound, Oathbreakers and Oathblood tell the tales of one of the most engaging warrior/wizard pairings to come along since Arthur and Merlin. The one is Tarma, the sole survivor of a massacred clan from a horse-nomad culture, sworn to serve her people’s Goddess as an ascetic warrior-monk. The other is Kethry, sorceress, castoff from a noble family, possessed of an earthy sense of humour and a magical sword.

Oathbound is the first volume and establishes the pair’s twofold motives; to rebuild Tarma’s shattered Clan and to gain a respected enough reputation to open a training school for aspiring swordswingers and spellslingers. Unlike many of their literary contemporaries, Tarma and Kethry use brains as often as brawn in solving their problems and always with refreshingly ironic humour.

The book has an episodic quality, as though it was originally several short stories now bracketed by introductory and climactic scenarios. Such construction would doom many a writer, but Lackey pulls them all together with the gradual evolution of her protagonists and lively, original storytelling that prevents the book from becoming a series of “another day, another deed.”

The second volume, Oathbreakers, has the pair as established members of a mercenary fighting Company, getting involved in royal intrigue, plots, assassination attempts, infiltration, exfiltration, and True Love, to list but a few of the assorted goings-on and shenanigans that assail our heroes. This book is much more tightly plotted, with engaging minor characters and appropriately nasty villains, who really do get what’s coming to them.

If Oathbreakers has a flaw, it’s a couple of coincidences that strain credulity and seem as if Lackey was merrily writing her heroes into one progressively narrower scrape after another, when she realised that she needed the story Moved Along. It’s almost like a literary hiccup in between smooth, coherent writing. Don’t let that prevent you from reading the book, though; they’re easily forgiven as you race along to the next “how are they going to get out of this one?”

Oathblood is an anthology of short stories anchored by a novella. I think most of the tales originally appeared in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword and Sorceress anthologies.  This is a collection of extremely entertaining tales.  Tarma and Kethry get into and out of all manner of odd conundra and puzzling situations.  Two of my personal favourites are the cursed coin and the locked room mystery.  Enough said…….

There are plenty more Mercedes Lackey stories on my shelf.     Maybe I should stop reading and start writing about them.

Dwarven Ballads

Of all the cultures Professor Tolkien created in his masterwork of Middle-earth, fewer are more captivating than the Elves. Firstborn, walking under the stars and moon before the coming of the Sun, teaching speech to Men and Ents, immortal unless killed and entitled to sail from the Grey Havens westward over the Sea to Valinor.

They’re also among the less interesting. Eternal, noble, possessed of deep knowledge and incredible power, they’re relatively changeless and given time, can do pretty much anything to which they set their minds.

More intriguing, to this little brain anyway, are the Dwarves. They’ve a reputation for being dour, humourless and grim, but as a culture, they’ve had reason. Driven from their ancestral halls, they are a people fallen from the heights of their civilisations in Moria and Erebor. Immensely talented in the creation of works of beauty and art, they are at once savage and unrelenting in war.

Perhaps the clearest portrait of their cultural essence is rendered by the song sung by Thorin and Company at Bag End before setting off on the quest for the Lonely Mountain. Imagine it chanted by thirteen deep voices in a fire-lit, smoky, low-ceilinged hall. . . .

Far over the misty mountains cold
To dungeons deep and caverns old
We must away ere break of day
To seek the pale enchanted gold.

The dwarves of yore made mighty spells,
While hammers fell like ringing bells
In places deep, where dark things sleep,
In hollow halls beneath the fells.

For ancient king and elvish lord
There many a gleaming golden hoard
They shaped and wrought, and light they caught
To hide in gems on hilt of sword.

On silver necklaces they strung
The flowering stars, on crowns they hung
The dragon-fire, in twisted wire
They meshed the light of moon and sun.

Far over the misty mountains cold
To dungeons deep and caverns old
We must away, ere break of day,
To claim our long-forgotten gold.

Goblets they carved there for themselves
And harps of gold; where no man delves
There lay they long, and many a song
Was sung unheard by men or elves.

The pines were roaring on the height,
The winds were moaning in the night.
The fire was red, it flaming spread;
The trees like torches blazed with light.

The bells were ringing in the dale
And men looked up with faces pale;
The dragon's ire more fierce than fire
Laid low their towers and houses frail.

The mountain smoked beneath the moon;
The dwarves, they heard the tramp of doom.
They fled their hall to dying fall
Beneath his feet, beneath the moon.

Far over the misty mountains grim
To dungeons deep and caverns dim
We must away, ere break of day
To win our harps and gold from him!

Wow. The thing fairly throbs with power and grim determination. Where’s my axe? My backpack? Off we go! Hm. Or not. Let’s calm down and take the song stanza by stanza.

Far over the misty mountains cold
To dungeons deep and caverns old
We must away ere break of day
To seek the pale enchanted gold.

Dwarves live in unforgiving environments. Driven by a desire to work and craft stone, gems and precious minerals, they make their homes in steep, rocky, damp and chilly places. It’s no wonder that they moved underground. Still, they’ve made comfortable places for themselves; the “dungeons” must refer to the use of the word as the keep of a castle, wherein the inhabitants resided. Above-ground, this was often a stone tower. Dwarven dungeons were probably underground dwellings, carved out of the rock. That they didn’t merely move into natural caves is borne out by the song’s distinction between “dungeons” and “caverns.” The last line of the verse introduces us to a Dwarven passion. Gold glitters and flashes shallowly in torchlight and the Dwarves’ love of the metal is akin to a magical compulsion to seek it out.

The dwarves of yore made mighty spells,
While hammers fell like ringing bells
In places deep, where dark things sleep,
In hollow halls beneath the fells.

The Dwarves are an ancient people of many achievements and great works. They are often portrayed as being anti-magical or at the very least, shunning the use of magic in their craft. The “mighty spells” may give the lie to that characterisation, in that the Dwarves may be able to imbue their creations with magical attributes. Conversely, it may be a metaphor for the consummate skill which the Dwarves bring to their crafts, such that their works, while untouched by the supernatural, are of unparalleled quality, seemingly magical. The rest of this stanza is a truly ominous bit of foreshadowing, as the “Dwarvish racket” resonates in the ears of things unknown to the bearded folk, yet close by whom they have delved.

For ancient king and elvish lord
There many a gleaming golden hoard
They shaped and wrought, and light they caught
To hide in gems on hilt of sword.

On silver necklaces they strung
The flowering stars, on crowns they hung
The dragon-fire, in twisted wire
They meshed the light of moon and sun.

We can take these two stanzas together, as they highlight the level of skill achieved by the Dwarves of old. Sought after by powerful Men and Elves, Dwarvish art in metalworking and gemsmithing must have far exceeded the capabilities of the other races. In their hands, cold metal and hard gems awoke to reflect back the light and wonders of the natural world.

Far over the misty mountains cold
To dungeons deep and caverns old
We must away, ere break of day,
To claim our long-forgotten gold.

Goblets they carved there for themselves
And harps of gold; where no man delves
There lay they long, and many a song
Was sung unheard by men or elves.

A circle back to the ancient homelands and a sign, with the “long-forgotten gold,” that the Dwarves have fallen away from the glories of their past, begin this stanza. The second of these verses harks back to the Dwarven skill of hand and makes the important point that no matter what “gleaming golden hoards” they delivered up to Men and Elves, the best of their creations they kept for themselves. More than artisans, tradesmen and merchants, the Dwarves developed and nurtured their own culture, keeping it fiercely secret from outsiders.

The pines were roaring on the height,
The winds were moaning in the night.
The fire was red, it flaming spread;
The trees like torches blazed with light.

The bells were ringing in the dale
And men looked up with faces pale;
The dragon's ire more fierce than fire
Laid low their towers and houses frail.

The mountain smoked beneath the moon;
The dwarves, they heard the tramp of doom.
They fled their hall to dying fall
Beneath his feet, beneath the moon.

The coming of the dragon; heralded in flame. The Dwarves’ creations caught and reflected back the beauty of the world. The dragon is a destroyer, a bringer of death to the world, covetous of that which, when its source of beauty is gone, is reduced to a hard pile of lifeless rock and metal.  The Dwarves are driven out from the safety of their “dungeons deep,” out into the harsh mountainsides where the dragon, where death, awaits.

Far over the misty mountains grim
To dungeons deep and caverns dim
We must away, ere break of day
To win our harps and gold from him!

Now for the last.  The Dwarves have suffered much.  They have fallen from their high places of old; their mountains are not just “cold,” but “grim” and their caverns, once ablaze with light, are danksome and dark.  The dragon rules a dead kingdom, but the Dwarves are determined not only to take back their treasure and works of their hands, but also their lost culture, to win back the respect of the outside world and the essence of their own place in it.