Wedding Bells In Fantasy Fiction

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TIME Commemorative Edition

So how about that wedding, then? I'm sure you know the one I mean: the handsome prince, the beautiful bride, the glittering ceremony, and of course the dress, the veil, the train, the tiara, the rings, the cake...And the kiss!

All the stuff of fairytale romance, in fact, which is probably why so many of us love a royal wedding. :-)

Although it did get me thinking, mainly along the lines that although romance abounds in Fantasy fiction, with happy-ever-after, couples-getting-together endings, there are relatively few actual weddings. 

The Red Wedding - no happy-ever-after here

By which I mean weddings of the Happy-Ever-After kind and definitely not the Red Wedding—and others of similar kind, such as Daenarys' child marriage to Khal Drogo—in George RR Martin's A Game of Thrones series.

Generally, though, a happier romantic story ends with the promise of a wedding—or in these less traditional times, with the couple intending to live together. Perhaps the reason books don't spend a lot of time on the weddings is because it's the promise and hope for the future that's the true culmination of the romance.

Nevertheless, here are some weddings that have actually taken place in Fantasy fiction.
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Aragorn and Arwen: The Return of the King

I remember this wedding really taking me by surprise, back in the day, because unlike the film there had not been much, if any, build up to the fact that Aragorn and Arwen loved each other enough to get married. But get married they did, in both movie and book:

"Upon the every eve of Midsummer...the riders came to the gates of Minas Tirith...Last came...Elrond...and beside him upon a grey palfrey rode Arwen his daughter...Then Elrond laid the hand of his daughter in the hand of the King (Aragorn)...and all the stars flowered in the sky. And Aragorn...wedded Arwen Undómiel in the City of Kings upon the day of Midsummer..."
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Sybel and Coren: The Forgotten Beasts of Eld

There's a wedding, too, in Patricia McKillip's World Fantasy Award-winning novel, between the warrior Coren and the wizard, Sybel --- although it is by no means the end of their story:

"Rok married them that evening in the hall lit with candles... "Coren." She looked up at him and saw in the red-gold wash that lit his face a deep flame of laughter that had not been there before in his eyes. She smiled slowly, as though she were accepting the challenge of it. "Sybel."
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Harry (Angharad/Harimad-Sol) and Corlath: The Blue Sword

This is very much a wedding in the traditional fairytale style:  the enemy has been defeated and the heroine and hero are young and victorious and in love.

"The city was decked with flowers, and long trailing cloaks of flowers ...were thrown around Corlath's shoulders and Harry's...and the ceremony was performed in the glassy white courtyard before Corlath's palace. People were hanging from windows and balconies...and lining the walls, and crowded into the courtyard itself until there was barely sapce for the king and queen..." 

A far cry from the Red Wedding indeed...

(The Blue Sword is a Newbery Honor Book.)

Aravis and Cor: The Horse and His Boy

Some weddings are somewhat more humorous in mention, but nonetheless give the story a sense of completion, as with Aravis and Cor (Shasta) in CS Lewis's The Horse and His Boy:

"Aravis also had many quarrels (and, I'm afraid, even fights) with Cor, but they always made it up again: so that years later, when they were grown up, they were so used to quarrelling and making it up again that they got married so as to go on doing it more conveniently."

As with all good writing, the reader gets the feeling that there's more to this marriage than the surface of the words might suggest. In any case, it still beats a Red Wedding, hands down.

Hild and Cian: Hild

Nicola Griffith's Hild (a World Fantasy Award finalist) also ends with a wedding between Hild and Cian, who have been childhood friends and allies. While there may be more to their relationship, and the marriage is outwardly one of political contrivance and convenience, there is also love there...

"What mattered was the truth, rising like birdsong, like the scent of flowers opening to the sun, of her wyrd. Cian's hand beneath hers. It had always been so. It had always been meant to be so. Fate goes ever as it must."

As for my books—no, no weddings there, not yet at any rate, although a wedding is certainly heralded at the end of Thornspell.

The books I've mentioned are only a sample of the weddings that I hope you, dear readers, can point to. If you have a favorite, or better yet, favorites, please do share with a comment. :-)

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Helen Lowe is a novelist, poet, interviewer and blogger whose first novel, Thornspell (Knopf), was published to critical praise in 2008. Her second, The Heir of Night (The Wall Of Night Series, Book One) won the Gemmell Morningstar Award 2012. The sequel, The Gathering Of The Lost, was shortlisted for the Gemmell Legend Award in 2013. Daughter Of Blood, (The Wall Of Night, Book Three) is Helen's most recent book and she is currently working on the fourth and final novel in The Wall Of Night series. Helen posts regularly on her “…on Anything, Really” blog and is also on Twitter: @helenl0we

"Thornspell" Giveaway Result

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The giveaway for a copy of Thornspell — offered as part of my post on Supernatural Beings In Fantasy: The Fey — has now been drawn and the winner is:

Chris Besier

Congratulations, Chris!

Thanks for entering the competition. I shall be emailing you directly. :-)

And thanks as always to all our wonderful Supernatural Underground readers and followers!

ALSO:

ICYMI, Merrie De Stefano's wonderful giveaway is still open — click Here to Read All About It and get the details.

Otherwise, until next month: read on!

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Helen Lowe is a novelist, poet, interviewer and blogger whose first novel, Thornspell (Knopf), was published to critical praise in 2008. Her second, The Heir of Night (The Wall Of Night Series, Book One) won the Gemmell Morningstar Award 2012. The sequel, The Gathering Of The Lost, was shortlisted for the Gemmell Legend Award in 2013. Daughter Of Blood, (The Wall Of Night, Book Three) is her most recent book and she is currently working on the fourth and final novel in The Wall Of Night series. Helen posts regularly on her “…on Anything, Really” blog and is also on Twitter: @helenl0we

Supernatural Beings in Fantasy: The Fey

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The Sleeping Beauty by John Collier

From fairytale, through folklore, to myth, supernatural beings are a cornerstone of Fantasy storytelling and the fey have always been one of favorites. As a very small child, I loved listening to a retelling of Sleeping Beauty that featured on a local radio station — and subsequently read all the fairytales I could find, particularly those with actual fairies or fey in them.

Some of the qualities associated with the fey that appealed to me included magic, otherness, mystery, power, and delight but also danger. These qualities are among those that also characterize the fey in Fantasy storytelling, such as Diana Wynne Jones' children's book Power of Three. Rudyard Kipling's Puck of Pooks Hill and Rewards And Fairies are another, though older example — to a decidedly adult version featuring some of the same characters, in Raymond E Feist's dark-edged Faerie Tale.

The fey unquestionably have their place in adult storytelling. Author CJ Cherryh has a series of Fantasy novels centered on the Fey and folklore, some in analogs of this world, such as Rusalka and Chernevog, while the Ealdwold books are set in an essentially "other" world where the fey are closer in kind to Tokien's elves. The fey appear in Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stackhouse series, in Neil Gaiman's American Gods, and Charles De Lint's Newford novels. In Stina Leicht's The Fey & the Fallen series, a darker and more brutal version of the fey are entwined with the Northern Irish Troubles.
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Readers who are fans of fairytale retellings and YA lit. will know this is home turf for encountering the fey. Some examples I have enjoyed include Charles De Lint's The Blue Girl, Melissa Marr's Wicked Lovely, and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough's Godmother books, which take a series of diverse fairytales and weave them into a contemporary story.

The fey take many forms, however, and Maggie Stiefvater's The Scorpio Races centers on the capall uisce, the vicious and maniacal water horses of Celtic legend.

All these stories are either urban fantasy or overlap our everyday world, but fey-centric tales and fairytale retellings can also take place in historical settings, such as Juliet Marillier's Wildwood Dancing (the twelve Dancing Princesses retold in a Transylvanian setting.) Recently, Katherine Arden's The Bear and The Nightingale returns readers to the Russian setting of Rusalka and Chernevog, but with a  distinct historical cast.

My own Thornspell also has an historical setting in the early to mid-Renaissance period, with the events taking place in  a realm that is almost-but-not-quite the Holy Roman Empire. And Thornspell, of course, brings us full circle because it's a retelling of Sleeping Beauty: in this case, from the perspective of the prince who breaks the spell cast by the wicked fairy — who also features in the story. :-)
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The giveaway has now closed. The result is posted Here. 

Giveaway!

 I've enjoyed reading all the books mentioned, but if you would like to check out Thornspell I have a copy to give away. To enter, leave a comment below the post with your contact details (so I can get in touch with the winner.) 

I'll make the draw on Saturday 12 May (using RANDOM) and will post the result here and in a fresh post at the top of the masthead, also on Saturday 12. 

(If the winner doesn't get in touch by Thursday 17, I'll redraw and again post the result here.)

Note: Neither I nor the Supernatural Underground will use your contact for any purpose except drawing this giveaway, unless your further permission is sought.

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Helen Lowe is a novelist, poet, interviewer and blogger whose first novel, Thornspell (Knopf), was published to critical praise in 2008. Her second, The Heir of Night (The Wall Of Night Series, Book One) won the Gemmell Morningstar Award 2012. The sequel, The Gathering Of The Lost, was shortlisted for the Gemmell Legend Award in 2013. Daughter Of Blood, (The Wall Of Night, Book Three) is her most recent book and she is currently working on the fourth and final novel in The Wall Of Night series. Helen posts regularly on her “…on Anything, Really” blog and is also on Twitter: @helenl0we

The Magic & Wonder of Trees in Fantasy

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"Enter these enchanted woods, you who dare..." 
- George Meredith, 1828-1909

Today I'm taking a look at the part trees play in Fantasy literature and whether authors in the genre have taken the Victorian poet's advice to heart. :)

Overall, it appears we have.

Ents, of course, are probably the most famous “trees”, or in their case, treelike beings, in Fantasy literature. They feature in the second and third books of The Lord of the Rings trilogy and played a major part in The Two Towers film, with the attack on, and destruction of Isengard:

“Pippin looked behind. The number of Ents had grown — or what was happening? Where the dim bare slopes that they had crossed should lie, he thought he saw groves of trees. But they were moving! Could it be that the trees of Fangorn were awake, and the forest was rising, marching over the hills to war? He rubbed his eyes wondering if sleep and shadow had deceived him; but the great grey shapes moved steadily onward.”

Sentient trees also feature in CS Lewis’s Narnia series and I’ve always loved the scene in Prince Caspian where Aslan reawakens the trees that have slept as a result of the Telmarine invasion:

“What Lucy and Susan saw was a dark something coming to them from almost every direction across the hills. It looked first like a black mist creeping on the ground, then like the stormy waves of a black sea rising higher and higher as it came on, and then, at last, like what it was — woods on the move. All the trees of the world appeared to be rushing towards Aslan.”

Sometimes, however, it is not a forest but a single tree that features — like the world tree in Mary Victoria’s Chronicles of the Tree series, which is first encountered in Tymon’s Flight:

“To starboard of the vessel…stretched a vast and furrowed mountain of bark, so wide that it’s curvature was almost invisible and so high that both its summit and its base were lost to view. The immensity of the wall was broken by a profusion of spoke-like limbs, the largest many miles in length. Several hundred feet above the dirigible the trunk culminated in the gently rising plateau of branches and twigs that made up the Central Canopy’s crown.”

Werewolves and other were-beasts have become very popular in recent years, but Fantasy contains at least one instance of tree-shifting: Danan Isig in Patricia McKillip’s The Riddlemaster of Hed, who teaches the skill to the protagonist, Morgon:

“Was I a tree? Sometimes I stand so long in the snow watching the trees wrapped in their private thoughts that I forget myself, become one of them. They are as old as I am, as old as Isig. . .”

When discussing trees in Fantasy I really can't go past the weirwood that stands at the heart of Winterfell, in George RR Martin’s A Game Of Thrones:

“At the center of the grove an ancient weirwood brooded over a small pool where the waters were black and cold. “The heart tree,” Ned called it. The weirwood’s bark was white as bone, its leaves dark red, like a thousand bloodstained hands. A face had been carved in the trunk of the great tree, its features long and melancholy, the deep-cut eyes red with dried sap and strangely watchful.”

And yep, trees do play a significant part in my own books, too.

Because Thornspell is a retelling of Sleeping Beauty — from the perspective of the prince who breaks the spell — the story needs must dives straight into George Meredith's "enchanted wood" territory:

“The road did not go far, petering out into a bridle path within a few hundred yards of the castle wall, and fading away altogether beneath the forest eave. It was very dark and quiet beneath the canopy, a heavy, listening silence. There was no call of bird or insect, no whisper of falling leaf—not even the wind stirred.”

Probably the most significant way in which trees shape the landscape in The Heir of Night (The Wall Of Night, Book One) is through their absence. The Wall of Night is a bleak, wind-blasted and lifeless environment and the contrast to more clement terrain only occurs in the last part of the book, when the protagonists cross into the hills of Jaransor:

“Eventually, Malian began to see the green shimmer of trees growing along small precipitous creeks, and they stopped at last in a narrow ravine where the trees formed a green roof and a stream ran clear over brown pebbles.”

In The Gathering of the Lost (The Wall Of Night, Book Two), trees and woods are a far more significant part of the worldscape:

“Mostly, Malian let the others talk as the miles fell behind them and Maraval forest rose up ahead like a green cloud … as the road took them deeper into the wood … the cavalcade fell silent, and the only sound was the clip of their horses’ hooves, the song of birds, and the deep susurration of the myriad leaves overhead.”

And still have their place in Daughter Of Blood (The Wall Of Night, Book Three):

“Malian let her mind follow the secondary route, leaping over huddled villages with their sheep pens and rocky fields, to settle on a pine grove near the crest of the road’s first long ascent into the foothills. She had camped a night in the dry earthy hollow beneath the trees, which grew so close together that only the very heaviest rain fell between the branches. Now, it was the best shelter she could recall along the route’s wild terrain.”

So the arrows of evidence do seem to be pointing in the same direction: which is that trees play a significant part in Fantasy world-building, including my own work.

Mary Victoria's world tree - art (c) by Frank Victoria

I am pretty sure, too, that readers will encounter them again in The Chaos Gate (The Wall Of Night, Book Four), which is currently in progress.

How about you? Got any favorite trees in Fantasy literature to add to my list? All types of Fantasy welcome, from magic realism, through paranormal urban, to epic. :)

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Helen Lowe is a novelist, poet, interviewer and blogger whose first novel, Thornspell (Knopf), was published to critical praise in 2008. Her second, The Heir of Night (The Wall Of Night Series, Book One) won the Gemmell Morningstar Award 2012. The sequel, The Gathering Of The Lost, was shortlisted for the Gemmell Legend Award in 2013. Daughter Of Blood, (The Wall Of Night, Book Three) is her most recent book and she is currently working on the fourth and final novel in The Wall Of Night series. Helen posts regularly on her “…on Anything, Really” blog and is also on Twitter: @helenl0we

Supernatural Couture

Gorgeous "Da Vinci" couture

Recently I've been thinking about supernatural couture, which is one of those "background but essential" aspects to Fantasy.

In part, the thinking was sparked by Rebecca Fisher's column, Big Worlds On Small Screens, in which she looks at SFF TV shows and films---most recently, Da Vinci's Demons, in which she wrote:

"...there’s also very little attempt to adhere to history accuracy — although you only need to glimpse the astounding outfits of the women to realize that."

As the pic shows---very outstanding and drop-dead gorgeous!

In books, too, attention to couture detail is often part of the background fabric (he-he) of the storytelling.

In Laini Taylor's fabulous Daughter of Smoke and Bone, for example, Madrigal goes to a ball, and the ball feels so much more real because she is wearing this:

"...it was midnight-blue shot silk. a form-skimming sheath so fine it felt like a touch could dissolve it. It was arrayed with tiny crystals that caught the light and beamed it back like stars, and the whole back was open, revealing the long white channel of Madrigal's spine all the way to her tailbone. It was alarming..."

When Blue goes on her first date with Adam, in Maggie Stiefvater's The Raven Boys, she dresses a little differently:

"She wore heavy boots she'd found at the Goodwill (she'd attacked them with embroidery thread and a very sturdy needle) and a dress she'd made a few months earlier, constructed from several different layers of green fabric. Some of them striped. Some of them crochet. Some of them transparent."

Patricia Briggs' Mercy Thompson is a motor mechanic, so overalls and a monkey wrench are part of her essential everyday attire and off-duty she's more of a a cropped T and jeans kinda gal.

In Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive series, noble women like Sharran always go out in public with one hand—the "safehand"—covered by a special sleeve or glove.

In The Heir Of Night, a young Malian attends a feast in "an elaborate black velvet dress" with her hair "bound into a net of smoky pearls." 

When the Prince first meets the newly woken princess at the end of Thornspell (a retelling of Sleeping Beauty from the prince's perspective), she is also "richly dressed": 

"Her gown was velvet over silk, and there was a golden fillet around her brow, a net of jewels and gold wire lying across her hair."

From the sumptuous, to the zany, to the practical—supernatural couture is an essential part of the Fantasy milieu.

But perhaps you have a favorite outfit associated with a book or character? Feel free to share here if you do. :)

Books for Christmas: A Celebration of Story

Giveaway Winners!

And  the draw winners are:

•  SandyG265 ~ 'The Heir of Night'
• Llehn ~ 'Thornspell'
• JacquiR ~ JAAM 26

Congratulations to the winners and my thanks to everyone who commented---remember to stay posted for the 'Grand Supernatural Underground Draw' on the 30th. And of course I'll be back on the 1st for my regular slot and with something I hope you'll agree is special ...

Book recipients---please contact me on contact[at]helenlowe[dot]info so I can arrange to send you your 'loot'. :)

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As a writer, it’s perhaps not surprising that books form one of the major landmarks of my Christmases past—not least, I suspect, because the gift of a book was always ‘sure to please’ me on the gift front. So I thought I’d share some of the brightest of those Christmas book memories today.

One of the earliest and most enduringly successful of those book gifts—possibly because it has always spoken to both the poet and prose writer in me, as well as to the lover of gorgeous illustrations—was Twas the Night Before Christmas (believed to be the work of Clement Clarke Moore, 1779-1863):

“Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house,
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse …”

I have always loved the story this book tells, and the way it captures the anticipation and enchantment of Christmas Eve, a time when the young child feels as though the whole world is poised and waiting … for something magical to happen. And in Twas the Night Before Christmas it does!

I was 10 when I received the second of those very influential Christmas books—Roger Lancelyn Green’s Tales of Troy and Greece. (I suspect my book is a compilation from two publications: The Tales of Troy and Tales of the Greek Heroes, both first published in 1958.) I was already an enthusiast for both Greek and Norse myths and legends, but there was something particularly real and compelling in Green’s retelling, and all his characters came alive for me on the page. I have read many versions of those same stories, and many other classical works and reworkings since then. But I still feel that Tales of Troy and Greece was the signpost that set me firmly on the path to short stories such as The Brother King and Ithaca, and to poems like my Ithaca Conversations sequence, as well as establishing the strong mytho-heroic influences on my novels, Thornspell and The Heir of Night.

My father died when I was twenty two, and money and good cheer were both in short supply on the Christmas following his death. But we still came together as a family and my mother gave each of us a book, a trade paperback from the stationers near her work. My gift was Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon—and I loved it. Although I was subsequently to read a huge number of retellings of the Arthurian legends (too many in fact!) The Mists of Avalon was the very first such retelling I encountered and I was enthralled by its interweaving of Celtic myth and real history, and the combination of politics and battles and magic, romantic and sexual relationships—but most of all that the entire story was told from the perspective of the women in the Arthurian cycle. That was definitely a first for me in my Fantasy reading and one I liked, opening up the notion that women’s history and women’s voices in and through storytelling had something to say: something that mattered.

My mother, like my father, passed away too young. But they left me a legacy beyond price, one bound inextricably into my Christmas memories—the gift of books, and through the books, of the magic that is both story and storytelling. So it is no accident, or mere observance of convention, that The Heir of Night, the first book in my Wall of Night series, is dedicated to my parents. 

Giveaways Galore:

As part of this countdown to Christmas, each Supernatural Underground author who posts in the "Christmas Memories" series is doing a giveaway—and there’s also a Grand Supernatural Underground Giveaway at the end of the series, I believe to be drawn on 30 December. There’ll be a copy of The Heir of Night in that Grand Giveaway—plus in the soldiers' gift package—but I am also giving away a copy of both Thornspell and The Heir of Night today, the recipients to be drawn from commenters on this post.

Plus for those who already have both Thornspell and Heir (yes, Sharon, I’m looking at you! :) ) I’m adding in a copy of JAAM 26, which contains my short story Ithaca and two poems from the Ithaca Conversations sequence—amongst very many other fine stories and poems from other writers.

Just post a comment here, telling me about a “landmark” gift you've received (it doesn't have to be for Christmas), and be in to win.

Eligibility will close at midnight, US Eastern Standard Time, December 26th—I will then post the result here on the 27th so don’t forget to check back.

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Supernatural Underground author Helen Lowe is a novelist, poet and interviewer. Her latest novel, The Heir of Night, the first of THE WALL OF NIGHT quartet, is published in the USA, UK, and internationally and won the Sir Julius Vogel Award 2011 for Best Novel. Her first novel, Thornspell, is published in the US by Knopf. Helen blogs every day on her Helen Lowe on Anything, Really site and on the first day of every month right here on the Supernatural Underground.