Culture Blogs
“From dragons to spaceships, from unicorns to time travel, join me around this campfire blog to explore Pagan themes in fantasy and science fiction, and all the subgenres in between. Reading just got interesting.”
Welcome to the Well at World’s End!
If you know your fantasy history, you’ll spot that the title of this blog comes form the very first fantasy book written by William Morris in 1896. For the first time, Morris deviated from writing “reality” and ventured into another realm, one inhabited by otherworld creatures, like giants and wise hermits, a place governed by the laws of magic.
In Well at World’s End, Morris takes the reader into a mythical region where a magical well grants the drinker immortality. He quests with helpers to find the well, facing danger at every step. The story sounds familiar, because we’ve seen similar ones over the ages, like Percival who quests for the Holy Grail, or Ponce de León’s journey for the Fountain of Youth.
But if we go a little deeper we will find that even this road leads right back to Pagan origins. Morris, like Tolkien years later, saw that magic once held an integral part of daily life, but had slowly faded from the countryside. His book, if nothing else, is a reminder of what was, and more so what could be.
Digging even deeper, we can make comparisons to Morris’ well and the cauldron—the giver of life. The Well at World’s End is essentially a retelling of the Holy Grail quest, which can be traced to the Legend of Tuatha de Dannan.
“They brought the cauldron of Dagda which would later be known as the Holy Grail.”
Dagda’s cauldron was said to be bottomless and granted the user unlimited fulfillment.
The well is also similar to Bran’s cauldron of regeneration found in the Mabinogion, which restored health to those even mortally wounded. In Greek mythology, Demeter places her son, Celeus, in a cauldron above a special fire in order to make him immortal. In Norse mythology, the magic cauldron, Odhrerrir, made by dwarfs, contained a potion that granted wisdom.
In today’s Pagan ritual, the well can be found on the altar as the chalice, which can represent the ebb and flow of life. And also the cauldron, which represents rebirth and regeneration, just as it did in Morris’ day.
But are we surprised to find fantasy fiction steeped in Pagan origins? Not really. What we can consider is the reminder these books bring to the modern world—the magical world is all around us, not separate, and we need not quest to find it, but rather, maybe it’s right in our own backyard.
Morris’s book is the perfect starting place for this blog, because many of the books that come after it, explore similar themes. As we get started on our very own quest—a quest for Pagan themes in speculative fiction—we’ll be visiting the trenches of writers throughout history and modern times. We’ll venture through dragon lairs and time warps, and steampunk trains to get at the Pagan.
If you have suggestions for future books, drop me an email at asummersword@aol.com with Pagan Themes in Spec Fiction as the subject header. Want to read along, email for a list of upcoming books. Let the quest begin!
Comments
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Saturday, 28 July 2012If people are interested in reading "Well at World's End" it is free at Amazon through their kindle program.
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Monday, 30 July 2012
Thank you for the great suggestions! Will add them to the list. Just came across "The Girl Who Circumnavigated..." Looking forward to the read. Also, Project Gutenberg has free copies of Morris book too, which you can read online or download to your computer. (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/169). Thanks for reading. Stay tuned for the next campfire gathering.
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Monday, 30 July 2012
My favorite stories are the kind that resonate with the truth that comes from all of history, for we are all from pagan roots! Thanks for the ideas for good reads. Looking forward to more of your posts.
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Monday, 30 July 2012Are you planning to cover, ahem, "popular" culture fantasy/sci fi? I'm thinking of a famously popular HBO show, the thealogy of which I haven't been able to make *any* sense at all. Hint, hint.
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Tuesday, 31 July 2012
Oh, my, let's skip right to the hard stuff! Adding it to the list--certainly a provocative pick and one I'm sure will lend to a nice discussion. --Lex, could've have said it better! Thanks for reading.
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Morris was already on my To Read list, but I will have to shift him further up the list now.
If no one else has suggested them yet, I highly recommend any books by Robin McKinley (especially "Chalice") and Patricia McKillip. Oh! And Catherynne M Valente's "The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making."