Article: (With acknowledgements to H.W.Longfellow) Should...
(With acknowledgements to H.W.Longfellow)Should you ask me whence these stories?
Whence these legends and traditions,
With their splash of Viking longships,
With their clash of sword and dagger,
With their stink of burning cities,
With their sound of anguished laughter,
With their sights of bloody ruins,
And their wild reverberations,
As of thunder in the mountains?
I shall answer, I shall tell you,
'From a fellow long and lively,
From the books of one called Schoolcraft,
From a place not far from Boston,
From those dreams called transcendental,
From the myths of the Algonquin,
Where they meet the tales of Huron
Or legends of the Iroquois.
I re-tell them as I learned them
From the lips of young White Crow,
Whom some have called The Albino.
It's a bit unfashionable, these days, to admit a fondness for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. His gripping narrative poems, especially The Song of Hiawatha, are so easily parodied we sometimes forget their invention, originality and idealism.
In fact, that whole period of 19th century American letters interests me and I remain devoted not only to influential transcendentalists, such as Thoreau and Emerson, but to Louisa May Alcott, whose stories were great favourites when I was growing up and whose amiably loquacious father was such a trial to poor Hawthorne.
What has this to do with a wild tale of Vikings, North American natives ('skraelings' as the Norsemen called them) and Elric of Melnibone, the troubled anti-hero of so much of my fantasy fiction? Well, there's my love of American literature, my fascination with American mythology and, frankly, my weariness with the countless spins on Arthurian romance originating from both sides of the Atlantic!
If Tennyson proposed to address the Matter of Britain, through the tragedy of Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere, Longfellow equally wanted to give us verse epics which addressed the Matter of America - or, at least, that part of his huge country familiar to him. Taking his materials chiefly from the folklorist Schoolcraft, he produced a Europeanised version of native myths just as Mallory employed miscellaneous collections of Celtic, Saxon and Norman tales for his English Morte D'Arthur, on which Tennyson based Idylls of the King.
Few dispute that Mallory's and Tennyson's stories were translated into the attitudes and manners of their day. Longfellow of course did the same with the folklore of sophisticated forest dwellers, chiefly the Huron, Iroquois and Algonquin. We know that neither cycle is particularly 'authentic', both are sentimentalised, but they retain powerful mythic resonances which continue to speak to us and lead us, as often as not, back to more authentic originals.
An Englishman still exploring the US, I sometimes think that many Americans don't value their own myths and history enough, that mass media too often provides a unnourishing substitute.. Occasionally it takes a visitor to re-value and remind us of our greatest treasures, as Americans, including Longfellow, have done so successfully with my British heritage. I can never hope to aspire to the achievement of Longfellow, but in telling this tale of plains, mountains, invasion, shamanism, magic and attempted conquest, a city of gold and the universal tree of life, I hope I have brought a spot of originality to the genre and perhaps respectfully reminded Americans of their fabulously rich common culture.
Michael Moorcock,
Lost Pines, Texas
January 2003
H.W.Longfellow (1807-1882) also wrote, among many others, Paul Revere's Ride, The Saga of King Olaf, Poems on Slavery and The Wreck of the Hesperus.
Copyright © 2003 by Michael Moorcock