Music from behind the Moon, from James Branch Cabell

James Branch Cabell wrote a seemingly little known work that passionately describes the aching that some of us feel for music that is strange, deep, otherworldly, and perhaps, to some extent, “dark”. “The Music from Behind the Moon” is a short story, which is a portion of a larger book called “The Witch Woman”. It concerns the quest of a bard, Madoc, to find the source of the “skirling” music of Etarre the witch woman that is all “a doubtfulness and a discontent”. Madoc is described as a skilled musician that plays upon a bronze harp, and sings beautifully. He is popular in the courts and with the heads of the regime in which he lives. However, he knows in his heart that his music is really nothing, that it just delivers to these followers of his art what they want to hear to feel, namely that everything is right in their world. He is tormented by the memory of Etarre’s music, which he once heard, but now has lost. The courtly, “patriotic” music that he plays and sings makes the courtiers feel that their country is the best that has ever been, but Madoc feels that such nationalistic fervor is delusional, that one’s country is an “insignificant pimple in the pages of history” from a more enlightened perspective. Only Etarre’s music will satisfy the yearning that he feels for something deeper and stranger, and he pursues it relentlessly.
This short work of Cabell’s is really a fable, and, in addition to beautifully making poignant observations about depth in music, also illuminates aspects of romantic love. Indeed, this work is, I believe, part of a series of books he has written which he describes as “woman worship”. Ironically, in this very same story, he also makes some moving comments about death and human mortality.
Let me add here before moving on to other examples that I love Cabell’s elegant style which involves, somehow, the ability to use whimsical humor and irony to evoke feelings of wonder, and often to make observations about life. Only he and Lord Dunsany, in my experience, seemed to be able to do this.
Two other works come to mind that present a related idea to the above: H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zahn”, and a French film “Tous les Matins du Monde”.
In the Lovecraft work, a short story that has been realized in short films that can be found on Youtube, a rather troubled and impoverished student of metaphysics takes a room in a desolate and unchartered area of a city, and he so happens to be in a room immediately below a most odd musical genius, a fiddler, Erich Zahn. He cannot help but hear the strange unearthly music from his room, and, as with Madoc, the student is obsessed with the weird music of Zahn and aggressively pursues hearing it from closer quarters. Zahn himself turns out to be a wildly tortured old man, and seems to be driven by something not of this world. I will not give away more of the story here, but just note that Lovecraft admirably captures the itch that so many of us have for the romantically strange (a desire that pervades a great deal of Lovecraft’s fiction).
In the film mentioned above, the main character is a viola da gamba player and composer, an actual historical musician in the 16th century named St. Colombe, who writes and plays music that is dark, somber, brooding, etc. The young gambist that comes to him for lessons soon becomes seduced by the desire for facile fame and the pompous music of the courts. Perhaps the same kind of music that Madoc had to play---only the young student does not seem to hear the “skirling music that is a “doubtfulness and a discontent”. Even as the student begins to achieve renown, Colombe scolds him for “playing music for kings”, and at another time destroys the student’s instrument in disgust by bashing it against the hard floor. Painful, to be sure, for us musicians, but it makes the point.These three works of art thus have the common theme of showing how the deepest music is not usually the music that is popular, and often not the music that makes us simply “feel good and complacent”. There are many among us that yearn for the transcendent in music, even if it involves elements of tragedy. Of the three works mentioned here, for me, only the Cabell story is profoundly moving. But the other two, the Lovecraft short and the film, are memorable, capture truths about music, and provide a degree of validation for those of us who find ourselves defending our tastes for “darkness” in music and the arts in general.

On the short stories of Lord Dunsany

Many of the fantasy short stories of Lord Dunsany, written in the early 20th century, evoke a certain odd flavor, an atmosphere of magic, somehow child-like in perspective, but at the same time sophisticated and droll. He had the unusual ability to combine humor with seriousness. I always get the feeling that the humor is rather in the spirit of saying, with a wink to the comprehending reader, "You and I know this is serious, and full of wonder....but we need to act as if we mean it in fun, lest we embarrass ourselves to those who do not believe in, or understand, the wonderful tales of old". Something like that anyway. As I think Ursala K LeGuin has somewhere pointed out, Dunsany (along with James Branch Cabell), was able to use humor without undercutting the sense of wonder.
Dunsany almost never used dialogue in his stories, choosing instead his own characteristic way of paraphrasing what a character said or thought. Many have said that he was long on style, but short on plot, and this is probably true. But it is irrelevant to what we might find special in his works. He was really more of a poet. The vantage point is often that of the small child who maybe thinks that the world is flat, that rainbows are other-worldly, and that amazingly different beings and creatures of faery dwell just over the next hill, or over the horizon. Many realists will probably find his stories silly, but, according to LeGuin, Dunsany has a widespread appeal to scientists. Oddly, Dunsany was apparently fascinated by technology--in contrast to, say, Tolkein and Lewis who seemed to evince "Luddite"-like distrust of it.
Today, most people you meet do not seem to have even heard of Dunsany, even though a web search will turn up sites written by a great many enthusiasts. H. P. Lovecraft was an adorer of Dunsany's work, calling it "crystalline singing prose", and himself went through an early phase where he imitated the style. Arthur C. Clark considered the last pages of The Charwoman's Shadow as the most beautiful and sadly nostalgic ever written. Philosopher Martin Gardner is also a Dunsany lover, and titled one of his books after a Dunsany phrase, "The Night is Large and Full of Wonder".
Those who want an epic fantasy, such as Lord of the Rings, will probably want to look elsewhere. As will those, I think, who want deep and subtle characterization, for it is largely absent in Dunsany's fantasy work. By the way, Dunsay also wrote plays of a more realistic nature, which were rather more well known in the mid 20th century. For example, I recall that the main character in Sinclair Lewis's novel Main Street, a culturally ambitious woman named Carol, living in the small town of Gopher, Minnesota, organizes a production of one of Dunsany's plays.
He wrote two fantasy novels, The King of Elfland's Daughter, and The Charwoman's Shadow. Both contain some beautiful passages, but tend to be a bit hard to get into.
My favorites are his short stories. I especially love "The Last Journey of the King", "The Ebb and Flow", "The Sword of Welleran", "Blagdross", "The Kith of the Elf-folk", and "The Three Sailor's Gambit". This last one is a quite amusing chess tale (Dunsany was a chess master, one of the highest ranked in Ireland at the time, I believe), but also contains many poetical passages.
"The Last Journey of the King" is a heart breaker, and concerns an aging king inquiring of his bevy of wise men what awaits him in the after-life. They each have their own versions to tell him, and each tale is of astonishing and soul wrenching beauty. There is always a thread of cynicism toward worldly things running through Dunsany's stories, and "The Kith of the Elf-folk" contains a heady dose of it while remaining gloriously poetical. The central character is a small marsh elf who has a go at being human with a "soul", but decides to go back to its Elvin existence in the end. His cynicism toward worldly pursuits comes out in "Blagdross", where he makes the poignant observation that sometimes, upon "seeing gold", people grow larger in their bodies while shrinking in their soul. I think will few dispute that, but none can put it so marvelously.

Some thoughts on Tolkein's Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit

Notes on The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit (J. R. R. Tolkein):

This is perhaps the most extensive and vast fantasy ever created. It is certainly the most popular of all time. But its reputation is well deserved. Beautiful, but at the same time remote and sad. As C. S. Lewis said, “good beyond hope”.
Though Tolkein claimed he hated allegory, one could argue (at the risk of provoking his “ring rath”) that it is present in “loose” form. It seems to me to be a sort of Christian story, with the biblical pattern and fragments shuffled around in a kind of collage. At any rate, many Christian principles are evoked, at least seemingly so (to this agnostic). But it is certainly not strict allegory. Tolkein himself stresses its “applicability” to his world view, and criticized the critics for ignoring the theological aspects.
But all of this is really, in a sense, irrelevant. The work stands on its own. To read it, for a LOTR lover, is to seemingly leave this world and step into this unique one, Middle Earth, which to my mind is like no other. It also seems we are stepping into a real history, in the middle somewhere, and there is a sadness that is like nothing I have ever experienced in the elves, but at the same time it is passionately beautiful. A religion could be made out of the experience of reading this book, and I am not so sure that in a way it hasn’t.
There is coziness aplenty, and boy do I love that. There is at times a bitterness that never leaves my mouth--such as when Frodo encounters the creepy shadow king on Weathertop. And Moria contains some of the stuff of nightmares, even without the unbearable battle of Gandalf with the Balrog. And come on now--who can fail to think of the Christian Gospel’s account of Jesus’s resurrection when Gandalf reappears and at first the fellowship fails to recognize his “risen” body.
There is terror, there is implied violence, there is love of nature, love of a journey (especially by foot).
There are notable absences: there is no sex (except indirectly with Goldberry, who does excite my own fantasies of a different sort).
Some may be offended at the rather traditional treatment of women here--there are no warrior women, at least not until a fairly brief scene with E__ in the last book (where she dresses up like a man and slays a Nazgul).
Aragorn appears to be fashioned after King Arthur to some extent. The Hobbits remind me in some ways of the Hebrews, although I think Tolkein also considers himself, presumably of Nordic and/or Anglo-Saxon ancestry, to be akin to these folk.
The Hobbit and LOTR are quite different in tone and in scope, although people often assume, and arguably rightly, that the Hobbit is a sort of prelude to LOTR. Certainly the stories are linked, but The Hobbit seems like it is in the fairy tale tradition, whereas LOTR is epic.
Some friends of mine once quit reading the Hobbit about half way though claiming that it was depressing. I can actually understand that--the strange remoteness of it could easily create a feeling even in me akin to depression. The combination of humor (as when the dwarves show up at Bilbo’s home with Gandalf near the start) and tragedy come close to doing this for me. Similar to Dorothy finding herself among the “cute” munchkins in Oz, when she has been abandoned to the tornado by her Guardian aunt and uncle...
Critics who pick on flaws in Tolkein’s style miss the point. Maybe they are right as far as that goes. I am sure it could be argued he is stylistically imitative in places. But never mind. He takes us to a strange and strongly flavored world, eternally remote form this one while at the same time applicable to it, and no matter that his style is not the standard modern style (of Hemingway, or Henry Miller, or James Joyce.)