Monday 5 December 2016

Wild Wind And Wild Magic

"Clouds raced on a wild wind."
-copied from here.

"We of Faerie are of the wild magic...
"There are darker currents that run beneath the surface, like the wild wind storming across the heathland or the flash of lightning on a clear summer's night..."
-Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: Worlds' End (New York, 1994), p. 53.

Gaiman's narrator is the Ambassador of Queen Titania. This Queen, of course, appears in Poul Anderson's A Midsummer Tempest. The idea of "...wild magic..." is relevant to Anderson's Hrolf Kraki's Saga. See here.

And the prose in Gaiman's comic strip panels sounds Andersonian.

2 comments:

Jim Baerg said...

"This Queen, of course, appears in Poul Anderson's A Midsummer Tempest"
In a way she also is the title character of "Queen of Air and Darkness".

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Jim!

But the Queen seen in Anderson's poem is a very different, darker, and GRIMMER character than Titania.

Ad astra! Sean