1 00:00:04,150 --> 00:00:07,930 [Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] Welcome to panel six. Our first speaker is doctor Grace Curry. 2 00:00:08,530 --> 00:00:14,200 Grace has just finished her doctorate and studies of J.R.R. Tolkien and his different iterations of The Silmarillion. 3 00:00:14,560 --> 00:00:20,230 And she's Oxford's very first doctoral, um, recipient who studied J.R.R. Tolkien. 4 00:00:20,590 --> 00:00:26,440 And today, I'll she'll be talking about the influence of Norse myth and sagas on the writings of, er, Edison. 5 00:00:26,440 --> 00:00:29,440 So you'll get Grace here, potentially. 6 00:00:34,420 --> 00:00:37,120 All right. Thank you everyone for coming to this talk. I hope you enjoy it. 7 00:00:43,490 --> 00:00:49,970 Africa Edison was born in Adelaide, Yorkshire, to solicitor Octavius Edison and his wife Helen Louisa Roper. 8 00:00:50,720 --> 00:00:56,510 As a fantasy author a decade older than his more widely read contemporaries J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, 9 00:00:56,960 --> 00:01:00,230 whose inklings meetings he once graced in the early 1940s. 10 00:01:00,620 --> 00:01:08,660 His writings were published early enough to influence the more famous duo of Oxford dons by the time Tolkien published The Hobbit in 1937. 11 00:01:08,990 --> 00:01:11,750 Edison had already put out two of his novels. 12 00:01:12,500 --> 00:01:20,870 As with Tolkien and Lewis Old Norse literature, the myths and heroic, often fantastic sagas of medieval Iceland influenced Edison's fiction. 13 00:01:25,870 --> 00:01:34,330 Edison began teaching himself Old Icelandic at Eton in the 1890s, as did Tolkien while at Birmingham's King Edward School almost two decades later. 14 00:01:35,330 --> 00:01:44,030 Edison continued learning Norse after he went up to Trinity College, Oxford to study classics, in which he achieved a second class degree in 1905. 15 00:01:44,570 --> 00:01:47,870 Tolkien also studied classics for the first two years of his degree, 16 00:01:48,080 --> 00:01:52,670 before switching to the English school, as part of which he studied Scandinavian philology. 17 00:01:53,540 --> 00:01:59,090 However, unlike Tolkien and Lewis, Edison's career would not be in academia but in the civil service. 18 00:01:59,750 --> 00:02:05,630 In 1906 he joined the Board of Trade, and in the same year he became a member of the Viking Club, 19 00:02:05,960 --> 00:02:10,400 later renamed as it remains today the Viking Society of Northern Research. 20 00:02:11,120 --> 00:02:16,640 While too old for military service in World War Two, Edison, like Tolkien, served as an air raid warden. 21 00:02:17,120 --> 00:02:22,040 However, he was not untouched by that conflict's tragedy, as his son in law was a casualty. 22 00:02:24,170 --> 00:02:31,670 Edison is most remembered for his heroic fantasy, starting with The Worm of Robberies, followed by the related Symbian trilogy, 23 00:02:31,670 --> 00:02:38,330 The Mistress of Mistresses, fish Dinner and Medicine, and the posthumously published and incomplete The Ascension Gate. 24 00:02:39,460 --> 00:02:47,470 Although Edison's oeuvre represents a pastiche of classical, medieval and Elizabethan influences, and more generally are markedly intertextual works, 25 00:02:47,680 --> 00:02:54,100 this talk will consider his amateur and Old Norse scholarship, which leaves its traces on his epic fantasy novels. 26 00:02:56,670 --> 00:03:01,680 Old Norse myths and sagas were enormously popular in the Victorian and Edwardian periods, 27 00:03:01,800 --> 00:03:06,060 and widely accessible through translations and adaptations in children's readers. 28 00:03:06,600 --> 00:03:11,670 Viking themed novels, which more or less closely emulated the medieval sagas, were all the rage. 29 00:03:12,210 --> 00:03:15,900 A noted example being each writer Haggard's Eric Bright Eyes. 30 00:03:16,740 --> 00:03:24,810 In one of his letters, Eddison recalls how he first took up Icelandic at 17 and what he describes as a saga madness. 31 00:03:26,910 --> 00:03:32,370 During the two year period of 1900 and 1901, Edison acquired a slew of translations, 32 00:03:32,370 --> 00:03:36,960 including George Webb Day Since The Story of Burns and Yarn from Brendan Dahl Saga, 33 00:03:37,500 --> 00:03:43,709 and also a 1900 reprint of William Morris Morris's and Erica magnusson, The Saga of Cadet Hair. 34 00:03:43,710 --> 00:03:50,550 The strong or gritty saga about the doomed anti-hero Gretta who fights trolls and the undead. 35 00:03:51,090 --> 00:03:59,040 He also owned many editions in the Norse original and language textbooks like Henry Sweet's Icelandic Primer and The Fusion, 36 00:03:59,040 --> 00:04:07,990 and York Powells Icelandic Prose Reader. A few years after the worm of a robberies, Edison published Steer Beyond the Strong, 37 00:04:08,410 --> 00:04:13,780 expanding on a figure from RBA saga which he read in William Morris's translation. 38 00:04:14,410 --> 00:04:19,270 Although not a professional academic, in 1930 his translation of Ail saga, 39 00:04:19,570 --> 00:04:24,370 only the second rendering of that work into English, was published with Cambridge University Press. 40 00:04:30,840 --> 00:04:36,240 It opens with a historical and literary introduction and ends with a terminal essay on translation. 41 00:04:36,690 --> 00:04:43,139 It is presented in relatively archaic English, with at least one more faithful rendering from the Old Norse, 42 00:04:43,140 --> 00:04:47,400 using the term bombers from the Old Norse plural wonder. 43 00:04:47,640 --> 00:04:56,790 For farmers, Edison corresponded with and received advice from several several notable North scholars like Bertha Phil Potts, 44 00:04:57,030 --> 00:05:06,990 mistress of Girton College, Cambridge, in his book Vikings and Victorians and Your One calls Edison a serious and imaginative Icelandic artist. 45 00:05:08,330 --> 00:05:16,190 All this material provided an imaginative wellspring, which became evident to other readers reading Edison's fiction in 1922. 46 00:05:16,220 --> 00:05:20,360 Each writer, Haggard wrote Edison, praising his work and recognising the saga. 47 00:05:20,360 --> 00:05:29,570 Influence. In The Worm of a robber. As C.S. Lewis wrote to Edison in 1942, using Elizabethan spelling and the Middle English word outdoor. 48 00:05:29,780 --> 00:05:33,920 In his witty TypeScript letter, in which he recognised in Edison's writing, 49 00:05:34,250 --> 00:05:41,750 the actors in whom I perceive you to be very well versed as William of Kelmscott, Snorri and Homer and Thomas Brown. 50 00:05:41,750 --> 00:05:46,010 Night scenery store Lucerne, a 13th century Icelandic chieftain, 51 00:05:46,010 --> 00:05:51,770 politician and orthography, compiled one of the two remaining sources of Norse mythology, 52 00:05:51,770 --> 00:05:58,850 the Prose Edda, while William of Kelmscott refers to William Morris, whose home was named Kelmscott Manor. 53 00:05:59,960 --> 00:06:03,620 Morris was a predecessor and literary inspiration who, like Edison, 54 00:06:03,620 --> 00:06:10,010 was also an amateur Norse scholar who translated sagas and wrote fantastic romances with northern elements. 55 00:06:10,670 --> 00:06:13,190 While not the predominant feature in Edison's fiction. 56 00:06:13,220 --> 00:06:18,890 Norse elements in his novels can range from decorative to more thematically significant instances. 57 00:06:20,570 --> 00:06:25,250 The worm of a robbery is the most commonly read of Edison's four fantasy novels. 58 00:06:25,760 --> 00:06:33,980 It starts in our world in the early 20th century in an article on Edison's translation of Ale Saga. 59 00:06:34,310 --> 00:06:44,240 Professor Matthew Townend compares the novels beginning to those of Norse sagas, following The Man That Our Hate x man called ex-Formula. 60 00:06:44,630 --> 00:06:49,010 Examples of which are found in Edison's to Saga translations. 61 00:06:51,980 --> 00:06:58,280 And so you see examples of that here. There was a man named Thorstein, man named Wolf man named blessing him. 62 00:06:59,230 --> 00:07:00,390 Lessing. Ham's house was. 63 00:07:00,400 --> 00:07:08,200 It has a special room in which he is met by a magical vehicle that travels through time and space and takes him to a fanciful rendering of Mercury, 64 00:07:08,560 --> 00:07:12,160 where he witnesses an ongoing war between the two super races. 65 00:07:12,160 --> 00:07:17,350 The warring demon demon lords of Lord Lords use brand up to ha and gold. 66 00:07:17,350 --> 00:07:25,570 Rebels go against the witch Lords of cars led by their sorcerer King Gorse, the 12th, and their allies. 67 00:07:27,290 --> 00:07:36,770 Edison's nomenclature, criticised by Tolkien as slipshod, is curiously childish, featuring realms like Pixie Land, Implant and Goblin land. 68 00:07:37,310 --> 00:07:41,130 The beings described can look more or less as what their names suggest. 69 00:07:41,150 --> 00:07:44,150 The demons have horns, but are otherwise human in appearance. 70 00:07:44,360 --> 00:07:51,050 The pixies of this world are not diminutive, and the pixie Lord love fairy seems like a figure from French medieval romance. 71 00:07:51,770 --> 00:07:56,510 The wider world depicted is like reading a Thomas Malory reimagining of Mercury, 72 00:07:56,810 --> 00:08:01,580 with a language and culture evocative of the Arthurian court dramas of England and France. 73 00:08:01,940 --> 00:08:06,980 Words like presences used in chapter eight, or reference to jousting in chapter nine, 74 00:08:07,250 --> 00:08:14,750 and aristocratic women like the Lady Mary Anne and later Lady Myra, all point to the strong influence of medieval chivalric literature. 75 00:08:15,320 --> 00:08:19,760 Yet the demon lords possessed dragons, war ships with dragon heads at the prow. 76 00:08:19,790 --> 00:08:24,079 I was told in chapter eight references made to fetches of the dead, 77 00:08:24,080 --> 00:08:30,410 a type of spirit from the Norse sagas, which in the novel are remarked to be streaming up from Erebus. 78 00:08:30,800 --> 00:08:37,610 The underworld of Greek myth shows Edison's interweaving of Norse and classical influences. 79 00:08:40,290 --> 00:08:45,870 This story pits the Demon Lords against the Witch Lords who sorcerer King Glorious 12. 80 00:08:46,080 --> 00:08:49,620 Perhaps influenced Tolkiens witch king, the lord of the Nazgul. 81 00:08:49,620 --> 00:08:50,760 In The Lord of the rings, 82 00:08:51,480 --> 00:09:00,240 King summons the terrible worm of a robber from the abyss to best his enemies a monster more generally symbolic of the cyclical nature of warfare, 83 00:09:00,360 --> 00:09:03,990 as at the end of the novel, when the demons have defeated the Lords of Witch Land, 84 00:09:04,140 --> 00:09:12,390 they cannot abide to live without conflict and are granted by the gods to reset time so they can fight their old foes all over again. 85 00:09:13,170 --> 00:09:18,930 Such a shocking conclusion is particularly striking in a work developed in the aftermath of the First World War, 86 00:09:19,350 --> 00:09:24,420 a conflict in which Edison was not a combatant, unlike his contemporaries Lewis and Tolkien. 87 00:09:25,320 --> 00:09:31,500 And yet it was oddly prescient about the future and the aftermath of what later, well, was later disproved. 88 00:09:31,500 --> 00:09:39,940 Concept of a war to end all wars. Some character names in the novel are of Norse derivation. 89 00:09:40,300 --> 00:09:46,030 King Earp of Ilion, one of the allies of the witches, is from the Norse part. 90 00:09:46,480 --> 00:09:51,880 The half brother of the heroes. Ham Theatre and Sorley and Ham the small from the Poetic Edda. 91 00:09:52,660 --> 00:09:56,979 The Goblin Lord Gro, the duplicitous villain and counsellor to teen chorus, 92 00:09:56,980 --> 00:10:02,590 is also Norse in origin, a variant of grow up, meaning to grow, the name of a sorceress. 93 00:10:02,590 --> 00:10:03,190 In stories. 94 00:10:03,190 --> 00:10:11,170 Prose Edda Lord grow assist the sorcerer King in summoning the worm of a robberies, and more generally in keeping with the sense of his name, 95 00:10:11,440 --> 00:10:16,690 can be said to grow mischief to one side or the other, and he changes sides a couple of times. 96 00:10:17,710 --> 00:10:25,450 In a 1957 letter, Tolkien saw the worm of a robber as being corrupted by an evil and indeed silly philosophy, 97 00:10:25,810 --> 00:10:31,360 and was concerned that Edison was coming to admire more and more arrogance and cruelty. 98 00:10:32,200 --> 00:10:38,110 Yet Tolkien praises Edison's work for its sheer literary merit while objecting to the characters. 99 00:10:38,530 --> 00:10:46,660 He makes an exception for Lord grow. Tolkien may have been intrigued by the particularly fitting use of the Norse name in the context of the novel, 100 00:10:47,110 --> 00:10:56,410 an exception to the slapshot nomenclature, he protested, as well as that figure's moral complexity of having treachery mixed with some conscience. 101 00:10:57,850 --> 00:11:05,770 And just to conclude, we're going to fittingly end with, um, the Norse apocalypse, uh, as referenced in the end of one of his novels. 102 00:11:06,610 --> 00:11:11,590 It is perhaps fitting to conclude with his borrowing of Ragnarök, the doom of the gods. 103 00:11:11,950 --> 00:11:20,349 The penultimate chapter of Edison's second novel, The Mistress of Mistresses, bears the title, and Thackeray then, or as he puts it, 104 00:11:20,350 --> 00:11:28,210 the wolf runs, borrowing the refrain from his spell in the Poetic Edda, referring to the lupine son of the trickster god Loki. 105 00:11:28,840 --> 00:11:36,100 In stories Prose Edda, it is told how Fenrir is bound by the gods in a vain attempt to prevent their destruction and the wolf's role in it, 106 00:11:36,400 --> 00:11:43,360 which includes the slaying of Odin, the leader of the gods, then we are only agrees to be bound if the god tier, 107 00:11:43,360 --> 00:11:46,870 shown here agrees to put his hand in the wolf's mouth as a pledge, 108 00:11:46,870 --> 00:11:56,110 so that if Fenrir is unable to loose himself from the final magical bond put on him by the gods or the Icier under the saint of testing his strength, 109 00:11:56,230 --> 00:11:59,680 he will bite off tears hand, which is what happens. 110 00:12:00,310 --> 00:12:05,799 The refrain and fleck in your hand is the latter portion in the latter portion of the Volo 111 00:12:05,800 --> 00:12:11,650 style tells of the terrifying liberation of Fenrir and the end of most of the Norse gods. 112 00:12:12,490 --> 00:12:20,770 Eddison uses this for the ending of his novel, with court intrigues in the MVA, a nearby realm to the realm of the demons, 113 00:12:21,640 --> 00:12:28,090 part of a wider cultural draw to the Norse apocalypse in the early and mid 20th century, 114 00:12:28,090 --> 00:12:31,930 which is something that I thought looked at in my thesis as a historical trend. 115 00:12:33,130 --> 00:12:41,080 Like others, Edison used more or less apparent borrowings from North Smith and sagas to help develop his invented worlds, 116 00:12:41,350 --> 00:12:45,940 but did so in a way that synthesised a variety of influences. 117 00:12:46,780 --> 00:12:54,339 So I just wanted to end by showing you a lovely, um, hand-drawn genealogy from the bubbly and where he, um, 118 00:12:54,340 --> 00:13:02,140 this is from an unpublished saga that's in the Bodleian, and he made a hand-drawn tree and, um, yes, a family tree. 119 00:13:02,440 --> 00:13:03,400 Thank you all for listening.