The Broken Sword (31 page)

Incidentally, readers of Professor Tolkien will be amused and possibly even startled to discover in these pages a couple of their old friends from Middle-earth, the dwarves Durin-Anderson calls him “Dyrin”-and Dvalin. I hasten to reassure you that this does not imply that Anderson has “borrowed” from the Tolkien trilogy. That would be an impossibility in fact-unless Poul Anderson had access to a time machine-for when Anderson wrote The Broken Sword, the first volume of Lord of the Rings had yet to be printed, even in Great Britain. Indeed, The Broken Sword appeared in print almost simultaneously with that first volume, for The Fellowship of the Ring was published in Great Britain by George Alien and Unwin in 1954.

The explanation is simply that Anderson, being of Scandinavian ancestry and well-read in languages like Old Norse, drew upon many of the same sources that Tolkien himself used-such as the Icelandic sagas. As for Durin and Dvalin, Anderson probably got them from the same place Tolkien did, the famous “Catalogue of Dwarves” in the first book of The Elder Edda (Voluspo, stanzas 10-15, et seq.). At any rate, you will find in this novel many of the same imaginative elements that appear in The Lord of the Rings: trolls, dwarves, elves, dragons, and the “broken sword” itself, an old literary motif Tolkien revived in his handling of Aragorn’s great sword, Anduril.

Poul Anderson can thus be seen as one of that great Fellowship of fantasy writers whose imaginations have been thrilled and excited by “The Northern Thing”: a Fellowship which includes William Morris, E. R. Eddison, Fletcher Pratt, C. S. Lewis, and Tolkien himself.

As you will see once you have read this novel, Poul Anderson is very much at home in even so splendid a company.

Poul Anderson died from cancer in August 2001 at age 74.