Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood: A Critical Companion (Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon) 3031103734, 9783031103735

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PALGRAVE SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY: A NEW CANON

Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood A Critical Companion Paul Kincaid

Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon

Series Editors

Sean Guynes Michigan Publishing University of Michigan–Ann Arbor Ann Arbor, USA Keren Omry Department of English University of Haifa Haifa, Israel

Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon provides short introductions to key works of science fiction and fantasy (SFF) speaking to why a text, trilogy, or series matters to SFF as a genre as well as to readers, scholars, and fans. These books aim to serve as a go-to resource for thinking on specific texts and series and for prompting further inquiry. Each book will be less than 30,000 words and structured similarly to facilitate classroom use. Focusing specifically on literature, the books will also address film and TV adaptations of the texts as relevant. Beginning with background and context on the text’s place in the field, the author and how this text fits in their oeuvre, and the socio-historical reception of the text, the books will provide an understanding of how students, readers, and scholars can think dynamically about a given text. Each book will describe the major approaches to the text and how the critical engagements with the text have shaped SFF. Engaging with classic works as well as recent books that have been taken up by SFF fans and scholars, the goal of the series is not to be the arbiters of canonical importance, but to show how sustained critical analysis of these texts might bring about a new canon. In addition to their suitability for undergraduate courses, the books will appeal to fans of SFF.

Paul Kincaid

Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood A Critical Companion

Paul Kincaid Kent, UK

ISSN 2662-8562     ISSN 2662-8570 (electronic) Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon ISBN 978-3-031-10373-5    ISBN 978-3-031-10374-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10374-2 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This book is dedicated to the memory of Robert Holdstock.

Series Preface

The infinite worlds of science fiction and fantasy (SFF) dance along the borders between the possible and the impossible, the familiar and the strange, the immediate and the ever-approaching horizon. Speculative fiction in all its forms has been considered a genre, a medium, a mode, a practice, a compilation of themes or a web of assertions. With this in mind, Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon offers an expansive and dynamic approach to thinking SFF, destabilizing notions of the canon, so long associated with privilege, power, class, and hegemony. We take canon not as a singular and unchallenged authority but as shifting and thoughtful consensus among an always-growing collective of readers, scholars, and writers. The cultural practice and production of speculation has encompassed novels, stories, plays, games, music, comics, and other media, with a lineage dating back at least to the nineteenth-century precursors through to the most recent publications. Existing scholarship has considered some of these media extensively, often with particular focus on film and TV. It is for this reason that Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy will forgo the cinematic and televisual, aspiring to direct critical attention at the other nodes of SFF expression. Each volume in the series introduces, contextualizes, and analyzes a single work of SFF that ranges from the acknowledged “classic” to the should-be-classic, and asks two basic, but provocative questions: Why does this text matter to SFF? and Why does (or should) this text matter to SFF readers, scholars, and fans? Thus, the series joins into conversation both with scholars and students of the field to examine the parameters of SFF vii

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studies and the changing valences of fundamental categories like genre, medium, and canon. By emphasizing the critical approaches and major questions each text inspires, the series aims to offer “go-to” books for thinking about, writing on, and teaching major works of SFF. Haifa, Israel Ann Arbor, MI

Keren Omry Sean Guynes

Acknowledgements

Any book is essentially a collaborative exercise. I particularly want to thank Alison Syring Bassford and Paul March Russell, who both provided material that proved essential for the book I wanted to write. Christopher Evans, Catie Cary, and Allen Stroud read some or all of the work in progress, and their comments were invaluable. I am more than grateful for the fact that Robert Holdstock’s partner, Sarah Biggs, has been enthusiastically supportive of this project right from the start. And, of course, I thank my wife, Maureen Kincaid Speller, for correcting my worst errors and for keeping me going.

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Contents

1 Introduction: Into the Wood 1 2 War15 3 Time33 4 Myth49 5 Aftermath69 Bibliography81 Index87

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Into the Wood

Abstract  The novelette of “Mythago Wood” was published in 1981 and expanded into a novel in 1984. It is the only work to have received the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Award both for short fiction and for novel. This chapter examines the work in the context of Holdstock’s earlier fiction, in particular looking at the way ideas about the unreliability of time and the inescapable influence of the past developed as themes that would run through all of his work. These themes were most fully expressed in the novel Where Time Winds Blow and “Mythago Wood”, both of which appeared in 1981, in which more or less the same ideas were expressed in one case in the language of science fiction and in the other in the language of fantasy. It was the use of fantasy that made this a radically different and profoundly influential work. Keywords  Robert Holdstock • Mythago Wood • BSFA Award Where Time Winds Blow The September 1981 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF) featured a cover illustration by Barbara Berger which showed close-growing trees receding into mysterious darkness, but from their intertwined branches emerges the face of a young, red-headed woman. The picture illustrates the story that led off that issue of the magazine, a © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Kincaid, Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood, Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10374-2_1

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novelette by a 33-year-old British writer who had not previously been published in F&SF or indeed in any American magazine. But though there were far more prominent authors in that same issue of the magazine, including Jane Yolen, John Kessel, and Barry Malzberg, it was this novelette, “Mythago Wood” by Robert Holdstock, that attracted all the attention. Holdstock had been born in Hythe, Kent, in August 1948, and was studying Applied Zoology and Parasitology at Bangor University in North Wales at the time his first short story was published in New Worlds in 1968. That first story, “Pauper’s Plot”, described by Andrew Darlington as “a bleak expressionist exercise set among drone-like slave-workers in a vast factory” (Darlington 2020), in which the workers plot to kill their sadistic overseer but fail to deliver the fatal blow, was in keeping with the grim, alienated feel of New Wave fiction at the time. But it was a style Holdstock would quickly abandon. In 1970, Holdstock moved to London to do research in Medical Zoology, but in 1975 he became a full-time freelance writer. His first two novels, Eye Among the Blind (1976) and Earthwind (1977), were fairly conventional science fiction stories, though they both displayed an interest in time and in the mysteries of the past. These were followed, a year later, by a horror novel, Necromancer (1978), another novel in which the present is haunted by the past. The three novels, and the handful of stories that Holdstock published during this period, were respectfully received. When Garry Kilworth linked Necromancer with Earthwind in the way they directed the reader “down paths overhung with mysticism and undergrown with strange evocations” (Kilworth: 53), he was pointing out a persistent theme that many readers were already detecting in Holdstock’s work. After the heady days of the New Wave in the 1960s, the 1970s were a relatively quiet time in British science fiction. There were no regular venues for British short story writers, and as a consequence far fewer new writers emerged than in the previous decade. Holdstock, along with Kilworth and Ian Watson, was among the most prominent of these, but though, as Philip Stephensen-­ Payne said as early as 1978, Holdstock “is already asserting himself as a major figure in the field” (Stephensen-Payne: 22), there was still a sense of faint praise about the response. Holdstock was a writer to watch, but he hadn’t quite delivered what the audience was watching for. That changed in 1981, with the publication of his fourth novel, Where Time Winds Blow (1981), and, just a few months later, the appearance of the novelette, “Mythago Wood”. The two works together are a

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consummation of all the ideas about the variability of time and the immediacy of the past that he had been tentatively exploring in his fiction to that date. In both, time—sinuous, riverine, non-linear—is equated with identity that is fragile and under threat. In both, time has carved its own unique landscape (landscape, particularly woodland, was always an important element in Holdstock’s work). In both, as I wrote immediately after learning of Holdstock’s death, “a man with psychic scars from the past must plunge into time, not to heal the scars but to accept them” (Kincaid 2011a: 3). In both, to sum up, the central character must travel away from the familiarity of linear time where it is easy to think one knows oneself, and into a realm where time is disordered and disordering, where there is no comforting familiarity and hence where one’s self-knowledge is inevitably undermined. Laid out in such reductive terms, Where Time Winds Blow and “Mythago Wood” are essentially telling the same story. The difference is that Where Time Winds Blow employed the language of science fiction, a language in which time slips and other games with time are very familiar, as Holdstock himself had demonstrated in his two previous science fiction novels. It was, therefore, easy to overlook the novelty of the idea at the heart of the novel. Thus, although it was shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Award, and Andrew Darlington considers it “a remarkably powerful and mature novel” (Darlington 2020), other critics were far less generous. Michael Bishop, for instance, considered it “well-intentioned, methodical, and ultimately downright tiresome” (Bishop: 90), and concludes: “It tries to be all (or at least most) things to all (or at least most) sf readers, and Holdstock is not yet writer enough to pull off this formidable feat” (Bishop: 92). Within months, however, Holdstock demonstrated that he was indeed writer enough by putting much the same story into the language of fantasy. This was the radical departure that marked “Mythago Wood” out as something new and exciting in the fantastic. The structure of time commonly plays little or no part in the structure of fantasy: past and present are consistent, practically static. The idea that time might be layered, that the same myths might take radically different shapes, that the past might interpenetrate the present and the present might interpenetrate the past, has no part to play in stories of the rightful heir being restored and evil being defeated because it might suggest that such a restoration is temporary, that such a defeat will inevitably be overturned once more. In a sense, therefore, “Mythago Wood” remakes fantasy from the perspective of science fiction. For Carroll Brown, “Mythago Wood” is “a story of myth told

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in a scientific mode” (Brown: 159), while Brian Aldiss, with David Wingrove, concluded that the novel of Mythago Wood is “as much a novel of inner space as it is a fantasy” and thus that “the novel attains much of its power from its science fictional mode” (Aldiss: 566). Or as the Science Fiction Encyclopedia puts it: “Mythago Wood is Fantasy rather than sf only if it is inappropriate to think of the creation of a rational model for conceiving racial archetypes as a proper subject for sf” (Clute 2021). This spectacular departure from the expected norms of fantasy literature, in effect a reimagining of the whole fantasy landscape, immediately caught the attention of readers. The novelette would win a BSFA Award and was shortlisted for a World Fantasy Award. When the expansion of Mythago Wood (1984) came out as a novel three years later, it, too, would win a BSFA Award (the only time in the history of the award that such a double has been achieved) and would also win the World Fantasy Award. Since then, the novel has consistently been named as one of the best and most important works of fantasy from the twentieth century. And in 2012, the British Fantasy Society renamed their award for the year’s best fantasy novel, the Robert Holdstock Award. It seems almost redundant to try to spell out how significant, how transformative, this novel was in the history of fantasy. It opened up an entirely new way of writing fantasy while at the same time harking back to the earliest stories that had shaped human culture. As we will see, Mythago Wood defied the conventions that had grown up around fantasy. At its most basic, it tells the story of a quest, that most typical of fantasy tropes; yet there is no return from this quest, the land is not healed, the hero is not restored. Indeed, there is no true hero just as there is no villain. The narrator, Steven, is the protagonist but not the hero, just the person caught up in the story from this perspective. His older brother, Christian, seems to occupy the role of villain, but in a later volume in the sequence, Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn (1997), he is revealed from a different perspective to be a traumatized victim. Their father, George, is at first shown as an austere, unfeeling man, but when he is transformed into the monstrous Urscumug he becomes, in the end, more human. In a realm where time is so inconstant, so changeable, so is identity. Everyone who enters the Mythago Wood of the title is transformed utterly, and so everyone becomes both hero and villain of their own story, and neither. And the stories arrive at no conventional ending, nothing is settled forever, nothing is explained; one story peters out as a new story starts to take its place. Transformation is the whole nature and character of

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Mythago Wood; it is not just what happens within the story, it is what happens to the story itself. One of the ways in which Mythago Wood transforms fantasy is in the absence of a map. Not only is there no map in the book (unlike much fantasy of the period), but Ryhope Wood, the real-world appearance of what we know as Mythago Wood, is literally unmappable. When Steven visits Harry Keeton at the aerodrome, the map displayed on the wall has a blank space where Ryhope Wood should be. And the two attempts to map the wood within the novel, first by George and later by Harry’s overflight, both end in failure. Yet, except for a couple of brief scenes, the entire novel, which includes an epic and unending quest, takes place within a deliberately restricted territory. The Huxley family home is Oak Lodge on the Estate owned by the aristocratic Ryhope family in Herefordshire. Where in Herefordshire is open to question, since the only nearby village mentioned is Shadoxhurst, and there is no such place in the county. There is, however, a village called Shadoxhurst on the Weald of Kent roughly midway between Holdstock’s childhood home in Hythe and Westwell where his paternal grandparents lived. Even if his journeys between the two locations would not have taken him through the village of Shadoxhurst itself, he would have repeatedly seen signposts emblazoned with the eye-­ catching name. Since the millpond and woodland close to his grandparents’ home inspired his creation of Ryhope Wood, it seems likely that he simply used another local name to help cement the connection to his childhood. Given that the novel is set in 1947, the year before Holdstock was born, this is clearly a landscape of the past, a place out of time, even before the novel ventures into the storied realm of Ryhope Wood itself. As for Ryhope Wood, “the ancient forestlands beyond the house, the primary woodland of oak, ash, beech and the like, in whose dark interior … wild boar could still be heard” (14), it is already presented as a place from another time even before we are introduced to its stranger inhabitants. We are repeatedly told how small the wood is, just “three square miles of original, post-Ice Age forestland” (20), and “a stand of trees around which I could run in little more than an hour” (161); yet within that tiny compass, battles rage, bands of warriors roam, communities occupy their ancestral lands, and travellers from outside might journey for months or even years without reaching the heartwood. Because what shapes the wood is not geography but history, to penetrate Ryhope Wood is to journey through time rather than space, and it is a journey that transforms everyone who attempts to make it.

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Those who will make that journey in the course of the novel are the three members of the Huxley family. The name Huxley is carefully chosen by Holdstock because of its resonances. One might think of Aldous Huxley, since the dystopian nature of family life under the austere scientist George has a suggestion of Brave New World (1932), while entry into the liberating and transformative realm of Ryhope Wood might suggest a passage through The Doors of Perception (1954). But the stronger connection is to Aldous’s grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, popularly known as “Darwin’s Bulldog” for his strong advocacy of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. More telling, in this instance, is the fact that T.H. Huxley provides an indirect connection to H.G.  Wells, who was one of Huxley’s students at the Normal School of Science. Wells’s first novel, The Time Machine (1895), is a touchstone text not only for Mythago Wood, but for everything that Holdstock wrote. The final novel in the Mythago Wood sequence, Avilion (2009), includes several direct references to The Time Machine, including a copy of the novel being rescued from the remains of Oak Lodge, and the appearance within the wood of the Palace of Green Porcelain. The Huxley family in Mythago Wood consists of the father, George (George Huxley was the name of T.H. Huxley’s father), and his two sons, Christian and Steven. George is an amateur scientist (we learn nothing of his experiences during the Great War, or of his profession, if he has one) who is plugged in to the network of archaeologists, occultists, and folklorists that flourished during the 1930s, and who has become obsessed with researching the mythagos he has discovered in Ryhope Wood. From his letters and notebooks that are quoted extensively throughout the novel, we see that this obsession takes over his life during the 1930s and the years of the Second World War. So much so, indeed, that it alienates his two children and leads directly to the suicide of his wife. To an extent, George Huxley is based on a photograph of John Middleton Murry, the modernist critic, who was the father of Holdstock’s friend and mentor, John Middleton Murry Jr., who wrote as Richard Cowper. Over Cowper’s desk there was a “really brooding photograph” of his father who had rather heartlessly dismissed his son’s first novel, and “that’s what empowers George Huxley … who actually wants to love his children but is so obsessed with his own exploration of the wood that he cannot find the time, the simple time, to be a kind father” (Kincaid 2011b: 16). All of this is seen in retrospect; he is dead by the time the novel opens, but he remains an active presence throughout the novel in the persona of the Urscumug.

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This is the mythago that has been the focus of George’s research, the mythago that he has identified as “the most powerful because he is the primary” (35). But because the mythago is, at least in part, the creation of the human imagination, there is a sense of inevitability in the fact that, after his death, George is transformed into the Urscumug whose being he has so thoroughly imagined. As children, Christian and Steven, both suffering from the neglect and indifference of their father and traumatized by the suicide of their mother, are allies. They spend a lot of time together, making toy boats and sailing them on the nearby stream, the sticklebrook. But with the start of the Second World War, first Christian and then Steven go into the army. When they return from war, their relationship becomes fractured. This is the point at which the novel starts. There is a brief prologue which takes the form of a letter from George Huxley to Edward Wynne-­ Jones, the Oxford academic who provides technical help to George in his attempts to summon up mythagos. The letter waxes lyrical about some of the peculiarities he has discovered within Ryhope Wood, and relates, at length, what he considers “an early form of Guiwenneth’s tale” (10), before mentioning, in a casual aside, that his two sons are about to go and fight in the war. The original novelette is then incorporated wholesale as Part One of the novel. The changes between the two versions are relatively few and mostly subtle—in the novelette, Steven is called up in 1944, but in the novel it is more specifically May 1944—but they can be significant. For instance, in the first paragraph of the story, where Steven Huxley talks about ripping a page from his father’s diary, he says: “The fragment was dated simply ‘August 34’, and I read it many times, appalled at its incomprehensibility” (Holdstock 1982: 177). In the second paragraph of Part One of the novel this becomes: “The fragment was dated simply ‘August 34’, and I read it many times, dismayed by its incomprehensibility” (13). The difference between “appalled” and “dismayed” is subtle but significant in the way it speaks to Steven’s emotional response to his father’s work. Steven, the narrator, is wounded in the final stages of the war, and after the war ends, he stays on in France, partly to recuperate, but mostly to avoid his father. Yet even after he learns of his father’s death in November 1946, he delays for nearly a year before finally going back to England. This suggests that it is not just his father that is disturbing him. When he does eventually return home to Oak Lodge, we see that he is reluctant to enter his father’s study or to read any of his research papers; these are redolent

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not just of the man but of the mysteries of Ryhope Wood. Right from the start there is a sense of something disturbing about the place, something inexplicably fearsome that is pushing him away. Meanwhile, Christian had written to say that he has married a girl called Guiwenneth, but then his letters stop. Even before he has physically appeared in the story, Christian is associated with absence, and this sense continues throughout the novel: there is something lost about the man. It is this that finally prompts Steven to return home. When he does arrive back at Oak Lodge, however, Steven finds the house in disrepair; there is no sign of Guiwenneth, and not only does Christian make no mention of his new wife, but he has come to resemble their father in both appearance and temperament. Christian, as we will see, is turning into his father in more ways than one, a harbinger of the growing antagonism between the two brothers. As Steven puts it: “I had come home to England expecting to find a cheerful young couple, and instead had found a haunted, wasting brother living in the derelict shadow of our family home” (26). The presentiments that preceded Steven’s return have proved correct: there is wrongness here. In The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997), John Clute essayed a four-fold structure of fantasy: Wrongness, Thinning, Recognition, and Healing. By wrongness, he meant “a sense that the world as a whole has gone askew, that the story of things has been occluded”. Throughout the first part of the novel, signs of wrongness accumulate. Quite neatly, as we will see, Part Two presents the “fading away of beingness”, the “transformation of the land”, that Clute associates with thinning; while in Part Three, Steven’s entry into the wood is equated with recognition, in which “the protagonist finally gazes upon the shrivelled heart of the thinned world and sees what to do” (Clute & Grant: 339). To an extent, therefore, Mythago Wood seems to follow the consistent pattern of any conventional fantasy. But only to an extent: crucially, there is no fourth stage, no healing, no return. Or rather, the world cannot be healed because the world has been left behind and there is no way back; while what healing there is, is not the end of this story but rather the beginning of another story, a story which also cannot be ended. The wrongness of the world that greets Steven’s return home is marked by Christian’s absence, for no sooner has Christian welcomed Steven home than he declares that he must leave again: “For God’s sake, Chris, where are you going?” Steven asks. “‘Inwards’, was all he said” (26). But a more ominous absence is that of the bride, of Guiwenneth. There is no

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sign of her in the now-dilapidated Oak Lodge, and after Steven is visited by a strange figure that we later come to recognize as a mythago, he finds a shallow grave and the body of a woman buried face down. She had been killed by an arrow which bore “the same carved markings” (30) as one which had, years before, injured George and which is still displayed in his father’s study. The corpse is accompanied by “the almost intolerable smell of putrefaction” (30), which suggests that she is human although later we discover that she is made of very different stuff. Christian’s return from the wood marks the point at which we begin to get some context for the various references to mythagos and the mysteries of Ryhope Wood, mostly through Steven reading his father’s notebooks. How accurate George’s theories are is something that is never spelled out, but there are clues (see Chap. 4) which suggest it is not the whole story. George’s rather simple idea is that mythagos are generated from the collective unconscious, which would imply that all the mythagos that populate Ryhope Wood come originally from his imagination. Guiwenneth, we learn, is a Celtic princess that George conjured into being and then fell in love with. Christian has since encountered her in turn and has also fallen in love with her (see Chap. 2 for some of the Freudian undertones that run through the novel). He blames himself for her death, for carrying her wounded body away from the sustaining aura of the wood, though he never explains why he buried her so carelessly, or why he buried her face down, which might imply a fear that she would rise again from the ground. However, since she is a mythago, brought into being by an aura in the wood stimulated by the human collective unconscious, he believes that in time he will find another iteration of Guiwenneth, which is what drives him time and again back into the wood to search for her. This time, when Christian heads off yet again on his quest for Guiwenneth, Steven sets up camp in a glade close to the edge of the wood. He quickly finds himself feeling the same sort of addiction to the wood that both George and Christian have experienced before him: “I could not spend more than an hour at the house before becoming restless, an unease that could only be dispelled by returning to the glade” (47). Yet the wood resists him; when he tries to penetrate any further beyond the glade he finds himself mysteriously turned around and returning to his camp once more. Then, one day when he has been absent, he returns to find his camp has been trashed. He flees in panic, runs into Christian, and then the pair find themselves confronted by the Urscumug, a monstrous, man-shaped creature in whom they see their own father: “The Urscumug opened its

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mouth to roar, and my father seemed to leer at me” (52). This dramatic confrontation is the embodiment of the wrongness that is in the Huxley family more than it is in the world. The novelette and the first part of the novel both reach a climax with this revelation, but the novelette continues with a brief coda, the majority of which becomes the opening paragraphs of Part Two of the novel. However, the novelette ends with a short passage that does not recur in the novel: It is summer now. The trees are full-leaved, the forest at its most impenetrable. I stay in the house, out of range, although I’ve noticed that, at dusk especially, shapes and figures begin to cluster in my peripheral vision. The aura of the woodland has reached the front of the house. Only in the back room, among the books and specimens, can I find a temporary escape from the encroaching dark. (Holdstock 1982: 223)

In the novelette the woodland, and the mythic figures it contains, becomes a madness from which Steven must retreat; and, significantly, it is a retreat that takes him into the study that is most closely associated with his father. In the novel, it becomes a madness that he must embrace. This embrace of madness is the thinning in Clute’s schema, the discovery of the extent of wrongness and the scale of the transformation it has wrought in the world, and the way the characters begin to realize how much their own being has been affected by this wrongness. Central to Part Two of the novel are an absence and a presence. The absence is Christian, away once more in the wood undergoing his own unseen transformations until he eventually re-emerges to devastating effect. The presence is Guiwenneth. By some reckonings, she might be considered little more than a bit-part player in this drama, having been absent other than as a corpse throughout Part One, and being absent again throughout almost the entirety of Part Three; yet her presence in Part Two is key to any understanding of Mythago Wood. Holdstock has often had strong female characters as his protagonists, from Elspeth Mueller in Earthwind to Tallis Keeton in Lavondyss (1988), so Mythago Wood is something of an exception. Guiwenneth is not a character who initiates action; indeed, she has little in the way of initiative in her own right, but she is the cause for action. But then, despite the decomposing corpse that was our first sight of her, she is not human but a mythago, a being of wood and stone as she describes herself to Steven. As

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such, she is born from the male gaze, from the desires and imaginations of each of the Huxleys in turn, and indeed is a vivid representation of the conflicts between the three men. For George, although she is a warrior princess, she is relatively helpless because that is how he views women; for Christian, she is stronger, a more fiery figure, someone to be fought over; and for Steven, she is a delicate, modern beauty. Each of the men, inevitably, falls in love with their dream image, and in turn each man acts because of his desire. More tellingly, Guiwenneth is a product of the wood. Throughout the novel there are several variations on her origin story. Essentially, there are two sisters; the good sister gives birth but the bad sister steals the baby. The baby is rescued by some version of Peredur and the Jaguth, a precursor of the Wild Hunt or the Knights of the Round Table, but Peredur is killed. Guiwenneth is then raised by the Jaguth, while memorial stones to Peredur and his band are common features in the wood. Guiwenneth needs a ceremonial encounter between Steven and the Jaguth before she will go to bed with him. But the Jaguth are presented as birds, or wearing antlers and the skulls of deer: they are creatures of the forest and Guiwenneth is their child. Though the most significant, Guiwenneth is just one of the ways in which the wood reaches out to Steven during the course of Part Two. A boat from the river in the deepest part of the wood sails out onto the shallow stream that is the sticklebrook. Saplings spring up with unnatural speed to fill the space between Oak Lodge and the wood, eventually surrounding the house and even breaking through its walls at one point. These transformations of the land, in Clute’s terms, are overt signs of thinning: Christian has become an existential threat to the wood, and Steven is needed to end that threat. But Steven is not yet ready to enter the story being written for him. His way of escape is to retreat into his father’s study and to the notebooks full of his father’s research into the wood. I think we are meant to understand that George’s theories do not tell the true or at least the full story of Ryhope Wood, but at this stage this is all that Steven (and the reader) has access to. He undertakes his own research also, going through the archive of the Ryhope family; visiting the family of his father’s colleague, Edward Wynne-Jones, who has himself disappeared in unexplained circumstances; and employing Harry Keeton to attempt an aerial survey of the wood. None of these prove particularly successful.

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Keeton, the other major character in the novel, is, like Steven, an injured warrior. He was an RAF pilot who was badly burned when his plane was brought down over a wood in France that is suspiciously similar to Ryhope Wood. He will play an essential role as Steven’s companion when they venture into the wood in Part Three, but he has his own quest to fulfil, one that will take him outside the story of Mythago Wood (though it will prove central to the next novel in the sequence, Lavondyss). Although it is clear that throughout this part of the novel, as Paul Williams says, “the forest has been preparing the brothers for the story roles it has chosen for them” (Williams: 24), Steven is reluctant to accept that role until Christian re-emerges from the wood once more, older and more ferocious than ever, leading a band of ruffians who kidnap Guiwenneth and leave Steven and Harry for dead. After this, Steven has no choice but to step into the third and final part of the novel. Part Three is where Mythago Wood should conform to the third and fourth stages of Clute’s schema: Recognition and Healing (or, in some formulations, Return). The fact that it doesn’t do so points to how radical a revision of fantasy this novel is. There are different characterizations of this revision, but all recognize that it is the nature of Ryhope Wood itself that necessarily detaches us from the familiar structures of a fantasy novel. Paul Williams, as noted above, sees Ryhope Wood as “a place composed of story, and a quest within its borders means entering into story itself” (Williams: 22), while for Carroll Brown, Ryhope Wood is “more a psychic landscape than a physical one, [and] a journey inward is a journey into the inner space of a human being” (Brown: 160). But these are saying pretty much the same thing: the landscape of Ryhope Wood is the landscape of the mind, of the imagination. The first two parts of Mythago Wood tell a story about Steven Huxley; the third part tells how Steven Huxley becomes part of a story. The rules, the structures, the very air we breathe are therefore necessarily different. That this is a conscious change by Holdstock is indicated by the fact that the various chapters that make up Parts One and Two are numbered, but the chapters in Part Three are titled. When Steven and Harry enter Ryhope Wood they leave behind the chronological structure that has hitherto shaped the novel (see Chap. 3). By entering into the psychic landscape of story, Steven must abandon any hope of shaping his own story. Now he is within someone else’s story,

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and his actions are guided by what that new story needs, not by what he wants. Steven enters the wood for one purpose and one purpose only: to rescue Guiwenneth. But that is not the story the wood is telling. Along their convoluted journey, Steven and Harry keep being told fragments of a new myth, the story of the Outlander and the Kinsman who will oppose him and defeat him. This is the role for which Steven has been groomed, the role of the Kinsman who will protect the wood from the destructiveness of the Outlander, Christian, and perhaps symbolically preserve the old mythic Europe from the arrival of Christianity. It is notable that this story has no part for Harry, who must eventually leave Steven in order to pursue his own myth. More significantly, it has no part for Guiwenneth: she was simply the lure that the wood used to bring Steven into this story. When Steven challenges Sorthalan about this, Sorthalan hastily and clumsily adds the girl to the myth, but it carries no conviction. When the novel reaches its climax up against the wall of fire that encloses the heartwood, Lavondyss, Christian talks about entering Lavondyss to have his youth restored and going out the other side in order to return to the real world. But there is no real world for them to return to; they are both mythagos now, and mythagos cannot leave the wood. So there is recognition, of a sort, if only the recognition that the story of Part Three is not the story that Parts One and Two had prepared for. But there is no return, because there is nowhere to return to, and because the characters have been so radically transformed that there is no one to do the returning. There is healing, of a sort. Urscumug, rediscovering a fatherly affection for Steven, carries the newly dead Guiwenneth through the flames into Lavondyss, where she might be reborn. But that, as the very last line of the novel tells us, is part of a different story altogether, “a story for another time, and another people” (252). In the chapters that follow, I have examined this novel from three overlapping perspectives that I have christened “War”, “Time”, and “Myth”, though the chapters range rather wider than those narrow terms might suggest. There are, inevitably, echoes and repetitions from one chapter to the next, simply because there is so much going on in the novel that is open to multiple interpretations. But, in the end, I hope to suggest something of the originality, the importance, and the downright strangeness of this wonderful novel.

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Bibliography Fiction1 In the Valley of the Statues. 1982. London; Faber and Faber. Mythago Wood. 1984. London; Gollancz [MW]. Avilion. 2009. London; Gollancz [MW].

Secondary Sources2 Clute, John. 2021. “Robert P. Holdstock”. In The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, https://sf-­encyclopedia.com/entry/holdstock_robert_p (accessed, 14 February 2022). Darlington, Andrew. 2020. “Robert Holdstock: Blowing in the Time Winds”. In Miles Higher, https://andrewdarlington.blogspot.com/2020/10/robert-­ holdstock-­blowing-­in-­time-­winds.html?fbclid=IwAR25y8frAZztxIV5bk2sksez FcWkyoFS-­gHzr1wem404M0KsV_ZHR8DHUjQ (accessed, 12 February 2022). Kincaid, Paul. 2011a. “An Answer?”. In Into the Woods: Robert Holdstock Remembered. Warton, nr Tamworth: BSFA. 2–4. Kincaid, Paul. 2011b. “The Memory of Stories: Robert Holdstock Interviewed”. In Into the Woods: Robert Holdstock Remembered. Warton, nr Tamworth: BSFA. 9–19.

1  Works in the Mythago Wood sequence are indicated MW; works in the Merlin Codex are indicated MC. 2  In addition to the sources shown below, I have relied on The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition edited by John Clute and David Langford, https://sf-encyclopedia. com/; and also on the Official Robert Holdstock website, https://robertholdstock.com/.

CHAPTER 2

War

Abstract  This chapter examines the way Mythago Wood was inspired by experiences of Holdstock’s grandfather during the First World War. The novel is inextricably connected with war in other ways: it is set just after the Second World War (three of the central characters are veterans of that war and profoundly affected by it), and the mythagos emerge from the context of war at different times in human history (we see prehistoric warriors, Roman invaders, knights in armour, Civil War fighters, and First World War soldiers). But the conflict at the heart of the novel is the oedipal conflict involving the three members of the Huxley family, inspired by their very different conceptions of the mythago Guiwenneth. Keywords  First World War • Second World War • Warriors • Mythago • Freud • Oedipal Conflict When British and French troops climbed out of their trenches on July 1, 1916, they began a battle that would last for 141 days and which would be fought along a 25-mile front. The Battle of the Somme was one of the bloodiest and most devastating battles in military history. On the first day alone more than 19,000 British soldiers were killed, and when the battle finally ground to a halt in November allied armies had advanced barely 6 miles. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Kincaid, Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood, Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10374-2_2

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Just a week after the battle began, fighting in the northern part of the line became concentrated near the village of Longueval. Between 8 and 14 July, British troops repeatedly attacked a German salient at the heart of which was a stretch of untended woodland known as Trônes Wood. The attacks and counter-attacks on both sides were poorly co-ordinated, but the confusion was made worse by the disorienting character of the wood. On more than one occasion during the week-long battle, troops who reached the eastern fringe of the wood were convinced that they were on the northern edge. At one point a hundred or so men from a Kent regiment were trapped in the wood, pinned down by German machine gun fire which, as Holdstock wrote about it much later, “scatters trees/The rain falls, wooden/Nature, scoured by hate/Creating a fall of beauty in the face of fear” (Holdstock 2011: 7). Men from a West Sussex regiment were sent to extricate the trapped men, among them was Douglas Ells, who would become Holdstock’s maternal grandfather. Ells was blown up and buried by ill-directed artillery fire from the British side. Fortunately, one of his comrades, Alfred Dedman, dug him out and helped him back to the British lines. Holdstock would write about this event in a poem mistitled “Trone’s Wood”. (Inexplicably, the poem is not included in his posthumous collection with Garry Kilworth, Poems, Peoms & Other Atrocities (2013), but fortunately it appeared in the British Science Fiction Association’s memorial booklet, Into the Woods: Robert Holdstock Remembered (2011).) This poem, in which he writes of “a time when a wood in France was Hell” (Holdstock 2011: 5), was clearly not the first time he wrote about the wood. It is obvious that Trônes Wood, dense and unnavigable, with no clear path and yet crowded with danger, was an influence on Ryhope Wood and is perhaps also a direct model for the wood in which Harry Keeton found himself in France. The events at Trônes Wood gave Douglas Ells lasting nightmares, so that he “screamed for twenty years afterwards” (Kincaid 2011: 9), but it had a lasting effect on his life in other ways. In the poem, Holdstock is perhaps echoing his grandfather when he says of Dedman: “Where did the courage come from? There in the face of the force of death/From which most men would run” (Holdstock 2011: 8). I think that one of the things going on in Mythago Wood is an attempt to find an answer to that question. After the war, Ells visited the Dedman family home in Eastbourne to say thank you. (In his accounts of this visit, Holdstock never mentions Alfred Dedman himself, and the implication is that he had been killed later in the war.) It was on that visit that Ells met and fell in love with Mercy

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Dedman. There was a class difference between the middle-class Ells and the working-class Dedmans, with enough family disapproval for Douglas to hesitate. Mercy married someone else, but “within three days she left the other person, came back and they ran off” (Kincaid 2011: 17), a romantic story that was to have been the basis for Holdstock’s next novel after Avilion. Grandfather Ells told no one about his experiences in Trônes Wood except his daughter, who would in turn pass it on to Holdstock. But other than that, he was a great storyteller, who would “tell horrifying ghost stories, frightening the life out of me; not just with the stories, but with the spooky way he used his hands and facial expressions” (Nicholls: 100). With his “grotesque, gory and terrifying” (Cary: 5) stories, Douglas Ells would introduce his grandson to the world of story and, indirectly, to the haunting ghostwood that is Ryhope. But Ryhope Wood owes something to Holdstock’s other grandfather also. Grandfather Holdstock was the gardener at Lacton Manor at Westwell in Kent. At the back of his grandfather’s house there was a “tangled oak and ash woodland around the millpond [… and it was this which would …] form the core of Ryhope Wood” (Cary: 5). The original idea for Mythago Wood had been “a ghost story centred around my grandmother’s house in Kent” (Locus: 53), a work that would thus combine the influence of both grandfathers. While telling stories to frighten Holdstock and his younger brother, Grandfather Ells would often steal tales from writers like Sapper or the Brothers Grimm. It is tempting to think that one of the storytellers Holdstock was exposed to at that early age may have been Arthur Machen. In the early 1930s, while picnicking on the Sussex Downs, the composer John Ireland became aware of a group of children dancing silently in front of him wearing clothes that seemed to come from an earlier age. When he looked away for a moment, the children vanished. He wrote to Arthur Machen describing the incident, and Machen replied with a postcard that simply said: “So you’ve seen them too!” (Young: 99). The appearance of figures from the past associated with specific ancient landscapes was a common characteristic of Machen’s fiction and those who came after, which must have been an influence on Holdstock’s work. But for Holdstock the figures out of time are not peaceful children but rough men torn from the wartime experiences of his grandfather. The story that would marry the peaceful setting of one grandfather with the terror of another is transposed from the First World War to the

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immediate aftermath of the Second. There are various reasons for this (see, for instance, Chap. 4); among others, the war had shaken up the geography of England, “unsettling people and their objects, transforming landscapes, moving things to where they weren’t before” (Matless: 239). Yet here, in Ryhope Wood, there is a piece of landscape that had not been shaken up, that had indeed been in place for millennia. And yet, though the landscape is unchanged, what lies within it is unsettled, for all time is thrown into turmoil within the confines of a wood that can be circumnavigated on foot in just a few hours. Since all the mythagos emerge from war and invasion, the message is clearly that war itself is what throws the world into disarray. Both the characters whose journey we follow into Ryhope Wood, Steven Huxley and Harry Keeton, have been damaged by the war. Steven is wounded in the early months of 1945, and after the war he stays on in France, partly to recuperate but also to avoid returning home. Harry, meanwhile, was a pilot who was brought down over woodland in northern France (woodland that we learn is a duplicate of Ryhope Wood but also, perhaps, of Trônes Wood) and bears both physical and psychological scars as a result. Neither makes much of their wartime experience; they are not warriors in the manner of just about every other male character they encounter; Steven, having been called up in May 1944, “went reluctantly away to war” (13), and Harry is similarly reluctant to talk about what happened to him, yet both repeatedly show their military training as they set out on their journey into the wood. War has impacted both men, but it is not central to who they are. On the other hand, the Huxley’s are a family at war with itself, and that war shapes everything that occurs within Ryhope Wood. The open warfare between the three members of the Huxley family— Steven, his older brother Christian, and their father George—is laid out succinctly in the opening pages of the novel. The difference between Steven and George is summed up when Steven says of his father, “Everything he loved, [was] everything I hated” (13). It is this that persuades Steven to remain in France once the war has ended. Christian’s relationship with George is similarly antagonistic, as Christian reports, it was “[m]ore like open warfare. … He tried to kill me on several occasions” (17). From afar, through the letters he exchanges with Christian, Steven learns that George has become ever more distant since his wife, Steven’s mother, had committed suicide and had descended into “an hysterical madness that could be truly frightening”, which in turn meant that

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“Christian’s relationship with our father was deteriorating rapidly” (14). Yet when George dies, and Steven finally returns home, it becomes clear that the fear and anger that he felt towards his father has now been transferred to his brother. Christian, as well as having aged visibly, now “reminded me very much of father: the same distant, distracted look, the same hollow cheeks and deeply wrinkled face” (16). And it is not just in appearance that Christian seems to be turning into George, for he displays many of those same characteristics, notably the obsession with Ryhope Wood, that had led to Steven’s alienation in the first place, so that “my unease with Christian grew stronger by the minute. … I wanted desperately to touch his arm, to hug him, and I could hardly bear the knowledge that I was afraid to do so” (18). Like it or not, and Steven’s extended stay in France suggests someone eager to avoid conflict, each is at war with the other two. And not just in this realm. As George is translated into the Urscumug, Christian becomes the brutal war leader known as the Outlander, and Steven finds himself willy-nilly taking on the role of the Kinsman, their conflict is continued into the realm of the mythagos. Indeed, as we will see in Chap. 4, it is hard to tell whether their conflict is imposed upon the mythagos of Ryhope Wood, or whether the wood itself is the cause of conflict. Certainly, it is George’s obsession with the mythagos which leads to his growing alienation from his wife and children. And the wood provides the casus belli in the shape of the Celtic princess, Guiwenneth, who becomes the object of desire for all three of the Huxleys in turn. George’s interest in the mysteries of Ryhope Wood is academic at first. So far as Steven was aware, his work originally “had been concerned with mapping the woodland, and searching for evidence of old forest settlements” (19). But his discovery of the mythagos, and, in particular, his theorizing that they emerged from the collective unconscious by way of his own imagination, had changed that. When Guiwenneth enters the picture, both his creation and an embodiment of his own desire, his interest becomes an obsession. His wife, Jennifer, is aware of Guiwenneth though she does not understand the nature of the mythago. Andrew M. Butler has pointed out that “Guiwenneth, as a version of Gwyneth, derives from the same roots as Jennifer” (Butler: 4), and so to the extent that mythagos spring from the collective unconscious filtered through George’s imagination, we can see that he has created in Guiwenneth an idealized version of his own wife. Although Jungian influences are on the surface of the novel, there is a Freudian undercurrent that runs throughout the book, made

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explicit in the Oedipal conflict between George/Urscumug and his sons. So, the desire that both sons feel for Guiwenneth, the fact that both sons enter into a form of marriage with the mythago, takes on an Oedipal aspect as both sons in turn bed an avatar of their own mother. Jennifer, of course, sees nothing of this. There is a suggestion that George regards his research as something to be shared with male equals, Alfred Watkins and Edward Wynne-Jones, but within the house it is restricted to the very masculine environment of his study. The discoveries George is making about the existence and the nature of mythagos are not something to be shared with a mere woman. He is too excited at having discovered a mythago strong enough to enter his house to notice, or to think of doing anything to assuage Jennifer’s jealousy, grief, and anger. Therefore, all that Jennifer can assume is that Guiwenneth is a girl with whom George is having an affair, and this contributes to her decline and eventual suicide. She “died of heartbreak” (99), as Steven puts it, an event that affects the boys deeply, but George’s chilling indifference is what leads directly to his alienation from both Christian and Steven. This alienation runs deep. In the letter to Edward Wynne-Jones dated December 1941 that forms the prologue to the novel, George writes excitedly of his latest explorations of the wood, talking of places like “the outer ash vortex” and “the Stone Falls”, a people called “shamiga”, and recounting a pre-Celtic “fragment of what can only be Guiwenneth’s tale” (9). It is only at the end of all this that he dutifully and dully reports that “[m]y eldest son will be called up soon, and Steven soon after” but this is mostly of interest because it will give him “more freedom to explore the wood, and deal with the girl” (10) There is a war on that will soon swallow up both his sons, but it is of little interest; only the wood and Guiwenneth matter. In fact, it is of little interest to Holdstock also. We are told nothing of Christian’s experiences in the war, or, other than the fact of his being wounded, of Steven’s (we never learn in which action it happened). The war that matters in the novel is the war between the Huxleys, a war that is reflected in the mythagos. Mythagos emerge from “cultural interfaces” which form zones, bounded in space, of course, by the limits of the country, but bounded also in time, a few years, a decade or so, when the two cultures— that of the invaded and the invader—are in a highly anguished state. The mythagos grow from the power of hate, and fear. (38)

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Being set so soon after the Second World War, it is easy to assume that the invader spoken of refers to a foreign nation, but we can also see the invaders as being first George and then Christian and their unwelcome intrusion into the wood. Indeed Christian, in his mythago persona as the Outlander, is specifically spoken of as a threat to the whole world of Ryhope Wood. The hate and fear, therefore, that powers the growth of mythagos, is that constantly referred to in the battles between the three Huxleys that recur throughout the novel. And Guiwenneth is the focus of all of this. Even after he learns of the death of his father, Steven is reluctant to return home from France. Oak Lodge is forever tainted with the loss of his mother and the memory of his father, and he has no desire to return to that divisive atmosphere; but then Christian writes of “his unusual marriage” (15) to a girl called Guiwenneth, after which all letters cease. When Steven does eventually arrive back at Oak Lodge, he finds Guiwenneth absent and his brother much changed, becoming, as we have noted, more like his father. Whether there is any connection between this increasing resemblance to George and the fact of Christian’s “marriage” to a woman we might assume had become George’s lover (and is, perhaps, an avatar of George’s wife) is unclear. But Ryhope Wood itself certainly has a transformative effect, making Christian older, harder, and addicted. So much so that he finds it impossible to keep away from the wood; he has barely welcomed Steven home than he sets off again and is absent for weeks. It is during this time that Steven is visited by what he only later realizes is a mythago, a man bedaubed with mud and dressed in crude clothes. The mythago’s dog starts snuffling at a spot where Steven subsequently discovers the hastily buried body of a woman that he realizes must be Guiwenneth. She has been killed by a crude arrow, similar to one that, years before, had seriously injured his father. The Huxleys are under attack from the wood, though whether these incidents are offensive, or defensive, is not immediately clear. Although at this stage the brothers remain friendly and supportive of each other, the differences between them are starting to appear. Christian sets off into the wood alone, with little or no modern equipment or weaponry. But when Steven sets up camp in a glade close to the edge of the wood, he does so like a soldier well used to making do, fashioning a sleeping bag out of “old blankets and some tattered oilskins” (47). He starts to spend more and more time at the camp, and by the middle of the next month, “I could not spend more than an hour at the house before becoming restless, an unease that could only be dispelled by returning to the

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glade” (47). The wood is starting to become an addiction for him too, as it has been for both his father and his brother. But the wood remains impenetrable; the further he strays the more he finds himself inevitably turned around and approaching the same glade once more. Then, some two months after Christian left, and when Steven is starting to see shadowy figures in his peripheral vision, his camp is thoroughly destroyed while he is away one day. As he flees in panic, he encounters Christian, who has undergone another transformation: “He was muscular and hard, deep-chested and heavy-limbed. He was a man made for fighting” (51). Although the wood is beginning to have the same addictive effect on Steven that it previously did on George and Christian, the brothers are not responding in the same way. Christian goes eagerly into the wood, trapped “by something in my own mind as surely as if I were a mythago myself” (52), and is being transformed into a warrior; Steven remains wary of the wood and prefers flight to fight. While Christian embraces the wood, going boldly into it, dismissive of its dangers, Steven retreats to that portion of Oak Lodge furthest from the wood. Here his inescapable fascination with the wood manifests in him reading his father’s notebooks and searching through the estate records of the Ryhope family. Then, when he learns that aircraft from a nearby airfield are doing an aerial survey for the Ministry of Housing, he gets the idea of photographing the wood from the air, in this way replicating his father’s early engagement in mapping the wood. This is another expression of his modern military thinking. The practice of mapping archaeological sites using aerial photography had been introduced in the early 1920s by O.G.S.  Crawford who had served in the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War. Crawford’s view that the countryside was “a palimpsest, a document that has been written on and erased over and over again” (quoted, Matless: 115) seems to perfectly capture the character of Ryhope Wood. But the wood’s past has not been erased; it is an impossible space that includes all times at once and so proves resistant to such a modern technological solution. When Steven visits the local airfield to arrange such a flight, the first thing he notices is that the map of the local area does not mark the wood at all. It is an absence, something outside the understanding of the modern world. It is also something that bears an implicit threat. Both Steven and the pilot, Harry Keeton, associate flight with war and injury. Steven’s only previous flight had been “an evacuation flight … to the place … where I would recover from the bullet wound in my chest” (77). While

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Harry has hideous burn marks around his chin and left cheek, the result of his own wartime experience: “Last time I flew over a wood a sniper made the best shot of his life and brought me down. … [Consequently] … I’m nervous of woods, Mister Huxley” (75). But then, Keeton doesn’t imagine there are any snipers in this wood, and Steven ruefully recognizes that “I couldn’t guarantee such a thing” (75), though as we later come to understand, it was no sniper that brought Harry down, and those same defences are at play here. The flight takes place on a clear day, yet a dark cloud hangs over the wood, “an eerie darkness as if a storm were raging above the forest” (79). And when they try to fly over the wood, “Strange golden light streamed from wingtip and propellor [sic] blur, as if we flew through a rainbow. The plane was struck from the right, and pushed hard towards the edge of the forest, back towards open land. Around the cabin a ghostly, banshee-like wailing began” (79). This is the forest fighting back against the modern world, pushing out all those who might try to intrude. We see such efforts to repulse the outsider, the invader, getting gradually more violent. At first Steven is simply turned around by the confusion of the untended woodland, like the soldiers in Trônes Wood, always finding himself back where he started. Then his camp is destroyed while he is absent. Now a violent gale blows away the plane in which he is flying. And the very next day a mythago, who appeared like “a Royalist from the time of Cromwell” (82), fires a flintlock at Steven. The ball strikes Steven on the side of the head, knocking him into the millpond but not seriously injuring him. This single shot from within the wood is the equivalent of the arrow that wounded George and the one that killed Christian’s version of Guiwenneth, though it is notable that the musket fired at Steven represents rather more modern military technology than the weapons used to warn off his father and brother. It is also interesting that the two arrows seem to have been intended, at least partly, to separate George and Christian in turn from Guiwenneth, while the musket shot drives Steven into her arms, since she is the one who pulls him from the millpond. There is one small way in which modern technology seems to defeat the ancient wood: Harry is able to develop some photographs from their flight. These seem to show some structures within the wood, though without enough detail to be able to map the place. They also show “the winding tendrils of energy arising from across the great span of the woodland” (102), the force that pushed the plane away and which is enough for Harry to recall his own experiences in what he calls the ghostwood in

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France, experiences which were more extensive and more traumatic than had been revealed to this point. Further clues will emerge as Harry and Steven journey deeper into the wood, notably as Harry, in typically militaristic mode, obsessively counts his remaining bullets: “One of these belongs to the Huntsman. One is his, and he’ll destroy something precious if I should use it by mistake” (226). What is meant by this, who the Huntsman might be, is not made clear in this novel, though it will help to provide a starting point for Holdstock’s next venture into Ryhope Wood, Lavondyss. There is a brief interlude while Harry is showing his photographs to Steven. They hear a noise outside, and Harry promptly draws his “regular forces-issue Smith and Wesson” (104). These two men are not long out of the military, and it continues to inform the way they think and act. Yet at the same time there is wariness rather than aggression in Harry’s reaction, neither of them is yet the full-blooded warrior that the wood produces. Steven, at least, will have to acquire some of these characteristics if he is to succeed in his quest, and the trigger for that transition comes when a now-middle-aged Christian leads a band of warriors in a raid upon Oak Lodge. By this point, Guiwenneth is living with Steven at Oak Lodge. She had earlier introduced him to the Jaguth, the archetypal mythago warrior band. “Immense curved antlers grew from their heads; their faces were the hideous skulls of deer, through whose blind sockets very human eyes gleamed in the torchlight.” When they remove their masks “their faces were painted black, and beards were ragged or plaited, indistinguishable in the half-light from the dark furs and woollens with which they had encased their bodies” (126). The blessing of the Jaguth, with whose legend Guiwenneth is most closely associated, has served as a sort of marriage (which suggests that Christian’s “unusual marriage” was the result of another such encounter). But for Christian, every version of Guiwenneth is and must be his, and he comes to take her back. Steven, Guiwenneth, and Harry Keeton are enjoying a convivial evening when a band of “strange men-creatures” (144) emerge from the darkness. At first it seems that these are the Jaguth once more, for “there came the eerie tune of the Jaguth, played on the reedy pipes I had heard before” (144). But of course, the Jaguth are the model from which even this outlaw band is derived. What is evident from the brief, violent attack that follows is that the two representatives of the modern military are no match for the mythagos. Harry Keeton is brought down instantly with

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“[t]hree feet of wood shaft jutting from his body” (144), and it only takes a few moments longer for Steven to be subdued. Only Guiwenneth seems able to take on these warriors: “[S]he fought with a fury that astonished me … [and] … moved so fast that I became confused watching her” (145). Modern warfare is calculated, unemotional, and reliant on technology; it does not prepare one for the savage, high-speed onslaught of this type of fighting. And even Guiwenneth, brought up in this kind of fighting, is soon overwhelmed. Only when the fighting is all over does Christian reveal himself as the leader of the band, “an old man, war-worn and ragged” (146) who “looked uncannily as I remembered our father” (149). The way that Christian has taken on the hated and feared aspect of Steven’s father adds an overt Oedipal quality to this murderous outburst of sibling rivalry. It is fitting, therefore, that the confrontation is brought to an end by the arrival of the true and dreadful father figure, the Urscumug. Since the Urscumug is the primary, the very first mythic figure to emerge, and therefore the source from which all subsequent mythagos spring, he is a father figure twice over: the father of all mythagos and the mythic embodiment of George Huxley. No sooner does the Urscumug approach, therefore, than Christian flees back into the wood, taking Guiwenneth with him as his captive. Though he leaves orders for Steven to be killed, the Hawks, as Christian’s outlaw band is known, scatter in disarray after his departure, and both Steven and Harry survive. This is the point at which we recognize that the novel is asking the question that Holdstock asked of Alfred Dedman in his poem about Trônes Wood: where did the courage come from? Though they are the Second World War veterans, both Steven and Harry have been graphically shown to be inadequate when it comes to fighting the sort of war common within Ryhope Wood. Neither of them has either the physical strength or the mental agility to engage in the sort of war that the mythagos have been engaged in throughout their many lives. War is endemic within Ryhope Wood: the mythagos emerge from war and exist for no other reason than war. The hero figure, whatever hero might mean in this context, is a personification of the hate and fear of an invasion, and the cruelty of those invading. And yet, within days of the attack, when neither of them has fully recovered from their wounds, both Steven and Harry determine to go in pursuit of the Hawks and to rescue Guiwenneth. Steven’s motive, we might readily assume, is love for Guiwenneth, though in this he is no doubt buoyed up by the various people that he

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meets who all tell him that he is the hero in a new myth. He has a purpose that is vital to the survival of the wood. But why does Harry Keeton choose to go with him? Since, as Sorthalan announces, only the Kin can kill the Outlander, Harry’s role is at best supportive. As Keeton muses, he will be the “companion, the stigmatized Kee, or Kitten, or however the name gets changed” (224), and in the end what will happen to “the Kinsman’s friend? What has legend told of faithful Kitten?” (225). He has his own quest, one that involves unexplained figures that he refers to as the Avatar and the Huntsman, a quest that was begun in the echo of Trônes Wood in France, and that has no part to play in this novel or in the legends he hears along the way. But his reason for being here seems to come down to loyalty, to friendship, a sense that this is the right thing to do and therefore there is no alternative. And one feels that for Holdstock this is the only reason why Dedman did what he did: as brothers in arms, Steven and Harry, Ells and Dedman, must be able to rely on each other, or there is no point. Their preparations for their expedition into Ryhope Wood are expressive of their own military experience. Harry arrives heavily armed, carrying a Lee-Enfield, “a heavy rifle, as I knew from experience” (160). But this is only days after he took a spear to the chest. Even if he was fortunate to avoid damage to the lungs, the wound has not fully healed, and he would not be capable of carrying such a heavy load. In the end he takes only a pistol. Yet the rest of the equipment they take is informed by what a modern army might advise for an infantryman such as Steven. They end up carrying only what they consider essential: food for a week, lightweight tent, change of clothing, and “[b]randy, medicinal alcohol, plasters, antiseptic cream, antifungal ointment, bandages: all of these seemed of the highest importance” (160). There is no suggestion that they use any of this, other than the tent; it is an encumbrance when they are in pursuit of men who are used to travelling light. Certainly, living off the land is not an option that seems to have occurred to either man, and before they have penetrated far into the wood Harry is complaining in his diary: “Shoulder very troublesome, but have opted for ‘hero’s’ way out, and shall not mention it” (162). Steven, at least, seems to be prepared to take on the wood on its own terms, recognizing that “the man we’re going in to find is primitive. He has opted for sword and spear and I intend to challenge him in the same fashion” (160). But then, Steven is already beginning his own transformation into a mythago.

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As we will see throughout this study, Mythago Wood subverts many of the clichés of the familiar heroic or quest fantasy. But the expedition into Ryhope Wood tends to follow a familiar pattern: a series of encounters, each of which reveals a little bit more to our protagonists until they are prepared for the final climactic battle. These encounters have a distinctive warlike sense about them, in keeping with the origin story of the mythagos. Thus, when Steven and Harry reach the fairytale castle, they are charged, without warning, by a knight in armour and only saved by a musket shot from the cavalier who had once shot at Steven. Indeed, this isn’t the only occasion on which the forces once used to keep Steven out of the wood are now employed to protect him, and thus aid him on his quest to defeat a man who is regarded as a predator on the wood itself. Even when the figures encountered are not themselves warlike, as with the Scandinavian charcoal burners, “their original legend must surely have included some elements of warriorhood” (226). There are some encounters with mythagos who seem distinctly peaceful, the Saxon family carrying the mummified hand of Aelfric, or the tribe known as the shamiga, for instance. But from these encounters, Steven learns the evolving story of the Outsider and the Kinsman, and thus hears the new legend of which he and Christian are a part. These mythagos also point him in the direction he needs to follow in order to fulfil his role in the story. Steven, of course, doubts his ability to live up to this legend, but when Harry asks why he is following Christian, he replies, simply, “To kill him and release Guiwenneth”, to which: “Keeton laughed. ‘I think that might do the trick’” (195). The most significant of these encounters begins when Steven and Harry come to a river crossing and are attacked by the Hawks. They are, as before, totally outclassed: “[W]hen it came down to it we were totally vulnerable, not even a 0.38 calibre pistol serving us well against the simple skills of trained soldiers” (203). But just as Steven and Harry seem helpless before the onslaught, there is an intervention by a mysterious force known as the freya: “The air became dark, all light draining from the riverside as if a sudden thunderous black cloud had come across the sun. … Something misty and wraithlike curled around the leading Hawk” (203). The freya manifest as “tall, wraithlike forms … tenuous mist-shapes, vaguely human” accompanied by “[s]trange laughter, and the banshee shrieking of violent mind-forms, [that] cut this part of the woodland off from all that was

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natural” (204). This is exactly the primal force that had so violently ejected Harry’s plane from the woodland, now returned to protect Steven. The freya prepare the way for another reappearance: the ancient boat that Steven had once seen sail out of Ryhope Wood on a stream far too shallow to accommodate it, now sails onto the river. The man sailing it declares himself to be Sorthalan, the first boatman, and wears a bronze helmet depicting “scenes of hunting and war” (207) that tell the story of Sorthalan’s life. Sorthalan’s role here is to complete, and thus confirm, what we have been hearing throughout this journey, that Steven is expected, that his story is known, that his fate has been spelled out; to become a myth is to enter a determinist universe. “The legend is clear” (212) as Sorthalan announces; only the Kin can kill the Outlander. Just as Christian has made himself a mythago, a legendary figure, so Steven automatically becomes a part of the legend as the one who will go up against Christian, “the bright side of the alien” (213). In order to communicate with Steven, Sorthalan summons a mythago of his own that completes the link back to Holdstock’s grandfather. Sorthalan’s mythago is a warrior of a different era, Billy “Spud” Frampton, a British soldier from the First World War. In appearance, Frampton is identical to Harry Keeton, but Keeton was at school with Spud Frampton, and “this isn’t him. He was fat and dark” (210). Frampton’s legend is a story that had been popular among the troops in the trenches. He went by many names, Shellhole Sam or Hellfire Harry, and he would “slip down into your shell hole, in the mist, where you were crouched, utterly buggered, utterly lost, and would somehow get you home. … He got one group of lost soldiers from the Somme in France right back to their croft in the Scottish Isles” (210). This is typical of the sort of ghost story that Douglas Ells would tell to his young grandchild, and indeed it was so fixed in Holdstock’s mind that he returned to it over 20 years later in the poem “Trench Ghost” which is published under the heading: “From COURAGE AND CLAY Echoes of my grandfather’s life” (Holdstock and Kilworth 2013: 16). In this poem the ghostly saviour is significantly called “Billy”, and the poem makes explicit, as the novel does not, that the returning soldier is dead, the bed awaiting him at home is “made of oak” with “Brass handles” but no candles because “[t]here will be enough candles in the church” (Holdstock and Kilworth 2013: 20). There are echoes of this story also in another poem, “Crater Encounter”, in which a ghostly

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woman brings a cup of tea to a soldier in a shell hole. There may be an echo of it also in the last chapter of his last novel, Avilion, in which a dead person is welcomed home. In an interview with Holdstock once I said that Mythago Wood seemed to relate more to the First World War than the Second (Kincaid 2011: 10), and this is why: the emotional connection to the trenches through Spud Frampton is more vivid than the more distanced connection to the Second World War through Steven and Harry. Even as a mythago, however, Frampton is out of place in Ryhope Wood. He belongs to a world very different from the wild creatures of the wild wood. “This ain’t right”, he complains, “This whole place. I think I’m dreaming. I can’t hear gunfire” (218). And the next morning he takes Harry’s pistol, a weapon with which he would have been familiar, and kills himself. Steven’s reaction illustrates the ambiguity of the status of mythagos: he felt “irrationally angry with Sorthalan, who seemed to me to have created a human being simply to be used and expended” except that Frampton was “no more real than the ghosts which hovered in the foliage around our camp” (219). And, of course, Frampton was a personification of a war in which too many men were considered expendable. In a way, Steven’s anger at Sorthalan is an expression of Holdstock’s anger at what happened to his grandfather. After the meeting with Sorthalan everything is in place for the final confrontation. But that confrontation must consist of the Kinsman facing up to the Outsider all alone, as the legend states. So Harry becomes aware that “the time of parting was coming” (228). After playing the sidekick for so long, he now senses his own legend, which will complete the story he began in the wood in France. A spirit of that French wood had burned Keeton in order to defend “[s]uch a beautiful place. … A place like heaven” but now he has come to believe that “What can burn can unburn” (233). So now he leaves with Magidion of the Jaguth, who knows of the city and of “the beast god that guards it” (233). Harry’s perception that what burns can unburn prefigures the climax of the novel, which takes place beside the eternal fire that marks the border of the heartwood, known as Lavondyss. This is “the unknown land, the beginning of the labyrinth. The place of mystery. The realm guarded not against Man but against Man’s curiosity” (246). It is the idea of heaven or utopia that Harry glimpsed, the beginning place where all is born again, and which W.A.  Senior equates with “the iconographical city in the

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medieval dream vision The Pearl … a city of light in a dark place” (Senior: 21). The dream is that, having penetrated the fire, all that is lost will be restored and time can be turned back, that, as Christian says, “the realm will let me shed those years, and the scars, and the pain, and the anger” (245). It is here, in the light of the fire, that Steven and Christian fight for the last time. It is an uneven struggle, of course. Christian has spent years learning to fight (he calculates he is “fourteen, fifteen years older than I would have been if I’d stayed at Oak Lodge” (244–45)) whereas Steven has acquired none of the skills of mythago fighters. But still he insists on fighting: “You’ve destroyed the realm”, he says, “We have to fight, Chris. You have to be killed” (245). Again, we recall the question Holdstock asked of Dedman: “Where did the courage come from?” And as with Harry, the answer seems to involve a cause, necessity, some purpose outside the self, because “so much depended on me, on my courage, on my resolve” (245). Christian can only treat this with scorn; he knows that courage and resolve would not be enough to enable Steven to defeat him in mortal combat. But then he acknowledges: “In a way you have killed me. … [Guiwenneth] loved you too much. It destroyed me” (245). So saying, Christian leaves Steven and heads into the fire where he hopes to be reborn. In a sudden access of brotherly affection, Steven throws after him the oak leaf amulet he had been given by Sorthalan long before, but the talisman knocks Christian over into the flame. “There was a long, piercing scream, then only the roar of the flames” (247). Steven, it would seem, has fulfilled his part in the legend twice over, first symbolically, then accidentally. But at the heart of this confrontation is a moment of peace, an end to the warfare within one section of the Huxley family. And there is a similar achievement of peace to come. Steven finds Guiwenneth, but she has been mortally wounded. But the Urscumug appears and carries Guiwenneth through the flames into Lavondyss, so that she might be reborn and come back to Steven. Like all things in the wood, the Urscumug had needed the Kinsman to protect them against the Outsider, and in that need Steven’s father “had rediscovered compassion” (251). Mythago Wood is a novel born out of war, and out of the horror of war, it is a novel in which war is what shapes and drives everything, but it is a novel in which peace and reconciliation is the only possible outcome.

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Bibliography Fiction1 Poems, Peoms, and Other Atrocities (with Garry Kilworth). 2013. Hornsea, UK; PS Publishing.

Secondary Sources2 Holdstock, Robert. 2011. “Trone’s Wood”. In Into the Woods: Robert Holdstock Remembered. Warton, nr Tamworth: BSFA. 5–8. Kincaid, Paul. 2011. “The Memory of Stories: Robert Holdstock Interviewed”. In Into the Woods: Robert Holdstock Remembered. Warton, nr Tamworth: BSFA. 9–19.

1  Works in the Mythago Wood sequence are indicated MW; works in the Merlin Codex are indicated MC. 2  In addition to the sources shown below, I have relied on The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition edited by John Clute and David Langford, https://sf-encyclopedia. com/; and also on the Official Robert Holdstock website, https://robertholdstock.com/.

CHAPTER 3

Time

Abstract  Time, as something fluid and inconsistent, is one constant feature in the fiction of Robert Holdstock, and this chapter considers how time shapes the landscape of Mythago Wood, and affects the way the characters understand what is going on. The irregularity of time within the wood is comparable to the nature of time in storytelling, which ties in with the notion that to enter the wood is to enter into the realm of story, a world from which there is no return to everyday normality. Keywords  Time • Walter Benjamin • Story • Mythotopes • Psychopomp In his last essay, “On the Concept of History” (1940), the German critic and philosopher, Walter Benjamin, talks of the angel of history looking always towards the past, so that “Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees a single catastrophe” (Benjamin: 392). In other words, we look backwards and see history as one thing leading to another, a sequence of causes and effects, but in truth the two cannot be distinguished. As Benjamin puts it: “[N]o state of affairs having causal significance is … historical” (Benjamin: 397). That is, we recognize an effect at the time, but a cause can only be identified, in Benjamin’s delightful term, “posthumously” (Benjamin: 397); we can identify a cause only after we have © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Kincaid, Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood, Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10374-2_3

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identified its subsequent effect. And that “cause” will itself be the effect of some prior event. Thus, to seek the origins of anything is to embark on an endless quest. We might, for instance, perceive that the origin of the Second World War lay in the Versailles Treaty, but that treaty was itself an effect of the war it ended, and that war was the effect of the network of European alliances which in turn was the effect of the disorder in the body politic generated by the ascendancy of Prussia and this in turn was the result of nineteenth-century imperial ambitions. Before long, we are seeking the origins of the Second World War at some point before the foundation of the Roman Empire, before the building of the pyramids, before the invention of agriculture. Or, in the case of Mythago Wood, we seem to find the origin of events in 1947 in the end of the Ice Age. In history, therefore, there are no causes, only effects. This was something that, perhaps subconsciously, Holdstock was exploring in his continual, almost obsessive, interest in time. In the Mythago Wood stories, as previously in Where Time Winds Blow and again subsequently in the three books of The Merlin Codex, he presented situations in which there could be no historical cause and effect. In these works, all times are present, effectively nullifying chronology, and without chronology there can be no causality. As Benjamin put it, “[T]ime must be brought to a standstill” (Benjamin: 403). To climb down into the canyon on VanderZande’s World in Where Time Winds Blow, to follow the inevitably winding pathways of Ryhope Wood, to sail the subterranean passageways of Celtika, is to step into a maelstrom of time, where all times are present without the structure that our conceptions of cause and effect impose upon it. When we encounter endless generations of the same mythic idea in Ryhope Wood, we are seeing so many effects jumbled together with no distinguishable causes. Time is, in a sense, the only continuing character in Holdstock’s work, yet it is never consistent. Even within any one novel it changes, deceives, and shapes the characters who explore it while being itself shaped by those characters. I began one essay about his work: “Later, time would flow so sinuously that it affected the very landscape through which it passed, changing the ecology along its banks, leaving behind curious abandoned ox-bow lakes” (Kincaid 2009: 167). But that ecology, that riverbank that provides a vantage point from which to observe the passing time, from where we might note how it swirls and retreats, how it lingers and speeds up, how it changes direction and seems to flow backwards, also affects the river of time. Chronology is the way we put a shape upon time with one particular sequence of cause and effect in order to fit it into a readily

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identifiable story. But to step into Ryhope Wood, for example, means abandoning one standard chronological sequence. Rather, anyone who enters Ryhope Wood enters all time, time that is invented anew by each new arrival, time from which ideas of before and after have been removed so that anything may happen in any order. In that spirit, it is worth taking a brief look at the role time played in the works preceding Mythago Wood, developing the character that would eventually take over Ryhope Wood. Holdstock’s first novel, Eye Among the Blind, was a straightforward science fiction adventure set on a planet called Ree’hdworld. From the start there is a dislocation in time as the protagonist, Zeitman (a name which incorporates the German word for time), returns to the planet after an absence of several years. There he discovers that time is oddly out of joint. The primitive but intelligent Ree’hd are attacking the small human “installation” that they have accepted for over 700  years; the semi-intelligent Rundii seem to be suddenly acquiring intelligence; ghosts of the supposedly mythical race of Pianhmar start appearing; and the secret to understanding all of this lies with a blind man who can see everything, who can appear and disappear at will, and who should have been dead for 700 years. This sense of the mythical made physical and the past being alive in the present, though rather crudely handled, feels like a trial run for some of the devices that would be more fully explored in Mythago Wood. In an interview with Geoff Rippington, Holdstock talked of having taken six months off from writing his second novel, Earthwind, to research the Megalith Builders of Neolithic Ireland and admits “I’m most comfortable, now, when I cast my imagination back to the landscapes of Celtic Britain and Ireland, and indeed even further, back before the Neolithic period in these islands. … I find significance there, among those imagined peoples” (Rippington: 23). Earthwind is, like the near-contemporary short story, “Earth and Stone” (1980), infused with the idea of the ancient ritual landscape associated with the Megalith Builders. In the novel, for instance, colonists on the planet Aeran have undergone an inexplicable cultural degeneration so that their society now resembles a prehistoric Irish society. Culture on Aeron is focussed upon carvings on stone megaliths, in particular the Neolithic symbol of the triple spiral. As Holdstock explained to Stan Nicholls: “I wondered if there was something archetypal about it, if there was something about it we recognise because it is more ancient than language”. As we see in Mythago Wood, there is a distinctly Jungian element in this, he was playing “with patterns that we hold in the

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cerebral cortex” (Nicholls: 103), and the image of the Neolithic megalith upon which memory is carved recurs in Mythago Wood when Steven and Harry, at the start of their journey, happen upon a large stone upon which someone had carved “the face of a wolf against a diamond background” (165). Nearby are ten more such stones, beneath one of which they find the body of a Bronze-Age warrior: the Jaguth, the Round Table, and the Wild Hunt are memorialized here. That immersion in an ancient past that is always present, that sense of it being inherent in the way our modern thought patterns work, would shape everything he wrote subsequently, being particularly inescapable in Mythago Wood and its sequels. But the most original idea in that second novel was the titular “earthwind”, as a result of which time does not flow as it does elsewhere, but rather “its behaviour is oscillatory. It fluctuates cyclically about the normal time flow” (Holdstock 1977: 160). In the novel, this disordering of time results in the steady erosion of memory, and in oracles that give absolutely accurate predictions, but it remains an exquisite science fictional device whose implications have barely begun to be explored. The freeing of time from strict chronological progression, the idea that time is a wild and uncontrolled landscape in its own right, would start to be more fully realized in his next science fiction novel, Where Time Winds Blow. It is with Where Time Winds Blow that “a non-standard timestream begins to weave its way into the architecture of the novel” (Kincaid 2009: 168). By the time he wrote Where Time Winds Blow, Holdstock was already at work on what would become the original novelette of “Mythago Wood” and the two works share this temporal complexity, although one expresses it in science fictional terms and the other in fantastic terms. In both works, time is not out there, a neutral dimension with a consistent shape that forms a landscape to be explored, but rather it is within the observer, something intimate, “something that interacts, that changes and is changed by the people it encounters” (Kincaid 2009: 169). The “earthwind” of the earlier novel has been transmuted in Where Time Winds Blow into an intermittent wind that blows through the canyons of VanderZande’s World, stripping away anything that is in its path and depositing in its wake the detritus of other times, maybe past, maybe future. The only way the human observers who gather above the canyons to observe these effects and, occasionally, riskily, venture down to gather what the winds have brought, can mentally withstand these events is by imposing their own rituals and sacrifices. To hold on to humanity it is necessary, as one of

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the characters says in the far future of Holdstock’s story, “A Small Event” (1977), to retain “that very valuable sense of the primitive” (Holdstock 1982: 59). All of these winds blowing through Holdstock’s earlier work, “the journey into the past, the quest for the primitive, the search for archetypes which give shape and understanding to who we are” (Kincaid 1993: 8), are all made concrete in Mythago Wood. Time, the disordered and disordering earthwind which blows between past and present, is revealed to be a psychological rather than an ontological reality, working its changes and being changed by the imagination, by the very human force of story. Although stories appear to have a chronology, ever since people first began to intone: “Once upon a time”, stories have been recognized as being cut off from time as we know it. Their internal chronologies can take any shape, begin anywhere, end anywhere, and follow a sequence that may seem logical or may seem random. Events within a story can repeat, echo each other, change sequence, come back to the beginning, or run backwards. The moment we enter a story we are outside normal quotidian time and, as in a dream, we are in all time. As Carl Jung said, within dream (which, in this instance, we can take to be the equivalent of story), “[T]he normal sense of time is lost” (Jung: 27). Thus, when Paul Williams says: “Ryhope Wood is a place composed of story, and a quest within its borders means entering into story itself” (Williams: 22), what he means is that to enter the wood is to enter the atemporal world that it represents. He goes on: “Once characters enter Ryhope Wood their stories conform to whatever structure the wood imposes” (Williams: 26), and that structure is the twisted, distorted time that this reinvented earthwind blows through the constricted landscape. This disordering of time within Ryhope Wood is made explicit from the very start. Steven Huxley himself is temporally adrift: having left home to join the army in May 1944, he had then refused to return home after the war ended, so as with Zeitman in Eye Among the Blind, when he does go back in 1947 there has been a gap in time within which the world has changed. The first and most obvious sign of that gap is the appearance of his brother Christian who seems to have lived through more than three years. Steven is shocked on first meeting his older brother to see how he “had aged incredibly, his hair quite streaked with grey, more noticeable for his having allowed it to grow long and untidy” (16). The disorder, that we associate immediately with the woodland, is in part physical, the hair grown long and untidy (particularly noticeable in men who have both

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recently left the army where a severely short haircut would have been the norm, and that would continue to be the common and expected model of male grooming for at least the next fifteen years). But what is even more noticeable is the ageing, which suggests a passage of time greater than the few years the brothers have been apart. Christian’s subsequent expeditions into the woodland will continue to have physical effects, changes in clothing, in physique, in behaviour. But it is always the way he ages at an abnormal rate that is the most notable, the most remarked upon side effect of entering Ryhope Wood. George Huxley records this time distortion as a scientifically observed fact about Ryhope Wood in his notebooks: “I have been more than five weeks in the deep woodland, but only a fortnight or so has passed at home”, a differential that he attempts to explain as “an effect of ‘relativity’” (157). Scientifically, of course, this explanation does not work. It would take a spatial dislocation immensely greater than three square miles of woodland could possibly afford to generate the sorts of relativistic effects predicted by Einstein’s theory. However, by the 1930s when George was writing, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity had passed from rarefied academic fields into more general public awareness. George’s reference to the theory, therefore, positions him within the intellectual currents of the day (something to be explored further in Chap. 4). And by calling on relativity, even if not fully understood, along with his use of the “frontal bridge” (60) invented by Edward Wynne-Jones, it shows him trying to find scientific rather than occult explanations for the phenomena he experiences within Ryhope Wood. At the same time as he was trying to enlist relativity to explain the wood, however, George was also noting phenomena that relativity could not cover. In particular, he wrote about the small stream that ran by the woods, known to the Huxleys as the sticklebrook: “[T]his tiny rivulet expands to full flood within two days’ journey inwards, I cannot imagine how the water balance is worked” (157). As he notes, there is no scientific explanation for how a waterway that is a small, shallow brook as it enters and “a wider shallower stream” (57) as it leaves the woodland, can become a wide, deep river whilst it is within the wood. But the distortions exhibited here, both temporal and geographical, point to what is perhaps the most vivid demonstration of the temporal anomaly in the book. One July day in the mid-1930s, when Steven is around nine years old, he and Christian make a model boat, which they name Voyager. It is crudely carved from a piece of fallen beech, and “I layered red paint on to the planking, and daubed our initials, one set on either side of the mast”

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(56). They launch the boat on the sticklebrook near where the stream enters the woodland, then race around the wood to where the brook emerges. But the boat does not re-emerge from the wood. It is not until six weeks later that they find the boat again. It was a wet summer, and in an attempt to explain this absence they imagine that the boat was grounded but had been freed when heavy rains raised the water level, though George’s discoveries, made at around the same time, suggest that no toy boat could have been grounded on that river. There is a curious echo of this incident later, when Christian has again disappeared into Ryhope Wood and mythagos seem to besiege Oak Lodge. Steven sees a boat “moving steadily along a stream far too small to contain its width” (65). The boat, too wide and with too deep a draft to possibly navigate the sticklebrook, is brightly painted with a single sail. The ship carries a man wearing a bronze helmet and metal armour who, before he disappears, tosses to Steven an oak leaf “fashioned out of silver” which bore “the shallowly inscribed letter C within the outline of a boar’s head” (66). The boatman, as we later discover, is Sorthalan, the first ferryman, who will be instrumental in conveying to Steven the message that Christian is a threat to the wood and Steven must stop him. Yet here he acts to carry a message from Christian to Steven. At this stage, Christian has clearly not completed his transformation into the destructive Outsider. But Sorthalan is, perhaps unknowingly, also bringing a weapon, for this silver oak leaf will, in the end, be what kills the Outsider; a doubling of purpose that is indicative of the way it is impossible to disentangle any straightforward sequence of cause and effect within the novel. There are enough differences of detail to show that Sorthalan’s boat is not a full-scale version of the toy Steven and Christian had sailed into the wood. Yet Christian’s message is as much in the means of conveyance as in the silver oak leaf itself: he knew the ship would resonate with Steven, recall their childhood together. How much Voyager is on Christian’s mind is shown at the end of the novel when he references the toy boat as a way of thinking about Lavondyss. And when Steven encounters Sorthalan’s boat once more, late in the novel, the carved figures at stern and prow send “shivers of recognition and horror through me, touching a part of my racial memory that I had long since suppressed” (206). The two boats, the toy from the mid-1930s and the full-size vessel from the late 1940s, are symbolic not only of the way that all times are present within the wood, but of the way that time distorts space. The impossibly long journey of the toy and the impossibility of Sorthalan’s boat sailing on the

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stricklebrook, taken together, demonstrate that Ryhope Wood cannot belong within George’s would-be scientific understanding. The primacy of Ryhope Wood is repeatedly emphasized. It is described as “the ancient forestlands beyond the house, the primary woodland of oak, ash, beech and the like, in whose dark interior … wild boar could still be heard” (14). And again, we are told that it consists of “untouched forest from a time when all the country was covered with deciduous forests of oak and ash and elder and rowan and hawthorn. … Three square miles of original, post-Ice Age forestland. Untouched, uninvaded for thousands of years” (20). Although Alfred Watkins, one of George’s correspondents, admits that “it is obvious that [no trees from prehistoric times] can now exist” (Watkins: 61), still, for George, they remain “ancient woodlands, primary woodlands” (39). The idea that this is a woodland that has stood, unaltered, since the ice retreated, puts the wood outside the normal sequence of historical time. And this temporal abnormality is apparent in every aspect of the wood. Thus, Steven establishes a camp just inside the fringes of the wood where he waits for Christian to return from one of his expeditions. This camp is trashed by unseen mythagos, forcing Steven to flee, but some time later he returns to the glade only to find everything gone, and the space crowded with oak saplings that were “too high by far to have grown in that space of a few months. … And winter months too!” (68). The wood is an independent entity that operates regardless of the seasons or the passage of time. As we will see in Chap. 4, the wood itself is an active participant in the events of this novel, perhaps more active than any of the human characters. Having reclaimed the glade, the woodland now reaches out to embrace the house, the grounds around the house becoming filled with saplings that formed a “pseudopod of woodland trying to drag the house itself into the aura of the main body” (70). This is symbolically consummated on the first night Guiwenneth sleeps in the house: “[N]ature advanced upon Oak Lodge in a frightening and dramatic way” (112) as the oak saplings that have surrounded the house now break through the walls and floor of George’s study so “the whole room rustled; it whispered” (113). Guiwenneth, as we shall see, is a creature of the wood, and in reaching out to enclose Oak Lodge the wood is simply providing the environment she needs to survive. And Guiwenneth is, therefore, as awry in time as the wood itself is, as Steven notes when she visits him and he feels: “[S]he stepped out of time, out of the years gone by, out of the previous life that

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had occupied this silent room” (90). The silent room, of course, is the one made noisy by the whispering of the wood that breaks into it. It is not just that Ryhope Wood is a confusion of all time, it is actively antagonistic to time as it is measured outside the wood. As Harry Keeton discovers when he and Steven set out on their expedition into the wood and he notices that his “watch is broken for no reason that I can fathom” (167). Their measurement of time does not apply within the wood. At this point, they have been travelling for some sixty hours, yet they are still only at the edge of “a stand of trees around which I could run in little more than an hour” (161). The wood disrupts both time and geography. Stefan Ekman has coined the term “mythotopes” for these disruptions of space and time within which the mythagos make their habitat. In Mythago Wood, Ekman argues, the woodlands “change depending on the nature of myths that take place there” (Ekman: 46). In the perimeter of the wood, for instance, the mythotopes are constant. That doesn’t mean unchanging; we have seen how quickly the glade in which Steven made his camp can be overgrown by the renewal of the forest, and, of course, the borders of the woodland can change as it reaches out to enclose Oak Lodge. But there is a glade to which Steven can reliably return, at least for a while. And the edge of the wood, other than the pseudopod that reaches towards Oak Lodge, seems to be well defined. The relationship between the woodland and the millpond doesn’t appear to change, and the remains of the fencing put up to enclose the wood in the eighteenth century can still be found. Moreover, the mythagos to be encountered within this part of the wood seem to be of a familiar type, such as the Twigling that Steven had seen when he was about eight, “a man in brown, leathery clothes, with a wide, gleaming belt around his waist, and a spiky, orange beard that reached to his chest: on his head he wore twigs, held to his crown by a leather band” (20). And since the arrows used, at different times, to injure George and to kill Guiwenneth, are the same, we might safely assume that they are fired by the same mythago. The constant mythotope is not part of the world of 1947, but it is open to it, and there is a certain amount of traffic both ways. However, when Steven makes several attempts to leave his camp and travel further into the wood he finds himself inexplicably turned around, so that, like a character out of Through the Looking Glass, whichever direction he started walking he always ends up back in the glade. This is presumably because, unwittingly, he has attempted to cross into another mythotope. The same sense of an internal border is revealed when Steven goes into the wood with

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Guiwenneth and tries to follow a path he had located on his father’s map that would take him further inward. Guiwenneth stops him with a warning of “Pergayal” (124) (the modern Welsh word for danger is Perygl). Going the wrong way into the wood (as she sees it) manifests in coldness, when she takes hold of him it is with “a cold little grasp”, but as they return to safety, towards the edge of the wood once more, “her hand in mine grew warm” (124). At this stage in the story Guiwenneth, the personification of Ryhope Wood, is preventing Steven from entering the secret places of the wood in a way that has a physical effect upon her own body. Ekman identifies several types of mythotope away from the common ground of the perimeter, including areas that are shared by multiple myths, and those areas that are specific to a particular myth. Sorthalan, for example, is tied to the river; the Saxon family are associated with the ruins of a Roman villa, and the shamiga guard river crossings and so are always to be found at such locations. On the other hand, the fairy tale castle, “a gloomy, overgrown fortress from the time of Knights, when chivalry had been more romantic than cruel” (186), is not just a setting for the knight who charges at Steven and Harry, but also for “the shadowy form of the cavalier who had shot at me by the mill-pond” (188), and whose shot now saves them from the knight. Each of these mythotopes represents a temporal as well as a geographic change: the misty Celtic and pre-Celtic past of the shamiga and Sorthalan, the post-Roman landscape of the Saxons, and the medieval and early modern world of the knight and the cavalier. The character of the wood changes according to the myths that belong there; thus when Steven and Harry move from a medieval wood to a more primitive forest, “it is a place of older myths and legends, something which can be inferred from the changes in the forest” (Ekman: 47). But though these seem to be regions delineated by the types of trees or the character of the structures encountered there, they are not closed off from one another. Steven and Harry move freely from one to another, without necessarily even noticing there has been a change; the difficulty of moving past the perimeter is not replicated here. Each of the mythagos encountered within this middle part of the wood seems to belong in their own particular mythotope, but there is nothing to say that they are tied to it. Sorthalan, as we have seen, has already sailed right out of the wood; while the Jaguth, the Wild Hunt of Peredur and his followers, are encountered by Steven in the perimeter of the wood though their monolithic gravestones are found close to the heartwood.

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Only the heartwood itself, variously known as Lavondyss or Avilion, is surrounded by a barrier designed to keep out intruders. Christian refers to it as “Tir-na-nOc … Avalon. Heaven. Call it what you like. It’s the unknown land, the beginning of the labyrinth. The place of mystery. The realm guarded not against Man but against Man’s curiosity” (246). But this is a physical and very visible barrier, a wall of fire. Since Lavondyss has already been equated with heaven, this recalls early Christian myths in which the dead would have their sins, or in this instance their curiosity, burned away before they are able to enter heaven. Ekman’s mythotopes are a convenient and perhaps useful shorthand for discussing the peculiar spatiotemporal geography of Ryhope Wood. But I am unconvinced that they are anything more than that. There are two internal borders within the wood, but they are of very different character and purpose. The wall of fire that encircles Lavondyss marks it out as a special place, a place that only the “elect” (to again call on Christian mythology) may penetrate. But the barrier that separates the outskirts of the wood from its inner landscapes is both immaterial and imprecise. It seems to be readily permeable to any of the wood’s denizens and serves merely to deter the casual interest of human explorers. Even so, any determined human can find their way inward to other parts of the wood, though at the cost of themselves becoming mythagos, as happens to all three of the Huxleys in turn. Thus, this first internal border does not so much mark the transition from one mythotope to another but rather serves as the way marker for a psychological transition, from human to mythago. As Williams puts it: “Crossing the threshold between the outer world and the haunted space of Ryhope Wood truly is a transitioning between worlds” (Williams: 26); but in order to make that transition, the person crossing that threshold has to become a different type of being. Marek Oziewicz even suggests that this transition is reflected in the very structure of the novel. In the first two parts the chapters are simply numbered, an orderly sequence that recounts, with the exception of a couple of brief forays into the perimeter of the wood, events within our chronological reality. But in Part Three, which transforms both Steven and Harry into mythagos as they journey deep into the wood, the orderly numbering is abandoned in favour of chapter titles, a response to the way the protagonists are “literally thrown into the sublime: they move in a reality in which time and space are preternaturally flexible” (Oziewicz: 85). It may be, of course, that the fiery border around Lavondyss is of the same type, that going through the fire requires a similarly radical remaking

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of one’s self. Given the fact that Mythago Wood itself remains silent on this since it never takes us into Lavondyss, and the subsequent incarnations of Ryhope Wood are never exactly the same, it is impossible to tell. But penetrating beyond the outer zone of Ryhope Wood seems to be a one-way street: by transitioning into mythagos, neither the Huxleys nor Harry Keeton are able to return to the outside world again. However, it is implied that George, in the figure of the Urscumug, does enter and return from Lavondyss, and in the process brings Guiwenneth back from the dead. In so far as there are three zones within Ryhope Wood, therefore, they are distinguished not by the nature of the myths that take place there, as by their function in creating and shaping the mythic figures in the first place. There is a strange sense of chronology in the arrangement of the mythotopes of Ryhope Wood. The heartwood, Lavondyss, is the most ancient part of the wood. Around this is arranged a sequence of zones in which both the types of trees and the character of the mythagos encountered there represent distinctly identifiable times. All of this is enclosed within the perimeter zone which serves as a transitional state between the mysteries of the wood and the realities of England in 1947. Such a chronological reading of the wood is perhaps encouraged by the sequence of encounters that Steven and Harry experience on their journey inwards: the medieval knight, the Saxon family, the prehistoric ferryman, a quest that seems to be leading backwards in time. Except, of course, that their first encounter is with the shamiga, a people who speak “the language of two thousand years before Christ” (175), and even before they enter the wood the mythagos encountered have followed no chronological order: the Cuchulainn figure, the Civil War cavalier, not to mention Guiwenneth, the Celtic princess. Not only does the novel avoid chronology whenever it is situated within the influence of Ryhope Wood, but in some ways it avoids any temporality. The myth that Steven finds himself fulfilling, the story of how the Kinsman fought the Outsider in order to preserve the wood, did not exist before Steven and Harry entered the wood. But the moment they did, the moment they crossed the barrier that required their translation into mythagos, the myth is known by everybody within the wood. There is no slow dissemination, it is instantaneous: within the realm of story, the creation of story itself lies outside of time. It is telling that the two main sources from which Steven learns his own myth—the naked twelve-year-old girl, Kushar, who is the “speaker of the life” (175) of the shamiga, and Sorthalan, the first boatman—are both

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associated with river crossings. Their role in escorting the traveller from one place to another across the boundary of the river is reflective of their more symbolic role as psychopomps. In mythological terms, the psychopomp is the ferryman who carries the soul into the realm of the dead, Charon upon the river Styx, or the three queens who bear Arthur to Avalon. To approach Lavondyss, or heaven, is to leave one’s mortal life behind. As Steven nears the fire he becomes unequivocally mythago when a shaman figure “marked my face with different ochres, and presented me with a small ivory figurine in the shape of a bear” (236). The bear is associated with Arthur, and also with the Urscumug, so this may serve to summon his father at the end, but certainly it marks the point at which the modern warrior has disappeared for good. Perhaps as significantly, as Steven enters a realm of ice and snow, he remarks off-handedly, “I nearly froze to death that night” (236). Steven will not enter heaven, but even to come this close entails a sort of death. In Jungian terms, the psychopomp mediates between the conscious and the unconscious realms. To this point, Steven had been an independent person driven as his conscience dictated. He had entered the wood on his own private quest to rescue Guiwenneth. But from the psychopomp he learns that he is part of a story, that his actions are dictated by what the story tells. Guiwenneth doesn’t even feature in Sorthalan’s telling of the tale. It is only as Steven persists in asking about her that Sorthalan suddenly and rather grudgingly finds a place for her: “I had not understood the presence of the girl. Now I do” (216). Both meanings of psychopomp are at play here: the two oversee the crossing of Steven from human to mythago, conveying him from the life of 1947 into a realm from which he can never return. And yet, having crossed that river of time, Steven had always been there within the realm of myth. The story of the Kinsman and the Outsider may not have existed before Steven entered the wood, but once he did, once he became part of the story, it had always existed. Chronology, time itself, is meaningless within the story. There is no beginning; in Walter Benjamin’s terms, there is no cause, only effect. Of course, there are two apparent origin stories in Mythago Wood, two apparent causes for subsequent effects: the origin of the mythagos and the origin of Mythago Wood itself. The two are, inevitably, interconnected: both emerged from the end of the Ice Age. The fire that surrounds Lavondyss is itself surrounded by a landscape covered by constantly falling snow, so heavy that no sooner has Steven

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killed one attacker than “[s]now began to coat his features” (238). The snow only ends as Steven enters “a zone of charred and skeletal trunks, their blackened branches like the stiffened limbs of fire victims” (239). It is in this intermediate zone, a place that has obviously been burned by the fire of Lavondyss but that is not itself Lavondyss, that Steven confronts Christian. And it is here that Christian offers the novel’s origin story about the wood. Beyond the fire, he insists, is “[t]he Ice Age that covered Britain more than ten thousand years ago!” And, he adds, “[W]ithin the Ice … a secret place. I’ve heard stories about it, rumours. A beginning place … something to do with the Urscumug. And then, beyond the Ice there’s the fire again. Beyond the fire, the wildwood. And then England. Normal time” (244). Lavondyss is, at the same time, an end, a beginning, and a middle; or at least, so it would appear. It is the end of the story, the end of this journey, the end of life; but it is also, or so Christian believes, a place of rebirth, where all the age and the wounds and the horrors that have accumulated during his time in Ryhope Wood will be burned away from him and he will emerge once more, back in England, back in “normal time”. It is, in other words, the closing of the book at the last page, and when that book is opened again at page one all will be as it was before Mythago Wood exerted its influence. But Christian will die in the flame, and though Steven will not enter Lavondyss, neither will return to England or to normal time. Once they are mythagos, once they are characters in a story, there is no normal time for them to return to. Of course, George, in the persona of Urscumug, does enter Lavondyss, though we do not see whether he actually returns. And Guiwenneth is carried dead into Lavondyss and is reborn. But George had “died in November 1946, of an illness that had afflicted him for years” (14), and Guiwenneth had been killed by Christian. The dead can enter Lavondyss, that is the point of heaven. Guiwenneth returns from Lavondyss because she is a mythago, a creature of the wood that incorporates Lavondyss. Mythagos are constantly reborn in new guises as myths and stories evolve, that is why the wood contains multiple versions of Robin Hood and King Arthur and Peredur. The beginning place within Lavondyss, the place of renewal and rebirth that Christian had heard rumours about, is presumably where each new iteration of the mythago is generated. Lavondyss, therefore, is where one story ends and a new one begins. In all of this we seem to be getting some vague glimpse of an origin story for both mythagos and Mythago Wood. But it is the role of the

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Urscumug—“something to do with the Urscumug” as Christian put it— that is the puzzle. Unsurprisingly, it is the psychopomps, Kushar of the shamiga, and Sorthalan, who tell the tale of the Urscumug, and it is a tale intimately connected to Christian, the Outsider. For Kushar, the Urshacam (as she called him) was “the first outsider. It walked the great valleys of ice; it watched the tall trees sprout from the barren ground; it guarded the woodlands against our people, and the people before us, and the people who came to the land after us. It is an ever-living beast” (182). In his further gloss on the story, Sorthalan speaks of the Urshuca, who “grew close to the earth” (213). These appear to be a hunter-gatherer people who were among the first to move into the new woodlands that grew up as the ice retreated, and who had defended the forest against early humans who had used fire to clear land for settlement, hence the idea of the heartwood being the realm beyond the fire. The Urscumug, the representative of the Urshuca peoples, therefore, became the first hero and, through their intimate relationship with the woodland, the first mythago. Given that mythic heroes are constantly being reinvented in a new form to suit new circumstances—the way that the Jaguth become the Wild Hunt, who in turn become the Knights of the Round Table, and then again are reincarnated as Robin Hood’s Merry Men—this suggests that the Urscumug is not just the first mythago, but the model for all subsequent mythagos. But this origin tale is specifically linked to the most recent of the myths embodied within the wood, the story of the Outsider and the Kinsman. For Urscumug is identified as “the oldest of the Outlanders” (213) who was lured away to the edge of the forest so that the heartwood he guarded was exposed to the Outsider. And the shamiga call on the Urscumug to destroy the Outsider because “the spirit of the Urshacam terrified him” (179). This, of course, is a reference to the antagonism between Christian and his father, which begins to raise questions about the antiquity of the Urscumug myth. More than that, we learn that the shamiga had told no stories about the Urshacam when George first contacted them, the tale and its long history had obviously been reconstructed retrospectively (“posthumously” in Benjamin’s term). How better to illustrate how differently time moves within the storied world of Ryhope Wood than to recognize that the very first mythago, the origin story of all mythagos, came into being only after the Huxley family begin their explorations?

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Bibliography Fiction1 Earthwind. 1977. London; Faber and Faber. In the Valley of the Statues. 1982. London; Faber and Faber.

Secondary Sources2 Kincaid, Paul. 1993. “Touching the Earth”. In Vector 175 (October/November 1993). 7–9. Kincaid, Paul. 2009. “Of Time and the River”. In Call and Response. Harold Wood: Beccon Publications. 167–173.

1  Works in the Mythago Wood sequence are indicated MW; works in the Merlin Codex are indicated MC. 2  In addition to the sources shown below, I have relied on The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition edited by John Clute and David Langford, https://sf-encyclopedia. com/; and also on the Official Robert Holdstock website, https://robertholdstock.com/.

CHAPTER 4

Myth

Abstract  This chapter positions George Huxley, the instigator of research into mythagos, in the company of proto-nationalist intellectual movements of the first half of the twentieth century; while Steven Huxley, his son, represents a more internationalist movement. Influences from Ralph Vaughan Williams and Alfred Watkins to Carl Jung all come into play in this chapter. The wood becomes an expression both of the distant past and of our more modern ideas of storytelling. By the time the central characters are transformed into mythagos, it is clear that the main protagonist in the novel is not any of the human or mythago figures, but rather the wood itself. Keywords  Myth • Ralph Vaughan Williams • Carl Jung • Collective unconscious To step into Ryhope Wood is to step outside of time and of geography. Neither the map nor the timepiece holds any sway here. Whether the traveller enters the wood from the nineteenth century or the twenty-first century, what they find there will be much the same. Any visitor, from whatever time, would encounter the same clogged pathways that defy anyone to take a straight route, and although the actual mythagos encountered may vary depending on the folk memory of the visitor, there would © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Kincaid, Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood, Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10374-2_4

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be the same layering of mythological figures that stretch back to the earliest memories of the earliest human. The very nature of Ryhope Wood is disconnected from the timeline of our own reality, so the novel could, theoretically, have been set at any point. Since Ryhope Wood is derived from Trônes Wood, which held traumatic memories of the First World War for Holdstock’s grandfather (see Chap. 2), it might therefore have made sense for the story to be set around 1920. After all, Steven Huxley would not have been alone among survivors of the Great War who chose to stay on in France after the peace, and Harry Keeton’s aerial survey would have been in keeping with the use of aerial photography to map archaeological site that was pioneered by O.G.S.  Crawford at the beginning of the 1920s. Indeed, it could be argued that it would have made more sense to set Mythago Wood early in the 1920s. The reason, I suspect, that Holdstock chose to set the story in 1947 (the year before his own birth), with flashbacks to the 1930s, is George Huxley. Because this date allows George to be positioned within an intellectual movement that was at its height during the interwar years. To examine why that might be, a good place to start is the quotation that Holdstock puts on the title page of his novel: I had that sense of recognition … here was something which I had known all my life, only I didn’t know it. Ralph Vaughan Williams commenting upon his first discovery of British folklore and folk music

Around the turn of the twentieth century, Vaughan Williams had become convinced that folk music must be preserved as a “national cultural asset” (Young: 71). Before long he was incorporating traditional tunes into his own compositions, thus helping to create the “pastoralist” school that would be the dominant mode of English orchestral music until not long before the Second World War. As Rob Young points out, Vaughan Williams himself “had no desire for the blossoming ‘national music’ movement to be hijacked by darker associations with nationalism or racial pride” (Young: 77–78), nevertheless he was inextricably associated with the preservationists, who were not always so wary. Folk song collectors were convinced that the songs they recorded, sung by uneducated agricultural labourers in remote rural locations, put them directly in touch with ancient traditions and gave them access to genuine historic English culture. In fact, the people were nowhere near as

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unsophisticated as the collectors assumed, and their repertoire was likely to include music hall ditties, church hymns, and extempore songs protesting local issues, as well as anything truly old. Nevertheless, the most prominent of these collectors, Cecil Sharp, saw himself as collecting folk songs to cultivate “a specifically English identity” (Cole: 22) by identifying what Sharp himself called “the natural musical idiom of a national will” (quoted, Cole: 24). The belief, which became more entrenched with the Great War, was that “the ‘English national character’ is fully expressed in the folk-­ songs of a few humble country singers of several generations ago!” (quoted, Hughes & Stradling: 84). In concert with the antiquarian and author, Sabine Baring-Gould (and antiquarianism was following the same nationalistic trend), Sharp published a collection of songs for school meant to counter “foreign models” (quoted, Cole: 28). Folk music was seen as a way of reconnecting with the best of Britain, a response to the modern world whose music was described by L.T.C. Rolt as “that dreary cosmopolitan shuffle that knows neither grace nor gaiety” (quoted, Matless: 204). The key word here is “cosmopolitan”, which was seen as the intrusion of foreign elements that would debase true Englishness. Thus, the growing influence of jazz, “frivolous, degenerate—and, above all, Black”, meant that the national, folk-inflected, pastoral school of English music “seemed in danger of being inundated by a rising tide of alien culture” (Hughes & Stradling, 100). In the years before the Great War, there was a widespread vogue for evoking an Arcadian past—found in everything from the poetry of Algernon Swinburne to the music of Arnold Bax, and of course Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908)—in the belief, which became even more pronounced after the war, that something purely English was to be found in the pastoral, pre-industrial world. Alongside the efforts of folklorists, this found echoes in many other areas of study, including antiquarianism, anthropology, and archaeology. Old songs and stories, like old ruins and buried remains, were seen to tell a story of England’s greatness, epitomized by the hero figures of King Arthur and Robin Hood and their like. A powerful influence in this area was From Ritual to Romance (1920) by Jessie L. Weston, which built on J.G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890) to find connections between the pagan and the Christian elements of the stories of King Arthur and particularly the tale of the Holy Grail, and thus present their distinctive Englishness. This became a touchstone for much of the modernist writing of the interwar years, such as The Waste Land (1922) by T.S. Eliot, and A Glastonbury Romance (1932) by John Cowper

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Powys, which made great play of situating King Arthur and his associated legends firmly within the landscape of contemporary England. Another instance of the way in which old heroic legends are given a nationalistic cast is the pivotal role that Herne the Hunter plays in John Masefield’s The Box of Delights (1935), representing the heroism that would emerge from what Masefield had elsewhere described as “the old beautiful peasant life” (quoted, Cole: 32). What was happening in these years after the First World War was that legend, story, and myth, along with the supporting edifice of history, archaeology, and folksong collecting, were being recruited to bolster a sense of British, or more specifically English, greatness, with a unique and glorious destiny. The country that had, in late Victorian times, been seen as shaped by God to rule the greatest empire in the world, was now seen as having been shaped by God to win the greatest war the world had known. The national music being collected by Cecil Sharp and extolled by folk dance revivalist Rolf Gardiner; the discovery of the “missing link” at Piltdown just before the First World War and the ship burial at Sutton Hoo just before the Second World War, along with the ley lines of Alfred Watkins, that suggested that England’s past was at least as grand and mysterious and extensive as anything found by Arthur Evans in Crete and Howard Carter in Egypt; and the heroic national story being told in histories aimed particularly at children like Our Island Story (1905) by H.E. Marshall, all fit precisely into this national mood. These all symbolize the post-war “restoration in the vernacular of a comfortingly ancient, leafy rural past” (Young: 93). The folk songs that Sharp collected would unify the nation as “a tribe of patriots restored to the expressive contours of their birthright” (Cole: 35) while Gardiner believed that Morris dancing was “a form of earth magic … [and] … a display of solely masculine virility” (Young: 115) that would “unite men and clarify their minds” (quoted, Matless: 204). Gardiner’s view is echoed in Steven’s encounter with the Jaguth which evokes a childhood memory of a Morris dance that was “something so primal that everyone present was reminded, subconsciously, of times gone by” (127). That there was a nationalistic impulse behind the way the English cultural story was presented in the years between the wars was perhaps inevitable, but it was not unique to Britain. An almost identical movement was taking place in Germany at exactly the same time, where research into national folklore and mythology fed directly into the rise of Naziism. And in Britain, Rolf Gardiner in particular would become active in

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organizations associated with Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, while Cole has shown how Sharp combined a distrust of democracy and a support for militant nationalism. This was the context within which George Huxley pursued his research into Ryhope Wood. Practically the first thing that we learn about him, in the page ripped from his diary by Steven, is that he has received a “letter from Watkins” who “agrees with me” (13) about the aura around the woodland. This is, of course, Alfred Watkins—at one point Christian confirms that “a man called Alfred Watkins had visited our father on several occasions” (39)—who came up with the idea of ley lines, which he first wrote about in The Old Straight Track (1925). For Watkins, trees, usually individual trees or “compact tree clumps” (Watkins: 61), are key components of his ley lines, often associated with stones, wells, mounds, and fire, all of which are encountered within Ryhope Wood. And he argued that folk legends contained “lingering fragments of fact disguised by an overlay of generations of imaginings” (Watkins: xix). It is easy to see, therefore, how Watkins’s ideas underly much of George’s theorizing about mythagos, as for instance when George talks of “the ley matrix in places where the mythagos still formed” (37). This may, incidentally, be why Holdstock chose to set the Huxley home very precisely at “Oak Lodge, at the edge of the Ryhope estate in Herefordshire” (14), since Watkins (1855–1935) lived his whole life in Herefordshire and rarely travelled beyond the borders of his county. This association with Watkins plugs George Huxley directly into the conservative network of interwar archaeologists and folklorists, those who, like Watkins, saw their ideas in terms of “Old England … reclaimed from professional oversight” (Matless: 123), and hence freed from the constraints of modernity. We are not told specifically about the political leanings of any of the Huxley family, but George is associated not only with the intellectual conservatism of the day, but his experiences within Ryhope Wood tend to be violent, culminating in his transformation into the monstrously pre-human Urscumug. For his son, Steven, he evokes “a memory of anger, of danger, and of fear” (25) so powerful that Steven is initially unable to enter his father’s study or read his father’s notebooks. In contrast, Steven is not only ideologically opposed to his father, but his most significant encounters within Ryhope Wood tend to involve peaceful families and tribal groups, the family of Saxons and the shamiga. For George, the threat comes from the wood, notably in the form of the arrow that injures him on one occasion. For Steven, the wood pushes him away,

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for instance in the storm it conjures to drive away Keeton’s aircraft, but the threat comes from within his family, in particular from his brother, Christian, who attacks him, nearly kills him, and draws him to their final confrontation within the wood. The political differences between the two men, George and Steven, father and son, are therefore illustrated by their differing interactions with the land. The interwar years was a time in which both left and right were laying claim to the landscape. On the left it was a place where working people could reclaim their presence in the world, typified by the Kinder Mass Trespass of April 1932; but for the right it was the place where the nobility and grandeur of the past must be preserved. For preservationists like the architect Clough Williams-Ellis and Rolf Gardiner, the landscape was equated with the old aristocracy, tradition, and “a sense of national duty” (Matless: 50), or as H.V. Morton put it, “The ‘Back to the Land’ cry is a perfectly sound instinct of racial survival” (quoted, Matless: 99). In an oft-­ quoted line, G.M. Trevelyan wrote: “[W]ithout natural beauty the English people will perish in the spiritual sense” (quoted, Matless: 123). In other words, the divine is immanent in Nature, which holds within itself all that is noble and glorious about England. The world of the past is inherently better than the tumultuous present, and so for L.T.C. Rolt, for example, to leave the busy heart of a town for the canal is to “step backwards a hundred years or more and to see things in a different, and perhaps more balanced perspective … [where] … many old traditions and customs survive” (Rolt: 12). But Holdstock allows us to step back in time, only to demonstrate that the old traditions and customs are crueller and more brutal, and precisely not an illustration of the pride and nobility of the nation. Indeed, the early incarnations of figures such as King Arthur and Robin Hood that are encountered are neither heroic nor particularly English. While the aristocratic Ryhope family, who have owned the wood and the whole estate for centuries, are ignorant about the character of the landscape they possess, wilfully blind to the peculiarities of the Wood that have been noted in their estate accounts for centuries. Thus, Holdstock situates his novel within the nationalistic culture of the time, and then carefully and systematically undermines that culture at every point. In political terms, therefore, the mythology presented by Holdstock in this novel is deliberately designed to counter the familiar nationalist story that was common at least at the time the novel was set (and that continues to hold sway in certain aspects of British culture to this day). Asked directly by Darrell Schweitzer if he saw Ryhope Wood as “a miniature of England’s

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past”, Holdstock replied: “It’s a very European book. The characters and the heroes that can be found in my enchanted wood will be familiar to Germans, Norse, French, Greeks, Transylvanians! They are the stuff of European myth” (Schweitzer: 50–51). Thus, the first mythago that Steven encounters after his return to Oak Lodge is a man whose “face was painted with dark patterns and his moustaches drooped to well below his chin; his hair was plastered thickly about his scalp; he wore a dark woollen shirt, with a leather jerkin over the top, and tight, check-patterned breeches that reached to just below his knee” (28). This is far from the traditional British idea of a hero, and indeed Christian recognizes the figure as “one of the most powerful of the myth images, recognizable all across Europe” (44), one of whose incarnations is as the Irish hero Cuchulainn. Already we are being told that there is nothing particularly English about Ryhope Wood, and indeed later volumes would include even more far-flung figures, including characters from Native American legend. This anti-nationalist strain in the presentation of mythology is a consistent undercurrent throughout the novel. This takes many forms, such as the repeated comments about the alienness of the mythagos as when Steven begins to realize how alien the wood was to the mythagos, and how alien the mythagos were to the wood. These creatures, created far away from their natural age, echoes of a past given substance, were equipped with a life, a language and a certain ferocity that was quite inappropriate to the war-scarred world of 1947. (49)

Many of the myths represented by these creatures have been completely forgotten, such as the Saxon family bearing the mummified hand and arm of a man called Aelfric. Steven tells us, “I could think of no story of Aelfric. The legend had been lost from the written accounts; in time it had been lost from the oral traditions. Thereafter it had remained only as an unconscious memory” (193). The alienness of the mythagos is emphasized by a mutual failure of comprehension. The difficulty of understanding their language recurs repeatedly. Even Guiwenneth, who has been generated from the imaginations of each of the Huxleys in turn, “scattered English through her dialogue with amazing frequency, but I still failed to understand the story she was telling” (110). Even though she learned English, that language could not “express how she felt, how close to some aspect of nature she felt, how like a bird, or a tree she felt” (131). Even a mythago, as close to our own time as the Civil War soldier, spoke words that “seemed

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foreign to me, and yet afterwards I was able to realize that they were English … but at the time his words had been alien sounds” (82). The past, and therefore the entire realm of the mythagos, is indeed a foreign country, and even though we create the mythagos, we cannot expect them to be only what we imagine them to be. The mythagos are not makers of some specifically English myth; they are not the constituent parts in some tale of English glory. Indeed, they barely have any connection to the heroes that contemporary England would have been familiar with. As Steven learns when he asks about the real Robin Hood, and Christian replies: “It depends […] on what you mean by real. Hood came to that oak forest, and may still be there. […] But there were many Robin Hoods, and all were as real or unreal as each other” (38–39). In fact, despite Ryhope Wood being located in Herefordshire, there is no real connection with England at all. From Harry Keeton, for instance, we learn that during the war his plane was brought down over a similar bit of woodland, an event that caused disfiguring burns to his face, but that was also seared into his memory. But when Harry leaves Steven, deep within the wood, in order to pursue his own quest for “the avatar and the city … [where] … the damage can be undone” (167), we understand that the two woodlands in two different countries are not just mirrors of each other, but are in some way interconnected, or perhaps even open into the same realm. Moreover, throughout their journey, Steven and Harry come upon various non-English sites, from a fairytale castle to a tall wooden house that is described as an “old Germanic location” (186). Holdstock was radical in the way his exploration of myth undermined the way myth had been used to enhance an image of nationalistic glory. And this extended to the characterisation of mythic figures. Contemporary fantasy, from Masefield’s Herne the Hunter in The Box of Delights to T.H. White’s Arthur in The Once and Future King (1938–1958), presented the hero figure as a modern, humane man (almost invariably a man) in comfortable medieval fancy dress, the sort that Errol Flynn might wear in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), but that no genuine medieval outlaw ever would. It is a pattern in fantasy fiction that continues to this day; we are meant to identify with a hero who represents something good and noble, because we are meant to carry that goodness and nobility of the past into the present day. But if the past is radically different from the present, as Holdstock contends, then its heroes would be radically different also. The mythagos encountered in the novel are not designed for

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twentieth-century consumption but are appropriate for their own times, crude, brutal, daubed in mud, and with nothing comprehensible to say to the modern world. In one respect, however, these mythic figures do seem to conform to tradition in the way that they follow the pattern laid out for a hero. As Holdstock explained to Stan Nicholls in 1993, his third published story, “The Darkness” (1972), “was just a dream written up, with absolutely no point to it whatsoever … but the allegorical aspect of it is present in Mythago Wood and Lavondyss” (Nicholls: 101). The landscape of dream would be present in much of his fiction, from Earthwind to the Merlin Codex, but it is a landscape interpreted through the theories of Carl Jung. Holdstock admitted to reading extensively from the work of Jung and James Frazer before he started to write the Mythago books, and Mythago Wood in particular came “directly out of my experience of Carl Jung, especially his works on symbolism” (Schweitzer: 52). For the Jungian, myth represents the ancient and the natural in humankind, and as such stands in direct opposition to the modern and technological. Early peoples are encapsulated in their symbols and myths, and “the same symbolic patterns can be found in the rituals or myths of small tribal societies still existing, unchanged for centuries, on the outskirts of civilization” (Henderson: 97). The recapitulation of mythic symbols, across centuries and across the world, represents the way “the psyche retains many traces left from previous stages of its development” (Henderson: 98), and the psyche, Jung tells us, is “a spirit that is not quite human, but is rather a breath of nature”, and we get closest to understanding it not in modernity but in “the sphere of ancient mythologies, or the fables of the primeval forest” (Jung: 36). How such ideas might be personified as the mythago, recapitulating the same symbolic patterns again and again as the myth changes according to who is telling it, is obvious. Hero myths vary in detail, but structurally they have “a universal pattern” (Henderson: 101) even though they emerge in cultures which have no contact with each other. This isn’t an idea that’s original with Jung or his followers; it goes back at least to Frazer’s The Golden Bough, but it shapes Holdstock’s creation in Mythago Wood. The mythagos encountered are not, in the strictest sense, mythic heroes, but rather they are the universal pattern of a hero, the platonic ideal as it were, that acquires individual characteristics and names (Robin Hood, King Arthur) as they are taken up and shaped by different cultures over time. Guiwenneth, for instance, is part of the story of Peredur, also

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known as Peregu, an outcast hero with a company of nine warrior companions, the Jaguth, “a prototypical gathering of the Knights of the Round Table or the Wild Hunt of Herne the Hunter” (Brown: 163). During the course of the novel we are told several versions of the tale of Peregu or Peredur, which involve the companions being transformed into birds in order to rescue Guiwenneth in the moment of her birth. Guiwenneth is then raised by the warriors after Peredur is, invariably, killed and his death is marked by a gigantic stone or, in one variation, a tooth of the giant Mogoch (Peredur is an ancestral form of Perceval; Mogoch in later variants becomes Morthid, perhaps suggestive of Mordred). The giant stone recalls one of the folk tales recorded by Watkins, about how “Robin Hood once stood at Standing Stone near Sowerby, and across the valley of the Calder threw a great stone which fell at Wainstalls, four miles away, and this was known as Robin Hood’s Pennystone” (Watkins: 170), with Robin Hood’s Merry Men another possible version of the Jaguth. The story of the stone may also contain an echo of the story of Merlin bringing the Blue Stones dancing to Stonehenge, another link to the Arthurian cycle. The various stories of Peredur interpolated throughout the novel are the most vivid illustration of the sort of symbolic pattern suggested by both Frazer and Jung. And in keeping with the pattern, Steven, a representative modern man, must literally leave the modern world in order to pursue his desires and dreams into the not quite human world of mythology and primeval forest. Steven’s modern status is ambiguous, however; his participation in the Second World War marks him as a man of his time, yet war itself has “enduring (or ‘archetypal’) meaning” and “transcends the differences of time and place [to] express themes that are universal” (Henderson: 99), so when he ventures into the wood he eschews Keeton’s modern pistol for more primitive weapons. He is already, therefore, part archetype even before he finds himself appearing in the legends he is told along the way. To enter the psychic landscape of Ryhope Wood is not to explore the world of mythology as a visitor, but to “journey inward … into the inner space of a human being” (Brown: 160) and thus to become mythic, something that each of the Huxleys in turn comes to understand only slowly. Carroll Brown notes, however, that while Holdstock builds his approach to mythology on Jungian notions of archetypes and the collective unconscious (terms which are used liberally throughout the novel), this is not wholeheartedly a Jungian work. Thus, when Jung claims that the collective unconscious is “identical in all men and thus constitutes a common

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psychic substrate” (quoted, Brown: 160), Holdstock undermines this notion by making his mythagos different depending upon the unconscious from which they emerge. Hero figures are radically different as they reiterate over time: “The form of Hood was subtly different […] because earlier images […] were affected by my own confused childhood images of the greenwood, and the merry band” (35). Even the same figure (e.g., Guiwenneth) would appear to be different depending on which of the Huxley’s have imagined her into existence. The variability of the character of Guiwenneth is an interesting study in its own right. Her origin lies in a culture when “the oral tradition held sway” and so she is “lost from popular memory” (42), though there are suggestions that her story informed the character of Queen Guenevere, and also some of the stories associated with Boudicca. Certainly, she is a warrior, and the glimpses we get of her part in the story of Peredur suggest she is strong, independent, and confident. Yet when George recalls an early encounter with her mythago, he notes that she “carries her weapons with awkwardness, as if unfamiliar” (91). When Christian meets the mythago his father has conjured, “she was not violent, perhaps because the old man himself could not think of a woman being violent” (43). For Christian, his version of Guiwenneth “might be a little tougher than my father’s version” (43) because he “had no such preconceived ideas about a woman’s strength or weakness” (55). Steven’s first major encounter with Guiwenneth is, initially at least, with the mythago as Christian imagined her. Steven is shot by a Civil War mythago and falls into the millpond, but he is pulled from the water by her “strong hands” which “strongly massaged my back” (82–83). But this Guiwenneth changes before our eyes. She becomes the personification of Steven’s own desires: “pale-skinned, slightly freckled” with hair that was “brilliant auburn, and tumbled in unkempt, windswept masses about her shoulders”, a modern beauty, and suddenly the hands are no longer strong but “small and delicate” (83). Looking at his own reflection, Steven sees a “lean, tousle-haired man” (90), and we get a sense that he has created Guiwenneth in his own image. Yet there is also something consistent in her: the Guiwenneth who visits Steven “flipped through the pages of several books, looking at the colour plates” (87), while the Guiwenneth who visited George “explored books, objects, cupboards” (91). Is this a continuity in Guiwenneth, or in the expectations of her by father and son? This ambiguity is captured in Steven’s repeated questioning: “Whose mythago was she?” (93); was she created by George or Christian or Steven? Or was

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there a separate Guiwenneth for all three? But notice how this question denies Guiwenneth any independent existence; at least as far as the men are concerned, she is there only as a product of the men who desire her. But this question—“Whose mythago was she?”—acquires a new meaning when we come to understand that the main narrative thrust of the novel, which only becomes explicit in its third and final part, concerns the transformation of each of the Huxleys in turn into a mythago. When George becomes identified with the Urscumug, it seems that a pre-­existing mythago had simply acquired some of the characteristics of the most recent person to imagine it. But as Christian and Steven chase each other through the wood they become part of a legend that had not been told before. To the shamiga Christian is the Outlander who is “not of us, nor of our kin, nor of our race, nor of our land, nor of this season, nor of any season during which our tribe has lived … his words have the sound of a man dying, without meaning … [and he] … destroys all that is strange to him” (178). His destructiveness, which is linked with the Urscumug, suggests that he has taken on the crude brutality of the earliest mythagos, though he is at the same time a brand new addition to the mythos. Steven, for his part, becomes what the Saxons call the “Cunnasman” (192), kinsman, and he is playing his part in a story in which “the heart of the realm was exposed. The Outlander is eating at that heart. Only the Kin can stop him” (213). As soon as Steven takes on this role, though from the moment he entered Ryhope Wood it is clear that he had no choice in the matter, he becomes a part of a story that has already gone through countless iterations. A legend that had never been told before Steven pursued Christian into the wood now becomes a pattern that both men must follow. Harry Keeton reflects on the ambiguity of this when he muses on his own part in the tale: “If we do become legends to the various historical peoples scattered throughout this realm … what would that mean? Will we somehow have become a real part of history? Will the real world have distorted tales of Steven and myself, and our quest to avenge the Outsider’s abduction?” (225). These are questions that the novel does not, indeed cannot, answer. This is in part because there is no way out of the wood. Neither George, Christian, nor Steven will ever leave the wood. This is a pattern that will repeat throughout the Mythago Wood sequence, with the central character “so radically changed by their quest and Ryhope Wood’s magic that they cannot return to their old world. Instead, they leave their world behind and take on mythological dimensions themselves” (Williams: 21). Nor, indeed, can any of the mythagos leave. When Guiwenneth is

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shot by an arrow, Christian explains: “She was alive when I found her, and she might have stayed alive, but I brought her out of the woods … in a way I did kill her. I took her away from the vortex” (32). In Holdstock’s final novel, Avilion, a sequel of sorts to Mythago Wood, Jack, the son of Steven and Guiwenneth and therefore part-human, part-mythago, does venture out of Ryhope Wood to visit the nearby town of Shadoxhurst, but that town is as alien as the wood was in this first novel, and he is unable to remain there. So there is no way we can ever discover whether the tale of the Outlander and the Kinsman has become a familiar myth in the world outside the wood. At the same time the questions raise an issue that will be returned to again and again in the subsequent mythago novels, and also in the Merlin Codex: how is myth created? What turns history into legend, and as the legend grows how is it tied to history? To recast this question within the terms of the novel: what does a mythago represent? The first suggestion of what is meant by a mythago comes in the pages of George’s notebook. George takes from Watkins the idea of an aura, a form of energy, that Watkins associated with ley lines, and writes: “In these ancient woodlands, primary woodlands, the combined aura forms something far more powerful, a sort of creative field that can interact with our unconscious” (39). It is through this interaction with the Jungian collective unconscious that the myth imago, “the image of the idealized form of a myth creature” (40), takes on substance. Holdstock, with a Master’s degree in Medical Zoology, would have been only too aware of the double meaning of imago, both as the unconscious idealized mental image of someone which influences a person’s behaviour and as the final stage in the evolution of an insect: so a myth imago is both actualized and idealized. It is this double nature that is never quite grasped by the Huxleys. Thus, after Guiwenneth has been killed by an arrow, Christian can say: “[S]he had no life, no real life. She’s lived a thousand times, and she’s never lived at all” (33), and so if he returns to the wood he will find her reborn again. Yet he can airily dismiss the notion that any mythagos are really dangerous because “[i]n a year […] many of the more hostile mythagos would have faded into non-existence” (45). In other words, because he desires Guiwenneth, the aura of the woodland will take her image from his imagination and recreate her, but the other mythagos will simply fade away for want of anyone remembering them back into life. Christian here seems to be echoing something that Claude Levi-Strauss wrote in Mythologiques (1971) where he called mythology “that huge and complex

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edifice which also glows with a thousand iridescent colors as it builds up before the analyst’s gaze, slowly expands to its full extent, then crumbles and fades away in the distance, as if it had never existed” (quoted, Menand: 215). In such an understanding, mythagos, the embodiment of myth, are rich and complex beings that are born and grow in the eye of the beholder, then fade to nothing since out of sight is here literally out of mind. This, of course, is not how the collective unconscious works: mythagos do not require conscious thought, but are folk memories lodged unwittingly deep in the racial memory of every human. This still doesn’t explain the population of mythagos in Ryhope Wood, since there doesn’t seem to have been much of a source for such racial memories. When Steven examines the papers of the Ryhope family, he discovers that the woods had been declared unsafe and fenced off as long ago as 1722, and an entry from 1536 or 1537 talks of Henry VIII hunting in the woods and records “the figure of Robin Hood, which apparently loosed an arrow at him” (61). We are led to believe that Ryhope Wood was barely visited for perhaps centuries before George began his investigations. If, as Christian insists, all mythagos fade away within a short period of time, then it would seem that George has to be the origin of the vast mythago population that is encountered in the wood. But that doesn’t really account for the mythagos that are not seen but who make their presence felt (such as those who trash Steven’s campsite just within the borders of the wood), those from legends lost to human memory, and those like the shamiga who have no particular legendary status but just constitute an ordinary human population. And the mythagos do not seem to fade away, though they do die, as witness the steady reduction in the number of the Jaguth every time the company is encountered. Nor does death betoken an end to their corporeal existence: when Guiwenneth is killed by an arrow, Christian buries her body and the body is still there for Steven to exhume some time later. Of course, both George and Christian Huxley do believe that the mythagos are products of their own imaginations, “ego’s mythological ideal” (55) as George put it. George has worked with the naturalist, Edward Wynne-Jones, to devise a “frontal bridge” (60) designed to link the two hemispheres of the brain to “enable his own aging mind to generate these ‘stored’ mythic presences from his racial unconscious” (61). This equipment is described at one point as a “curious mask” (60). Masks are

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used metaphorically throughout this novel, for instance in the description of the Urscumug, whose “[f]ace seems smeared with white clay, forming a mask upon the exaggerated features below. […] A mask upon a mask?” (36). In the way that a mythago takes on a sort of reality, masks will come to play an increasingly important part in later novels in the sequence and, in connection with shamanism, in the Merlin Codex. As it is, the mask that Wynne-Jones creates is designed to excite “the zone of the pre-mythago”; George continues: “If only there were some way of exploring the living brain to find exactly where the site of this occult presence lies” (35). George was writing at a time—this entry in his notebook is dated September 1935—when there was a lot of interest in Madame Blavatsky and Theosophy, which may explain the use of occult here. Like many people with an amateur interest in science at this period, George sees a connection between the psychological and the occult. Modern technology is thus being employed to conjure the ancient and mystical. Mythagos spring from a little-understood part of the human brain, but also have a real external existence. Since mythagos existed before George conceived the Wynne-Jones device (e.g., the one that shot at Henry VIII), the purpose of this device is not so much to create new mythagos as to focus George’s attention in order to explore his own portion of the collective unconscious. His aim is to search back and identify the earliest mythic figure in human consciousness, the myth from which all other myths grow. He names this primal figure the Urscumug, who is “the most powerful because he is the primary” (35). We never really find out where this name, or indeed this idea, comes from. (The name could contain a hint of the Latin, Ursus, meaning bear, which might provide a link to Arthur, since that name is derived from “Artorios … the bear-like man” (38), but none of this is spelled out.) Later, Steven and Harry Keeton encounter references to the Urscumug, the shamiga talk of the Urshacam while Sorthalan uses another name, Urshucum. Urshacam is described by the shamiga as “the first outsider. It walked the great valleys of ice; it watched the tall trees sprout from the barren ground; it guarded the woodlands against our people, and the people before us, and the people who came to the land after us. It is an ever-­ living beast” (182). This would make the Urscumug the origin, the “primary image” as George called it (182), powerful enough to be remembered in terms of the Ice Age even though this was 7000 or 8000 years

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before the time of the shamiga. Except that in terms of the creation of myth, the shamiga had told no stories about the Urshacam when George first contacted them; the tale and its long history had obviously been reconstructed retrospectively once George had translated himself into the Urscumug mythago. In other words, it makes no difference whether the Urscumug was conjured from some long-buried racial memory or was a straightforward product of George’s imagination. The terrible creature that blocks the way of Steven and Christian during an early exploration of the wood—“a monstrous shape, twice as high as a man, but man-shaped and stooped, black as night save for the great white splash of its face” (51)—is, to all intents and purposes, George Huxley: “The Urscumug opened its mouth to roar, and my father seemed to leer at me” (52). As Steven muses: “[H]ow he must have hated, and hated us, to have imposed such terror onto the thing” (52). The Urscumug is not a product of George’s desires and dreams, but an embodiment of his personality. He had been “a cold, resentful man” who, towards the end of his life, became “a crazed figure” (17), a man who could watch the descent of his wife towards her suicide and record in his notebook, “Nothing in me hurts at the thought of this” (92). Christian, in turn, seems to have inherited his father’s interest in and beliefs about mythagos. When Steven remarks that this obsession killed his father and appears to be killing Christian, Christian replies “It might even be worth dying to achieve what he tried to achieve … and failed” (19). But when Steven follows this up by asking why he might want to raise the Urscumug, Christian’s answer, to study the earliest times of man, is undermined: “[H]is voice was hollow, the mark of his uncertainty, the stigma of his lack of conviction in the truth of what he said” (41). What is actually driving Christian is his obsession with Guiwenneth, and in his desire to take his father’s love object for himself, he becomes more and more like his father. This is made explicit from the start. When Steven returns from France at the start of the novel, he finds his brother much changed, unusually aged, and closer to his father in both appearance and temperament: “[A] haunted, wasting brother living in the derelict shadow of our family home” (26). With each venture into the wood he is further transformed, first into someone “muscular and hard, deep-chested and heavy-limbed. He was a man made for fighting” (51); then into the leader of a band reminiscent of the Jaguth, “an old man, war-worn and ragged … a strong man going to seed in late middle age. The flesh of his body, I noticed, was

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a latticework of scars and weals” (146). By now, Christian “looked uncannily as I remembered our father” (149), and at the same time he has become possessed by the wood, much as, by analogy, we now realize George had become. When Steven asks him to leave the wood, to come back to this world, he replies “For a while … yes, I might have come back … [but] … I could no longer do that” (150). After setting off in pursuit of his brother, Steven learns that the people of the wood already know Christian as “uth guerig, whatever that meant. Killer. Rapist. Man without compassion” (171). Christian has not just been aged by his time in the wood, he has been brutalized by it. There can be only one Urscumug in Ryhope Wood, because there can be only one primary mythago, the source from which all other mythagos spring, and that, inevitably, is the father. But if the son cannot, in purely Freudian terms, displace the father in the bed of his lover, Guiwenneth, then Christian can at least have a Guiwenneth of his own and can rival his father in the viciousness and cruelty of the mythago he becomes. George and Christian follow much the same trajectory in their transition from human to mythago. Both become monstrous, an extension of what we know of their human characteristics. There are minor differences: George employs an artificial device which Christian does not need, and Christian, as his name implies, takes on a further metaphorical role standing for the destruction of the old mythic Europe by the arrival of a new religion, “a disintegration reflected in Christian’s plundering and terrorism of the mythic realm of Ryhope Wood” (Brown: 165). Despite his horrors, the Urscumug is essentially protective of the heartwood, but Christian, the Outlander, represents an existential threat to the wood itself, and so, in an escalation of sibling rivalry, Steven is called upon to play the part of the Kinsman, to save the wood. The one thing that Steven’s transition to mythago demonstrates is that the creative force involved lies not as George believed in the human collective unconscious, but in the primal woodland itself. Initially, Steven is wary of the wood. When he senses mythagos approaching the house he retreats to his father’s study, a room that holds terrors of its own for Steven but that is still the part of Oak Lodge furthest away from the wood, and “the haunting aura vanished … unable to compete against the powerful residuum of intellect that was my father’s own ghost” (64). But the wood reaches out for him, seedlings growing vigorously to fill the space between the edge of the wood and the house, and as the wood has extended its control to enclose the house so Steven is visited by more and more

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mythagos. Chief among these, of course, is Guiwenneth who, as noted above, now takes on a form calculated to appeal to Steven. Whether this new incarnation is created by Steven’s desire or by the wood is never explicitly clear. So far as Steven is concerned, following his father’s lead, he has imagined her into being: “No birth, no genesis by whatever strange forest beast, could possibly compare with the generation of a girl by my own mind” (123). But Guiwenneth herself takes a different tack: “I am wood and rock … I am not like you. The wood protects me, rules me” (134, my emphasis). It is Guiwenneth who takes the lead in their relationship. When she intrudes upon a meeting with Harry Keeton, she gives Steven a kiss which he felt was “a possessive, protective gesture, and I couldn’t comprehend the reason for it” (105). And it is Guiwenneth who leads Steven out to a glade in the wood one night for an encounter with the remnants of the Jaguth. This ritual in the pre-dawn woodland is a form of betrothal, an official acknowledgement of Guiwenneth’s chosen relationship by her forest guardians. That night is the first she sleeps with Steven, and that is also when she makes Oak Lodge her home, “she was finished with the wildwoods” (129). Except that the wood has reached out to Oak Lodge, she is still within the wood and cannot leave it for fear of “a shooting pain through her whole body, as if she were being punished for straying so far from the mother wood” (132). She still belongs wholly to Ryhope Wood, and the blessing dispensed by the Jaguth was upon Steven’s betrothal to the wood. Steven’s anguished question—“Whose mythago was she?” (93)—has an answer, but not one any of the Huxley’s would have considered. Ryhope Wood has given Steven something to desire, something he will want to hold on to, so that when the ragged parody of the Jaguth bursts from the wood under Christian’s command to kidnap Guiwenneth, Steven has reason to go after them, to rescue Guiwenneth, and to defeat the man who threatens destruction to the wood. And the wood which has, before now, consistently pushed Steven away, now opens the way for him. Paul Williams has argued that “Steven hears the story of the Outsider and Kinslayer and chooses to take upon himself the tale [… and thus is able …] to restructure his quest around the story of the Outsider and Kinslayer” (27), but this is to misread the novel. Steven does not choose to play the Kinsman, there never was a choice, that role is thrust upon him. He is not creating a myth; he is being shaped by a ready-made myth. From the moment that Ryhope Wood began to reach out for Steven, he was always already playing the part of the Kinsman.

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Steven makes only one choice. At the very end of the novel, Christian has gone into the flames surrounding Lavondyss, the heartland, the afterlife, the place of rebirth. Guiwenneth has been killed, but the Urscumug has picked up the body and carried it through the flames to be restored. And Steven makes camp by the stone of Peredur and waits for her return. He chooses to become a mythago, to become a part of the story of the valley “where the girl came back through the fire” (252). But then, there was no real alternative.

CHAPTER 5

Aftermath

Abstract  This concluding chapter considers the response to Mythago Wood, and looks at how the ideas and approaches generated in the novel fed into everything Holdstock wrote subsequently, not just the further novels in the Mythago Wood sequence, but also his non-mythago work, most notably the trilogy of the Merlin Codex. The chapter finishes by noting how profoundly influential Mythago Wood has been on all subsequent works of fantasy. Keywords  Lavondyss • Merlin Codex • Reality and story • Fantasy Not everyone applauded Mythago Wood. One Australian review, for instance, characterized the novel as the story of “the well-off son of a loony father, living in a spooky house near an even spookier wood” (Blackford: 34), which is accurate enough in its way, but it does rather miss the point. Those who look for the familiar in the story find it too familiar, but most reviewers noticed that Holdstock was taking the familiar only to undermine it and create something new. Martyn Taylor, for instance, noted that the familiar forms of fantasy had made it “virtually impossible for serious British authors to address themselves to the subject of myth” (Taylor: 15), but Holdstock had succeeded by addressing the mythic in a vigorous new way. And other reviewers agreed. Like Taylor, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Kincaid, Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood, Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10374-2_5

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Geoff Ryman finds most fantasy boring, “[I]t only looks at itself”, but Holdstock reinvigorates the form by drawing on myth images that are “alive and alien” and also “rough, wild, dirty, and … full of humour” (Ryman: 74); the result is “a fantasy about fantasy, about the ways in which our minds create worlds” (Ryman: 76). The novel, and its successors, was, Kálmán Matolcsy has declared, “the single most notable effort in British fantasy since the works of J.R.R.  Tolkien and C.S.  Lewis” (Matolcsy: 26). For my part, I called Mythago Wood, with the possible exception of The Lord of the Rings, “the most important contribution to the literature of the fantastic to appear in the twentieth century. It rewrote the rules, redefined the relationship of fantasy and mythology, and brought a toughness and intellectual rigor to a genre that all too often descends into the twee and the banal” (Kincaid 2014: 174). Speaking personally, that is a view I find myself repeating ever more emphatically every time I revisit the novel. With the invention of Ryhope Wood, with the idea that the world of story is a place that is darker, dirtier, and grittier than we normally care to image, that the past is constantly reshaping the way that we comprehend the world, Holdstock was reinventing fantasy in much the same way that the Culture novels by Iain M. Banks reinvented space opera, or perhaps that John Le Carré reinvented spy fiction: by removing the glamour. Which is not to say that the old style of comfortable, comforting fantasy adventures is no longer being written; it is, and in increasing numbers. But rather, Mythago Wood, along with John Crowley’s Little, Big (1981) which appeared in the same year as the novelette of “Mythago Wood”, demonstrated that fantasy was a form that could be serious, challenging, and original. And any author wanting to stretch what can be done with fantasy must take account of the innovations that Holdstock introduced. There are no easy questions, or easy answers, in Mythago Wood. There is no problem that can be solved with an airy invocation of magic, no solution that waits at the end of a colourful quest. Because all the questions lie within the characters, within their imaginations, and within their sense of story. And there are no answers to these questions, no way out of the conundrum of identity or of story. As John Clute puts it: the further into Ryhope Wood the characters penetrate, “the huger and more unbearable becomes the ur-reality of the heartwood: it is a movement towards epiphany” (Clute 1995: 111). The mystery is: what is this epiphany? Donald E. Morse suggests that the central question of Mythago Wood is: “What if a being created by humans became aware of itself as a created

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being?” (Morse: 5). In fact, the central question that Holdstock poses is more complex than that. The various members of the Huxley family who have each dreamed their own version of Guiwenneth into existence themselves also become creatures of dream, creatures of story, as they enter the wood. So multiple questions arise: how does a human react to becoming a myth? How does a dream creature dream other creatures into being? Once a human becomes a mythago, is it still capable of imaging other mythagos into existence, and thus are mythagos self-perpetuating? And is a human mythago capable of returning to the human world; can we ever truly leave story for reality? Perhaps even more puzzling: if George has become the Urscumug, who dreamed him into that state? Who dreamed Christian into the leader of the warrior band? Who dreamed Steven into the role of the Kinsman, the outsider who has, throughout mythic time, come into the wood in order to battle Christian? Who is the author of these stories, these identities? Mythago Wood, in other words, raises a series of existential questions that undermine our notions about reality and story, identity and imagination. And it is such existential questions that insist that fantasy can never be simple again, because these questions are implicit every time we enter the world of story. If this seems like a complex response to the novel, it is worth remembering that each subsequent journey into Ryhope Wood becomes more complex, more unsettling, so that, as Morse puts it, “Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood novels are among those rare books that add to our experience rather than simply reflecting that experience back to us” (Morse: 5). In a way, Holdstock became as trapped in Ryhope Wood as George and Christian and Steven are. But it was a productive entrapment, as Faren Miller puts it, Holdstock’s revisitings of Ryhope Wood are “in no way an obsessive writer’s dead end. It is more like a time machine. Enter, and the possibilities open” (Miller 1991: 16). Holdstock would return to Ryhope Wood in four subsequent novels and a novella; but practically everything else he wrote, most notably the three novels of the Merlin Codex, grew from the ideas and settings first explored in Mythago Wood. Yet in returning to the wood, he was careful not to repeat himself, each subsequent volume would raise further questions and examine further complexities. Thus, the first return to Ryhope Wood in Lavondyss: Journey to an Unknown Region (which, like its predecessor, won the BSFA Award) seems as if it might offer an ending to the story of Harry Keeton, who disappeared alone into the wood in the latter part of Mythago Wood; but

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his fate remains unknown at the end of the novel: there are no tidy conclusions to these stories. The novel concerns Harry’s half-sister, Tallis, who grows up haunted by Ryhope Wood and by the mystery of Harry’s fate. (There is, in Mythago Wood, nothing to suggest that Harry is local and would therefore have known the Huxleys before the war, but that is taken for granted in this second volume; one of the few instances where the malleability of the wood is echoed in the malleability of the reality of the novels.) It is interesting that Holdstock follows a novel in which the only significant female figure is a construct of the male gaze, with one which follows its strong, independent female central character from pre-pubertal childhood into old age. For most of the novel she observes the wood from outside, though affected by it. When she sings a song she thought she had made up herself, Ralph Vaughan Williams (appearing as a character in the novel) identifies it as a traditional song he had collected years before; the wood had taught her the song. It is worth noting that the novel’s subtitle, “Journey to an Unknown Region”, echoes a choral work by Vaughan Williams, “Toward the Unknown Region” (1906), which, along with the quotation that opens Mythago Wood, tends to cement his importance to the sequence as explored in Chap. 4. In Mythago Wood, George Huxley used a “frontal bridge” devised by Edward Wynne-Jones as a way of linking the hemispheres of the brain to enable him to generate mythagos. This device is described as a “curious mask” (60), and in Lavondyss the idea of the mask is literalized in the series of masks that Tallis carves from various trees within the wood. These masks take on a shamanistic role, opening a new way for Tallis to penetrate the wood through what are called “hollowings”. Thereafter, masks would continue to exert such a shamanistic pull in most of Holdstock’s subsequent work, perhaps most tellingly in the powerful opening section of Celtika (2001), the first part of the Merlin Codex, where Merlin walks through a dense Scandinavian forest where the trees are bedecked with mysterious and threatening masks which betoken the mystery he is entering. But here the masks, and their hollowing effect, create a new relationship between human and mythago. Roger Luckhurst points out that the war veterans entering the wood in Mythago Wood are “explicitly presented as melancholics seeking redemption” (Luckhurst: 176), and their slow entry into the wood with its frequent frustrations matches this melancholy. But there is nothing melancholy about Tallis Keeton’s eventual journey through the wood from hollowing to hollowing. And as the wood shapes Christian and Steven in Mythago Wood, here the effect is, in part at

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least, the other way; as Clute puts it, the wood increasingly takes on “the shape of her abyssal self” (Clute 1995: 111). As she ages within the wood, so the wood comes to reflect the changes in her character and worldview. In this monograph I have argued that, in Mythago Wood, Ryhope Wood itself plays an active part. It is the wood that manipulates Steven into entering the wood to challenge Christian’s depredations. But it remains the case that mythagos emerge from human history, from the collective unconscious, from the urge to tell stories. The reality outside the wood shapes the irreality inside it. The story of Tallis Keeton draws our attention to this aspect once more, that influence and creation run in both directions, and it is something that becomes even more disturbing, more challenging to our notions of identity, in another of the mythago novels, The Hollowing (1993). The world is the offspring of the mind, an outgrowth of identity, memory, and story. But what if the mind that creates the world is itself damaged? Alex Bradley is a highly imaginative child, but he has also suffered brain damage. When he disappears into Ryhope Wood his active imagination populates it with mythagos that are as lost, damaged, and frightened as their creator, their warped and incomplete characters posing an existential threat to the wood and all its inhabitants, human and mythago. Since Alex is obsessed with the story of Gawain and the Green Knight, perverse, incomplete, and monstrously distorted versions of this tale fill the wood. His father, Richard, damaged in his own way after his marriage fell apart, must repeatedly battle these monsters as he tries to find and rescue his son. Richard’s quest takes him through a series of the hollowings that Tallis had opened, aptly described by Faren Miller as “plunging through space/ time and myth/time like wormholes through sf’s hyperspace” (Miller 1993: 17), which has the effect of shattering the landscape of story into a haphazard, kaleidoscopic array of disconnected spaces, which echoes the disordered nature of his son’s mind. For once, Ryhope Wood proffers up a relatively happy ending: Richard finds Alex and takes him home; but what leaves the wood can never be exactly the same as what entered it. These two novels play with ideas of identity and imagination, but the remaining works in the Mythago Cycle take a more psychological approach by re-examining the various members of the Huxley family. The novella, “The Bone Forest” (1991), for instance, goes back to the earliest attempts to map Ryhope Wood by George Huxley and Edward Wynne-Jones, but here we see from George’s point of view how his obsession with the curious manifestations they encounter in the wood contributes to his growing

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alienation from his family. Thus, Jennifer Huxley’s suspicions about the mythago Guiwenneth seen in Mythago Wood are here mirrored when George encounters a mythago of himself, the Grey-Green man, whom he discovers having intimate relations with his wife. The family are disturbed by the actions of this doppelganger without realizing it is not the real George, and so the alienation emanating from the forest works both ways. Story, we see, has no place for truth; what Clute calls the “arduous heart of fantasy” (Clute 2003: 178) is arduous precisely because trust can play no part there. The effects of this alienation are seen clearly in Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn, which focuses on the trauma Christian experiences following the suicide of his mother. His own journey into Ryhope Wood starts out light and comic but becomes progressively darker and more horrific as he is haunted by what may be the ghost of his mother and accompanied by a group of violent companions whose own stories all seem to be incomplete. As we saw in Mythago Wood, the stories enacted within the wood are necessarily inconclusive, played out again and again with endless variations yet never reaching a climax. These inconclusive stories in Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn often involve variations on the legend of King Arthur, including, at one point, three virtually identical Arthurs. Even when Christian has the chance to enter the underworld and learn two conflicting accounts of his mother’s suicide, there can be no resolution. In her review of this novel, Faren Miller makes reference to another Christian, in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress; but that Christian’s journey through the realm of story had a resolution, a happy ending at which to aim. In contrast, Holdstock’s Christian, perpetually in limbo, perpetually hovering between life and death, is playing a part in a story for which he knows there is no end. In his reinventions of the inhuman realm of mythology Holdstock never caught the true horror of the situation he had created as effectively as he did here. As Miller says in her review, the novel offers up “important truths, from powerful glimpses of the human condition to a sense of the constantly transforming heart of all fantasy: at once comic, tragic, gorgeous, gory, astonishing” (Miller 1997: 19). Both Lavondyss and The Hollowing are set after the events of Mythago Wood, but the only real continuity is in the setting. Thus Tallis, in Lavondyss, might be seeking her brother, Harry Keeton, and might encounter Edward Wynne-Jones, now acting as a shaman within the wood, but her story does not truly interact with the events or characters of Mythago Wood. While both “The Bone Forest” and Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn take place before

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the events of Mythago Wood. Thus, the only novel that might be considered a true sequel to Mythago Wood is the last one in the cycle, and also the last novel that Holdstock wrote, Avilion. But this is not the story of “the girl [who] came back through the fire”, the “story for another time, and another people” (252) promised in the very last line of Mythago Wood. Alone of the works in the Mythago Cycle, Avilion opens within the wood, where Steven Huxley (human-turned mythago) and Guiwenneth (mythago become notably more substantial and individual, a very different person from the Celtic princess encountered in the first novel) have set up home together with their two children: Jack who follows the human path and Yssobel who follows the mythago path. Although we have the same characters and the same setting as Mythago Wood, what is important here is how much they differ. Stories never stay the same; they change in subtle ways with each retelling, so the Ryhope Wood entered in each of the six iterations of the Mythago Cycle is always different. Though Lavondyss and Avilion are two names for the same place, the Lavondyss that Tallis reached is not the same as the Avilion that Yssobel reaches. The Christian who here leads an immense ghostly war band that travels through time to change the course of battles is not the same Christian encountered in Mythago Wood or Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn. And overall, while Mythago Wood contained much violence, it was also a novel suffused with a sense of new growth, the excitement of adventure, discovery, and love; Avilion, in contrast, presents winter following upon winter, the dying of the year, stories coming to an end and fading from memory. Ryhope Wood is always under existential threat, because stories are never stable, never consistent, never reliable, but as long as some memory remains then the wood remains. But the fading of memory is a far more profound journey into darkness, into finality. The previous stories we have been told about Ryhope Wood are all mirrored here, but the reflection is distorted. Guiwenneth has disappeared with a shadowy troop of horsemen, recalling her kidnap in Mythago Wood, but here her leaving is voluntary. Yssobel sets out to rescue her from Avilion, entering the heartwood by stealing the death of King Arthur and taking his place in the barge of the dark queens, an echo of Christian’s journey into the underworld in Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn, complete with the reference to Arthur. Jack, in turn, sets out on his own quest to find Yssobel, a journey that initially takes him out of the wood to Oak Lodge, where he hopes to summon a mythago of his grandfather, George Huxley, revisiting the idea of the Grey-Green man from “The Bone Forest”. It is

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impossible to know for sure whether Holdstock intended Avilion to conclude the Mythago Cycle, but the way it revisits and reinvents the mythologies first explored in Mythago Wood does give it a sense of closure. But the ideas that are such a distinctive underpinning of Mythago Wood and its successors—the importance of landscape, and particularly of ancient woodland, as a way of getting to the heart of what makes us human; the role of mythology, not as a simple, fully formed structure but an evolving web of story that is in a constant process of change; and above all the nature of time as something fluid, indeterminate, often incoherent—would escape Mythago Wood and inform just about all of his subsequent works. Indeed, a further short novel, Merlin’s Wood (1994), is often included as part of the cycle (for instance, in Wikipedia and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy), despite the fact that it is set in northern France and contains no characters in common with any of the other Mythago works, though there is, perhaps, a resonance with the wood in France where Harry Keeton was shot down. The Merlin’s Wood of the title is Broceliande, a gloomy place of ghosts and legends. Here a woman, Rebecca, has a child, Daniel, who is born deaf, dumb, and blind; but as the boy grows he begins to acquire these faculties while at the same time Rebecca loses them. This vampiric relationship, which continues until Rebecca is drained of all self-awareness, recapitulates the way Vivian drained the spirit of Merlin before imprisoning him within Broceliande. When Rebecca and Daniel both die within the forest, her husband, Martin, sets out to find and release Merlin in the hope that he might thus restore them both to life. As was so often the case in Holdstock’s work, the quest is doomed, and when Merlin takes possession of Martin’s body there is an echo of the way that no one can escape Mythago Wood. While other novels were less clearly derivative of the Mythago Cycle, they did tend to be infused with a similar set of concerns and imagery. Though the locus of his horror novel, The Fetch (1991), is a chalk pit in the Kentish Weald rather than woodland, it is still a place between worlds, a place built upon the imagination of a damaged child in a damaged family. Here the boy, Michael, tries to appease his adoptive parents by fetching saleable relics from the past (a memory of Where Time Winds Blow here), but when his strange talent starts to wane it unleashes dangers both from this world and from the other. While in Ancient Echoes (1996), there is an urban version of Mythago Wood, where the protagonist uses lucid dreaming to enter a pre-Roman city where he must seek out a pair of hostile

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mythagos, one of whom has stolen the soul of his daughter. Even the one film novelization that was published under his own name, The Emerald Forest (1985), based on the film by John Boorman, concerns the search for a stolen child through the Brazilian Rain Forest, where primitive forces are at play. One of the most striking ways in which the ideas of Mythago Wood permeated Holdstock’s other fiction is in the three novels that make up the Merlin Codex: Celtika (2001), The Iron Grail (2002), and The Broken Kings (2007). Damaged families, the dangers of primitive mythic figures, and the haunting atmosphere of ancient woodlands all combine, but in a way that seems designed to overturn the expectations that the Mythago Cycle raised. For instance, the first novel in the codex, Celtika, opens with an extended scene that could almost have been lifted from any of the Mythago novels. A figure trudges through a dense, dark woodland in winter, there are crude, oddly threatening masks along the way, and at the end there is a confrontation with myth. But the setting is northern Scandinavia at a specific moment in history, 278  BC; the masks are associated with local shamanic practices; the viewpoint character is Merlin, not a mythago but a historic figure; and the myth he is here to confront is the raising from a frozen Finnish lake of the ship Argo in which Jason has lain interred for some 700  years. I have proposed elsewhere (an idea that I know made Holdstock uncomfortable, but which still feels to me to have some validity) that if Mythago Wood is theory, then the Merlin Codex is practice: “Mythago Wood lays out this idea of different elements of mythology coming together, and then in the Merlin Codex you see what happens when they actually do come together” (Kincaid 2011: 15). In the trilogy we do not pass into the world of story, but rather story already occupies the real world. There are no myth imagos; the mythic figures that populate these novels are whole and coherent characters carefully situated within Northern European shamanism, or the Celtic Dawn, or whatever. The narrator is Merlin, an immortal who has walked down through the centuries, not someone for whom there are crude earlier versions or more polished later incarnations. The story takes place in 278 BC, the year in which Celts invaded Greece and sacked Delphi; yet it is also a world cut loose from history in which the Argo can sail mysterious underground passageways between Greece and Britain, and in which half of Britain is given over to the shadow realm of the dead, a version of the Celtic Tír na nÓc. In Mythago Wood there was a discontinuity between

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story and reality marked by the edge of Ryhope Wood; here there is no discontinuity, the two realms merge into one. Time, of course, is just as fluid, just as deceptive. Merlin, who had once sailed with Jason under another name, has roused Jason from his slumber because he has discovered that Medea had not murdered Jason’s children as had been thought. Instead, she had cast them through time, and Jason and Merlin must now cross the river into the land of the dead in order to discover and retrieve the children. Given that Medea is, unknown to Merlin, his own immortal sister, we can see familiar patterns recurring: dysfunctional families, children in peril, the barely discernible difference between life and death, reality and imagination. Yet while the trilogy treads much of the same ground as the Mythago Cycle, it does so under a very different light. Throughout the sequence of novels, from Lavondyss to The Broken Kings and Avilion, Holdstock is in search of the epiphany that Clute spoke of, and is attempting to answer the questions that Morse raised. Yet each visit to the interface of myth and reality, to the meandering timescape of his stories, could answer one set of questions only at the expense of raising another. So, each step along the way, starting with Mythago Wood, perhaps even starting with Eye Among the Blind, adds new details, new complexities, to a startling intellectual examination of the very nature of story. I can think of few other examples in modern literature in which the same territory has been explored with each new work, while avoiding repetitions and increasing the richness of the vision. Anyone who has travelled through Mythago Wood, from the first novelette to the final novel, has been to places that have never lost their ability to shock, to challenge, to make one think anew. And the other works that have appeared alongside this cycle, that have informed and been informed by Ryhope Wood, raise yet more questions, different perspectives, new approaches. All started with Mythago Wood, a work that opened up a new direction for fantasy, that established Holdstock as, in Clute’s words, “the finest writer of metamorphic fantasy now working” (Clute 2003: 179). This was stunning stuff, I wrote, “rich, daring, challenging, it stood as a vicious yet haunting retort to the vacuous prettiness of so much modern fantasy. Here, we were told, our imagination sprang from the darkest corners of our being, and from a primal age where life was indeed nasty, brutish and short” (Kincaid 2014: 165). And its resonances continue to sound in the best fantasy writing today. Any writer who wants to examine how eternal stories continue to shape the modern world has to take account of Mythago Wood.

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We see its influence, for example, in novels like Some Kind of Fairy Tale (2012) by Graham Joyce, which appropriately went on to be named the Best Novel by the British Fantasy Society, an award that only the year before had been renamed the Robert Holdstock Award. It is the story of a girl who is taken into the land of fairy only to return twenty years later to face the real-world consequences of her absence. The influence is there, too, in Ivory Apples (2019) by Lisa Goldstein, which, like so much of Holdstock’s work, concerns the interplay between reality and fiction, here in the form of a popular fantasy novel that also reveals the truth about an erotic and dangerous mythological realm situated right beside our own. The unexamined intersection between reality and some strange other realm is also at play in The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again (2020) by M.  John Harrison. While The Good Neighbours (2021) by Nina Allan leaves ambiguous what part the fairy realm had to play in a terrible murder. Time and again, the most original and intriguing new works of the fantastic show traces of Holdstock, and, in particular, of Mythago Wood. Little wonder that it is now consistently counted among the most important and influential fantasy novels of the last century.

Bibliography Fiction1 The Emerald Forest. 1985. Harmondsworth; Penguin [Film tie-in]. The Fetch. 1991. London; Orbit. The Hollowing. 1993. London; HarperCollins [MW]. Merlin’s Wood, or The Vision of Magic. 1994. London; HarperCollins [Collection, includes: Merlin’s Wood (1994, MW(?)), “Earth and Stone” (1980), “The Silvering” (1992)]. Ancient Echoes. 1996. London; HarperCollins. Celtika. 2001. London; Simon and Schuster [MC]. The Iron Grail. 2002. London; Simon and Schuster [MC].

1  Works in the Mythago Wood sequence are indicated MW; works in the Merlin Codex are indicated MC.

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Secondary Sources2 Clute, John. 1995. Look at the Evidence. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Clute, John. 2003. Scores: Reviews 1993–2003. Harold Wood: Beccon Publications. Kincaid, Paul. 2011. “The Memory of Stories: Robert Holdstock Interviewed”. In Into the Woods: Robert Holdstock Remembered. Warton, nr Tamworth: BSFA. 9–19. Kincaid, Paul. 2014. Call and Response. Harold Wood: Beccon Publications. Miller, Faren. 1991. “Locus Looks at Books”. In Locus 365 (June 1991). 15–16, 51. Miller, Faren. 1993. “Locus Looks at Books”. In Locus 392 (September 1993). 15, 17. Miller, Faren. 1997. “Locus Looks at Books”. In Locus 442 (November 1997). 17, 19.

2  In addition to the sources shown below, I have relied on The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition edited by John Clute and David Langford, https://sf-encyclopedia. com/; and also on the Official Robert Holdstock website, https://robertholdstock.com/.

Bibliography Works by Robert Holdstock

Fiction1 Eye Among the Blind. 1976. London; Faber and Faber. Earthwind. 1977. London; Faber and Faber. Necromancer. 1978. London; Futura. Where Time Winds Blow. 1981. London; Faber and Faber. In the Valley of the Statues. 1982. London; Faber and Faber [Collection, includes: “Earth and Stone” (1980), “A Small Event” (1977), “In the Valley of the Statues” (1979), “Ashes” (1974, as “Ash, Ash”), Travellers (1976), “The Touch of a Vanished Hand” (1977), “The Graveyard Cross” (1976), “Mythago Wood” (1981)]. Mythago Wood. 1984. London; Gollancz [MW]. Elite: The Dark Wheel. 1984. Cambridge, UK; Acornsoft [chapbook]. Bulman. 1984. London; Futura [TV tie-in]. Bulman 2: One of Our Pigeons is Missing. 1984. London; Futura [TV tie-in]. Thorn. 1984. Birmingham, UK; Birmingham Science Fiction Group [chapbook] The Emerald Forest. 1985. Harmondsworth; Penguin [Film tie-in]. Lavondyss: Journey to an Unknown Region. 1988. London; Gollancz [MW]. The Fetch. 1991. London; Orbit. The Bone Forest. 1991. London; Grafton [Collection, includes: “The Bone Forest” (1991, MW), “Thorn” (1984), “The Shapechanger” (1989), “The Boy Who 1  Works in the Mythago Wood sequence are indicated MW; works in the Merlin Codex are indicated MC.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Kincaid, Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood, Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10374-2

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Jumped the Rapids” (1984), “Time of the Tree” (1989), “Magic Man” (1976), “Scarrowfell” (1987), “The Time Beyond Age” (1976)]. The Hollowing. 1993. London; HarperCollins [MW]. Merlin’s Wood, or The Vision of Magic. 1994. London; HarperCollins [Collection, includes: Merlin’s Wood (1994, MW(?)), “Earth and Stone” (1980), “The Silvering” (1992)]. Ancient Echoes. 1996. London; HarperCollins. Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn. 1997. New York; Roc [MW]. Celtika. 2001. London; Simon and Schuster [MC]. The Iron Grail. 2002. London; Simon and Schuster [MC]. The Broken Kings. 2006. London; Gollancz [MC]. Avilion. 2009. London; Gollancz [MW]. “Trone’s Wood”. In Into the Woods: Robert Holdstock Remembered. Warton, nr Tamworth: BSFA. 5–8. Poems, Peoms, and Other Atrocities (with Garry Kilworth). 2013. Hornsea, UK; PS Publishing.

Pseudonymous books Legend of the Werewolf (as Robert Black). 1976. London; Sphere [Film tie-in]. Berserker: Shadow of the Wolf (as Chris Carlson). 1977. London; Sphere. Berserker: The Bull Chief (as Chris Carlson). 1977. London; Sphere. The Satanists (as Robert Black). 1978. London: Futura [Film tie-in]. Raven: Swordsmistress of Chaos (as Richard Kirk). 1978. London; Corgi. A Time of Ghosts (as Richard Kirk). 1978. London; Corgi. Berserker: The Horned Warrior (as Chris Carlson). 1979. London; Sphere. Lords of the Shadows (as Richard Kirk). 1979. London; Corgi. Cry Wolf (as Ken Blake). 1981. London; Sphere [TV tie-in]. The Untouchables (as Ken Blake). 1982. London; Sphere [TV tie-in]. Operation Susie (as Ken Blake). 1982. London; Sphere [TV tie-in]. You’ll Be All Right (as Ken Blake). 1982. London; Sphere [TV tie-in]. The Stalking (as Robert Faulcon). 1983. London; Arrow. The Talisman (as Robert Faulcon). 1983. London; Arrow. The Ghost Dance (as Robert Faulcon). 1984. London; Arrow. The Shrine (as Robert Faulcon). 1984. London; Arrow. The Hexing (as Robert Faulcon). 1984. London; Arrow. The Labyrinth (as Robert Faulcon). 1987. London; Arrow.

Non-Fiction Alien Landscapes (with Malcolm Edwards). 1979. London; Pierrot Publishing. Space Wars: Worlds and Weapons (as Steven Eisler). 1979. London; Octopus.

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Tour of the Universe: The Journey of a Lifetime, the Recorded Diaries of Leio Scott and Caroline Luranski (with Malcolm Edwards). 1980. London; Pierrot Publishing. The Alien World: The Complete Illustrated Guide (as Steven Eisler). 1980. London; Octopus. Magician: The Lost Journals of the Magus Geoffrey Carlyle (with Malcolm Edwards). 1982. Limpsfield, UK; Paper Tiger. Realms of Fantasy (with Malcolm Edwards). 1983. Limpsfield, UK; Paper Tiger. Lost Realms (with Malcolm Edwards). 1985. Limpsfield, UK; Paper Tiger.

As Editor Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. 1978. London; Octopus. Stars of Albion (with Christopher Priest). 1979. London; Pan. Other Edens (with Christopher Evans). 1987. London; Unwin. Other Edens II (with Christopher Evans). 1988. London; Unwin. Other Edens III (with Christopher Evans). 1989. London; Unwin.

Secondary Sources2 Aldiss, Brian with David Wingrove. 1986. Trillion Year Spree. London: Paladin; 1988. Benjamin, Walter. 2003. Selected Writings Volume 4, 1938–1940. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Bishop, Michael. 1982. “Where Time Winds Blow”. In Foundation 24 (February 1982). 90–92. Blackford, Jenny. 1986. “Mythago Wood”. In Australian Science Fiction Review, second series, issue 1 (March 1986). 34–36. Brown, Carroll. 1993. “The Flame in the Heart of the Wood: The Integration of Myth and Science in Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood”. In Extrapolation, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Summer 1993). 158–172. Butler, Andrew M. 1997. “The BSFA Award Winners: Robert Holdstock— Mythago Wood”. In Vector 192 (March/April 1997). 4. Cary, Catie. 1993. “Robert Holdstock Interviewed”. In Vector 175 (October/ November 1993). 3–6. Clute, John. 1995. Look at the Evidence. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Clute, John. 2003. Scores: Reviews 1993–2003. Harold Wood: Beccon Publications. 2  In addition to the sources shown below, I have relied on The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition edited by John Clute and David Langford, https://sf-encyclopedia. com/; and also on the Official Robert Holdstock website, https://robertholdstock.com/.

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Clute, John. 2021. “Robert P. Holdstock”. In The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, https://sf-­encyclopedia.com/entry/holdstock_robert_p (accessed, 14 February 2022). Clute, John & John Grant, editors. 1997. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. London: Orbit. Cole, Ross. 2019. “On the Politics of Folk Song Theory in Edwardian England”. In Ethnomusicology, Vol. 63, No. 1 (Winter 2019). 19–42. Darlington, Andrew. 2020. “Robert Holdstock: Blowing in the Time Winds”. In Miles Higher, https://andrewdarlington.blogspot.com/2020/10/robert-­ holdstock-­blowing-­in-­time-­winds.html?fbclid=IwAR25y8frAZztxIV5bk2sksez FcWkyoFS-­gHzr1wem404M0KsV_ZHR8DHUjQ (accessed, 12 February 2022). Ekman, Stefan. 2011. “Exploring the Habitats of Myths: The Spatiotemporal Structure of Ryhope Wood”. In The Mythic Fantasy of Robert Holdstock: Critical Essays on the Fiction edited by Donald E. Morse and Kálmán Matolcsy. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland. 46–65. Henderson, Joseph L. 1964. “Ancient Myths and Modern Man”. In Man and his Symbols edited by Carl Jung. London: Picador; 1978. 95–156. Holdstock, Robert. 2011. “Trone’s Wood”. In Into the Woods: Robert Holdstock Remembered. Warton, nr Tamworth: BSFA. 5–8. Hughes, Meirion & Robert Stradling. 2001. The English Musical Renaissance 1840–1940: Constructing a National Music, Second Edition. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Jung, Carl G. 1964. “Approaching the Unconscious”. In Man and his Symbols edited by Carl Jung. London: Picador; 1978. 1–94. Kilworth, Garry. 1978. “Necromancer”. In Vector 90 (November/December 1978). 52–54. Kincaid, Paul. 1993. “Touching the Earth”. In Vector 175 (October/November 1993). 7–9. Kincaid, Paul. 2009. “Of Time and the River”. In Call and Response. Harold Wood: Beccon Publications. 167–173. Kincaid, Paul. 2011a. “An Answer?”. In Into the Woods: Robert Holdstock Remembered. Warton, nr Tamworth: BSFA. 2–4. Kincaid, Paul. 2011b. “The Memory of Stories: Robert Holdstock Interviewed”. In Into the Woods: Robert Holdstock Remembered. Warton, nr Tamworth: BSFA. 9–19. Kincaid, Paul. 2014. Call and Response. Harold Wood: Beccon Publications. Locus. 1985. “Robert Holdstock’s Many Careers”. In Locus 299 (December 1985). 5, 53. Luckhurst, Roger. 2005. Science Fiction. Cambridge: Polity. Matless, David. 2016. Landscape and Englishness, Second Expanded Edition. London: Reaktion Books; 2019 pbk.

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Matolcsy, Kálmán. 2011. “Masks in the Forest: The Dynamics of Surface and Depth in the Mythago Cycle”. In The Mythic Fantasy of Robert Holdstock: Critical Essays on the Fiction edited by Donald E. Morse and Kálmán Matolcsy. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland. 26–45. Menand, Louis. 2021. The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War. London: 4th Estate. Miller, Faren. 1991. “Locus Looks at Books”. In Locus 365 (June 1991). 15–16, 51. Miller, Faren. 1993. “Locus Looks at Books”. In Locus 392 (September 1993). 15, 17. Miller, Faren. 1997. “Locus Looks at Books”. In Locus 442 (November 1997). 17, 19. Morse, Donald E. 2011. “Introduction: Mythago Wood—‘A Source of Visions and Adventure’”. In The Mythic Fantasy of Robert Holdstock: Critical Essays on the Fiction edited by Donald E. Morse and Kálmán Matolcsy. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland. 3–11. Nicholls, Stan. 1993. Wordsmiths of Wonder. London: Orbit. Oziewicz, Marek. 2011. “Profusion Sublime and the Fantastic: Mythago Wood”. In The Mythic Fantasy of Robert Holdstock: Critical Essays on the Fiction edited by Donald E.  Morse and Kálmán Matolcsy. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland. 81–95. Rippington, Geoff. 1979. “Robert Holdstock Interviewed”. In Arena SF 9 (August 1979). 18–26. Rolt, L.T.C. 1944. Narrow Boat. London: Methuen; 1985. Ryman, Geoff. 1985. “Mythago Wood”. In Foundation 33 (Spring 1985). 74–76. Schweitzer, Darrell. 2013. Speaking of the Fantastic. Cabin John, Maryland: Wildside Press. Senior, W.A. 2011. “The Embodiment of Abstraction in the Mythago Novels”. In The Mythic Fantasy of Robert Holdstock: Critical Essays on the Fiction edited by Donald E.  Morse and Kálmán Matolcsy. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland. 13–25. Stephensen-Payne, Philip. 1978. “Civilisation and Savagery: Two Novels by Robert Holdstock”. In Vector 86 (March/April 1978). 22–25. Taylor, Martyn. 1984. “The Tail of History”. In Vector 123 (December 1984). 14–16. Watkins, Alfred. 1925. The Old Straight Track: Its Mounds, Beacons, Moats, Sites and Mark Stones. London: Abacus; 1976. Williams, Paul. 2018. “Stepping into Story: Narrative Grammar in Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Cycle”. In Gramarye 14 (Winter 2018). 21–31. Young, Rob. 2011. Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music. London: Faber.

Index

A Adventures of Robin Hood, The, 56 Aldiss, Brian, 4 Allan, Nina The Good Neighbours, 79 Ancient Echoes (Holdstock), 76 Avilion (Holdstock), 6, 17, 29, 61, 75, 78 B Bangor University, 2 Banks, Iain M., 70 Baring-Gould, Sabine, 51 Battle of the Somme, 15, 28 Bax, Arnold, 51 Benjamin, Walter, 33, 34, 45, 47 On the Concept of History, 33 Berger, Barbara, 1 Bishop, Michael, 3 Blavatsky, Madame, 63

Bone Forest, The, novella (Holdstock), 73–75 Boorman, John, 77 Boudicca, 59 Box of Delights, The (Masefield), 52, 56 Brave New World (Huxley), 6 British Fantasy Society, 4, 79 British Science Fiction Association, 16 British Union of Fascists, 53 Broken Kings, The (Holdstock), 77, 78 Brown, Carroll, 3, 12, 58 BSFA Award, 3, 4, 71 Bunyan, John Pilgrim’s Progress, The, 74 Butler, Andrew M., 19 C Carter, Howard, 52 Celtika (Holdstock), 34, 72, 77 Clute, John, 8, 10–12, 70, 73, 74, 78

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Kincaid, Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood, Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10374-2

87

88 

INDEX

Cowper, Richard, 6 Crater Encounter (Holdstock), 28 Crawford, O.G.S., 22, 50 Crowley, John Little, Big, 70 D Darkness, The (Holdstock), 57 Darlington, Andrew, 2, 3 Dedman, Alfred, 16, 17, 25, 26, 30 Dedman, Mercy, 16, 17 Doors of Perception, The (Huxley), 6 E Earth and Stone (Holdstock), 35 Earthwind (Holdstock), 2, 10, 35, 57 Einstein, Albert Theory of Relativity, 38 Ekman, Stefan, 41–43 mythotopes, 41–43 Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land, 51 Ells, Douglas, 16, 17, 26, 28 Emerald Forest, The (Holdstock), 77 Encyclopedia of Fantasy, The, 8, 76 Evans, Arthur, 52 Eye Among the Blind (Holdstock), 2, 35, 37, 78 F F&SF, see Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction Fetch, The (Holdstock), 76 First World War, 22, 28, 29, 50, 52 Flynn, Errol, 56 Frazer, J.G., 51, 57, 58 The Golden Bough, 51, 57 Freud, Sigmund, 9, 19, 65 Oedipus Complex, 20, 25 From Ritual to Romance (Weston), 51

G Gardiner, Rolf, 52, 54 Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn (Holdstock), 4, 74, 75 Glastonbury Romance, A (Powys), 51 Golden Bough, The (Frazer), 51, 57 Goldstein, Lisa Ivory Apples, 79 Good Neighbours, The (Allan), 79 Grahame, Kenneth The Wind in the Willows, 51 Grimm, Brothers, 17 H Harrison, M. John The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, 79 Henry VIII, 62, 63 Holdstock (paternal grandfather), 17 Holdstock, Robert, 2–6, 10, 12, 16, 17, 20, 24–26, 28–30, 34–37, 50, 53–59, 61, 69–72, 74–79 Ancient Echoes, 76 Avilion, 6, 17, 29, 61, 75, 76, 78 “The Bone Forest” (novella), 73–75 The Broken Kings, 77, 78 Celtika, 34, 72, 77 “Crater Encounter,” 28 “The Darkness,” 57 “Earth and Stone,” 35 Earthwind, 2, 10, 35, 57 The Emerald Forest, 77 Eye Among the Blind, 2, 35, 37, 78 The Fetch, 76 Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn, 4, 74, 75 The Hollowing, 73, 74 The Iron Grail, 77 Lavondyss, 10, 12, 24, 57, 71, 72, 74, 78 Merlin Codex, The, 34, 57, 61, 63, 71, 72, 77 Merlin’s Wood, 76

 INDEX 

Mythago Wood, 4–6, 8, 10, 12, 16, 17, 27, 29, 30, 34–37, 41, 44, 45, 50, 57, 61, 69–79 “Mythago Wood” (novelette), 2, 36, 70 Necromancer, 2 “Pauper’s Plot,” 2 Poems, Peoms & Other Atrocities, 16 “A Small Event,” 37 “Trench Ghost,” 28 “Trones Wood,” 16 Where Time Winds Blow, 2, 3, 34, 36, 76 Hollowing, The (Holdstock), 73, 74 Huxley, Aldous, 6 Brave New World, 6 The Doors of Perception, 6 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 6 Hythe, 2, 5 I Into the Woods (BSFA), 16 Ireland, John, 17 Iron Grail, The (Holdstock), 77 Ivory Apples (Goldstein), 79 J Joyce, Graham Some Kind of Fairy Tale, 79 Jung, Carl, 37, 57, 58 archetypes, 37 collective unconscious, 58, 61 psychopomp, 45 symbolism, 57 K Kessel, John, 2 Kilworth, Garry, 2, 16 Kinder Mass Trespass, 54

89

L Lacton Manor, 17 Lavondyss (Holdstock), 10, 12, 24, 57, 71, 72, 74, 78 Le Carré, John, 70 Levi-Strauss, Claude Mythologiques, 61 Lewis, C.S., 70 Little, Big (Crowley), 70 Longueval, France, 16 Lord of the Rings, The (Tolkien), 70 Luckhurst, Roger, 72 M Machen, Arthur, 17 Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1 Malzberg, Barry, 2 Marshall, H.E. Our Island Story, 52 Masefield, John, 52, 56 The Box of Delights, 52, 56 Matolcsy, Kalman, 70 Merlin Codex, The (Holdstock), 34, 57, 61, 63, 71, 72, 77 Merlin’s Wood (Holdstock), 76 Middleton Murry, John, 6 Middleton Murry Jr., see Cowper, Richard Miller, Faren, 71, 73, 74 Morris dancing, 52 Morse, Donald E., 70, 78 Morton, H.V., 54 Mosley, Oswald, 53 Mythago Wood, novelette (Holdstock), 2, 4–6, 8, 10, 12, 16, 17, 27, 29, 30, 34–36, 41, 44, 45, 50, 57, 61, 69–79 Mythologiques (Levi-Strauss), 61 Mythotopes, 41–44

90 

INDEX

N Naziism, 52 Necromancer (Holdstock), 2 New Wave, 2 New Worlds, 2 Nicholls, Stan, 35, 36, 57 Normal School of Science, 6 O Old Straight Trac The (Watkins), 53 Once and Future King, The (White), 56 On the Concept of History (Benjamin), 33 Our Island Story (Marshall), 52 Oziewicz, Marek, 43 P Pauper’s Plot (Holdstock), 2 Pearl, The (anon), 30 Piltdown Man, 52 Poems, Peoms & Other Atrocities (Holdstock & Kilworth), 16 Powys, John Cowper A Glastonbury Romance, 51 Psychopomp, 45, 47 R Rippington, Geoff, 35 Robert Holdstock Award, 4, 79 Rolt, L.T.C., 51, 54 Royal Flying Corps, 22 Ryman, Geoff, 70 S Sapper (H.C. McNeile), 17 Schweitzer, Darrell, 54 Science Fiction Encyclopedia, 4

Second World War, 6, 7, 21, 29, 34, 50, 52, 58 Senior, W.A., 29 Shadoxhurst, Kent, 5 Sharp, Cecil, 51–53 A Small Event (Holdstock), 37 Some Kind of Fairy Tale (Joyce), 79 Stephensen-Payne, Philip, 2 Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, The (Harrison), 79 Sutton Hoo, 52 Swinburne, Algernon, 51 T Taylor, Martyn, 69 Theosophy, 63 Through the Looking Glass (Carroll), 41 Time Machine, The (Wells), 6 Tolkien, J.R.R., 70 The Lord of the Rings, 70 Toward the Unknown Region (Vaughan Williams), 72 Trench Ghost (Holdstock), 28 Trevelyan, G.M., 54 Trônes Wood, 16–18, 23, 25, 26, 50 Trone’s Wood (Holdstock), 16 V Vaughan Williams, Ralph, 50, 72 “Toward the Unknown Region,” 72 Versailles Treaty, 34 W Waste Land, The (Eliot), 51 Watkins, Alfred, 20, 40, 52, 53, 58, 61 ley lines, 52, 61 The Old Straight Track, 53 Watson, Ian, 2

 INDEX 

Wells, H.G., 6 The Time Machine, 6 Weston, Jessie L., 51 From Ritual to Romance, 51 Westwell, Kent, 5, 17 Where Time Winds Blow (Holdstock), 2, 3, 34, 36, 76 White, T.H., 56 The Once and Future King, 56 Wikipedia, 76

91

Williams-Ellis, Clough, 54 Williams, Paul, 12, 37, 43, 66 Wind in the Willows, The (Grahame), 51 Wingrove, David, 4 World Fantasy Award, 4 Y Yolen, Jane, 2 Young, Rob, 50