Poul Anderson, Three Hearts and Three Lions

 Introduction

Opening Passage: There are two passages that can be considered the 'beginning', in the Note (which gives us the frame narrative) and Chapter 1. From Chapter 1:

He woke slowly. For a while he lay unaware of more than the pain in his head. Vision came piecemeal, until he saw that the thing before him was the root of a tree. As he turned over, a thick carpet of old leaves crackled. Earth and moss and moisture made a pungency in his nose.

"Det var som fanden!" he muttered, which means, roughly, "What the hell!" He sat up. (p. 10)

Summary: Holger Carlsen was a Dane who studied mechanical engineering in America; he was completely normal and unexceptional, behind the fact that he was adopted orphan. While he was in America, Denmark fell under the heel of Nazi Germany, but when rumors begin to spread that the Danes might be on the verge of active revolt, Holger returned to Denmark, despite the grave danger, and eventually joined the underground resistance. While involved in an important mission for the underground, he got into a shooting incident with the Germans in which he was apparently knocked out, and...

...woke naked in a strange forest, near a horse (named Papillon, according to the headstall) and some clothes and armor that were his size. Putting on the armor, he soon meets a beautiful swan maiden, who (as the name suggests) has a vestment that allows her to become a swan. Her name is Alianora. Sh takes him to Mother Gerd, a witch, who sends him on the duke of the elves in Faerie. Alianora introduces him to the dwarf Hugi, who becomes a trusted companion. When they reach the elves, Holger narrowly avoids being lured by the elves and Queen Morgan le Fay into a trap and put to rest for centuries beneath Elf Hill.

Meanwhile, he slowly begins to unravel the nature of the world around him. There are two great forces, Law and Chaos, in continual struggle. The fairy realm and all the bogies of human fear are on the side of Chaos, trying to turn the world back into some ungoverned and ungovernable state; on the side of Law are the major empires of men in the Middle World, the Holy Empire and, farther away, the Saracen lands. The denizens of Faerie have powerful magic, especially of illusion and glamour, but they are helpless before the holy symbols and prayers of Christianity. This comes us something of a shock to Holger, an agnostic. Holger also finds that he has something like a memory of the world, but just out of reach; he cannot recall anything, but sometimes he gets flashes and glimpses, and sometimes things seem very familiar, and sometimes he knows things that he certainly did not learn in our world. Figuring out the mystery hidden by the veils of memory will become essential to finding a way to return home. But when he does return home, what does he now leave behind, as a man who has lived in both worlds?

The overall story is not, I think, greatly surprising to anyone who knows the basic story of the Carlovingian paladin, Holger Danske, also known as Ogier the Dane, and the essential insight that Holger had to discover in order to begin to fulfill his role in that world and return to our own is one that I had guessed within literally a few minutes of starting the book. But it is told with considerable skill, and in that way is a bit like Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court -- if you know the story of King Arthur, you can guess a lot about where the latter story might go, but that's not the point, because it's not really a mystery story but (as we would say today in our anime-influenced world) an isekai, and the point is to see someone from our world make their way through another world. 

The fantasy elements of the tale are great. The attempts to hold together our world and the Middle World are somewhat uneven, although they occasionally (as with the explanation of why those who steal a sun-turned giant's gold are cursed) are clever. Part of the point, of course, is that Sir Holger trying to reach the goal of his quest while Morgan le Fay and an army of Chaos try to stop him is doing something of essentially the same kind as Holger Carlsen in the Danish resistance racing to try to get someone important out of the country while being hunted by Nazis. The battles of Law and Chaos are not exactly the same in style in the two worlds, but they are the same in substance. And it makes sense that Anderson puts this in terms of Law and Chaos rather than Good and Evil; it is easier to convince ourselves that we should let Chaos rule than that we should submit to Evil, and, in any case, in World War II, we had plenty of reasons to recognize that Law could be flawed and Chaos attractive, independent of any moral question.

Where the book is weakest is in its humor. There's a lot of potential humor in a story like this, and I think Anderson doesn't manage to draw it out to more than an occasional chuckle. I think this is what primarily prevents Three Hearts and Three Lions from rising to the level of Connecticut Yankee; the latter's easy humor both makes it easier to immerse oneself in the story and gives the social commentary aspect of it a greater depth than it would otherwise have. Nonetheless, unlike Connecticut Yankee, which would be practically unbearable if it were not written by someone as funny as Mark Twain, this is not primarily a comic work, and therefore, while lessened by its missed opportunities in humor, is not hurt as badly as it might have been by this weakness.

It is difficult sometimes to return to the sources of things. This book has been so influential on pop fantasy that it's necessary to remind yourself that you aren't seeing a trite repetition of a common trope but the first original that everyone is imitating. Dwarves are often portrayed in pop fantasy as having Scottish accents, which might seem rather random; but the reason is found here, where Anderson gives, for the very first time, a memorable dwarf character who speaks in broadly Scots-like dialect. Parts of the story can easily read like a Dungeons & Dragons role-playing campaign -- but the reason is not that Anderson is indulging in the bad habit of LitRPG but that early Dungeons & Dragons often imitated Three Hearts, and parts of that were so popular that they continue today in many different versions of many different fantasy role-playing games, which have in turn influenced fantasy on screen and page. (The same problem arises for the Conan stories, and for exactly the same reason.) The original should not be blamed for being popular and influential, even if some later imitations have degenerated to a sort of cargo-cult repetition. If you can come to it with fresh eyes, however, this is an enjoyable and rewarding book, and it is easy to see why it captivated so many, and why people have been imitating bits and pieces of it ever since. 

Favorite Passage:

Everywhere around were stars, but unthinkably remote in a black heaven. The Swan flashed overhad, the Milky Way spilled suns off its dim arch. Carl's Wain wheled under the Pole; all the stars were cold. Northward he began to see the peaks of this range, sword sharp, sheathed in ice that gleamed under the moon. Behind him waxed lightlessness.

Gallop and gallop and gallop! Now Holger heard the wild horns closer, shrilling and wailing. Never had he heard such anguis as was blown on the horns of the damned. Through the clover air he heard hoofs in the sky and the baying of immortal hounds. He leaned forward. His body swayed with Papillon's haste, his rein hand loose on the arched neck, his other hand gripped about Alianora's. (p. 213)

Recommendation: Recommended.

****

Poul Anderson, Three Hearts and Three Lions, Open Road (New York: 2018).

Links of Note

 * Two interesting items from "Medievalists.net":
 Lorris Chevalier, The Myth of Mills: Bridging Antiquity and Medieval Innovation
Lorris Chevalier, The Myth of the Medieval Flail: Separating Fact from Fiction

* Manuel Fasko, Shepherd on Nonlinguistic and Prelinguistic Cognition: A Case of Nonconceptualism? (PDF) -- I'm not convinced by all parts of this argument, and think that when she means 'latent conception' she means precisely what she says -- a conception that is not recognized as such at the time -- but it's an interesting discussion

* Ina Goy, Immanuel Kant on the Moral Feeling of Respect (PDF)

* Jonathan Gilmore, The Paradox of Tragedy, at the SEP

* Juan Carlos Gonzalez, Believing in organisms: Kant's non-mechanistic philosophy of nature (PDF)

* Patrick Flynn, Physicalists Should Have a Problem with the Problem of Suffering, at "The Journal of Absolute Truth"

* Emanuel Rutten, On Herman Philipse's Attempt to Write Off Cosmological Arguments (PDF)

* Patrik Engisch, Recipes, Traditions, and Representation (PDF)

* Julian Kwasniewski, 'Back to the Land' Catholics Champion Faithful Agrarian Living, on the Catholic Land Movement, at "National Catholic Register"

* Chris Fraser, Paradoxes in the School of Names (PDF)

* Gabriel J. LeBeau, Abdul-Rahman Alkiswani, Daniel J. Mauro, Paul J. Camarata, A Plausible Historical and Forensic Account of the Death of Thomas Aquinas

* Mustafa Yavuz, Avicennian Reception of Aristotelian Botany (PDF)

* L. W. Blakely, Philosophy in the Ruins, at "Front Porch Republic"

ADDED LATER

* This report in the Los Angeles Times, by Connor Sheets, on some of the failures that have made the recent Palisades fire so devastating, is an astounding look at a case of poor political priorities.

Emerentiana Emerita (Re-Post)

 Today is the feast of St. Emerentiana, so here is a lightly revised post from 2020 to mark the day.

*****

 Agnes was a Roman girl from a wealthy Christian family; as was common among the wealthy, she was given to a wetnurse, who was Emerentiana's mother, and who was lactating because she was already nursing Emerentiana. The two girls grew up together, and Emerentiana, who was not from a Christian family, eventually became a catechumen. About this time, according to the story, some of Agnes' pagan suitors who were rejected precisely because they were not Christian reported her to the authorities as a Christian. She was eventually beheaded. A few days later, Emerentiana was found praying outside her tomb near the Via Nomentana by a number of pagans who criticized her for doing so; when she scolded them for the evil they had done to her friend and foster-sister, they stoned the young catechumen to death. She was canonized and is often depicted holding stones in her lap. Both Agnes and Emerentiana are said to be buried in the Roman church of Sant'Agnese fuori le mura (Saint Agnes Outside the Walls), which was built over the catacombs on the Via Nomentana where Agnes was buried and Emerentiana martyred; but it can't be completely ruled out that she is in fact buried somewhere else nearby.

The name 'Emerentiana' is a fairly unusual one (although in some traditions, the Virgin Mary's grandmother is named Emerentia); the name comes from Latin ēmerēre, which means to deserve or merit, especially because you have completed a term of service. It's the same word that gives us the English word 'emeritus' for professors who have completed their service; 'emeritus' was the word Romans used for a veteran who had been honorably discharged.

The building of the church above the catacombs was a common practice in the early Church; it's actually the source of the Catholic customs of dedicating churches to saints, of putting relics in or under altars, and of having patron saints. While the earliest Christian churches seem to have been house churches, the earliest Christians would have particular liturgies at the graves of martyrs in catacombs and the like. The martyrs themselves were, so to speak, the altars. (In the Emerentiana legend this may well be why the pagans reacted so vehemently to Emerentiana praying at Agnes' tomb.) When it later became feasible, they would build churches and basilicas over the catacombs, and of course, the church would be referred to by the relevant martyr, leading to the practice of churches having titular saints. Where it was possible, the churches would be built in such a way that the altar was right over the saint giving the church its title, as Sant'Agnese fuori le mura is built so that the remains of St. Agnes are thought to be directly beneath the altar. But sometimes this was not possible, so it would be done symbolically by putting a relic of the saint in the altar, if one could be had. This continued even as there was a need for churches far from any martyr's grave, and when saints who were not strictly martyrs were given honors analogous to martyrs (thus leading to canonization in our usual sense). Thus, for instance, not far from where I live is a church dedicated to Saint Albert the Great; there is a little bit of bone from St. Albert in the altar, so every time Mass is said, it is in a sense said on the tomb of St. Albert, which in reality is very far from here. These titular saints, especially the more famous ones, were often associated with particular places, which became the idea of patron saints of places, which then expanded, sometimes by accident of location, sometimes by historical association, and sometimes just by analogies based on their lives, to patron saints of guilds and other things. Agnes being the more famous Virgin Martyr, she has a long list of things of which she is taken to be patron saint, most of which are based directly on her life or on historical associations that built up around her titular church. Emerentiana, always the quiet girl in Agnes' shadow, has a much shorter list. Indeed, the only thing I've ever seen Emerentiana listed as patron of is stomach problems. Like most lesser-known saints, the patronage comes purely by an analogy; as I said above, she is usually depicted seated with a pile of stones in her lap, and it's usually thought that she became associated with stomach problems because having a lap full of stones looks like it would be hard on the abdomen. It's far from being the only saint-patronage based on a visual pun.

In any case, I think St. Emerentiana would make a good patron saint for friends.

The Pardon Power

 People have been talking a lot about presidential pardons recently, in part because of controversial pardons by both Biden (e.g., pardoning his son Hunter despite having explicitly and publicly promised his Democratic supporters that he would not) and Trump (e.g., pardoning almost all January 6 protesters). As always happens with this topic, people say things that are motivated more by partisanship than the facts of the matter, so it's worth reminding ourselves how pardon power works.

The presidential pardon power is found in the U.S. Constitution, Article II, Section 2, Clause 1:

...he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.

Note that there are only two explicit restrictions here -- it has to be for offenses against the United States, and does not extend to cases of impeachment. The question of implicit restrictions, deriving from the concept of a "Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons", is an interesting field of discussion. One topic that often comes up is whether the President can pardon himself; self-pardons have historically not been regarded as possible, although this has never been directly tested in the United States (where federal courts usually try to avoid directly convicting Presidents for things). Another one relates to Biden's last-minute pardons, several of which were non-specific as to crimes and for people who have not been charged for anything, and might never be. These preemptive pardons are almost certainly not legitimate -- you can only pardon for offenses, and offenses have to be specific. The pardon power is not a power to give someone an immunity from prosecution, particularly if the pardon doesn't identify a particular offense and any charges or even investigations necessarily post-date the pardon.

However, these are not the issues that usually come up in discussion; people complain about pardons themselves, not about whether something is really a pardon or not. In doing so, they often misunderstand the point of the pardon power. These are matters I've discussed before, so I'll quote some of a post from 2008 below. (The original links to the sources have since broken; I'll look when I have the chance for new ones, if I have a chance.) Suffice it to say that the whole point of the pardon power is that it is difficult to put a rule to, because it really exists to handle cases where the rules are not good enough. The ideal situation for the pardon power is for when people are guilty -- have broken the law -- but it is not good for society as a whole to treat them as guilty and punish them. There are lots of situations in which you might need this, and pretty much any restriction you try to make on it will result in cases being treated too harshly because the law doesn't consider the relevant circumstances, or in cases being applied where, whatever the law may say, a large number of people regard applying it to the given case as an abuse of power, or in cases where punishing someone who is well and truly guilty of something would in fact harm the public good more than the punishment would benefit it. Whatever you may think of the prudence of particular pardons, it's clear that at least many of the more controversial pardons of Biden and Trump are intended by them to be exactly of this sort, and therefore exactly what the pardon power is for.

And, frankly, while individual pardons may be unwise, extensive use of the pardon power is not in general a bad thing, and should be encouraged rather than (as is usually done) discouraged. This is true because mercy is a higher and greater expression of civilized life than justice, and because, important as positive laws can be, the people as a whole are more important than any particular law. The justice system serves the people, and the people involved with it are prone to forget that; the pardon power is one of a very few things that explicitly recognizes that there are sometimes things that are more important than law enforcement. The pardon power is also important because it is a reminder that even good laws applied by good courts are not expressions of omniscience, and can fail to foresee genuinely important circumstances. 

*****

Blackstone had argued that the power of pardon was one of the advantages of monarchy over other forms of government because it (1) reduced the temptation of courts to strain the interpretation of law in order to take into account all the circumstances; (2) endeared the Crown to the people through acts of compassion; and (3), although this is only suggested in passing and is perhaps not Blackstone's own view, allowed the prince to express in a subtle way its disapproval of a too-strict law. 

Blackstone argues that a democracy can't seriously allow the power of pardon because there is no authority higher than the legislature and it would be inappropriate to give judges this power; which is fine as an argument as long as you don't have the tertium quid of an 'energetic magistrate' who is neither legislator nor judge. The colonies had carried over the power of pardon, and when they formed the Office of the President, the one that we know, they had two models to choose from: in most state constitutions the power of pardon was invested in the governor, in a few in the legislature. The power of pardon was given to the President in order to provide a check and a balance against Congress. 

 It's important to note that the power of pardon was not given in order to facilitate law or judicial justice. Quite the opposite; it was designed, and defended, on the basis that there needs to be a protection even from law and even from judicial justice. It was not made in order to prevent the backfiring of justice; one of the types of cases for which it was explicitly considered was the one where legal justice succeeds: the law was in general a reasonable one, and the judgment in court was a reasonable application of the law. As I think Oliver Wendell Holmes somewhere put it, it was explicitly supposed to include cases where policy required "a remission of a punishment strictly due, for a crime certainly ascertained." The cases where pardon can correct faulty justice were merely considered an additional benefit. 

 Hamilton explicitly argues that the power of pardon should be open to a very liberal use: 

 Humanity and good policy conspire to dictate, that the benign prerogative of pardoning should be as little as possible fettered or embarrassed. The criminal code of every country partakes so much of necessary severity, that without an easy access to exceptions in favor of unfortunate guilt, justice would wear a countenance too sanguinary and cruel. 

 It is thus entirely different from an acquittal; it does not imply innocence or vindication. Thus when we consider how it might be improved (and it is always possible that any clause of the Constitution might be improved), it does not make much sense to consider it as if it were part of the justice system. It is entirely a different matter: it is a distinct system for protecting people from the legislature and the courts; it is based on the principle that these things may not have a good result even when working quite well. (That there is some wisdom to this is seen in the aftermath of the Civil War, since Lincoln spent an immense amount of time using his pardoning power to protect deserters, especially very young ones, from full punishment.) Pardon is part of our justice system in a kind of incidental way; as it is set up to work, one can argue, it is (so to speak) part of our benevolence system, and works on the principle that mercy can and should sometimes supercede the ordinary operation of justice. James Wilson puts this point nicely: 

 The most general opinion, as we have already observed, and, we may add, the best opinion, is, that, in every state, there ought to be a power to pardon offences. In the mildest systems, of which human societies are capable, there will still exist a necessity of this discretionary power, the proper exercise of which may arise from the possible circumstances of every conviction. Citizens, even condemned citizens, may be unfortunate in a higher degree, than that, in which they are criminal. When the cry of the nation rises in their favour; when the judges themselves, descending from their seats, and laying aside the formidable sword of justice, come to supplicate in behalf of the person, whom they have been obliged to condemn; in such a situation, clemency is a virtue; it becomes a duty. 

 It's pretty clear, I think, that this in itself unsettles people; and repeatedly one finds that many of the arguments for restricting the pardoning power boil down simply to the fact that justice was not served. That really implies that there should be no real pardoning power at all; pardon gets its strength precisely from the fact that it is able to do this. The more restricted motivation that provides grounds for restricting the pardoning power (rather than eliminating it) is to discourage corruption. Certainly restrictions of the power to pardon are not unheard of -- the President perhaps has a less restricted power of absolute pardon than the British monarch had in the time of Blackstone. The pardoning power was (as I understand) in a way smuggled through the Constitutional convention, being added at the last minute and not discussed at length, despite being controversial; and it has, moreover, a long history of being used for political expediency. There is room for both motivations, if reasonably unfolded (as well as for reasoned defenses of keeping things as is, if any are on offer).* But I think it is very important to keep the two arguments distinct; otherwise we'll just make a hash of things. 

_____ 

* I'm of the view that the pardoning power is very important, and should be used more systematically than it usually is. I am open to arguments, however, that it could be reworked in ways to reduce any encouragement to corruption that might possibly result from it.

Two Poem Drafts

 On a Passage in a Letter by Mary Shelley

From the window he looked down upon the terrace and the sea,
which rushed with endless foaming in a raging, rising flood;
he saw himself in shadow and from shadow he did flee:
his hand around the throat of fate, the pounding in the blood,
brought terror to his heart and from the sight he fled
in fear of things that ever were and children ghostly-dead.
Thus lonely on a poet's throne, with burdened poet's crown,
he fled, for sea was flooding in and all was coming down.

Psalm 148

Glorify the One Who Is, glorify the One Who Truly Is;
Glorify Him in the loftiness.
Glorify Him, all His envoys;
Glorify Him, all His armies;
Glorify Him, bright sun and yellow moon;
Glorify Him, you heaping, shining stars;
Glorify Him, you loftiest loftiness,
And you flowing flows above the loftiness.

They will glorify the Name of the One Who Truly Is,
For He commanded and they were founded,
And He made them stand onward and always,
And He inscribed that they not pass over.

Glorify out of the land the One Who Truly Is,
O monsters and all deep things,
Flame, hail, snow, and mist,
Tempest winds fulfilling His word,
Hills and hillocks,
Fruitful trees and all cedars,
Wildlife and all beasts,
Creeping reptiles and chirping, flying birds,
Kings of the lands and all nations,
Chieftains and all vindicators of the land.

They will glorify the Name of the One Who Truly Is,
For His Name alone is uplifted,
His splendor above the land and the loftiness.

At Dawn, Behold! The Pall of Night Was Gone

 Morning Joy
by Claude McKay 

At night the wide and level stretch of wold,
 Which at high noon had basked in quiet gold,
 Far as the eye could see was ghostly white;
 Dark was the night save for the snow's weird light.
 I drew the shades far down, crept into bed;
 Hearing the cold wind moaning overhead
 Through the sad pines, my soul, catching its pain,
 Went sorrowing with it across the plain.
 At dawn, behold! the pall of night was gone,
 Save where a few shrubs melancholy, lone,
 Detained a fragile shadow. Golden-lipped
 The laughing grasses heaven's sweet wine sipped.
 The sun rose smiling o'er the river's breast,
 And my soul, by his happy spirit blest,
 Soared like a bird to greet him in the sky,
 And drew out of his heart Eternity.

Twofold Reflection of First Truth

 As a certain gloss on the verse The true have vanished, etc., of the Psalms says, the one First Truth is reflected by many truths in our minds, just as one person's face is reflected by many faces in a broken mirror. Now, this manifold reflection of the one First Truth involves two things. One is the light of our intellect, of which the Psalms speak: The light of your face, O Lord is signed upon us. The other is the first principles (simple or compound) that we naturally know. For we are only able to know the truth because of these first principles and the light of our intellect, and they are only able to make the truth clear to us because they resemble the First Truth, which makes them to a certain extent unchangeable and incapable of misleading us.

[Thomas Aquinas, Quodlibetal Questions, QQ. 10, art. 1, Turner Nevitt and Brian Davies, trs., Oxford University Press (New York: 2020), p. 142.]

The verse mentioned in the first sentence is Psalm 12:1; due to numbering differences, the gloss is the gloss on Psalm 11:2. The verse mentioned in the third sentence is Psalm 4:6 (Psalm 4:7 in the Vulgate), one of St. Thomas's favorite verses. Simple first principles are objects of the intellect like being and good; compound first principles are things like the principle of noncontradiction or the first principle of practical reason. In a sense, just as we can call God 'Truth Itself', we can call God 'The Principle of Noncontradiction Itself', that actual First Truth of which our understanding of the principle of noncontradiction is the participation.