The Bitterbynde Trilogy (66 page)

INTRODUCTION

The Writing of The Bitterbynde

In the words of the incomparable Tanith Lee, ‘the story began with a feeling…'

People have asked me, ‘How much of the whole story did you have in mind when you began writing
The Bitterbynde Trilogy
? Did it grow organically as you wrote, or was it clear from the start?'

I've known since around the age of seven, when I read
The Chronicles of Narnia
, that I wanted to write—one day—a very long story set in a world of my own creation. When I was nine, reading Tolkien's
The Fellowship of the Ring
for the first time and walking the landscape of Middle Earth in the company of Strider and the hobbits, a flash of utter yearning set this goal in carborundum.

During childhood and young adulthood I wrote many long stories set in fantastic realms. Feelings and inspirations crowded in on me in legions. At some point, one of them began to stand out, to tug at me and demand to be listened to. It was a sense of searching for something lost.

Not merely a lost thing; a lost and beautiful thing, a marvelous, noble, unparalleled thing, or perhaps a place…

That's how it all began. I, the writer, began at last to construct in words that world. My world.

Yet I myself was lost; as lost and amnesiac as my protagonist. Where was my story going? Where had it come from? I did not know, so I simply kept writing and world-building, luxuriously drawing in objects and emotions and landscapes and scenes I loved. It came to me that this was the story I had always dreamed of writing. And I wrote it for myself, not knowing whether anyone else would ever read it, never showing it to other eyes.

Eventually there came a time when I had to know whither my pen (I wrote longhand, as you can see by the images included in this edition) was taking me, and why. That was when the long hours of cogitating commenced. I'm sure I must have spent hours gazing at nothing while possible scenarios played out in my head. There were many. How did I choose one? Because it felt right. That's the only way I can describe it. Everything else felt wrong, and only one choice felt right.

The plot began to take shape.

I believed at first that I was writing a novel. Typically (I find it hard to write short stories) it turned into a trilogy, and fortunately that trilogy divided itself naturally into three parts without any conniving from me.

I write not like a bricklayer building a wall, course upon course from one side to the other, but like a child doing (and sometimes undoing) a jigsaw puzzle. I leap ahead, go back, slide sideways, chop out a paragraph here and insert a paragraph there. If anyone had asked what chapter I was up to, it would have been almost impossible to say.

Following are some questions about the Bitterbynde which have been put to me by readers and interviewers, and which do have answers.

Question: ‘Did you have the landscapes and feasting descriptions in your head/heart/psyche before you put the stories together, then link them with the characters you envisaged?'

Yes. If that particular universe exists within my skull, then the world of Aia formed like whirling fragments coalescing to form a planet; fragments of the real world, snatches of things I've read, or heard, or seen. The characters arrived later—though even they had predecessors in my early scribblings.

John Berlyne, interviewing me for Science Fiction Review, posed this question: ‘The language used in the writing of this book is very rich—the whole experience is like eating a very rich meal. There is great enjoyment in the digestion. Is this something you employ in all your general style writing or something you've used specifically to tell this story?'

My answer: ‘It is my general writing style. I'm interested in art and—I don't think it's true synaesthesia—I associate some words and letters with certain colours. When writing
The Bitterbynde
I wanted to use as many colours as possible from the lavish English language palette, simply because they are there for the taking.'

In my first year at university I entered the library seeking an English dictionary, which I visualised as a single, fat book. Rounding the dusty corner of an aisle, I was gobsmacked to discover the entire Oxford.

I stood gaping at this treasure trove for quite some time, running my gaze up and down the loaded shelves, rank on rank, which—how had I not known?—contained the multiple thick volumes and supplements of this mighty work. I was astonished and smitten at the same time. I felt like some starving beggar presented with a feast, or a painter who had only known ochre, charcoal and chalk, learning that now she could dip her brush into a rainbow.

How many words are there in the English language? A note on the Oxford Dictionary website states, ‘… there are, at the very least, a quarter of a million distinct English words … of which perhaps twenty per cent are no longer in current use. If distinct senses were counted, the total would probably approach three quarters of a million…'

The vocabulary of most English speakers is said to be around 4,000 words. Shakespeare's vocabulary, on the other hand, contained more than 29,000 words.

Few can approach the genius of Shakespeare, but by my troth! he had the right idea. Dive into the multicoloured lake and swim. Splash around words of every flavour and hue, and if you don't find exactly the right one to fit your meaning, invent one.

Not only the intriguing range of meanings, but the sounds and the shapes of words and letters fascinate me. In written form, some evoke images and colours. The capital letter ‘A', for example, is one of my favourites. It's like a powerful bird in flight, a pair of wings, a chevron, a towering mountain peak, the wake of a fast ship. It's a strong, stalwart, letter and its colour is dark—dark blue or even black. The lower case letter ‘i' is golden. The dot dances above it like a flower-head on a stem, or like a mote of sunlight. It's airy and weightless. Certain words and names (for me) take on some of the characteristics of the letters of which they are composed.

Question: How much of the Australian landscape comes into your novels?

Answer: Most of the landscape of Aia is European, but I wanted The
Bitterbynde
to be set in the southern hemisphere, largely because there's no reason why it shouldn't be. Most fantasy lands seem to exist in the northern half of their planet, but it doesn't have to be that way.

Some of my favourite trees are Australian wattles and some of my favourite birds are the colourful Aussie parrots, so they had to be included in the setting.

That said, my inner landscape, which is quite beyond my control, is a reflection of Britain/Europe, so it was quite difficult for me not to write of the north as ‘cold' and the south as ‘hot'. My mental landscape was shaped by my childhood reading material and other British cultural influences. I grew up searching vainly in the Australian countryside for thatched cottages and babbling brooks and with the phrase ‘cold north wind' coming easily to my lips even when summer's north wind blew across southern Australia like the breath of hell's blast furnace. I grew up with the irrational intuition that October was autumn, and therefore harvest month, ‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness', despite the fact that every October I could see trees and flowers bursting into spring greenery. This incongruity not so surprising, perhaps, when you reflect that in midsummer many Australians still sit down to hot flaming brandy plum pudding on Christmas Day, and it's only in the last couple of decades that our Christmas cards have depicted anything but snow, holly and red breasted robins. Long live incongruity, say I!

Question: ‘Who are the men who inspired Thorn?‘

I have to smile when I'm asked that question! Thorn. He's almost perfect…

Physically, he's pretty much identical to Daniel Day-Lewis as Hawkeye in the movie ‘The Last of the Mohicans'. That's the image I had in mind when I was writing about him. His personality is a melange of Aragorn as I first pictured him at the age of nine, my imagination, some of Tanith Lee's most compelling male characters, and a beautiful youth who was my boyfriend when we were teenagers. Tane the God of the New Zealand Forest is also mixed up in there somewhere.

Question: How did you come up with all of the names?

‘Ashalind', ‘Imrhien' and ‘Tahquil' appeared by themselves, demanding to be used whether I liked them or not. Everyone else's name had to be sought for. Obviously Finvarnan names have an Irish influence and Rimanian names have a kind of South American Native Indian flavour; the names of the Stormrider merchants and teachers have a French ring to them and the Stormriders themselves have Latinate names while the courtiers' appellations are classically English. It was important to match names to their countries of origin. Fantasy, by its very nature, has to be firmly rooted in the real world in order to be made as believable as possible.

An interviewer from ‘Future Fiction' said, ‘Thanks for reminding us that there's more to fantasy than elves, dwarves and goblins!'

My response: In writing this trilogy, I deliberately set out to beat a path of my own. Partly, this stemmed from reading a lot of rather homogenous fantasy that seemed to try to reflect Tolkien but never quite managed it. Partly it evolved from my desire to create a world that was truly different, not merely a caricature of Europe in the Dark Ages populated with 21st century characters dressed up in medieval costume. Professor Tolkien was inspired by Scandinavian mythology with its elves, dwarves and goblins. It is a sumptuous, stirring tradition, but only one of many folk traditions in the world.

Before I started writing
The Ill-Made Mute
I had, for several years, been interested in the folklore of the British Isles. My reading in the area was extensive. Gradually I came to understand that the world I wanted to write about was teeming with the supernatural denizens of British folklore. By British folklore, I mean the genuine, oral traditions of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. All the ‘wights' in The Bitterbynde Trilogy are drawn from the pages of authentic folk records.

Question: ‘Did you start with the folklore stories and references as a basis and weave the main plot-line through them, or did you start with the main plot and then pick out folk tales that fitted in?'

The answer is, ‘a little of both'. A major section of the plot was inspired by the fairy-story of the Pied Piper, so in that particular case the folklore came first. In the main, however, I started with the plot and threaded various folktales through it.

Many people have perceived a Celtic influence in my stories. Strictly speaking, Celtic legend refers to such famous, tragic and bloody sagas as
Cuchulain, The Red Hand of Ulster and The Cattle Raid of Cooley (Tain Bo Cuailnge)
. The folklore in which I am immersed does not touch upon those legends. Instead, it pivots around the everyday beliefs originating in ancient rural communities throughout the British Isles. Nonetheless there is much overlap between Celtic and British folk tradition—for example, different versions of waterhorses exist in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales—and in Scandinavian countries, as well. What is even more fascinating is the fact that several identical folktale themes exist all over the world. An example is the poignant theme of a mortal man who journeys to Faerie with a beautiful faerie woman, then pays a visit back home under a geas of faerie protection only to find to his sorrow that centuries have elapsed since his departure and everyone he knew is long-gone, after which he accidentally breaks the geas and withers away from old age. This motif is found in cultures as disparate as that of Japan and Ireland.

Katharine Briggs' collections of folk tales, which she recorded at first hand from storytellers across the British Isles, had a profound effect on me. I discovered in them a diverse range of supernatural creatures who deserved as much of the limelight as elves and dwarves (or dwarfs) and other marvellous Norse/Scandinavian entities.

The Briggs stories have survived for centuries by being passed on orally. In order for them to have survived that long there must surely be a power in them that appeals to the human psyche. It certainly appeals to mine. I wanted to bring them out of candle-light into the electric light of the 21st century so that a wider sweep of readers could appreciate them.

There is a strangeness and a thrill about these raw tales and the eerie manifestations who figure in them. When incorporating folk-fairies, I have tried not to change them, not to touch them too much, not to annul that which gives you a chill down the spine, the inexplicability of them.

As I have said elsewhere, ‘My main aim, when using time-honoured tales as a resource, is to retain their purity. Their purity is their punch.

‘These are stories whose grip on the unconscious mind is so powerful that they have endured throughout many lives of men. They have become immortal; born long ago when humankind lived closer to nature, passed down verbally through the generations and finally crystallized in written form.

‘There is a strong tendency for writers to humanise and contemporise the creatures of myth and legend. In so doing, their integrity is instantly destroyed and their original power is forfeit. “Faeries” in their primeval form share some characteristics with humans of the third millennium, but certainly not all. For example, a drowner, when cheated of her prey, does not rant in anger and frustration. She merely rises out of the water and states (in rhyme, and quite prosaically), that if she had successfully lured her victim into the water she would have drunk his heart's blood.

‘Evil faeries, or “unseelie wights”, do not assail humankind by grouping together in organised armies. They act in small groups or alone. There are unbreakable laws governing the ways in which they can assail and harass us; for example, most of them are unable to cross a threshold unless invited, and if we do not show fear their power over us is diminished or cancelled.