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S3 Bonus Episode 1 - A Guide To The True State of Affairs in Dalemark
905 Plays7 days ago
Truth is the fire that fetches thunder.
A planned minisode on the Guide to Dalemark goes fully off the rails with the addition of early proto-Dalemark novella "The True State of Affairs," for a wide-ranging discussion on art, time, splendor, and a possible alternate vision for Diana Wynne Jones' career.
Transcript available here, and we'll be back sometime next month with our next bonus episode on The Tough Guide to Fantasyland!
NB: this episode contains discussion of child abuse and pedophilia.
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Transcript
Introduction to Bonus Episode: 'Eight Days of Diana Wynne-Jones'
00:00:03
Speaker
Hello and welcome to our first bonus episode for the third season of Eight Days of Diana Wynne-Jones. I'm Rebecca Framo.
Dalemark Discussion Begins: Trivia, Themes, and Initial Missteps
00:00:21
Speaker
our first bonus episode for the third season of eight days of diana winjones i'm rebecca frabo Tesh and i'm Emily Tesh and we have made some mistakes. Our plan was that this was going to be a mini-sode, a little mini-episode. We were going to go through the brief guide to Dalemark and talk about some Dalemark trivia and maybe some big themes.
Exploring 'The True State of Affairs': Unpublished Work and Themes
00:00:44
Speaker
And I believe, I think this is your fault actually because you were the one. Yeah, this my fault. No, you know what? It's not my fault. You know who I'm going to blame? Farrah Mendelsohn, Diana Wynne Jones scholar. It is Farrah's fault. It's absolutely Farrah's fault. Whose book alerted me to the existence of one more published Dale Marks story, which is The True State of Affairs, written in the 1960s, so before any of her published children's books, but not published until the collection Everard's Ride in the 1990s.
00:01:15
Speaker
A True State of Affairs is novella. And it was really, really hard to get hold of. And thank goodness for Becca's librarian skills, because I was screwed. was like, this is going to cost 70 quid to get a secondhand copy. No, Becca found it. Yes. And I actually, so I knew about it from Farah's book.
00:01:33
Speaker
I'd been, we'd been planning to talk about it in, you know, when we did kind of our short story review. For the back half of Diana Wynne Jones' short stories, which we'll probably do at the end of next season.
00:01:44
Speaker
And so we hadn't been planning to pick it up yet. And then and you said, well, it's for Delmark. And if we're going to be doing the full kind of overview of Delmark, we should look at this very first earliest proto Delmark story.
Adult Themes in the Novella and Their Influence on Later Works
00:01:56
Speaker
I didn't realize when we agreed to this that it was a novella. I think we could easily have done a full episode just on the true state of affairs because there's so much in this story.
00:02:07
Speaker
There's so much. The true state of affairs actually, I think, brings to mind the specter of a different Diana Wynne Jones or a different career for Diana Wynne Jones because it is adult fiction, adult fantasy fiction, written in the sixty s It is Deeply, deeply concerned with the experience of being embodied as a woman in a fantasy world. It's interested in marginalization and in imprisonment. It is interested in sex and especially in taboo sex. It is interested in paedophilia and homosexuality. and you're like, so this was all there.
00:02:47
Speaker
Yeah. And then she wrote children's books for 20 years. And I won't say it didn't come out in the children's books. I think one thing you pointed out, Becca, was a true state of affairs feels like it's prefiguring which week.
00:02:59
Speaker
Yeah, it feels like it's prefiguring, like it feels like there's a couple strains of thought in a true state of affairs that are going to end up being expressed in different ways throughout her career writing children's books.
00:03:13
Speaker
And one of those is the strains of thought that will kind of go on to be developed in Delmark. I think there is a lot here that speaks to what Delmark will become. But then there's another strain of thought, I think, that ends up getting developed in more oblique ways in books, in some of her darkest works, like Time of the Ghost, Witch Week, Fire and Hemlock, Black Mariah.
Plot Overview of 'A True State of Affairs' and Its Thematic Depth
00:03:34
Speaker
There's a lot of stuff here specifically, I think, that looks forward to Fire and Hemlock. And that reading this, you're like, oh, Fire and Hemlock was unambiguously doing that on purpose. There's no way to imagine it wasn't. Yeah, which also, I think,
00:03:48
Speaker
finishes closing the loop that we theorised existed with the help of a listener between Fire and Hemlock and Dale Mark. They are such different projects. They are drawing on the same well of T.S. Eliot's The Four Quartets and some other stuff.
00:04:05
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, it feels like, you know, there's kind of, again, no way to imagine that wasn't always in the mix from the beginning, because now we have this common ancestor for, I think, both of these books and for some of the ideas that are going to be developed in the books.
00:04:18
Speaker
And on first description, True State of Affairs really does sound like a Delmark book. It sounds like the last Delmark book. The plot of True State of Affairs is that a woman named Emily from the modern era, from modern Britain, has found herself back in time in the middle of a messy historic war in a place called Dalmark.
00:04:47
Speaker
The link between modern Britain and Dalemark is not really quite clear. She seems to think of it as back in time, but it seems to be second world. And that's not really, you know, the point is not necessarily, i think, her view of this history. The point is that she is modern and the place that she has found herself is bloody, messy historical fantasy.
00:05:09
Speaker
It's a battle. It's a war. And she spends all of it in prison. Right. And the book is a, the novella is a first person narrative and it's within the text.
00:05:23
Speaker
This is Emily's diary or it's her notes that she is writing to herself on scraps of paper. She's scrounged with a quill pen that doesn't work very well because she had to teach herself how to cut a quill pen. Yeah. And this is her record of her experiences in fantasy prison.
00:05:42
Speaker
Thinking of the way that Emily has to write, you know, the question of what Emily writes, what she will write in prison, is raised pretty early on. You know, she gets the paper. She sort of wheedles the paper out of her jailers. She does a lot of wheedling things out of her jailers. Emily is pretty.
00:05:58
Speaker
And she's sort of, because she's literate, she has managed to convince her sort of most immediate jailer, Edwin, that she is aristocratic, which means that she's getting slightly better treatment than she was before he believed that she was aristocratic.
00:06:12
Speaker
I think absolutely vital, though, that this is the first step in protecting herself, because before that, he she describes him as an old lecher and he threatens to rape her. And she has a really hard time fending her fending him off because he mis um misinterprets some of her behavior as being sexually forward because she's used to doing things like having her hair down when she's washing it.
00:06:34
Speaker
Right. There's this element of sexual threat always. She is always sexually under threat. She is always physically under threat. She is always imprisoned in her movements. ah Like so much of the novella is about Emily's experience being a prisoner and a woman who is a prisoner and how desperately vulnerable she is. Yeah, and the, you know, her sexuality is one of the few, very few tools that she has at her disposal to improve her own treatment.
00:07:06
Speaker
So as long as she can engage in this sort of friendly flirting with Edwin, who is the jailer, walking a very delicate balance without seeming too forward and risking rape, or pushing him away entirely and losing her lifeline to things that she needs in order to survive, she can mostly get by.
00:07:26
Speaker
And one of the things she gets from Edwin is paper. And what the text says is when I got this paper, I had a fancy that I would write great things and spend my pens discovering truths. I would love to.
00:07:37
Speaker
I have a feeling that truths are gathering at the back of my head, ready to burst through, but they will not burst. And I text
00:07:48
Speaker
and besides i am not one of those who finds it easy to think in grand abstractions and i find it even more difficult to set them down clearly and i think one of the main concerns of this text is What do you write about?
00:08:02
Speaker
Do you write about big ideas? Or do you write about the little horrible truths of your daily life? The question... Emily is perpetually scrounging for paper, and eventually she's going to end up in a correspondence with another prisoner that requires her to...
00:08:17
Speaker
hide away, squirrel away little tiny pieces of paper and write one or two sentences at a time. It really reminded me of some of the conversations about Jane Austen in A Room of One's Own, about you know the visual metaphor of women hiding their writing, writing on little pieces of paper, writing in small spaces.
00:08:34
Speaker
And it feels like this this novella is an attempt to enter into that conversation about women's writing in a real way. Right. This novella is very much about women. writing as a woman, what you write about, and you're right, is the the core concern is the distinction between writing great things, writing great truths, and writing the dreary, trivial minutia of everyday existence.
00:08:59
Speaker
And it's later that she points out that when you are a prisoner, the dreary trivia becomes wildly important. Whether or not your water is clean that morning transforms your day in fairly horrible ways, and there's nothing you can do about it.
Emily's Experiences in Prison: Survival, Relationships, and Realizations
00:09:13
Speaker
In this situation, there's not much space for greatness, for writing great things.
00:09:19
Speaker
Your world becomes small and you become small. And the question is, can you build something great and something important out of these true smallnesses, these awful truths that are the sort of building blocks of your life?
00:09:34
Speaker
So while she's in prison and sort of trying to figure out, you know, she's trying to piece together from contradictory stories from her jailers. What is even happening? What is the context? Why is she there? She knows that she was sort of shoved into this position by a woman that she only refers to as that bitch Hilda.
00:09:50
Speaker
And who I think must be a predecessor of Hildy in Drowned Amet. That bitch Hilda has done a classic medieval switcheroo, has identified a woman about the same shape as her, given her her dress and been like, you're me.
00:10:04
Speaker
And Emily has been captured and imprisoned in Hilda's place because Hilda is an important political figure in whatever war this is that has swallowed up whatever country this is. We never hear the name Delmark.
00:10:15
Speaker
We hear it once. we? It said once. Yeah. I remember because it jumped out at me because it had not shown up before and it never comes up after. Aha. So that bitch Hilda, we don't know any more about her.
00:10:27
Speaker
Yeah, sorry, I found it. The one place we see the word Dalemark is when she's thinking about the political structure of the place that she's trapped. And it says it almost seems as if the truth of Dalemark is in this apparent diversity with its kind of ramshackle overall unity.
00:10:42
Speaker
So that is the one place we hear the word Dalemark is when she's trying to think about the truth of this country. Yes, this country she has never seen except for the inside of her prison. This country where she has I think she has one glimpse of the natural world and it's the tree that she can just barely see growing and in an unlikely place on the thatched roof of the guardhouse opposite.
00:11:03
Speaker
So what is there of Delmarc for her to know and what sources she has result in this question through the through the text of how is it possible to know anything when you are this in this small dreary life?
00:11:19
Speaker
Shall we talk about her sources? Yes. Yeah, yeah. So she has two jailers that she sees on the daily. One of them is Edwin, we've already talked about. He is a depressed old man who is a sexual threat, but also, you know, he complains to her about how his daughter doesn't appreciate him enough and about the petty minutiae, trivial minutiae. Actually, both her jailers are primarily distinguished by their complaints to Emily, who is...
00:11:44
Speaker
who has no choice but to listen and who thinks about how this is one of the things that you experience as a prisoner is you don't have a choice about who you talk to or what they say to you. Yeah. Yeah. that's as She says it's the worst thing about being the prisoner actually is that you can't just leave when someone comes and has a miserable conversation with you.
00:12:02
Speaker
So there's thing about Edwin, I think, before we move on to the other one, is that without Emily's internal narrative, he would, I think, come across as a kindly old man. like He takes very good care of her. He goes out of his way to make sure she has better fuel, better food. When she gets ill, he's clearly sincerely worried about her. At one point, he thinks she's going to kill herself and he's horrified. like It is only because we know Emily's inner experience that this kindly old man is also a terrible threat and intensely boring and miserable and she can't stand him and yet he's
00:12:40
Speaker
probably one of her closest friends because she sees two people ever. Yeah. Yeah. This book is really about... the sort of unwilling bond that imprisonment makes of you. And I think this is even the way that, you know, this the Stanford prison experiment of it all, the way that the the jailer and the jailed are sort of trapped together in this place, in this situation, and that forms a bond between them that they both might hate, but is undeniable.
00:13:11
Speaker
Emily is also Edwin's only prisoner. She works this out carefully because he won't admit it to her, But she is in fact his only reason for existing. His daughter clearly doesn't care about him.
00:13:24
Speaker
He has no other purpose or importance within this fortress she's imprisoned in. Like, she's the justification of his life and also his victim. He tries to pretend that he has other prisoners to make himself seem cruel and important to Emily, which is so sad.
00:13:40
Speaker
Right. And he's not even the saddest person she talks to. No, that's Wolfram! So Wolfram is... i think Wolfram is a Mordred figure, to be honest.
00:13:52
Speaker
Wolfram is ah deeply miserable and unhappy young man. He's a bastard. Emily puts that together pretty quickly, that you know that's part of his bitterness, is that he's been sort of denied opportunities for advancement and stuck. Like her, he has this uncertain quasi-aristocratic status. where he kind of is and isn't someone who deserves better treatment.
00:14:17
Speaker
Right. And the thing about Wolfram is that Wolfram is a pedophile. Wolfram has... We're going to get into, i think, the particulars of the situation, but Wolfram...
00:14:32
Speaker
longs he longs to be loved by somebody and i think that's that's how emily identifies it is that wolfram has you know was humiliated as a child over and over again and so he longs for the love and respect and sexuality of younger boys And that's stated explicitly. It's very explicit statement.
00:14:55
Speaker
And it's also, it's interesting the narrator doesn't react to particular horror or disgust. Emily, like Wolfram, is a dreary nobody in this world. And it's like, yeah, this sucks to be us. But what she's horrified by is not what he physically wants from younger boys, but what it says about The kind of mind he has, the kind of mental world he inhabits, he's so depressing. He's dreary. Yeah, what Emily says, I have the quote. Specifically, she says, it was not his physical intentions that troubled me. It is just that Wolfram is such an unpleasant person.
00:15:34
Speaker
I can understand how he got that way. but it does not alter the fact that he is fixed as being a cold-blooded snob, a greedy social climber, and one of those people who casts on life a sort of moral grayness and boredom of the spirit.
00:15:47
Speaker
Seeing him over there, I felt like I did one time when I was calling on my godmother, and her lunatic old aunt saw me from her window and looked at me like a lizard that had just swallowed a fly. I knew that I had, for a minute at least, been incorporated into her deranged world, and the thought sickened me.
00:16:03
Speaker
So what we have here actually is a link between Wolfram and Aunt Mariah. I was just thinking that. We have this this vision of the the person whose's whose inner grayness and moral emptiness just infects you through their worldview.
00:16:17
Speaker
Yeah. Let's get back to Wolfram and Emily because I think we have a lot more to say about them, but I think we have to introduce Asgrim and Kiartan now. Yes, we do.
00:16:28
Speaker
So Emily has the framing of Emily's story to Emily for most of it is as a love story. yeah Emily has one ray of light in this awful prison and and it's the fact that there is a handsome man she can sometimes see when she walks in sort of the tiny courtyard space on the roof she has outside her prison door. And she learns, again, by putting together inconsistent information from Edwin and Wolfram, neither of whom want her to know about this man that she catches glimpses of.
00:16:59
Speaker
that this is in fact a terribly important person. He is the leader of one of the factions in this great messy civil war, and he seems to be a great and noble person. His ambition is to liberate the thralls, the serfs of Delmarc, and create a more equitable country, and he was ah betrayed, you know, and and brought into this place, and now he's trapped in prison.
00:17:22
Speaker
And Emily's like, just like me, for real. right We have so much in common. So Emily sees this man and her heart instantly goes out to him. Part of it is that he's very clearly very sexy. Oh, absolutely. Interestingly, I mean, this is not the only time Emily sees an attractive man and goes, oh, thank God, something nice to look at. There's part of what I'm interested in about, about so I talked about embodiment. yeah She washes her hair, she thinks about her clothes, she thinks about how she looks, but she tracks the time in prison by how many times she's had her period and has to have this awful conversation with Edwin each time of, I need some rags, please.
Complex Dynamics: Emily, Asgrim, and the Nature of Hope
00:18:01
Speaker
Yeah. there and like This is when you think about early Jones writing about how she hated or resisted writing about girls because she hated the experience of writing this sort of embodied womanhood. but This character is all embodied womanhood. And part of that is she has a sexuality.
00:18:17
Speaker
She's yeah very into Asgrim. Later on, she meets a sexy prison guard and is like, whoa, whoa. And both of these times she reacts to these men like she looks at Asgrim and she's like, what a handsome man and he must be, you know, I have a sense of safety and and trust from him. And she meets the handsome prison guard. Again, the prison guard and Asgrim, like, this is one of Asgrim's prison guards who's been beating Asgrim up.
00:18:40
Speaker
And she looks she's like he's very handsome. I bet he's not as bad as I thought he was. I bet he's actually sort of nice. and Right, but it's her her desperation for the one nice nice things she can see to have some worth to them because there is so little of worth in her imprisoned life.
00:18:58
Speaker
So Askren becomes very important to her very, very fast. Just being able to glimpse him is everything she cares about. And you can't trust, I think it's really important that pretty early on, we are given the sense that we can't trust Emily's perceptions of things. When she starts, you know, she gets this information about the world that she's in. She starts, she tells us all about her thoughts, about what should happen to the country and her perceptions of the people there.
00:19:22
Speaker
And then later people will come in and sometimes Wilfrin comes and reads her writing because he wants to make sure she's not writing anything seditious. And it's like, you've got this all wrong. You know, you don't understand what's going on out there at all. One thing that's really clear actually is that both Wolfram and Edwin like have everything they need to put together this woman is a time traveller from some distant future and neither of them is curious enough or interested enough to care. Emily writes a detailed description of a bicycle.
00:19:51
Speaker
And they're just like, she must be insane. it's The first glimpse of the bicycle horse in Denmark, another link between this and Crown. But I think, oh, I wanted to say, Emily's first real glimpse of Asgrim is she's looking at this apple tree that she can barely see that is her one link to the natural world. And she sees him catch a falling leaf.
00:20:14
Speaker
And we get, i must remember to ease out of Edwin, whether they believe here too, that you get one happy day if you catch a falling leaf. Which is fire and hemlock, it's fire and hemlock. But it's moment of beauty that she sees in Asgrim's catching the leaf and smiling at it and being delighted by it.
00:20:34
Speaker
That's when she seems to fall in love. Yeah, and she writes about, again, looking at Asgrim and seeing a reflection of herself trying to build something beautiful out of this horrible place in which they're found.
00:20:46
Speaker
So she she learns about his his sort of his ambitions to improve the country, improve the great of Delmar. She calls it a kind of splendor. She says, to be worthwhile and to feel yourself worthwhile, you must have a sense of splendor, of ultimate forceful goodness, which serves you both as yardstick and mainstream. And then she says, possibly being wealthy, gifted, and powerful, he came by the notion of splendor rather easily, and it seemed large and perspicuous to him.
00:21:16
Speaker
Then he was imprisoned. Almost everything he valued was removed or destroyed, and the ideas he had started were persecuted. Edwin tells me that any thrall found with his symbol is to be executed on the orders of his opponent.
00:21:28
Speaker
He was forced to the small, dreary round of prison life, where a detail like dirty drinking water, as mine is today, assumes worldwide proportions. Trivia are all you have.
00:21:39
Speaker
And yet, in order to sustain your identity and your sanity, you are forced to find your sense of splendor, even in these trivia. I found it when I saw Asgrim catch his leaf.
00:21:49
Speaker
Right. And the nature of the love story seems to be that Asgrim and Emily are finding splendor in each other. Asgrim goes to fairly great lengths to send her messages, which include declarations of love, poetry,
00:22:07
Speaker
and questions that he asks her and seemed interested in the answer. And this is the fantasy of ah of a romance of the mind, right? They have these tiny, tiny conversations, but which all seem to be so important and about things that matter so much. He asks her about how this country should be governed.
00:22:25
Speaker
Emily like, yes, I will provide my 20th century ideas. I think perhaps you should let the thralls have a say sometimes. you like You're not a very enlightened 20th century thinker, Emily.
00:22:38
Speaker
No, she's doing her best, but her idea, her again, her ideas are small. Like, this is not Emily talking down about herself. I think it's clear that Emily's gra Emily is is clever and she's able to interpret Asgram's sort of cryptic messages to her and what he's talking about. And sometimes she's able to kind of cut to the truth of the matter, right? There's one time where he kind of sends her two sort of very elusive, high-flown poetic messages.
00:23:04
Speaker
And she looks straight at them was like you've asked me the same question twice. but We don't have time for this. where you we We're communicating on these tiny strips of paper. So she has ideas worth conveying. But her vision of the sweep of history is a small vision.
00:23:19
Speaker
And her she's sort of grasping for understanding about the politics of it all at all times. And she struggles to have this sort of... Like the one of the other characters, the person who brings messages between her and Asgrim is a thrall.
00:23:36
Speaker
His name Hobby. Hobby. And she looks at Hobby and thinks to herself about how much she struggles to see him as a person and not just as a tool. Because to her and Asgrim, that's what he is. A useful, loyal tool.
00:23:51
Speaker
Right, and Hobby, in fact, spends quite a lot of the story being the person who carries their messages back and forth. You know, so he is... taking part in this rebellious, perhaps revolutionary activity. He's clearly a supporter of Asgrim and his dream of of freeing the thralls.
00:24:06
Speaker
And Emily feels guilty because Hoppy clearly thinks we're exchanging important messages. And in fact, We're not. At least not by hobby standards if what you care about is the revolution. We're we're not doing that.
00:24:18
Speaker
And what she says when she looks at hobby is again, you know, sort of the counterpoint to her looking at these handsome men and thinking there must be something worthwhile in them. She says that hobby was simple humble simply humble and unlovely, as useful as a saw or a hammer.
00:24:31
Speaker
And just as you are irritated if the handle is loose on either of those, so you were irritated if hobby showed any personal feelings about anything. Not fair. Not fair at all. I keep reminding myself that Hobby was a human being, too.
00:24:44
Speaker
It's also the thing that jumped out at me. I wish I knew more about Hobby. He cannot be more than 16, but he has the lined, knowing face of a middle-aged man. Poor kid. You're like, ah, this is the boy with the young old face. And I do think...
00:24:58
Speaker
but You do see echoes or perhaps pre-echoes of things that will come back in the Delmarque Quartet proper. This is a Mitt figure, right? This yeah this boy revolutionary with the young old face.
00:25:10
Speaker
And that makes Hobbie's eventual fate all the sadder. he dies He develops a fever. Emily can see he's sick. She protests to Edwin to let him have a rest or a break or help something. Of course, as a prisoner, she has no power and Hobby is only a thrall. His purpose is to work. And so he works till he drops and he dies in a corner by a staircase, possibly still carrying Emily's last message to Asgrim. She doesn't know. We will never know. And the question of whether or not that got there is, and what Asgrim knew is really significant because sort of the first moral question that arises about Asgrim is Asgrim has a son.
00:25:51
Speaker
This is a beautiful 12 or 13 year old boy. His name is Kiartan, which really seems to be a kind of proto-Kialan in much the same way that Hobby is a kind of proto-mit.
00:26:03
Speaker
Yeah, Kiartan is... like Kjartan, a boy imprisoned through sheer bad luck by a very cruel enemy of his father's. A boy who's the son of a great and noble father with splendid ideas, a freedom fighter.
00:26:21
Speaker
And a ruthless man. So, Kjartan has been imprisoned somewhere else. He's allowed to come visit Asgrim over the holidays. And there's a couple of days where Emily and Wolfram are both looking out over, you know, from the window of Emily's room watching Kjartan and Asgrim frolic. I think frolic is really the only word.
00:26:44
Speaker
They're having this lovely, innocent, manly, masculine father-son bonding time.
Moral Ambiguities and Survival Tactics in Imprisonment
00:26:49
Speaker
And this is when Emily identifies that Wolfram has conceived a passion for Cjartan.
00:26:55
Speaker
And she identifies with it because she feels the same way about Asgrim. Right. Emily and Wolfram both exist on the outside of this delightful manly bond that the father and son share.
00:27:11
Speaker
And both of them sort of look at it and want and... It's not really suggested that Wolfram's pedophilic passion for Kjartan is any worse than Emily's longing for Asgrim. Both of them are doing something they're not supposed to do or not supposed to get caught at.
00:27:31
Speaker
Both of them are seeing something splendid and And are small, you know, feel themselves small and gray and grimy and trapped by kind of smallness of mind, looking at what they perceive to be greatness, something big and something beautiful.
00:27:48
Speaker
Yes. And then Wolfram actually, so Emily is thinking sympathetically about Wolfram at this point. She says, I do pity him terribly. He's eaten and aching with passion.
00:27:59
Speaker
And to feel criminal on top of that is too much. I suppose there's enough of a parallel between us for me to know how he feels. And then Wolfram actually tries to go and interact with Ki-Ar-Din across the way. And at this point, Emily's like, wait, no, no, wait. I was sympathetic as long as you were over here with me.
00:28:17
Speaker
Right. But also what's really interesting about it is she comes, she writes about describing with like, I paraphrase, that that was the most cringeworthy thing I have ever seen. Yes. Her feeling is not horror. It is profound embarrassment. Yeah.
00:28:34
Speaker
And what she sees is not, and a little bit of disgust. And it's not just disgust at Wolfram. What she also sees and recognizes and is embarrassed by and horrified by and disgusted as by is a response from Kiartan that she recognizes as knowingly flirtatious. Professional expertise is what she calls it. Yeah. Yeah.
00:28:59
Speaker
because it's what she's been doing with Edwin, it's how you handle and keep at arm's length someone with much more power than you when you are a prisoner. And Kjartan, like his father, has been imprisoned for some time. And Emily sees that this the splendor she thought she saw in him is actually has been damaged. She calls him, I think, a practiced catamite, this 12 or 13 year old boy. Yes, what she says is that the curious thing is that I am sure both the parts of Kjartan that I have seen are quite genuine.
00:29:29
Speaker
He is as truly a boyish boy as he is a practiced catamite. And it's clear looking at this, that this is a so yeah a survival strategy that Kjartan has adapted in prison.
00:29:40
Speaker
As a beautiful child. Yeah. Tell you what it made me think about. I recently read Rupert Graves autobiography. Goodbye to all that.
00:29:50
Speaker
ah Which deals quite heavily with his time in boarding school. And he talks about his bisexuality. What he calls my pseudo homosexuality. And blames boarding school for it entirely. But a figure that comes up, and which I have seen elsewhere as well, it's not just Graves, but Graves, which has jumped out at me as a striking example, is this figure of like the the doubled boy,
00:30:13
Speaker
the 13 or 14 year old boy in boarding school, which is certainly in Diana Wynne-Jones, rather than being in prison, who is simultaneously the the strong and delightful and full of potential and flourishing and flowering young Englishman.
00:30:31
Speaker
Wonderful. But at the same time, is he gay? And the the ambiguity, the doubt about it, the fact that those two things could coexist creates a tremendous anxiety.
00:30:43
Speaker
Is he? Surely not. He must be pure. No, he can't be. And the question is, was that flirting? Could he? Would a boy like that? And the question of how far is the environment of...
00:30:56
Speaker
a boarding school, a prison, to blame for turning this perfect boy into this source of worry. yeah I don't know. I found it fascinating. I thought about how many boarding school boys there are in Diana Wynne-Jones. Yeah. i like I think we need to think about David. We need to think about Christopher.
00:31:14
Speaker
And we certainly need to think about the boys in Time of a Ghost. But Kjartan is a kind of comes before all of these. Yeah. But we also, I think, need to talk about Polly and her subtle flirtatiousness and the way that she gets round her mother's borders in order to make them allies to her.
00:31:35
Speaker
Because Polly is also in a kind of prison of her own mother's small mindedness. And the question of whether Polly is flirting with these older men with Thomas Lin rises over and over and over again.
00:31:48
Speaker
The question of whether Polly is a beautiful little girl or a beautiful little heroic boy comes up over and over again. Yes. It's like, Kjartan. as a figure in Jones's work makes so clear sort of in retrospect, the amount of thought about the, the, the adult child relationship and the pedophilia relationship and the child abuse relationship that that actually has been running through Jones's work from the beginning.
00:32:17
Speaker
And how much that's linked to all of that, all of this sort of, this anxious position of the the beautiful child who's who's spoiled by this strangeness, by this lack of masculinity, or the anxious man who's...
00:32:34
Speaker
whose A sexual criminal who's spoiled by this lack of masculinity is a point of recognition and identification for Emily. Emily looks at these people and understands them and thinks, i feel, she feels when she feels disgust, it's because I feel the same as they do. I've disgusted to understand how well, to understand so well how they feel and how they are.
00:32:55
Speaker
Right. It's the, I guess, almost the moral damage, the psychological damage of being a prisoner. Like she's she's worried for Kiata and she's frightened for him. like If he grows up like this, he will never be the potential, the splendor that she's seen in
Prison as Metaphor: Women's Roles in Fantasy Narratives
00:33:10
Speaker
him. And it's prison that's doing it to him. I hope he gets out.
00:33:14
Speaker
But it's this idea that like being this kind of prisoner person, this morally damaged person, will trap you in trivia for life, as Wolfram clearly has already been trapped and Emily sees how he became so damaged and at the same time has no sympathy for him because he still sucks. Right.
00:33:34
Speaker
And I think the prison is... pretty unambiguously a metaphor, right? Emily's position, Emily's, the smallness of Emily's place in the great story of what is happening to Dale Mark at this point is a metaphor. It's a way to look at imagining yourself in into a great and epic story as a modern woman and finding no place for yourself there are only the smallest of places and being forced to write from within that incredibly small place.
00:34:09
Speaker
Right. Can you have a woman in fantasy? Can you be a woman in fantasy? Can you be a woman who writes fantasy? And I think looking over Delmark, ah you can actually read the Delmark Quartet as a long, slow argument about this question.
00:34:29
Speaker
in which piece by piece, step by step, we come to the figure of Maywen, who in her own time, at the very end of Crown of Delmarc, sets off to have her own fantasy adventure.
00:34:42
Speaker
But that is the first time actually that a woman can set off to have an adventure entirely her own. Maywen's previous adventure is Noreth's, and Noreth didn't get to do it because she was stabbed in the dark.
00:34:56
Speaker
Delmark has to change to make a space where a woman can be a fantasy hero. Delmark has to modernize because there is no place for a modern woman in this space.
00:35:09
Speaker
Anglo-Saxon world. The central, you know, sort of the turn of the story as regards Asgram. So we've been talking about how Emily looks at Asgram and sees an identification, someone who by virtue of his prison is in a position as small as hers. And so they have this exchange, this correspondence where he's sort of which she interprets as being about, and I think is about, how do you think great ideas, how do you can how can you balance the greatness of your ideas with the smallness of your place and situation?
00:35:41
Speaker
And she thinks that this is Asgrim's only lifeline, as he is hers. And then, so first, Kjartan escapes, and Emily finds this out from her jailers and writes a note to let Asgrim know.
00:35:58
Speaker
Before the note makes it there... The point being, of course, that Kiatan was hostage for Asgrim's good behaviour. So once he's escaped, Asgrim no longer has to behave. Before the note makes it there, her correspondence is discovered by Wolfram. He's sitting in the chair in her room complaining about his miserable life.
00:36:17
Speaker
He started by this point, ah by the way, the-ing and the-ing her, Wolfram has. Which Emily interprets as an insult and then ah is realizes after asking Wilbur about it that it's actually a sign of friendship and affection. She is his closest and possibly only friend.
00:36:34
Speaker
This says awful things about both of them. Yep. So he discovers the little stash of paper that she's hidden in this chair. Nothing happens to Emily.
00:36:45
Speaker
Because at this point, Edwin and Wolfram both think of her as a kind of friend. As far as Emily knows, horrible things are happening to Asgrim. He's beaten. He takes to his room.
00:36:56
Speaker
he All of the his guards, this is when she meets one of his handsome guards, and all of them seem to have developed kind of an admiration and a respect for how well he's taking this terrible treatment based on the secret correspondence.
00:37:10
Speaker
And then Asgrim kills the handsome guard and escapes. And this question, so this question arises as Emily sort of starts to put together that he'd had this escape plan all along. He'd been sending various real political messages out, kind of messages that she'd felt guilty that Hobby wasn't carrying all along.
00:37:32
Speaker
That this had all been part of a bigger plan that he'd been devising that she wasn't part of and wasn't relevant to. She was... A diversion. An entertainment. In prison.
00:37:44
Speaker
Right. And Emily was not unreasonable in interpreting their relationship as a love story because he did very much say i love you in a very early message before they'd ever actually spoken about anything of any meaning.
00:38:00
Speaker
And it's not until the end of the story reflecting on this, she goes, but he never called me thou and it was never about me. like To Asgrim, Emily is a woman figure high up who could be any woman. I mean, part of the point of her from the beginning is that she could be any woman. She's a stand-in for Hilda.
00:38:20
Speaker
Right. That bitch Hilda, who Asgrim eventually marries. Yeah. And she's she... It's very sad in her... In her narration, she tries to justify his behavior to herself. says, well, he didn't promise me anything. He never called me thou. Probably there's all sorts of rules here that I didn't know about. And um a woman from this place would have understood he didn't mean it. I think actually it's pretty clear that he has treated her very shabbily. Yeah. Because the thing that jumps out at me is the poems.
00:38:53
Speaker
yeah The poems are also striking because we've seen them before In various forms They are in the Delmarc Quartet Where they are credited to The Adon Who is this legendary figure of Delmarc The last king of Delmarc Who was the leader Of one side in a civil war Some 400 years before the quartet happens Who got mixed up in all sorts Of weird magic stuff alongside The mage Osphamiron Who turns out to be Duck Our good friend Duck who died and was brought back to life. Basically the sort of legendary King Arthur figure. yeah But he also wrote poems.
00:39:29
Speaker
And we get little snatches of the poems in Cart and Quidder and Drown Amet. In particular, we get the line, truth is the fire that fetches thunder, which is this poem.
00:39:40
Speaker
Yeah. Which Emily gets one verse at a time. And I am going to give us the poem. And I think it's very much Diana Wynne-Jones case of decide what this is all about, write second verse yourself. So let us do some poetry and decide what this is all about.
00:39:57
Speaker
Unbounded truth is not a thing cramped to time and bound in place. It strangely changes space, enlarging laws to loyalty and making words reality and stones words or nothing.
00:40:11
Speaker
The boundaries containing me are wider than the world by grace of truth, which is another thing. So that's the first verse Emily gets. And it seems to be a verse about their shared experience of prison and this desire for finding something that is beyond it and greater than it.
00:40:29
Speaker
that truth is greater than the real world, is what makes laws real, is what gives stones. meaning we're We're doing some like quite 20th century linguistics here, actually, being by the signifier and the signified.
00:40:42
Speaker
But the boundaries containing me are wider than the world. And then he sends her a second verse and at this point, if I was her, i'll be like, okay, so he's definitely into me. This truth is mine in closer things and walks in sight across the way, watching the dunleaf stray, only for my eyes smiling.
00:41:03
Speaker
It moves in long hair trailing and locked in words it sings. This strange truth is everything that walks at hand and every day quickens with the face it brings.
00:41:14
Speaker
Yep. I mean, how else you supposed to read that? that that That's a love poem, right? That is describing the experience of watching Emily walking about in her prison the same way that she watches Asgrim walking about and feeling that to be a truth or the truth. yeah Beautiful.
00:41:32
Speaker
Romantic. lovely Congratulations to the both of them. But is the the third verse begins with a negative, a counter. But truth, which is another thing, aside from laws or words or time, has strangely entered space, lifting the clod from under, moving men from men asunder, and only leaves us dying.
00:41:56
Speaker
Truth is the fire that fetches thunder, kindled of itself, and only mine in the heart that had its fashioning.
Asgrim's Self-Centered Truth and Emily's Disillusionment
00:42:05
Speaker
That's less romantic. You've got to think about it carefully because it gets complicated. But that, at its core, and Emily actually thinks about it a lot in the last section of the book after Asgrim has escaped and repeats it a few times.
00:42:17
Speaker
Truth is the fire that fetches thunder kindled of itself. In other words, truth comes from itself, even if you happen to be looking at the the figure of a beautiful woman opposite and you think that's the splendor.
00:42:31
Speaker
That's not the actual cause of your your truth that is lighting up your world, echoing with thunder. The heart that had its fashioning, the truth comes from within you.
00:42:42
Speaker
Yeah, it didn't come from Emily's. Or at least Asgrim's splendor comes from within him. Emily's did not come from within her. She had Asgrim or nothing. And it turns out she never had Asgrim. Yeah, but Asgrim had himself.
00:42:55
Speaker
Asgrim... has always had his profound self-confidence. the The way that she looks at him and is like, oh, he must be so shaken to be in prison, to be trapped in this smallness.
00:43:08
Speaker
No, the walls the walls were big, wider than the world. I don't remember the exact quote from the poem. He was never trapped. He was never bounded in a nutshell. And when Wolfram comes to tell her that Asgrim's escaped, Wolfram, Emily says, has made the vivid thing commonplace and given plain facts a dreary oddity.
00:43:27
Speaker
I suppose, says Wolfram, he must have thought it worth all those lives. Frinkle will hang the five guards, thou knows, and one is dead already. Then there's the three bakers, twenty or so helpers we've not yet found, and all Harold's folk, if we had caught them, he must be sure of his worth.
00:43:42
Speaker
Don't you think? And he didn't know Kjarjan was free. You can be sure we kept that from him. So then Emily is left with the question. Did he know Kjarjan was free?
00:43:55
Speaker
Or did he risk his son's life, throw it away as easily as he threw away 30 other lives in effecting his escape as an important person, a splendid person, a significant person?
00:44:07
Speaker
There's this immensely sad sequence where Once Ascrim's escaped, his side starts winning the civil war and it becomes clear very quickly that he's going to end up in charge, that he can do whatever he likes, which means that if he wanted to, he could come back to this prison and collect Emily or release her or do something with her or remember she existed But he doesn't.
00:44:34
Speaker
She's not important. Wolfram, who is the bastard half-brother of Asgrim's enemy, is also not important. So nobody comes.
00:44:44
Speaker
They are just left and everybody else flees from the town. So in in the end, it is just... Emily, Wolfram, Edwin, and I think one servant, just hanging out in this fortress that nobody is even going to bother to capture in the Civil War because nobody cares. It's that unimportant. And Wolfram lets Emily out of herself.
00:45:07
Speaker
You might as well. Doesn't matter now. that There's no longer any reason to keep her locked up. And he says, we've lost. And the we, it's not quite clear, is it we as in me and my half-brother whom I hate?
00:45:19
Speaker
Or is it we as in you and me, the two of us who have everything in common? I think the most poignant for me, there's two moments of great poignance for me in the end of this story.
00:45:31
Speaker
And one is this moment with Wolfram. from which the title of the story comes. Wolfram stood by the hearth, and I sat in the chair, and we were both quite aware of the true state of affairs. It was in Wolfram's most characteristic manner. He knew how I felt, and I knew how he felt, and neither of us had struggled for the knowledge.
00:45:48
Speaker
Wolfram had just let me know it was there because it was there, and I know it never occurred to him to dissemble. Wolfram never dissembles. This is the odd thing about him. He has called me Thou, and Thou by my true name, because he feels genuinely friendly toward me.
00:46:03
Speaker
I may struggle fretfully to deny it, but I feel just the same towards Wolfram. I could have harmed him over Kiartan, but I never dreamt of doing so. He is my friend. What a weird and comfortless thing to know.
00:46:15
Speaker
But it is plain truth, like the other. And this is one of the small... petty, dismal, but important truths that Emily has come to realize in her life. Wolfram is a truth. He never dissembles, unlike Asgram, who writes these beautiful visions, these beautiful verses about what truth means, and dissembles, and lies, and makes truth mean what he wants it to mean.
00:46:39
Speaker
And then there's this horrible, gray, dismal, little, criminal little man who has always shown Emily the truth and who unfortunately is her friend.
00:46:52
Speaker
And the truth is that they are either going to dwindle into obscurity there together, or they're both going to die. There just is, there's certainly no sense that Emily is ever going to be rescued from her ah dislocation in time.
00:47:04
Speaker
She's seems to be stuck in Delmark for good or ill, and mostly for ill because there's no place to be a modern woman here. And then, it's It's the moment when she's released.
00:47:17
Speaker
It's after the door, after Wolfram leaves the door open. She's like, well, I might as well go see what Asgram's rooms were like. And she goes and looks at his space.
00:47:28
Speaker
and realizes that he actually was never in a small little cell like she was. He had big rooms, fitting for a fitting for the home of a great man.
00:47:39
Speaker
A big bed, patterned carpets. And when he looked out the window, he could see he had a view. He couldn't just see her. Her only view was the little tree and him on the edge of his balcony.
00:47:51
Speaker
But he could see the whole of this beautiful tree and the bigger world from his window that she couldn't see at all. He was never in the kind of privation that she was in.
00:48:01
Speaker
And the little gifts that he sent her, you know he sent her a cloak because he sees she's cold. He sent her a parcel of nice food. But this is what he had all the time and did not share with her.
00:48:13
Speaker
Right. He sends her a cloak to wear when he can see her. She's only got one dress. She spends the rest of her time in the one dress Hilda put on her for the imposture right back at the beginning of the story.
00:48:25
Speaker
like If he actually cared about her like As an embodied person, as a physical person, he clearly had the the money and the the power to arrange for better food all the time, more clothes. But...
00:48:39
Speaker
He only cares about her as the image that he sees sometimes, as this image of splendor to, I think, not just to amuse himself, but to give him something to think about yeah during his imprisonment. Like the the role of woman, the role of womanhood is perhaps to be an object of love.
00:48:58
Speaker
But it's not about you. And only only so only a silly woman would think that him saying he's in love with you is actually about you. Because his world is so much bigger than you
Emily's Constrained Reality and the Role of Fantasy Perspectives
00:49:09
Speaker
are.
00:49:09
Speaker
You're stuck with your love being all about him and only him because you have nothing else. But that's not the case for him. Yeah. It's a very uneasy ending.
00:49:21
Speaker
They're just there. Her and Wolfram and Edwin in this prison. There's no sense of possibility of return to the future, of return to a bigger place. She's out of her prison, but she's still in prison.
00:49:33
Speaker
And so is everyone else in this prison. Right, and part of the the dreariness, the trivia, is that because of her position, she's come to see Asgrim in that same dreary, miserable light. He's stopped being splendid.
00:49:51
Speaker
I cannot believe that a man with Asgrim's regard for integrity would do this to me, even though I know he has done it. It's this idea that actually this great and splendid man clearly wasn't particularly great and splendid he's treated her badly he's arranged for 30 people to die to aid his escape was it worth it well as grimmer thought it was worth it yeah and he didn't need to care what anyone else thought and you know it worked he got out he won the war yeah he became he freed the thralls he freed the thralls he did he did all these great things like the this fantasy book told from as grim's point of view is a very heroic fantasy story And I think part of what the true state of affairs is saying is that when you examine fantasy from the underside, from the position of, certainly of a woman, of someone who doesn't matter, all the splendor starts to fall away from it. And that's not good thing. It's awful. It's heartbreaking.
00:50:50
Speaker
Yeah. There's a thread, a little bit of a thread in this novella as well in Emily considering the gods, right? The idea of the gods, the sort of splendor of vision that they provide, which I think is interesting. It's interesting because we know that this is proto-Delmark because the gods are not yet Delmark's gods.
00:51:11
Speaker
These people pray to Woden. This is still... Clearly a much more Norse, much more historical vision of Dalemark. But Emily describes the gods as splendid, something that makes life better, makes all the dull, ordinary things worthwhile.
00:51:27
Speaker
And she has this ongoing conversation with Wolfram about it. And Wolfram says, you know, some people call themselves Woden's men, so they needn't keep their word. Woden's a great liar, thou knows.
00:51:38
Speaker
Wolfram sees nothing of the gods that's splendid. he thinks if He believes in them. It's not that he doesn't believe in them. But he thinks that they're busy with their own things and have no concern or care. That splendor has nothing to do with the petty, miserable human experience that humans are living. Woden's a great liar thou knowest is, of course, a fair description of Asgrim.
00:51:58
Speaker
Exactly. And I do think that, you know, something that we saw coming back to the 90s is this wrestling with the idea of, you know, as she kind of returns to the idea of the return of the king, of the return of the gods, of something more splendid than this world.
00:52:16
Speaker
ken Is that something that you can believe in? The 70s and 80s are 90s. There's this real interesting arc in Diana Wynne-Jones and how she writes about and portrays godlike figures.
00:52:30
Speaker
Are they something numinous and real or are they petty and human and just human beings and all their sort of miserable grain is writ large? And I do think there's some seeds here of the wrestling with that, the linking of those ideas.
00:52:44
Speaker
What is a great king? What is a god? What is splendor to someone whose daily life is only little minutiae?
00:52:55
Speaker
And I'd say we should call it there, but in fact, we have quite a long list of stuff to talk about. All right, so... Which of these ideas get carried forward into Delmarc? Because I don't think all of them do.
00:53:12
Speaker
Delmarc, I mean, some of them do in upside down and folded over ways, but some of the stuff that she's talking about in this novella, I do think it's kind of channeled off into a different stream of writing.
00:53:27
Speaker
Honestly, this novella, I mean, I said before, makes me imagine an alternate Jones. And I was talking to you about it before the episode. i was saying, wait, are there any women writing adult fantasy in 60s, 70s Britain?
00:53:41
Speaker
was like, Tanith Lee is a bit later, I think. And you pointed out Naomi Mitchison. But... Yeah, Jones gets funneled into children's books.
00:53:52
Speaker
Yeah, as a lot of the greats were at that time. It's Susan Cooper, Alan Garner, over in the US, early Ursula Le Guin. Although I think one difference must be that the US had this tradition of risk-taking science fiction publishing, which did not exist in the UK. I wonder what American Diana Wynne-Jones would have written.
00:54:14
Speaker
It's a fascinating question. But yeah, there's a lot of women in, instead of sort of bouncing around from science fiction to fantasy and and figuring out, you know, finding space between those, there's a lot of women in Britain at that time who are moving between children's fantasy or epic fantasy and gothic fiction.
00:54:35
Speaker
Like that's where the sort of writing about women in small spaces goes into Mary Stewart and Joan Aiken are writing adult gothics alongside their fantasy and in a way this is a gothic and Diana Wintel is clearly interested in the tradition of the gothic but Delmark does not then go on to engage with the tradition of the gothic right the the books of Delmark are journey books they're not bound in small spaces and the first Delmark book that she then writes I think is really interesting that
00:55:07
Speaker
carton you know she I think she moves back towards these ideas, but Cart and Quitter is in many ways her sort of most traditional quest fantasy book. There's a young boy, there's a journey, there's a noble child who seems destined to be king. He's not going to be, but you don't know that when you're reading Cart and Quitter.
00:55:28
Speaker
theyre Right. Cart and Quitter, I mean, i think in common with true state of affairs, Carton Quidder takes the big picture of a great uprising, a great war, a great revolutionary change in Delmark and looks at it from the angle of a very small and sideways angle.
00:55:48
Speaker
Does that make sense? Or even so though, Morrill gets more of Delmarc than Emily ever does. Morrill gets to go across the mountains, he gets to close that mountain pass, like he does stuff. Yeah.
00:56:02
Speaker
At every point all of the protagonists of Delmarc do stuff.
The Guide to Dalemark: Historical Context and Narrative Complexities
00:56:06
Speaker
They're all vivid and active. But they are also, you know, something that I think was interesting looking at the... Something that was interesting looking at the Guide to Dalemark, which you had to do a lot more of than I did. Oh, God.
00:56:21
Speaker
I think we did ah notice this back in the 70s episodes, but I didn't realize how deep it ran. So I have the very, very beautiful, they are beautiful, Oxford Children Modern Classics.
00:56:34
Speaker
which I'm holding up to the camera for Becca and you guys can't see them. They're so beautiful. They're very pretty books. Beautiful editions. Which are from, I think, 2000. So seven years or so after the quartet was complete.
00:56:46
Speaker
And someone... I think probably Jones herself, based on how much this the person seems to know, has gone in and customised guides to Dalemark in the back of each book so it's relevant only to that book and has varied it up and changed which jokes are in it and cut some out and moved things around.
00:57:07
Speaker
Becca has what we think is the original guide to Denmark from the original end of Crown. Yes, I have the 1995 American Greenwillow edition. So they are US editions. So there's always some potential, you know, US publisher shenanigans going on. But I do think my best guess is that this is one original guide that went in at the end of Crown and then got severed and altered for each individual book. So the truth, the quote-unquote truth, and I think there is a real question about how much of this guide to Denmark is telling you truth. We are all Emily now. We're all Emily. We're feverishly trying to look through different editions to find the real guide. and I'm like, we're having an Emily problem. And you said, yes, I am having an Emily problem.
00:57:56
Speaker
But the we can't even rely on the guide to be to tell us the same truth book to book. And one of the things that I have in my complete guide, quote unquote complete, maybe complete, that doesn't turn up, I think, in any of your guides is this note about wars in Delmark.
00:58:13
Speaker
It says, wars in Delmark were frequent, but three only need concern us. The prehistoric invasion by heathens from Halligland, the Adon's Wars, in which the Adon claimed the crown, one of the few civil conflicts in which earls from both north and south appeared on either side,
00:58:26
Speaker
And the great uprising when Amal the Great took the crown, which ended in the establishment of modern Dalemark as one kingdom. And I think the thing that is interesting about the Dalemark books, I mean, there are many, many things that are interesting about them, and that is also a link and follows on from the true state of affairs, is that all of the Dalemark books take place in the interstitials around these wars. None of them concern the wars themselves directly. The protagonists are not there when they happen.
00:58:55
Speaker
Taniqui is not actually involved in the war part of the invasion. there Her family is traveling upriver in the aftermath of the war when you know it has already taken things from her.
00:59:07
Speaker
The Addons Wars sort of haunt the narrative to use an overused phrase of Cart and Quitter particularly but also all of the Delmar books after that but we know very little about them and the books stop before the great uprising happens just sort of poised on the verge and we learn about the great uprising and the add-ons from the sort of bits of history that they leave behind them from the ballads from the records from some things that we learn from the guide which seems particularly almost all the new information that we get from the guide to delmark about characters that we've heard of concerns what happened in the add-ons war and what happened in the great uprising and it is partial and incomplete and untrusting where the information because we're not there to see it the books are not about these
00:59:55
Speaker
epic novelistic high fantasy wars. They're about the build-up to them and the after effects of them. One that we picked out in the episodes at the time was what became of Hoban, Mitt's very pleasant and admirable character of Mitt's stepfather in Drowned Amit, ah who in history we know becomes bloody Hoban for unclear reasons, although you had a theory.
01:00:20
Speaker
Yes. So, and again, i think this is part of the sort of deliberate untrustworthiness of the guide, right? Because what we get in the Hoban entry, which tells us that he was known as Bloody Hoban, that he led the revolt in Hoban once Amal the Great seized the crown, that rapidly became a bloodbath, that killed so many people, many of them innocent, that King Amal himself was forced to intervene, and it was said that Hoban shot himself rather than submit to a king.
01:00:47
Speaker
This may be true. But the story that he shot his wife and daughters at the same time is probably a fabrication. That's what we get in the Hoban entry. We get different information in the Milda entry, which says, sadly, neither Milda nor her daughter, which is Mitt's mother who had two children with Hoban,
01:01:06
Speaker
Neither Mildon nor her daughter survived the great uprising, though there are several highly colored stories about their deaths. The most likely theory is that they perished in the terrible violence and confusion after the mob stormed the Earl's Palace in Holland, when the Earls of Dermoth and Weywald sacked the city in reprisal.
01:01:22
Speaker
If you put these stories together, you can come up with a more coherent narrative than you get just by looking at the Hoban entry, which says, okay, these are books in which grief causes people to do terrible things. That's been a consistent theme of Delmarc.
01:01:36
Speaker
Morrill kills a whole army because he's sad someone one shot his horse. It's thematically consistent, if a reading that Milda and her daughters die in the great uprising, and that as a result, Holborn's reaction is somewhat like that of Moro when he brings down a mountain pass on an army, causing disproportionate retribution.
01:01:55
Speaker
That's thematically consistent with what we've seen of Delmarc. You can make sense of it from the guy that Hoban was in the books. But you don't get that in the Hoban entry. You have to bring in other information and you have to sort of pull that together. And even then, it's a morass of maize and mites and it was said.
01:02:10
Speaker
Right. The guide is we're not given an actual source for it, a voice. We're not saying this is the annals of so or so, or this was written by what's her name. Like unlike ah the note at the end of spellcoats, which gives us ah the name of a particular museum curator who is translated the spellcoats. And then the guide tells us she translated them inaccurately. Yeah. So the guide kind of existed, this intermediate space between in-universe or in-world document and authorial document and kind of, i think, flips back and forth partly based on how much Diana Wynne-Jones wants to make a particular joke, and I respect her for this.
01:02:49
Speaker
But it is also, of course, the guide in its original form, we think, please correct us if we're wrong, is put together for Crown of Denmark in the nineteen ninety s Which makes sense. Crown of Delmark is the last Delmark book. She's ending the quartet. She had the 15-year gap in between books, so she's got a lot of material. In fact, given that Delmark goes back at least a decade, probably more, before the first book was published in the 70s, she must have masses of material that she knows she will now never use.
01:03:19
Speaker
So there's lots that's in the guide that's just... Here's what I've got. Here's more of it. And this is, of course, a classic of the 1990s fantasy genre. You all want an appendix, right? We haven't invented the wiki yet, but here you go. Here's the next best thing. Right.
01:03:37
Speaker
And I think the guide is also a little bit of a joke on the concept of an appendix. Yeah. Giving you a detailed lore drop. Here's a pile of fantasy fiction facts for you to add to your mental picture of this world. Jones's guide says nope don't trust a word of it it's all nonsense or is it don't buy the beer in King Haven which is a joke that got rewritten four different times in four different ways in order to be put in the back of all the separate guides I got she thought it was really important to have that joke There's the stuff that's in the guides, the the cat broad categories of stuff that's in the guides are like helpful little geographic notes. These are broadly the same across all the different editions. You know where Hanart is.
01:04:21
Speaker
Information about a minor character that you probably wouldn't have thought to ask about, usually because they ended up playing a role in the Great Uprising. jokes she very carefully defines because like a solid 30 of the guide is either law school slang which again you didn't care about but she's gonna tell you anyway or a reminder that moral and his family have a bunch of stupid little names for their stepfather ganner there's innumerable entries in the guide that are just stupid word colon ganner and that's it
01:04:53
Speaker
And then you get to Gada's actual entry and it's like, a just and much liked administrator wanted the few to survive the great uprising. Like, wait, there's some actual history here. Right. And then notes about people that we actually know and have spent time with, which are invariably brief and don't tell you any of the things you'd really like to know about them or what happened to them.
01:05:15
Speaker
What happened with Dagnar and Fenne, who was a spy from the South? We'll never know. What you know is that Dagnar, eventually after 15 years, became an Earl. Great, moving on.
01:05:26
Speaker
But we do find out that Dagnar's complicated let legendary name is based on two characters met by the witch Kenareth in her adventures. And you're like, what? Who? had never heard of these people. before. When did this happen? Was Tanakui okay? I think my favorite confusing little note that's just put in there clearly to make you wonder about something that you never would have wondered about is when she notes that the name Osphamaron that Duck uses has the or particle in the middle of it that means younger and so it's clearly, you know, it's not known who Osphaman was, says the note, but the name means Ospham, Osphamon the Younger and it's like
01:06:03
Speaker
I would never have thought to wonder who Aspaman was or consider that this was a name that meant somebody the younger if you hadn't told me. And now you're telling me to wonder about it and also that I'll never know about it because there's no information. There's also some stuff which like you can put together bits of the stories and the nature of the undying.
01:06:23
Speaker
But the guide is not very very not very clear on it, and I think intentionally so. The question of, are the undying gods? Are they human beings? or Are they real people or legendary people?
01:06:36
Speaker
Are the ones that are gods actually real people or legendary people who have allowed themselves to be worshipped? One thing that really jumped out at me was an entry that is the Drowned Amit version of the guide is interesting because it cuts loads of stuff and then puts in a bunch of other stuff. but But it cuts in particular an entry that is in Carton Quidditch for Almet, the son of the Adon, who went to live in Holland and became the first Earl of Holland in Legends, according to some. and you're like, wait.
01:07:06
Speaker
Shocking Amet, isn't it? the Son of the Adon Ammanalia Bred, grandson of Kenareth Tanaqui. That's one of the undying. Like, wait, we've just been told the family connection. And I think I'm right. But it's like that. It is that these is these ah stories glimpsed sideways where you have to put it together yourself and also care quite a lot about it in order to do so.
01:07:26
Speaker
Which I suppose is part of the joy of an appendix. Right. um Going all the way back to the original great big fantasy book with appendices. I recently reread Lord of the Rings.
01:07:38
Speaker
Side note, I do think Delmarc is talking to Tolkien. It must be talking to Tolkien. Of course it's talking to Tolkien. All the jokes about horses. Sorry. Anyway. um But there is a delight in when you have loved a world, flicking through the appendix and going, ooh, didn't know that. And the and of what happened after of it all is also satisfying. It gives a sense of ah of a history going both ways, backwards and forwards, from the little glimpse of it that you that you've seen.
01:08:08
Speaker
i think Jones is having fun. Yes. And I do think that she wants you to like to get some of her little jokes, right? And some of them do have thematic implications. Like, I think the Hoban stuff, when you read it, the Hoban stuff is, I think, the thing that most stands out at you, right, when you're reading the appendix. You get to the, you're like, oh, okay, here's some jokes, here's some geographic entries. and Then you get to the Hoban entry, and you're like, wait, what the fuck?
01:08:31
Speaker
I think it's the one that, you know, people I know who have read the appendices are you know, stands out the most in memory. But it is a signal, I think, to read more closely and that you will find things that are actually relevant to your experience there. i think my my favorite, you have to, again, read closely and put two entries together for this, is the note about Enblith the Fair, a character, again, completely unimportant to the main narrative, a mythical figure of Delmarc.
01:08:58
Speaker
uh queen of delmarc hundreds of years after the reign of king hern daughter of the undying said to the most beautiful woman who ever lived tanamorel found and blith living as a pauper in the woods and tricked the king into marrying her all right that's the entry about emblem of the fair then later on in a different en entry specifically in the tanamorel entry it says he assisted and so under this name he assisted and blith the fair to become queen because according to some stories she was his daughter and you're like wait What?
01:09:28
Speaker
So this is... Duck's got form. Duck's got form. He's done this before. Have daughter. What if she were queen? oh For reasons, you know, why? Why is he doing?
01:09:41
Speaker
But the fact that he's done it before and that again, the shape of Crown of Delmarc only happens because of the shape of Duck's grief for his daughter.
01:09:52
Speaker
is I think of major thematic import for Dalemark as a whole, and you don't get the information that this is the second time he's done it, that he has this history of being a mediocre, politically ambitious dad to daughters.
01:10:06
Speaker
Unless you like scan across the different entries in the appendix and do weird red string theory across And it's so much fun to do weird red string theory across them. much fun.
01:10:18
Speaker
and also, again, At the same time, sometimes you're reading the guide and you're like, you're just you're just lying to me now.
Themes of Kingship, Godhood, and Identity in Dalemark
01:10:24
Speaker
um There's a point in the guide, the Taniqui note in the guide specifically. Yes, whereas like some people think she's the same person as the legendary witch Kenareth. But Taniqui was clearly a real person. And you're like, who wrote this? Who is supposed to have written this? Diana, you know they are the same person.
01:10:43
Speaker
You've just told us they're the same person. We've just read The Crown of Delmark. So... It does, i think... Like, I think the purpose of the guide is to have fun, first of all, to tell a lot of little jokes, to lean in. The guide the guy does come out of the 90s, so to lean into some of the fantasy trends of the 90s that Diana is already engaged in starting to explore and hold up to the light and poke fun about. she's You know, this is the decade of the tough guide, which we will be doing an episode on.
01:11:15
Speaker
But also... It's continuing the conversation that I do think starts in true state of affairs, continues through all of the Dalemark books, but very explicitly in spell codes about what we can know from history, what we should take from it, how we can understand it what is the true state of affairs we'll never know it's experienced differently by different people and our sources for discovering it are unreliable and altered by shifting language and by shifting understandings and the patterns that we think we see you know the pattern from carton quitter that moral really clearly identifies oh i am os fameron and here is my friend the adon and we're crossing the mountains and that means that we're going to be embarked in this war to make him king
01:11:58
Speaker
are not always reliable and are not always trustworthy. Sometimes the pattern is different than you understand or expect it to be. Yeah. And we should call it there, but we're not going to.
01:12:11
Speaker
Because I've had a promise to myself that I would write a list of questions and then ask them. yeah So, Becca, I'm going to ask you a question. Should we alternate? Yeah, we can take turns.
01:12:22
Speaker
I want to go first, though. Yes, do it. What is Delmarc about? such a mean question it's such a mean question and i don't think like i think it's about many many things but i do think primarily it is about the argument about the shape of a land and its history and the people who are bound up in it. I think this question of what is a king, what is a god, what is someone who is tied to the land, you know, the like the the entry about the undying is the longest in the entire guide.
01:13:01
Speaker
I think the question of what are the undying, are they just people who've allowed themselves to be sort of woven into history, bound into history, bound into godhood in a certain way, is one of the central questions that we're left with in Delmarc.
01:13:15
Speaker
And this question of how history sort of folds in on itself, how time folds in on itself, is something that is at the beginning of Dalemark in True State of Affairs. It's at the end of Dalemark in Crown. She comes back to it and she returns to it.
01:13:28
Speaker
And I do think that a lot of the shape of the books... is this kind of back and forth shuttle weaving exploration of those ideas.
01:13:41
Speaker
If you put a gun to my head, that's what I think. Okay, you can ask me a question now. Do you want a hard one or an easy one first? I don't mind. All right, let's do a silly one.
01:13:51
Speaker
Bad dad sweepstake. We said we were going to do it. It's time. Who is the worst dad in Denmark? Ooh. Okay, Dads of Jailmark, a quick reminder, Moral's dad, Clennon, spy for the south, real pain in the neck for many reasons, complicated man. Then we have ah Key Island's dad, Earl Carroll. Who do think, by the way, Ashgrim is another pattern for Earl Carroll. I do think so. But then I also think Asgrim is... It's entirely possible that Asgrim is the Adon. It is quite possible that like the Emily episode happened in our Dale Marks history and we just don't know because it didn't get written down anywhere important. Her papers got burned.
01:14:33
Speaker
The Adon never gets a given name. He could be Asgrim. ah He wrote all Asgrim's poems apparently. Anyway, Asgrim of course is on the dad list in the Dad's New Stakes. I think there is actually a fairly natural clear winner which is Mitt's dad, Al. We have to exclude him because he's the worst dad in Delmark. There's Navis. There's Navis, Hildy's There's Klosty the Clam who could really have ah stood to give them a bit more information. Right.
01:15:02
Speaker
There's Wend. There is Wend, oh god. That's serial daughter queener. There's Maywen's dad, the museum curator. just I think the one counts as a dad because we do meet his daughter, if only briefly. Yes, one definitely counts as a dad. He is, of course, also Dale Mark's grandfather. Yes, like our grandfather. Yes, he is is ah the legendary divine ancestor of all Dale Mark and therefore a dad. And therefore a dad.
01:15:29
Speaker
And there's Hestephan. who Oh, yes. Who does a lot of stuff because his daughter has been imprisoned, including murdering Norrith. Right. o Worst dad in Delmar. Well, unfortunately, the winner is Al.
01:15:43
Speaker
i know you wanted to exclude him, but like but he he just he he is the worst dad in Delmar. He is also, I think, the dad who most thoroughly encompasses the um the theme, if you like, of becoming or unbecoming your parents and what that can mean. Yes. Which I think is more prominent in the first two Delmar books and takes a bit more of a backseat for Tanaquiz and Maywen's story, perhaps because it is less possible as a female protagonist to become your father. Your horrible father.
01:16:14
Speaker
Although there is actually, for my money, one of the most charming moments in Maywen's story is when she's like, oh, my dad and I are basically the same kind of person. Yeah. I can see why mum divorced him. i I'm really glad they got divorced. But there isn't really a question of I mean, there isn't much of a question of are you going to become your mother in Delmarc? There's a little bit of a question with Tanakui of whether she's going to become... Cankreden.
01:16:43
Speaker
There's a question of whether she's going to become Cankreden. And Kenbleth, the yeah was ken but thats who i was thinking ancestral sorceress. But yes, these sort of two models of magical weaving that she has. But yeah, I do think that the though that the question of the question that comes back in Crown, that again has its roots in true state of affairs, is parental ruthlessness. right do you Do you sacrifice your children for the greater good or not? Are you a good a figure for the country but a bad dad or are you a good dad but a bad figure for the country
01:17:17
Speaker
ah Ah, interesting. And of course you do have even Maywen's dad has in fact, both Maywen's parents have sacrificed their marriage, Maywen's childhood she expected on mutual fulfillment. that They're both very, very happy people. Neither of them is a natural parent. That's really clear.
01:17:35
Speaker
And both, nave Navis is would say a pretty mediocre dad at best, occasionally he tries, but a remarkably important figure for the country. Carol Is, to Kealan's mind, a good parent?
01:17:49
Speaker
He thinks quite highly of him, but in the end, and is also deeply ruthless about other people who are not his children, and we see that come out in his treatment of men. And I do think that we're meant to hold all these things sort of against each other, you know, sort of roll all these dads against each other like marbles and look at their different facets and go, hmm. Hmm.
01:18:08
Speaker
Yeah, it's still Al though. It's still Al. It's still Al. Which is it is a good thing actually though that Al died in Drowned Abbott because he was the rightful king of Dalmark. That is true. but We are told Mitt ah has his right to be king in a direct line father to son descended from the son of the Adon.
01:18:27
Speaker
Which means his father was the rightful king first. Yep.
Art, Truth, and Historical Narratives in Delmark
01:18:31
Speaker
That would be great for everybody. I do like by the way your alternate theory about Hoban and Milda.
01:18:38
Speaker
which which was that uh let me see if i'm getting this right it's that Hoban looked at Mitt becoming king and then looked at his beautiful clueless wife Milda and was like this woman cannot you lost to spend money this woman cannot become queen mother we're gonna fake your death it's a nicer story i don't think it's what actually happened though I mean, i I do think that the to jump back to Hoban a second, the commentary on Hoban in the guide and bloody Hoban, etc. is also clearly a comment on the way history looks at revolutionaries and the way history after the fact writes about revolutionaries who step beyond the bounds.
01:19:17
Speaker
So I do think that much of what we see about Hoban cannot be taken to be any of the truth of what happened. So maybe he did score us send Milda away to the Holy Island. Maybe they all emigrated and ended up in Haligland, which we know in modern Denmark is an oil-rich republic.
01:19:38
Speaker
Yeah, an oil rich republic full of... Thanks for the glossary! Yeah, that's not a question I thought to ask, but here we are. An oil rich republic full of people who aggressively do not believe in the gods, even though the Delmark's religious beliefs came from Haligland to begin with, which I think Holman would probably enjoy. I don't think that Holman is a very religious figure. There we go.
01:20:01
Speaker
My turn to ask question. Yes. ah So, Delmark has... a singer and a weaver as two of its main protagonists what is art for?
01:20:16
Speaker
again this is one of the things where I would have had an answer before the true state of affairs go on give give give us the what the answer was and then tell me why it doesn't work So the question, you're you're spoiling my question for you because my next question for you was going to be what is truth?
01:20:33
Speaker
And i do think the question of what is truth is really bound up in the question of what is art? Is art for telling things that are true? Is it a crime to use art to tell things that aren't true? And I think the argument in Cart and Quitter and in Spellcodes is...
01:20:54
Speaker
In many ways, yes, you have to be very, very careful with using art to say things that aren't profoundly true to your soul that are a little bit of lie. Moral's sort of great mistake, great tragedy, the thing that he carries with him throughout the rest of the series is that he fooled the quitter by writing this great lament to his father and bringing down the mountains with it.
01:21:18
Speaker
And that was true enough that the quitter responded to him. But he knows in his heart that it was about his horse. And that's the note that that book ends on, is that this great work of art and this violent work of art was in some way a lie.
01:21:32
Speaker
And when we see him in Crown, he's still haunted by that. Right, it's not that art has to be true, it's that art makes things true, can make a lie true, which I think does come back to True State of Affairs and Ask Grimm's poetry.
01:21:48
Speaker
Yeah. The other thing, I'm actually just thinking about this now, I wanted us to get back to the question of binding and unbinding, which I think is also central to the book. And something that, again, you get a glimpse of in the glossary when thinking about Norrith and the eventual name of the palace that Mitt builds is Tanereth Palace, which we're told means, if anything, younger Norrith.
01:22:16
Speaker
But we're also told that the word Oreth from other entries in the glossary means has something to do with binding. Anareth, the wife of Closti the Clam, her name means unbound.
01:22:29
Speaker
There is, in fact, another Tanareth, which is with just one N spelled slightly differently, that means the younger bound one. So the name Tanareth that we give to this palace is associated, the name North that's associated with Maewen, with this history of Dalemark, has something to do with what is or isn't bound in this place.
01:22:49
Speaker
And I do think that art is a kind of binding concept in these books into truth of a binding and ambiguity into a form and that That ambiguity can have tremendous impact. Because tell you what an artwork we haven't discussed is then is the sculptures, which are the binding of the one and of Tanamel.
01:23:13
Speaker
Both of them are bound in form through a work of art, which is then owned, possessed by the the children of Fusty the Clam. And that, I think, makes it interesting that the ending of Crown of Delmarc ends with us in a museum where that sculpture of the one and Favaron's magical quidder that became Morrell's quidder are set up in glass cases and this is the ultimate fate of these very important works of art that have shaped the history of Delmarc is their inner museum to be looked at
01:23:46
Speaker
And this is, I think, not unambiguously a good thing. Yeah. And not just that, but when Meiwen, like us, Meiwen is reduced at the end of the book to trying to find out the fate of these vivid people that she spent time with and cares about from the little glimpses of artifact that are left behind.
01:24:07
Speaker
And in many cases, this is how they've been represented in art. What she knows about the fate of Morrill, one of her dearest friends, is that there's a sad painting about him and he he looks depressed.
01:24:19
Speaker
And that's what she's going to take away about his fate is this this painting of him. She knows about Mitt. nothing because she looks up at the picture of Mitt at his purple breeches and is like, well, he's nothing like that. I can't glean anything from this. didn't bind him at all.
01:24:33
Speaker
And then she realizes, oh, it didn't bind him at all deliberately. There's no truth in that painting of him. And so therefore it can't bind him. Whereas there's enough truth in that painting of moral that for Maewen, that's always going to be moral is that sad boy with the quitter.
01:24:49
Speaker
Right. Art sort of art fixes a story or a history into one shape. And therefore, I don't know. Art art is a killer. Art destroys. like morals Moral's art kills an army.
01:25:04
Speaker
And then the painting of Moral fixes him forever as this um this figure of sadness. I don't... I can't get quite get my head around this thought. Help.
01:25:16
Speaker
Art does also unbind. That's the other side of it, I think, right? Is that the end of Spell Quotes is Tanakui weaving the story and putting it over the statue of the One. And this unbinds him. It frees him.
01:25:28
Speaker
Because it's the truth of, you know, she's gone up and down the river. She's seen all of the One, which is the river. And by telling the story of the truth of the river, she's able to free him from this little space in which he's been trapped. This this confinement, if you will. This prison.
01:25:41
Speaker
his prison, ah to become a greater thing. And so there's there is this flip side to art that it can be a liberating force and unbinding.
01:25:52
Speaker
It can unleash a great and powerful truth, or it can unleash a small and personal truth that is important, that frees you. But it can also tie you in. It can also ah capture you and hold you down. it's It's two things at once, as everything always is.
01:26:08
Speaker
Nicely done. All right. All right. Now do it. What's truth? Come on. What's truth? Oh, easy. Truth is the fire that fetches thunder. like No, I think we've actually covered a lot of the headlines of the truth question in what we've just said about art.
01:26:25
Speaker
I do think the question of truth in fantasy is one that Jones is really interested in. Because, of course, fundamentally a fantasy book is not true. Like, by definition, a story that's set in a fantasy world is calling your attention to the illusion of a novel, of a piece of writing. This is not a true world. This never happened.
01:26:48
Speaker
And I think in some ways the, I'm not going to say realism because that has a specific meaning in literature, but the setting of a contemporary world or even a historical world um invites the reader to take part in a lie, which is that this book, it could be true.
01:27:05
Speaker
Does that make sense? So if you're reading if you're reading The Wonderful Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, you are being invited to believe that this is the true story of Thomas Cromwell.
01:27:16
Speaker
It is not. It is fiction. It is made up. This is this is this is what is known as lying. Whereas a fantasy book, by definition, is not inviting you to take part in an illusion of truth. It's saying this is an unreal thing.
01:27:32
Speaker
therefore, what truth are you telling with this untruth? hook of I tried to be clever, I just ended up back at Oscar Wilde. It's a lie that tells the truth.
01:27:43
Speaker
And then you end up at Dorothy Parker. I never tried to take the credit. We all assume that Oscar said it. well So, go on you. I'm just going to say, maybe to bring in a little bit of T.S. Eliot instead, because the four quartets we know are woven into Dalmark.
01:28:01
Speaker
the He has a lot to say there about the timeless moment is England and nowhere, never and always. History is now and England. Is the truth of Delmarc, of Maywin, who is fundamentally a young British girl in many ways, who is a return to Emily, who is unambiguously an English woman, is Delmarc a way to tell some kind of truth about history and England?
Character Analysis: Asgrim, Mitt, and the Nature of Truth
01:28:31
Speaker
whom I think I read Elliot on now and England differently. Now is if perhaps is perhaps the the attention to what Emily in True State of Affairs calls trivia.
01:28:47
Speaker
ah The everyday, the moment, the immediate, the right now, the water you're drinking. Thinking about Eliot's poetry, he actually has a real genius for observation of small moments.
01:28:59
Speaker
Thinking of the love song of J.R. for Prufrock especially. ah but he he He observes immediate and present moments. He moves his poetry into the physical embodiment of life in the early 20th century.
01:29:13
Speaker
In the rooms the women come and go. Anyway. So maybe that's now. And then England is a kind of story. here So there's ah there's history history is now and the story that we've been told. History is now and a great fiction.
01:29:33
Speaker
Or history history is now and a concept. I don't know if I can get to truth from there. Let me think. Truth I feel like a true stage of affairs has upended all my ideas. Yeah, I know. the delmark Truth is the fire that fetches thunder. I have thought of as like an unambiguously, like, not maybe not unambiguously good, but like noble thing. It's a splendid line. But the fact that she has then given it to Asgrim, who is liar, a deceiver, an aristocrat who by virtue his influence,
01:30:09
Speaker
great importance great self-importance, great self-worth, great splendor is unable to see the people he's trampling on in pursuit of his truth. It gives you a a different sense of maybe what thunder means. Yeah.
01:30:23
Speaker
Yeah. But the fact that she wrote it fast undermines the whole fucking thing. Diana is always more complicated than you think she is. Every time.
01:30:35
Speaker
And I do think that, like, I look at Asgrim and I look at Hobby and I look at Mitt and I look at this great splendid man that's Asgrim, this heroic figure, and I look at the way she writes Mitt in Drowned Abbott, this miserable child who cannot, who is trapped in, like you know, again, in sort of the the miserableness of his childhood, of the the world he's built around himself.
01:31:04
Speaker
And that that's the figure that she decides to make central to Delmark, to make the story of Delmark is, you know, when Mitt chooses to step into the kingship of Delmark, he becomes the story of Delmark.
01:31:17
Speaker
Yeah. And that this is the story of Delmark. It's not Asgrim. It's not the add-on. It's not Kjallan. It's Mitt. The fisherman. The fisherman. I think putting Crown in the context of the series of Returns of True Kings in the nineteen ninety s makes it all the more striking because I think Mitt is the only actual commoner among them.
01:31:39
Speaker
Yep. she's otherwise quite into maybe it was a sainted figure of divine power all along maybe maybe it was the special magic wizard maybe it was King Arthur maybe it was King Arthur and the fact that we have this deep backstory for Mitt in Drowned Amit this deep and very painful backstory for Mitt in Drowned Amit makes him I think the most persuasive of these true returning kings who will save the day yeah This feels like someone who genuinely could and must imagine a different path for Delmarc.
01:32:14
Speaker
And what he's going to do to Delmarc is not a restoration, which I think is also vital in this like Return of the King narrative. Mitt, possibly a alone of them all, is not restoring some noble past because the past sucks. He's doing something new.
01:32:32
Speaker
But she still can't get past... I do think that this is an... It's an ongoing argument, right? This desire for splendor to get to, even if the the the glorious returning king is Mitt the fisherman.
01:32:45
Speaker
He's going to have a palace. He's going to have a palace. He's going to build the city of gold. He's going to have the big battle. He's going to have the great the great uprising and he's going to elevate Navis to be a duke who's more important than all the earls. And he's going to to build this great palace and he's going to make this a wealthy kingdom.
01:33:02
Speaker
we're not turning away from the vision of splendor. We're not rejecting it. We're still moving towards it. But there's this thing, the thing that Emily says in The True State of Affairs that I think is the one moment that we actually see Asgrim respect her or give a ah ah response that indicates that he respects her as a thinker and not just a beautiful vision of a woman in Across the Way is She says, you know, he's he's written to her about truth.
01:33:35
Speaker
And she says, your saying is good since it gathers small and great into one, all needing leaven. And he says, this of leaven was a new thought. The idea of trying to gather small things and great things together and infuse them with something splendid, but without losing the smallness of the small, without losing the truth that is the the little things of which history is built, of which daily life is built.
01:34:03
Speaker
Because Jones's fantasy as a project is deeply interested in daily life and in the everyday. um And as she moves through her years of writing children's fantasy, you can see how deeply that runs in her work.
01:34:18
Speaker
Delmarc is her only major, completely separate secondary world. Yeah. And I think there is a reason for that. I think in desiring to write small truths or true smallness, she must make use of our world, of the modern world.
01:34:35
Speaker
Yeah. I have one more question for you. Yes. What's your last question for me? Should Hearn and Karzaydan have kissed? Oh, yeah. What? um How can you know I believe this profoundly? i Yes, but I wanted you to tell me about it some more. I agree. Obviously they should have kissed. Obviously this was a true meeting of the minds and souls as we've rarely seen it across across the omer of Dalemark.
01:35:06
Speaker
It is perhaps, would you say, the greatest romance at Dalemark? The David and Jonathan. Yes, I think perhaps I would say that. It was, I very, very rarely these days feel moved to write fan fiction, but I did write fan fiction about Hernan Karsade and cars aide on I was like, but they really should have kissed.
01:35:25
Speaker
It's so clear they should have kissed. And who knows, perhaps in the long vastness of time, you know, the the interstitial spaces, we know that the story of Delmarc that we have is incomplete and partial.
01:35:39
Speaker
And there is room in and around the truth that we've been given for another undeniable truth, which is that they should have kissed and perhaps did. Alright, here's my last question for you. Speaking of those interstitial spaces, and you can't say the story where hers and her and Karzaydan kissed because you already wrote it. Leave me alone.
01:36:02
Speaker
if if You could get one more Dale Mark story out of Diana because it's clear that she had a lot of Dale Mark rattling around in her brain still. What's the one that you would want to see? oh Oh, that's tricky.
01:36:18
Speaker
oh that's really tricky. I think I would want a Tanakui story. Not Tanakui the girl, the spellcoats, but Tanakui the old woman.
01:36:29
Speaker
Racketing, Dale Mark. But also I think late Diana Wynne Jones is really interesting on old women. And I would like to hear how Tanakui tells a story when she's old.
01:36:42
Speaker
So I would like to hear perhaps Tanakui's version of Mae Wen's quest for her true love. I think that would be quite funny. Oh my God, that's such a good idea. ah Now I want it really badly and I'm super sad that we'll never get it Yeah, perfect. what about you?
01:37:00
Speaker
Is there one you'd want? I want to know who Osphamon was.
01:37:07
Speaker
It's so stupid, but I'm desperate to know. I think to get that, I think you would have to have the story of the Adon. How did the Adon come to meet Duck Tanamoral, calling himself Osphamiron?
01:37:19
Speaker
What happened there? You have to imagine. Here's the thing about... Duck, Tanamoral, and the Adon and Manalia Bread, is that you have to imagine this was a very funny road trip, because what we know from the glossary is that we have the Adon. We have Oswe Amaran, who was obsessed with the Adon and wrote massive amounts of great poetry about him.
01:37:39
Speaker
We have Osfamaran's niece, Manalia Bread, who was also obsessed with the Adon and wrote massive amounts of great poetry about him. And we have the Adon's shitty half-brother who killed him. who And we have the Adon's son from his first marriage who was also along on the road trip. Oh yes, so he is! The Adon's new god-wife and her god-uncle who was also obsessed with him.
01:38:04
Speaker
You know what? I think this bloody world is Asgrim, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, think it's gotta be. I wonder if the evil half-brother ah who's jealous of them murders him because he's so great he is in fact a Wolfram.
01:38:17
Speaker
Well, yeah, i think it I think that kind of maybe gets folded into that story, right? Because that is Wolfram and his opponent, ah his his rival is his his full brother. Well, there you go.
01:38:29
Speaker
so wait we can't say that we want the story of the aid on because we already got it it's the true state of affairs and it was very depressing but it was so depressing i you know it is fascinating to imagine the career that diana windjones might have had if she'd continued writing in that vein if that's the path that she continued to walk down i do think that what we get after sort of Sublimating that vein of adult writing for several years, for several decades, under fantastic children's books, where a lot of these ideas only come out elusively, is something, you know, the adult career that we get out of adult fiction writing career that we get out of her in the 90s, the exuberance of it, the sort of unbinding of it, if you will, looks so different from the career that you would have imagined from someone who'd gone on writing adult speculative fiction after The True State of Affairs.
01:39:26
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, we are lucky to have the Diana Wynne Jones we do have. But I do imagine as well, the adult books that she didn't write in the 70s and 80s. I think they would have been fascinating.
01:39:37
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Well, as T.S. Eliot says, history may be servitude and history may be freedom. and We can imagine all of the freedom. We have the freedom, the endless freedom to imagine all of the different variants possible of what Dale Mark could and would and might have been. Oh, I meant to ask you one more question. I'm sorry. yeah Can I sneak in one more? i know we have to wrap.
01:40:04
Speaker
So one of the things that you said to me when we were reading The True State of Affairs is Do you think that Danmark was Diana Wynne-Jones' sexy back novel?
01:40:17
Speaker
What do you think that looks like? Okay, no, I think to clarify, the sexy back novel refers not to the song, but to fire and headlock. LAUGHTER
01:40:30
Speaker
In which Polly, as a teenage girl, did something which I certainly found very familiar, very relatable. I think many teenage girl writers have done this and wrote an enormous great big epic, which was not good, but was sexy.
01:40:47
Speaker
Yes. Do you think Asgrim was originally the man with the sexy back? I would not be surprised in the least. I think um unless it's all hidden in a drawer somewhere in her archives that we are probably never going to read Dinah Wynn Jones Juvenilia. And I mean, there is a reason I personally would not want eddie anyone to be reading my teenage novels.
01:41:09
Speaker
But I'd love to know.
Conclusion and Future Episodes
01:41:12
Speaker
I'd really love to know. And we never will. But we invite you all to wander with us. Thank you for joining us to this episode that was not a mini-sode about Delmar. could probably talk about Delmar more, let's be honest. I do think it...
01:41:27
Speaker
It belongs in the canon of children's literature. It deserves to be more widely read and more widely known. Absolutely it does. And we certainly will be talking about Delmark more because we have two more bonus episodes that we're planning for this season. ah The first will be on Tough Guide to Fantasyland, which I think is a great way to synthesize the 90s because so much of...
01:41:48
Speaker
The jokes and arguments that she's making there, I think, pop up in different ways across all the ninety s the back half of the 90s books. And then the last will be our Q&A episode. So feel free to keep sending us questions.
01:42:00
Speaker
ah We'll probably be recording about one of these a month. So my guess is that we'll be recording. No, wait, we have dates. We do have dates. Anyway, we'll be recording ah the Tough Guide in June and the Q&A in July. So get us your questions before them.
01:42:18
Speaker
Okay. And we'll talk to you all soon. Bye. Bye. See you soon.