[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] Welcome to panel six. Our first speaker is doctor Grace Curry. Grace has just finished her doctorate and studies of J.R.R. Tolkien and his different iterations of The Silmarillion. And she's Oxford's very first doctoral, um, recipient who studied J.R.R. Tolkien. And today, I'll she'll be talking about the influence of Norse myth and sagas on the writings of, er, Edison. So you'll get Grace here, potentially.
All right. Thank you everyone for coming to this talk. I hope you enjoy it. Africa Edison was born in Adelaide, Yorkshire, to solicitor Octavius Edison and his wife Helen Louisa Roper. As a fantasy author a decade older than his more widely read contemporaries J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, whose inklings meetings he once graced in the early 1940s. His writings were published early enough to influence the more famous duo of Oxford dons by the time Tolkien published The Hobbit in 1937.
Edison had already put out two of his novels. As with Tolkien and Lewis Old Norse literature, the myths and heroic, often fantastic sagas of medieval Iceland influenced Edison's fiction. Edison began teaching himself Old Icelandic at Eton in the 1890s, as did Tolkien while at Birmingham's King Edward School almost two decades later. Edison continued learning Norse after he went up to Trinity College, Oxford to study classics, in which he achieved a second class degree in 1905.
Tolkien also studied classics for the first two years of his degree, before switching to the English school, as part of which he studied Scandinavian philology. However, unlike Tolkien and Lewis, Edison's career would not be in academia but in the civil service. In 1906 he joined the Board of Trade, and in the same year he became a member of the Viking Club, later renamed as it remains today the Viking Society of Northern Research.
While too old for military service in World War Two, Edison, like Tolkien, served as an air raid warden. However, he was not untouched by that conflict's tragedy, as his son in law was a casualty. Edison is most remembered for his heroic fantasy, starting with The Worm of Robberies, followed by the related Symbian trilogy, The Mistress of Mistresses, fish Dinner and Medicine, and the posthumously published and incomplete The Ascension Gate.
Although Edison's oeuvre represents a pastiche of classical, medieval and Elizabethan influences, and more generally are markedly intertextual works, this talk will consider his amateur and Old Norse scholarship, which leaves its traces on his epic fantasy novels. Old Norse myths and sagas were enormously popular in the Victorian and Edwardian periods, and widely accessible through translations and adaptations in children's readers.
Viking themed novels, which more or less closely emulated the medieval sagas, were all the rage. A noted example being each writer Haggard's Eric Bright Eyes. In one of his letters, Eddison recalls how he first took up Icelandic at 17 and what he describes as a saga madness.
During the two year period of 1900 and 1901, Edison acquired a slew of translations, including George Webb Day Since The Story of Burns and Yarn from Brendan Dahl Saga, and also a 1900 reprint of William Morris Morris's and Erica magnusson, The Saga of Cadet Hair. The strong or gritty saga about the doomed anti-hero Gretta who fights trolls and the undead. He also owned many editions in the Norse original and language textbooks like Henry Sweet's Icelandic Primer and The Fusion,
and York Powells Icelandic Prose Reader. A few years after the worm of a robberies, Edison published Steer Beyond the Strong, expanding on a figure from RBA saga which he read in William Morris's translation. Although not a professional academic, in 1930 his translation of Ail saga, only the second rendering of that work into English, was published with Cambridge University Press. It opens with a historical and literary introduction and ends with a terminal essay on translation.
It is presented in relatively archaic English, with at least one more faithful rendering from the Old Norse, using the term bombers from the Old Norse plural wonder. For farmers, Edison corresponded with and received advice from several several notable North scholars like Bertha Phil Potts, mistress of Girton College, Cambridge, in his book Vikings and Victorians and Your One calls Edison a serious and imaginative Icelandic artist.
All this material provided an imaginative wellspring, which became evident to other readers reading Edison's fiction in 1922. Each writer, Haggard wrote Edison, praising his work and recognising the saga. Influence. In The Worm of a robber. As C.S. Lewis wrote to Edison in 1942, using Elizabethan spelling and the Middle English word outdoor.
In his witty TypeScript letter, in which he recognised in Edison's writing, the actors in whom I perceive you to be very well versed as William of Kelmscott, Snorri and Homer and Thomas Brown. Night scenery store Lucerne, a 13th century Icelandic chieftain, politician and orthography, compiled one of the two remaining sources of Norse mythology, the Prose Edda, while William of Kelmscott refers to William Morris, whose home was named Kelmscott Manor.
Morris was a predecessor and literary inspiration who, like Edison, was also an amateur Norse scholar who translated sagas and wrote fantastic romances with northern elements. While not the predominant feature in Edison's fiction. Norse elements in his novels can range from decorative to more thematically significant instances. The worm of a robbery is the most commonly read of Edison's four fantasy novels.
It starts in our world in the early 20th century in an article on Edison's translation of Ale Saga. Professor Matthew Townend compares the novels beginning to those of Norse sagas, following The Man That Our Hate x man called ex-Formula. Examples of which are found in Edison's to Saga translations. And so you see examples of that here. There was a man named Thorstein, man named Wolf man named blessing him.
Lessing. Ham's house was. It has a special room in which he is met by a magical vehicle that travels through time and space and takes him to a fanciful rendering of Mercury, where he witnesses an ongoing war between the two super races. The warring demon demon lords of Lord Lords use brand up to ha and gold. Rebels go against the witch Lords of cars led by their sorcerer King Gorse, the 12th, and their allies.
Edison's nomenclature, criticised by Tolkien as slipshod, is curiously childish, featuring realms like Pixie Land, Implant and Goblin land. The beings described can look more or less as what their names suggest. The demons have horns, but are otherwise human in appearance. The pixies of this world are not diminutive, and the pixie Lord love fairy seems like a figure from French medieval romance.
The wider world depicted is like reading a Thomas Malory reimagining of Mercury, with a language and culture evocative of the Arthurian court dramas of England and France. Words like presences used in chapter eight, or reference to jousting in chapter nine, and aristocratic women like the Lady Mary Anne and later Lady Myra, all point to the strong influence of medieval chivalric literature. Yet the demon lords possessed dragons, war ships with dragon heads at the prow.
I was told in chapter eight references made to fetches of the dead, a type of spirit from the Norse sagas, which in the novel are remarked to be streaming up from Erebus. The underworld of Greek myth shows Edison's interweaving of Norse and classical influences. This story pits the Demon Lords against the Witch Lords who sorcerer King Glorious 12. Perhaps influenced Tolkiens witch king, the lord of the Nazgul.
In The Lord of the rings, King summons the terrible worm of a robber from the abyss to best his enemies a monster more generally symbolic of the cyclical nature of warfare, as at the end of the novel, when the demons have defeated the Lords of Witch Land, they cannot abide to live without conflict and are granted by the gods to reset time so they can fight their old foes all over again.
Such a shocking conclusion is particularly striking in a work developed in the aftermath of the First World War, a conflict in which Edison was not a combatant, unlike his contemporaries Lewis and Tolkien. And yet it was oddly prescient about the future and the aftermath of what later, well, was later disproved. Concept of a war to end all wars. Some character names in the novel are of Norse derivation. King Earp of Ilion, one of the allies of the witches, is from the Norse part.
The half brother of the heroes. Ham Theatre and Sorley and Ham the small from the Poetic Edda. The Goblin Lord Gro, the duplicitous villain and counsellor to teen chorus, is also Norse in origin, a variant of grow up, meaning to grow, the name of a sorceress.
In stories. Prose Edda Lord grow assist the sorcerer King in summoning the worm of a robberies, and more generally in keeping with the sense of his name, can be said to grow mischief to one side or the other, and he changes sides a couple of times. In a 1957 letter, Tolkien saw the worm of a robber as being corrupted by an evil and indeed silly philosophy, and was concerned that Edison was coming to admire more and more arrogance and cruelty.
Yet Tolkien praises Edison's work for its sheer literary merit while objecting to the characters. He makes an exception for Lord grow. Tolkien may have been intrigued by the particularly fitting use of the Norse name in the context of the novel, an exception to the slapshot nomenclature, he protested, as well as that figure's moral complexity of having treachery mixed with some conscience.
And just to conclude, we're going to fittingly end with, um, the Norse apocalypse, uh, as referenced in the end of one of his novels. It is perhaps fitting to conclude with his borrowing of Ragnarök, the doom of the gods. The penultimate chapter of Edison's second novel, The Mistress of Mistresses, bears the title, and Thackeray then, or as he puts it, the wolf runs, borrowing the refrain from his spell in the Poetic Edda, referring to the lupine son of the trickster god Loki.
In stories Prose Edda, it is told how Fenrir is bound by the gods in a vain attempt to prevent their destruction and the wolf's role in it, which includes the slaying of Odin, the leader of the gods, then we are only agrees to be bound if the god tier, shown here agrees to put his hand in the wolf's mouth as a pledge, so that if Fenrir is unable to loose himself from the final magical bond put on him by the gods or the Icier under the saint of testing his strength,
he will bite off tears hand, which is what happens. The refrain and fleck in your hand is the latter portion in the latter portion of the Volo style tells of the terrifying liberation of Fenrir and the end of most of the Norse gods.
Eddison uses this for the ending of his novel, with court intrigues in the MVA, a nearby realm to the realm of the demons, part of a wider cultural draw to the Norse apocalypse in the early and mid 20th century, which is something that I thought looked at in my thesis as a historical trend. Like others, Edison used more or less apparent borrowings from North Smith and sagas to help develop his invented worlds, but did so in a way that synthesised a variety of influences.
So I just wanted to end by showing you a lovely, um, hand-drawn genealogy from the bubbly and where he, um, this is from an unpublished saga that's in the Bodleian, and he made a hand-drawn tree and, um, yes, a family tree. Thank you all for listening.