H. Warner Munn (1903–1981)

This is a reprint of two much earlier stories by the author, 'King of the World's Edge' and 'The Ship from Atlantis', collected into one volume. As this reprint is dated after "Merlin's Ring" by the same author, I began reading "Merlin's Ring" first, then realised it was a sequel so stopped reading that in favour of reading this book first - unfortunately the early section of the sequel contains massive spoilers for the second story in the present volume.

Most of the present book is taken up by the story of Ventidius Varro, a soldier in the army of Roman Britain who witnessed the gradual withdrawal of the legions back to Rome. He tells, forty years after the event, of how he had fought in the war against the Saxon invasions, following Arthur of legendary fame. When Arthur was fatally wounded, Myrdhinn (the Welsh name for Merlin) arranged for his body to be entombed in a safe place until he would revive some time in the far future to lead the defence of the British. Ventidius, Myrdhinn, and various others from Arthur's army embarked on a ship and sailed to a land they believe to be a haven: the New World/North America.

Initially meeting friendly people on an island, they are attacked by hostile fishmen on the mainland who kill some of their number and carry off a Saxon who had become part of the crew. That character later returns to cause some havoc. The ship is sunk soon after and many of the crew drown, and the survivors, Ventidius and some of his fellow soldiers, are taken captive by local native Americans. Gradually they learn that these people are oppressed themselves, and Ventidius and Myrrhdin form friendships which will stand them in good stead later on. They are drawn into the conflicts between various tribal groups.

The bulk of the story is a version of the early history of the Americas, including the Mayans who are called Maians and portrayed as very bloodthirsty and oppressive, a somewhat different take on them than I've heard before, and the people who later become the Aztecs who seem more deserving of that reputation. There is a lot of fighting and both Ventidius and Myrrhdin are later viewed as gods. This story has a brief 'frame' which tops and tails it and in which it is explained that this is the first person account of a Roman, uncovered following a storm at Key West and translated by a scholar. Rather incredibly, it was meant to have been delivered by the son of Ventidius, Merlin's godson, to the emperor of Rome in the belief that the Romans require a safe haven to retreat from the barbarians besetting what is left of the empire. I found it hard to believe that the emperor would be expected to read a long novel just to be given that message!

The second story in the book is about Ventidius' son, Gwalchmai, who goes to deliver the message ('The King of the World's Edge') but soon loses it. He is becalmed and, desperate for moisture, drinks a potion of Merlin's (Merlin is only called Myrrdhin in the first story) which he realises later is the substance that his godfather had doled out in occasional drops to prolong his own life. By drinking the potion in one go, Gwalchmai becomes not only long lived but also has great powers of recuperation.

He comes across a strange swan shaped metal vessel, becalmed like his own, which is far in advance of current technology, and turns out to be a survivor of Atlantis. Aboard is a metal statue of a young woman, inhabited by the transferred spirit of Corenice, a young Atlantean woman who had died after the loss of Atlantis, and the two eventually fall in love. But after they help a community who are being attacked by a decadent remnant of Atlantean civilisation, disaster befalls them. I found this second segment a bit boring in places and there were too many farfetched things to have to suspend disbelief about, not least that the Atlanteans were below sealevel and preserved by a forcefield but had nevertheless learned enough of what was going on in the outside world to have been able to send fighting men to the conflicts in the first story. Corenice also has the ability to send her consciousness into other living things and she teaches Gwalchmai how to do this, a skill which becomes crucially useful in the follow up volume.

Despite all the stories about battles, this book is a bit more lively than the sequel as the main part of it is told in first person. The author has a tendency to headhop and act as an omniscient narrator when writing in the third person, which is shown in 'The Ship from Atlantis' and the sequel. So I am awarding it a 3 star rating overall.… (meer)

I started the present volume in the belief that it came before "Merlin's Godson" because the copyright date of this was 1974 and the latter was published in 1976. It soon transpired that this was a sequel and, on investigation, "Merlin's Godson" was a compilation of two earlier stories in the series. Presumably it was reprinted to make those available again as they had been published around the 1940s or so. So I put this aside to read that one first, though it was unfortunate that the first part of this is a big spoiler for the events of 'The Ship from Atlantis' which forms part two of "Merlin's Godson".

Although this sequel was written in the 1970s, the author's old school style is preserved including the unfortunate tendency to constantly head-hop and comment on things that the characters themselves do not know, especially as the action of this story occurs over several centuries. I found the style very "dry" and wasn't sure I would finish it, but I finally did.

The story follows on from 'The Ship from Atlantis". Gwalcmai, son of the ex-Roman legionnaire who became 'king' in the pre-Columbian New World, and the local woman he married, has been trapped in a glacier for about two centuries. During that time his love, Corenice, the Atlantean woman who has the knack of sending her spirit into other living things, has been hanging around as various creatures hoping that a human being would arrive just in time to prevent him being lost as the glacier melts and bits drop off into the sea. She manages to possess a Viking girl Thyra, so the girl's father and rather unpleasant betrothed, plus the much nicer Irish slave, do come to his rescue, and they live for a while with a pacifist community nearby, but soon the psychopathic betrothed is plotting to do away with the other men to possess Thyra himself.

Eventually, Gwalchmai, Thyra/Corenice and the slave who loves Thyra set out on Gwalchmai's long-interrupted mission to Rome (in 'The Ship from Atlantis' he set off to bring word of the Americas to the Emperor of Rome and offer the New World as a refuge for the people of Rome, beset by the barbarians), but it is soon interrupted when he receives a communication from the ring he wears, which is an heirloom from his godfather, Merlin. This tells him to go off to a spae-wife (someone who sees visions) and he will be told what to do. And so commences the long winded and torturous journey, performing one quest after another and sometimes spending a century or two in suspended animation while Corenice has to inhabit other bodies and hang around. Various supernatural beings are encountered along the way including fairies, the god Thor, Corenice's sea-goddess, and a dark and hostile being which was mentioned in the earlier volume as having descended from another planet.

Everything bar the kitchen sink is thrown in, including the court of the Mongol Khan, medieval Japan (and why should being knocked on the head cause Gwalchmai to lose a whole lifetime with the reincarnated Corenice?), King Arthur (where I found it hard to believe that Merlin had created an elaborate mausoleum complete with magical paintings in the time that Arthur's followers were hanging around at the bottom of the hill in 'The King of the World's Edge', part one of "Merlin's Godson") and Joan of Arc. It transpires that Gwalchmai and Corenice, while she inhabited a body with no spirit of its own, had a son who was born after Gwalchmai went off on his ill conceived journey to Rome, and they are therefore the ancestors of Joan.

One jarring note occurred a couple of times where Gwalchmai has the urge to use violence to put Corenice in her place. As I wasn't able to write this review until some days after finishing the book and the details have blurred, I can only recall the first incident: Corenice is playing along with a woman they meet who sympathises with her for her husband's lack of consideration for her pregnancy. Gwalchmail wants to hit Corenice and is actually looking around for a willow to cut a switch. Considering that he supposedly has a centuries-long devotion to her this was hard to fathom.

The book drags in places. The best feature is the cover: the flying swan ships of Atlantis do make a cameo appearance in an unexplained time travel sequence. Although it was clear in 'The Ship from Atlantis' that these vessels are of a gold coloured metal, the image of a fire-breathing mute swan is striking. For this and the occasional historical interest I am awarding this volume 2 stars.… (meer)

King of the World’s Edge by H. Warner Munn is truly a pulp era story, first serialized in Weird Tales in September of 1939. A bold tale with massive scope, this is an alternative history of both the Americas and the last remnants of Romano-Britain that works in myth and legend from two continents. It holds up pretty well eighty-two years later.

I picked this book up because of a blog post by Paul Lucas. Lucas wrote up a compelling review of Munn’s book, so when I saw the collected paperback version with King of the World’s Edge and The Ship From Atlantis titled Merlin’s Godson at a used bookstore, I picked it up immediately.

The King of the World’s Edge hits a lot of my interests: alternative history, Arthurian legends, the archaeology and anthropology of pre-Columbian America. The opening of the book, as Lucas notes, is a succinct retelling of a modern take on King Arthur as the last of the Romano-Britons. I can easily imagine that this is one of the versions of the tale that Tim Powers had in mind when he wrote The Drawing of the Dark or Last Call, participating in that Great Conversation that makes the kind of adventure story I like more than merely disposable entertainment.

After Ventidius Varro, the last of Arthur’s centurions, and Myrdhinn, the mage of reknown, escape the ruin of Arthur’s doomed attempt to unite Britain, Munn’s story then borrows heavily from Bernal Diaz’ The Conquest of New Spain, especially the early Expedition of Francisco Hernandez de Córdoba that was the first contact between the peoples of the Yucatan and the Spanish. The sequence of events and locations in Munn’s book when the Romans approach the New World is nearly the same, except that Córdoba’s men weren’t run off by frog men.

By luck, I had been reading Diaz’ account at the same time as King of the World’s Edge, and was thus able to clearly see this narrative debt. While I prefer to read fiction over non-fiction for pleasure, I’ve found that adding in some relevant historical works leavens my appreciation of popular fiction like this considerably. Pulp fiction in my experience has a pretty thorough grounding in real events and real people, and I’ve often read something later that gave me an “Aha!” moment when a reference was unfamiliar.

For example, reading Ross Douthat’s NY Times editorial and followup Substack on the French & Indian War, and in particular his account on how the defeat of General Braddock at Fort William Henry and the subsequent massacre of the survivors by the native allies of the French general Montcalm was a key turning point in the war, and in history, I was struck by how Munn described war in his fictional pre-Columbian America in much the same way as it was waged in the sixteenth century. The behavior and motives of the combatants were much the same. Which is not implausible.

But a work like this is not just aiming for historic verisimilitude, but also at mythic resonance. I was particularly interested in Munn’s take on the legends of Aztlan, the northern home of the Aztecs, having seen Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven’s version of it in Burning Tower. I had wondered why Niven and Pournelle had included an Arthur-type character in that story. Maybe they were harkening back to King of the World’s Edge.

In Munn’s telling, the remarkable and horrifying civilization of the Aztecs was partly due to an inheritance from these voyagers. The war-like Varro gave them some of the Roman genius for war, and the wise and learned Myrdhinn gifted them arts, science, and less successfully, Christianity. Varro’s influence found better and more receptive soil in which to take root, and so warfare dominated the destiny of the Aztecs.

All of the other peoples that come into contact with Varro and Myrdhinn are also changed by the experience. From the formation of the Peoples of the Long House to the downfall of the mound builders of the Ohio river valley, Munn does a remarkable job keeping the story moving with all of this going on. The book covers many years, from the flight of the last Legions of Britain to the culmination of Varro and Myrdhinn’s coalition- and nation-building in a climatic battle.

Modern epic fantasy would tell this kind of story in several volumes each approaching a thousand pages. Munn does it in less than two hundred. Lots of details that are now common get skipped, but I admire the pacing that makes this possible. In a way, the story is all the grander for being so short. Contemporary books are longer because they just include more quotidian details, which are not particularly mythic.

There are another two books that Munn wrote over the decades of his long career in this world, I’m curious to see where he takes it from here.… (meer)