Okay, now, I know you’re going to laugh at me here. However, I suppose you deserve to know the whole story of this book. After all, I told you about the whole ‘Adonis’ thing.
Well, the thing is, the first version of the book included about two pages of poetry from WYRN THE KING. I think every prose writer goes through a stage where we think, for some reason, that we have a talent for poetry. It’s doubly bad in fantasy, where we’ve all read Tolkien, and fell like adding poems, songs, and the like to our stories.
The thing is, most of us aren’t very good at it. WYRN THE KING was a narrative alliterative poem patterned after BEOWULF, and it was TERRIBLE. I might be masochistic enough to post it in the ‘deleted scenes’ section of the website. I’m honestly not sure yet. (Actually, I wrote the poem as a college assignment. I wiggled out of doing something research-oriented by somehow convincing my teacher that I deserved to do a creative project instead. When I finished, I felt a little bit obliged to stick it in my current book, as I’d told my teacher I would. Sorry, Dr. Thursby, but. . .uh. . .it didn’t make the final cut.)
Anyway, there was a point behind sticking the poem in the text, even if I completely overshadowed it by including so many lines of poetry. This section is really all we get in the book itself about Fjorden’s past. As I’ve explained in the annotations, Fjorden switched to Shu-Dereth to do its conquering, relying on religion rather than armies. When they did so, they went back and rewrote many of their great classics. (Orwell would be proud of them.)
This is actually based on some events in our world. Some scholars think that BEOWULF underwent similar revision, the monks who copied and translated it adding Christian symbolism to the text. After all, no great artist could possibly have been a true pagan. Everyone knows that Aristotle was a Christian—and he died before Christ was even born!
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