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But at least it's a relief to hear of a master-race that isn't blond
I am curious now to read Evangeline Walton's Witch House (1945), because She Walks in Darkness (2013) was my first encounter with her non-Mabinogion fiction and I cannot tell if it is representative or not. It's a slim thriller, very definitely a Gothic—I don't imagine there's any genealogical connection, but I was reminded of Mary Stewart's My Brother Michael (1959) with its murky secrets and echoes of wartime, ghostly ruins and rumors of lost treasure, and vengeance. Everything is charged, threatening. The supernatural might erupt at any moment, like the dead from their broken tombs or Mania from her underworld. It's a historical novel only by virtue of having been written in the 1960's and set in 1950. (The work the narrator's new husband is doing at the Villa Carenni was "begun five years ago, just after World War II ended.") There are weird political undercurrents—I am not sure what to make of the anti-Communism, except that I thought at first it was meant to tell us something about the narrator and then I had to conclude it was telling me something about the author. I am not sure what to make of her handling of the Etruscans, either, except that it's both the strength of the novel and its strangest element.
Walton's Etruscans are an exotic, cruel, elegant people, exquisitely decadent as Melnibonéans: "I'd say their tastes were rather birdlke. They ate insects dissolved in honey, and did everything to music—from kneading the dough for their bread to flogging their slaves . . . a typical late Etruscan tomb, built when the Rasenna's power was fading and their once blissful belief in an afterlife had turned into a nightmare, perhaps because they thought their gods were punishing them for some known crime . . . The early Rasenna went dancing into battle. No race ever had a more fiery lust for life, but by teaching them to expect bliss after death, their priest-kings made them fearless warriors. Later, in their decline, when they had lost hope and desired only to drowse pleasantly toward death, then priests who were no longer kings had to make death terrible." Their art is full of pitiless beauty and fantastic horror, their tortures as perpetuated by their ancestry-proud Italian descendants ingenious. The life and the loveliness and the humanity of their work comes late in the book and almost as a surprise: "There was nothing evil: all must have dated back to the days when the Twelve Cities of the Rasenna were still young and happy." Admittedly, we may not be meant to accept this characterization uncritically; much of it is attributed to a character who reveres the Etruscans as the survivors of destroyed Atlantis, holding themselves apart as masters and bestowers of civilization until their own curdling delicacy and the barbarism of their neighbors dragged them down. Then again, as the last of a fearsomely learned, closely bred, domineering aristocratic family with roots in Volterra since it was Velathri, Prince Mino Carenni is our representative of the Etruscans in the present day, recapitulating in himself the splendor and decay of his ancestors: "Prince Mino was a great scholar, but a little mad. The Carenni family was just a little too old, I think . . ."
(Paul di Filippo in his foreword imagines the character played by Vincent Price, but I saw Peter Cushing at once: "A gray-haired man sat at a folding table on which was an oil lamp strong enough to give his work full light. He was writing, his fine aquiline face set in lines of concentration. The beautiful fabric of his pinstripe gray suit looked as if he had just dressed to welcome an honored guest in his elegant drawing room," later "a tall lean man with white hair and piercing black eyes. His profile, stern and finely chiseled, might have been cut out of an ancient frieze; it had none of the softness of living flesh." Courteous, inflexible, a gracious and dispassionate host with a "cold, cultured voice," the prince comes alive when he speaks with dreadful certainty of his heritage and what it both confers on him and compels him to do. "The face of that last high priest who buried himself with his threatened temple and its treasures never can have looked more dedicated, more terrible, in its all-sacrificing exaltation." I've seen that icy fanaticism on Cushing; it looks good on him. I disagree also with di Filippo that Jack Nicholson would have been good casting for the dark, dazzling Floriano, who might be a Gothic hero and might not, but I'm not sure who I'd choose. Louis Jourdan feels too obvious, also it might be nice to have someone actually Italian in the movie. Maybe someone who worked with Pasolini.)
It's a very Roman portrayal, cut with mid-century fantasy (the Atlantean stuff, shading into full New Age), and I cannot tell how much Walton felt it to be true of her "Mysterious Etruscans" and how much it just served the atmosphere she wanted to build of ancient dread and crumbling aristocracy and things of such awful purity, they are best left to their gods and not even the most worshipful or well-intentioned attempts of humanity. The effect on me was a weird kind of double vision: I recognized the style and in some cases the specifics of the artifacts she writes about, cinerary urns with portrait faces, paintings of red and white dancers as in the Tomb of the Lionesses, Tuchulcha with fistfuls of snakes and the mirror-motif of winged Eos (Thesan) carrying off Kephalos (or Tithonos: Tinthun), but I found her Etruscans themselves more recognizable as refugees from a high fantastic Atlantis—Valyria, Númenor. I suppose that's the sort of thing that happens when the Romans keep talking about your religion (when they're not impugning your morals) while your own language survives mostly in loanwords, inscriptions, and twelve hundred words of partly translated linen, but still.
I am trying to think now of other treatments of the Etruscans in fiction, speculative or not. Irritatingly, the first example that's coming to mind is Mary Gentle's alt-historical Ilario: The Lion's Eye (2006), where they basically replace Jews ("I would have known that next time there were rumours of Etruscans poisoning wells, or Etruscan merchants cheating their Christian customers, or the city fathers needing a scapegoat and the Inquisition needing bodies for burning—" Speaking of Jewish erasure). The protagonist in Ursula K. Le Guin's Lavinia (2008), speaking with the future shade of Vergil, associates his ethnicity with his skills as a poet, vates: "I knew that word of course: foreteller, soothsayer. It went with his being part Etruscan . . ." I gave an unwanted gift of divination along with an Etruscan name to a character in a short story of mine because it was the last thing he needed. I bounced off Mika Waltari's The Etruscan (1956) in high school. And there's Orcus' moon Vanth, but for purposes of literature I am not sure that counts.
That can't be it. Recommendations?
Walton's Etruscans are an exotic, cruel, elegant people, exquisitely decadent as Melnibonéans: "I'd say their tastes were rather birdlke. They ate insects dissolved in honey, and did everything to music—from kneading the dough for their bread to flogging their slaves . . . a typical late Etruscan tomb, built when the Rasenna's power was fading and their once blissful belief in an afterlife had turned into a nightmare, perhaps because they thought their gods were punishing them for some known crime . . . The early Rasenna went dancing into battle. No race ever had a more fiery lust for life, but by teaching them to expect bliss after death, their priest-kings made them fearless warriors. Later, in their decline, when they had lost hope and desired only to drowse pleasantly toward death, then priests who were no longer kings had to make death terrible." Their art is full of pitiless beauty and fantastic horror, their tortures as perpetuated by their ancestry-proud Italian descendants ingenious. The life and the loveliness and the humanity of their work comes late in the book and almost as a surprise: "There was nothing evil: all must have dated back to the days when the Twelve Cities of the Rasenna were still young and happy." Admittedly, we may not be meant to accept this characterization uncritically; much of it is attributed to a character who reveres the Etruscans as the survivors of destroyed Atlantis, holding themselves apart as masters and bestowers of civilization until their own curdling delicacy and the barbarism of their neighbors dragged them down. Then again, as the last of a fearsomely learned, closely bred, domineering aristocratic family with roots in Volterra since it was Velathri, Prince Mino Carenni is our representative of the Etruscans in the present day, recapitulating in himself the splendor and decay of his ancestors: "Prince Mino was a great scholar, but a little mad. The Carenni family was just a little too old, I think . . ."
(Paul di Filippo in his foreword imagines the character played by Vincent Price, but I saw Peter Cushing at once: "A gray-haired man sat at a folding table on which was an oil lamp strong enough to give his work full light. He was writing, his fine aquiline face set in lines of concentration. The beautiful fabric of his pinstripe gray suit looked as if he had just dressed to welcome an honored guest in his elegant drawing room," later "a tall lean man with white hair and piercing black eyes. His profile, stern and finely chiseled, might have been cut out of an ancient frieze; it had none of the softness of living flesh." Courteous, inflexible, a gracious and dispassionate host with a "cold, cultured voice," the prince comes alive when he speaks with dreadful certainty of his heritage and what it both confers on him and compels him to do. "The face of that last high priest who buried himself with his threatened temple and its treasures never can have looked more dedicated, more terrible, in its all-sacrificing exaltation." I've seen that icy fanaticism on Cushing; it looks good on him. I disagree also with di Filippo that Jack Nicholson would have been good casting for the dark, dazzling Floriano, who might be a Gothic hero and might not, but I'm not sure who I'd choose. Louis Jourdan feels too obvious, also it might be nice to have someone actually Italian in the movie. Maybe someone who worked with Pasolini.)
It's a very Roman portrayal, cut with mid-century fantasy (the Atlantean stuff, shading into full New Age), and I cannot tell how much Walton felt it to be true of her "Mysterious Etruscans" and how much it just served the atmosphere she wanted to build of ancient dread and crumbling aristocracy and things of such awful purity, they are best left to their gods and not even the most worshipful or well-intentioned attempts of humanity. The effect on me was a weird kind of double vision: I recognized the style and in some cases the specifics of the artifacts she writes about, cinerary urns with portrait faces, paintings of red and white dancers as in the Tomb of the Lionesses, Tuchulcha with fistfuls of snakes and the mirror-motif of winged Eos (Thesan) carrying off Kephalos (or Tithonos: Tinthun), but I found her Etruscans themselves more recognizable as refugees from a high fantastic Atlantis—Valyria, Númenor. I suppose that's the sort of thing that happens when the Romans keep talking about your religion (when they're not impugning your morals) while your own language survives mostly in loanwords, inscriptions, and twelve hundred words of partly translated linen, but still.
I am trying to think now of other treatments of the Etruscans in fiction, speculative or not. Irritatingly, the first example that's coming to mind is Mary Gentle's alt-historical Ilario: The Lion's Eye (2006), where they basically replace Jews ("I would have known that next time there were rumours of Etruscans poisoning wells, or Etruscan merchants cheating their Christian customers, or the city fathers needing a scapegoat and the Inquisition needing bodies for burning—" Speaking of Jewish erasure). The protagonist in Ursula K. Le Guin's Lavinia (2008), speaking with the future shade of Vergil, associates his ethnicity with his skills as a poet, vates: "I knew that word of course: foreteller, soothsayer. It went with his being part Etruscan . . ." I gave an unwanted gift of divination along with an Etruscan name to a character in a short story of mine because it was the last thing he needed. I bounced off Mika Waltari's The Etruscan (1956) in high school. And there's Orcus' moon Vanth, but for purposes of literature I am not sure that counts.
That can't be it. Recommendations?
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I remember that! I'm still looking forward to it. Has it gotten to the stage where it can be sent anywhere, or is it still in the writing?
they tended to be full of some blinkers-on gender assumptions that made a lot of the conclusions questionable (as well as short on basic day-in-the-life details, because household and social stuff is girl stuff).
He mentioned this yesterday. It did not sound helpful at all.
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Hah. Thank you! I still want to finish the novella that follows on it someday.
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I think you will still get a kick out of it. It has a terrific underworld.
(I can't believe Tanith Lee never wrote anything with an Etruscan theme, but I don't remember it and I can't find any hints that I just missed the story. Egypt, Assyria, Carthage, Persia, all present and accounted for; medieval Jewish mysticism, we got that right here; pre-Roman Italy, zilch. Considering how much she likes the ancient, the chthonic, and the evocative, I am actually surprised.)
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Haninuh and his daughter Ruquel, The Book of the Beast (1988). They're as exoticized as anyone else in her alternate Paris, but I listed them over at
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I might try it just to see how it compares to the Mary Renault model. I should also read Thomas Burnett Swann, whom I know almost strictly by reputation; I have the vague sense that I might have read some of his short fiction, but I know none of his novels. They're outright fantasies of the ancient world.
(Oh! Dorothy J. Heydt's Cynthia short stories! Which I hope are still in a box somewhere in my parents' basement with the rest of the Sword and Sorceress anthologies, not thrown out, because it took me years to collect all of those! I waited for the collection. I still don't know why there isn't one.)
I do still like her Mabinogion novels, but it's possible her layers of random mysticism bother me less with ancient Welsh people because I haven't studied their culture, so I notice less when she's being nonsensical.
I enjoyed the novel very much! It's a slight story for its pace and information, and I wouldn't give it to anyone as a primer on the actual civilizations of seventh-century Italy, but I didn't want to throw it across the room for failed ethnography. I've known for years that The Mask of Apollo (1966) is a terrible guide to the day-to-day workings of a fourth-century Athenian theater company as we now understand them, but it's still my favorite novel by Mary Renault; Robert Holdstock's Lavondyss (1988) is a Neolithic fantasia, but it's a terrifying, compelling, and immanent one. Within limits, I can filter for a lot of that sort of thing. I just like noticing the things under the surface of the book I'm reading, if I can pick up on them, and I remain curious what the alternatives in this case are.
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I think I read one of the Cynthia stories? If I'm remembering the right thing, then I quite liked it. I did use to read the Sword & Sorceress anthologies, though I never collected the full set.
Okay, I'm glad it was an enjoyable read. I like Etruscans (from what little I know of them), and I like Numenoreans, but there are so many ways that combining things can go wrong. (And the next thing you know you've got monkey-ponies.) I'm glad that wasn't the case here.
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"What's with all the screaming?"
She Walks in Darkness is not monkey-ponies. I don't know if it's the most amazing novel that could ever have been written with its components, but it's worth picking up and seeing what you think of it. The atmosphere is very good, whatever you think of the archaeology. Its katabasis is controlled and terrifying and it has a haunting sense of deep time and places.
[edited for definite article]
ETA:
...exquisitely decadent as Melnibonéans...
Great line, this.
...Mary Gentle's alt-historical Ilario: The Lion's Eye (2006), where they basically replace Jews...
Good grief, that's unpleasant.
It's always good to be reminded of "The Mirror of Venus." Excellent story, and if you ever find yourself writing more in that 'verse I'd love to see it.
*It occurs to me that I should look into what, if anything, Francophone popular literature has produced in that vein. Irish-language literature seems sadly lacking in the straight-ahead fantastic, although there is some horror, a lot of thrillers and detective novels, and a fair number of historicals set in the 18th century and onward. If I were able I'd write us a corrective to the Lord Madog the Space Celt type of thing--it'd need translated to English to have any impact on the audience most needing it, but it would be more satisfying in Irish.
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I don't think Walton represents them as evil: they aren't dark elves or anything. They are the kind of baroquely dying culture that exists in heroic fantasy and far-future science fiction (which looks a lot like the former), living at the elaborate extremes of a way of life that has outlived itself. And so in the way of chthonic things—turning up wherever the earth is too deeply broken, their dead honeycombed beneath the cities of our modern age—they have never quite gone away. The Roman roads run in plain sight everywhere, but the Etruscans are the uneasy presence in the land. We're not quite talking The National Uncanny, partly because the trope of the elaborate, antique, decadent civilization doesn't apply to the national image of Native Americans so much as it might have if, say, Cahokia had still been around in the 1600's (the Aztecs are another story), but it did make me wonder what traits or circumstances cause a historical culture to be figured as haunting, unquiet, when others are simply the people your neighbors are descended from.
For an illustration of the kind of double vision I was talking about:
Funeral urns lined the walls and, by turning his head, he could see the sarcophagus built against the massive central pillar, beneath the glaring Gorgon's head. Here the master and mistress of some ancient household slept, their dependants around them. Their painted, life-sized effigies half-sat, half-reclined upon the sarcophagus, side by side. In the dim light, the two looked startlingly, almost threateningly alive, capable of rising to chastise an intruder.
What this sounds most like is the Sarcophagus of the Spouses, who don't look threatening at all: almond-eyed, braided, smiling. But to the narrator—the writer, the reader—they're something that could come out of the ancient dark through which move strange and violent figures, eerily present for all they're long gone. Do the ancient Egyptians get this kind of dead watchfulness? This is almost Andre Norton.
Good grief, that's unpleasant.
It's a bit weird. Ash: A Secret History (2000) has no Jewish characters onstage that I remember, but they exist quite plainly in the fifteenth century of the novel: the wife of one of the protagonists was Jewish and the legend of the Golem and the Rabbi of Prague is central to the alternate history. I can't remember even a drive-by mention of Jews in Ilario, which is especially peculiar considering that the two novels are set about a generation apart. And there's that passage about the Etruscans and then everything else we see of the one family with whom the protagonist gets themselves entangled and while I don't think it registered much the first time, it's weirder every time I return to it. It's not my major complaint about the book, though. Ilario has bigger problems.
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You're right; I appreciate the disclaimer at the bottom, but by that point my head had already started to explode.
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Could be worse. Could be D.H. Lawrence.