I started the novel in August and completed it a few days before Christmas. My first fantasy novel, and the first of a trilogy. As a player of Dungeons & Dragons from the time I was ten years old, a year after the game was invented, I have always loved building worlds filled with magic, sorcery and dragons; and I have so enjoyed building the world of WistThistle that I’m even looking forward to editing the book, to adding the small details that occurred to me while writing the last paragraphs. I’ve already edited the first chapter, which means I could technically submit the novel to agents this evening.
The novel and main character are a little different than I first imagined them, but the spirit remains the same.
“Hwat! The tale of warriors, heroes, noble houses or great Sagelords is not what I come to tell.” So begins the tale of the Wayfarer Ta’Ehto, also called Ohéto—which is the name of the gray catkins that grow on the Wistthistle, meaning greycoat or mouse. In the dragon tongue she is called Findahl, which also means greycoat. While the War of the Isles is told in noble gatherings, portrayed in hall-length tapestries and elaborately sung by court poets, the tale told here is the tale of a woman beloved by the common folk. For her no tapestries are woven and for her no court poets sing. She had no gift for magic, lacked the warrior’s strength, and was not descended from the nobility, but girls dress in her likeness and her tale is preserved in the workaday poetry of Hæthrymic storytelling. I have tried to capture the lovely rhythms of the Hæthrymic language with a more fairytale-like English. And the dragon’s tongue—what can be said of it? One cannot truly translate the dragon’s tongue. The tongue has no nouns or adjectives, but is only verbs, for the dragon perceives the world, not as it is, but as a world of endless becoming.
My heroine, Ehto, is loosely an Inuit heroine with a gift for listening, languages, and kindness. She wants nothing to do with the war raging through the Isles, and doesn’t understand the forces arrayed. She only wants to wander the isles like the Japanese poet Basho—going from one utamakura to the next. She’s small in stature, hides and runs away when she can, yet doesn’t know her own power when she protects those she loves. She directly and indirectly causes the destruction and dissolution of the most powerful force in the Isles—the great wizards called the Sages of Halder. She learns the language of the dragons, hundreds of years after the last Sage spoke their tongue, and it is the dragons who give her the name by which she’s known—Findahl (greycoat or mouse in the dragon tongue). She is Findahl, the first druid in hundreds of years; and doesn’t herself know what it means to be a druid. Those who fear her the most look in all the wrong places. No one thinks that a woman, let alone a young woman, from the snowbound tribes of the North Crescent could be the most feared adversary of land and sea.
There were those in the village who had hidden when they heard the dragon speak. They had understood nothing else, but understood the name Findahl. Findahl was a man. Findahl was a young woman. Findahl was a sorcerer who might take the shape of a girl so small that she could walk unsuspected through town and city. Findahl spoke the tongue of every isle. Findahl could speak with dragons. Yet no person could speak the language of every isle and so it was thought that Findahl was both man and woman—being many people. Ehto, seated among the villagers, would ask if any had seen Findahl, and the traders would answer that none had seen the witch, sage, or sorcerer, and yet they boasted that if they ever saw Findahl, they would know him.
This from the closing paragraphs of the book.
I hope to have the first book of The Isles of Erþe fully edited by the first of January. I wrote the final page of my second novel on the first of January last year. Once I’m finished editing, adding the little details that add to Ehto’s world, I’ll devote January to writing some of the poetry I’ve wished to write. Then in February I’ll be begin to the second book of the trilogy. The current length of the book is 85,000 words, short for a fantasy novel, but just the length I was aiming for. I hope to finish the next two books in the coming year.
up in Vermont | December 19th 2023
PoemShape 