Designing the underworld

Where did the details of the underworld in Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright come from?

1.

The shrouded halls and mournful paths have had a rhetorical foothold in the poem since early work: I had an important breakthrough in writing initial parts of Book I when, on 16 December 2022, I realised that the narration and characters could believe that those who die in hyperspace go to a different underworld, set apart from the usual one.

Various things, some said in the poem, some baked into the stanza-form used throughout the underworld passages, allow readers to think that the underworld might not be wholly true, if they prefer.

2.

In basic concept, the underworld experienced by Kin-Bright and Qwerthart in books IX and X starts with Virgil's imagined underworld in the Aeneid. However, I dislike, and didn't particularly want to use, most of the mythology of statecraft that takes up the Virgilian underworld.

Much of the basic flavour, therefore, draws on the underworld of the Odyssey. Homer's Hades is a very tangible place, disconcertingly so to modern readers, I think; it's also at the edge of the world, which was what led me to the cliff idea (not in Homer!).

4.

Some of the fish in the sea under which the two queens walk make light; advanced technology connects that light and funnels it below to be the sunlight in the uplands of the underworld. This is partly because I needed them to experience the yuri aquarium without quite knowing that that was what was happening (my concern for tradition extends beyond canonical poetry…). It's also an allusion to Aura Battler Dunbine, in which the world has no moon(s), but great shoals of luminous fish sometimes swim in the sea above the sky at night, a detail I have loved ever since I watched the show.

5.

The stones in the bed of the river marking the beginning of the real underworld shine:

Its waters ran full free of muddy tint,
and in its bed a-glowing, stones gave glint
to eyesight daunt with sharp reflected light,
as fresh and clear as stars on frosty night.

This is a commonplace comparison in Middle English and Older Scots; I was thinking particularly of Pearl, in which

In the founce ther stoden stonez stepe,
As glente thurgh glas that glowed and glyght—
As stremande sternez, quen strothe-men slepe,
Staren in welkyn in wynter nyght.

(In the bottom there shone gleaming stones, that glowed and glistened like glint through glass—like stars streaming [with light!], when earthly people sleep, shine in the sky on a winter's night; 113–16.)

And also of William Dunbar's Golden Targe:

The bank was grene, the bruke was full of bremys,
The stanneris clere as stern in frosty nycht.

(35–6)

Both poems are dream-vision stories, so the allusion adds to the unreality of the passage. Pearl is also a vision of the afterlife, although in this case heaven as imagined by a later fourteenth-century Christian.

6.

At first, I imagined the queens would climb down the crag to reach a deeper but still horizontal layer of the underworld, a little like in Dante. Then it struck me that the 'shrouded halls' might themselves be carved into the cliff.

The sacrifice of a beast, and the eerie materiality of the dead, who can stand on solid rock and drink shed blood, I take from Homer. Elements of the sacrifice come from various places:

… Kin-Bright round the blood-trench wine out-poured;
at hand she gestured to the beast unscarred;
to friendly gods she becked, but fiends abhorred;
to powers that help her might, she swore reward;
then barley, milk, and honey-ants she strewed
about the pit, and so its use renewed.

Odysseus pours out a libation around his trench first of honey and milk mixed, then of wine, then water, and scatters barley (XI.27–8); I telescoped this down a bit, and because so much Taru food and environment and culture is more insectoid than ours, I guessed that honey-ants might be what they would use. (In various places around the world, people do eat honey-ants.)

7.

Stipulations against eating and drinking anything from the underworld sprang from a range of analogous classical stories. It was a short leap from these to the additional rule that the shroud covering each hall's entrance should not be moved by living hands.

Worm-Spine Hall has no shroud, which we can infer perhaps forms part of the punishment meted out to those held there. Various mythological imaginaries include an advanced and nastier part of an otherwise morally neutral underworld, where those who commit particular outrages and betrayals might wind up. The idea that this place might be a cave with the spines of worms (that is, dragons) on its ceiling came from Völuspá 38, 'Sá er undinn salr / orma hryggiom.'

The torments of Worm-Spine Hall I borrowed and compressed from the strange tableau of horror in fairy land in Sir Orfeo:

Than he gan bihold about al,
And seighe liggeand within the wal
Of folk that were thider y-brought
And thought dede, and nare nought.
Sum stode withouten hade,
And sum non armes nade,
And sum thurth the bodi hadde wounde,
And sum lay wode, y-bounde,
And sum armed on hors sete,
And sum astrangled as thai ete;
And sum were in water adreynt,
And sum with fire al forschreynt.
Wives ther lay on childe bedde,
Sum ded and sum awedde,
And wonder fele ther lay bisides
Right as thai slepe her undertides;
Eche was thus in this warld y-nome,
With fairi thider y-come.

(Auchinleck version, with some spelling modernisations.)

Some stood up straight and short, without a head;
and some bore through their bodies open wound;
and some lacked arms, and some lacked feet to tread;
and some with vermin hungry were cocooned;
and some lay simply out, as if they swooned;
and some in madness lay, in fastenings bound;
and some in fire stood fixed, and some there drowned.

8.

Leaving this lowest hall, they see a gigantic imprisoned figure far below in the mist, either at the base of the cliff, if base it has, or else 'down' from their perspective because of the curve of the space station.

A rumbling far-borne travellers' gaze down drew,
to something deep below, or else perhaps
so distant that the station's curve gan skew
their lateral sight. Announced by thunderclaps,
and garish shown by lightning, in a lapse
of cloaking mist, a gauntlet steel-grey rose,
its greatness such as mind-grip overthrows—

though Kin-Bright deemed each finger might the size
of god attain. Its wrist a mighty chain
enwrapped, and fast it held before their eyes,
although the plate-hand giant wrenched with strain
that striking rampart strong would flat as plane
the landscape leave. It heaved like one that wrack
full desperate seeks, till shackles hauled it back.

Mostly, this is meant to be strange. But I did take inspiration from the idea of the titans imprisoned in Tartarus. Hesiod's explanation for the origins of the word that eventually gave us present-day English titan involves effort/strain, thus 'wrenched with strain', and revenge, thus 'wrack'.

That origin in my head does not mean that this figure somehow is a titan: it is whatever you decide in your head when you read the passage. But that's what I was thinking of.