Miscellany and Iambic Doggerel

So it has been a year since James Maliszewski's last post at Grognardia and the OSR is still a thing. Still no Dwimmermount, though. I read a lot of forgettable nonsense at Grognardia over the years but he was nothing if not consistent. In the interim I've largely stopped reading all the blogs as they generally shit me to tears*. Zak has perceptive things to say, of course, and I love Scrap and Patrick dearly for burrowing fearlessly into the living heart of the mystery. There is also a small knot of crazies including Logan and Arnold and Jack Mack and the gloomtrain kid and Pearce Shea that will be important in years to come. There is a trigger-happy quality to some of the newer stuff (esp. Logan's body-horror stuff) that makes me think the most influential texts of the OSR might just be Carcosa and LotFP. I am guilty in this regard also, I think Weird means surreal juxtapositions with no concern for politeness.  Original Weird was somewhat inspired by the erosion of the prevailing paradigm by the discoveries of deep time and space and the deep subconscious (makes me think the genre should be called Deep).

So, yeah, flirting with taboos - there is potential artistic material to be mined from a setting in which the awful prejudices of historical people are represented and exaggerated**. I'm particularly fond of dystopian nastiness and have a peculiar distaste for Flintstones settings where contemporary values prevail and whatever handwavium the setting runs on is responsible for the production of a contemporary standard of living.
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So I sicken of the way I've been writing my setting material and yearn for an easier way. I therefore attempted to exorcise the mawkish verbosity and faux gravitas that infects everything I write by writing a dungeon in blank verse. This didn't work. I've never actually written any subterranean stuff for the setting since I made peremptory stabs several years ago. In my mind, the underground is the Middenmurk proper and needs to be magnificently weird and horrible and possessed of a Northern Renaissance quality of flamboyant chimerical madness tempered with claustrophobia and disassociative feelings and it's too much and I daren't venture in. Patrick's Veins of the Earth setting captures the level of weird difference-from-the-expected I want to achieve while being, of course, different in its specifics.

Miltonian similes represent dangerous tangents to the inexperienced pentametrist. You are going off in one direction when you take the opportunity to describe something by saying what it's like then you plunge merrily into that comparison. Sometimes you forget where you are and start up another simile inside the simile, which is fucked. Aside from that I've clumsily allowed the structure to dictate the flow and struggled to not use single syllable words at the start of lines because the initial iamb demands an unstressed syllable and polysyllabic words in English tend to stress the initial syllable unless it is a prefix in which case it isn't stressed most of the time but sometimes is. I haven't actually written anything deliberately iambic before but have carried around bits of Paradise Lost in my head for decades so should have done better. Blame Patrick for the impetus. I'll do Anglo-Saxon alliterative couplets next.



The Sump of Gremory

And lo! Of how in ancient North did stand
Beneath a tinker-beaten pewter sky
The fellest manse of man's untimely fall
I here will tell to those who hearken near
On moor where malice makes her lonely home
Abandoned to the centuries and rot
A piled keep of dismal disregard
Umbrageous and repugnant borehole fane
Looms dark in dread defiance of His law
Above a shaft of seven hundred feet
That into deeply dolven dark did pierce
From which do noxious vapours issue forth
That carry the asphaltick reek of pitch
As like the odious breath of titan worm
That in its fretful slumber is disturbed
By dreams of plund'rous interlopers bold
Descending they the longest ladders down
Into those shadow-haunted Upper Hells
Where black in gilded gulches wallow foul
Th'accursed Elder Dragon's fearsome brood
That gloat and dream their phantasies of greed
And stoke in furnace-bellies the fires of hate
That when the oldest prophecies bear fruit
Shall all the waking world to cinders burn

So thither then do trudge the lowly few
Such bastard sons of those ignoble knights
Whose harness goes to rust in dusty vaults
Who quail to face the paynim's crooked sword
Such bastard daughters fled from whoredom's yoke
Who'd fain stick poniard into noble loins
And brave the heartless northern demon night
As bear the weight of drunken tyrant lust
To bear more bastards destined for the chain
Of servitude and labour until death
To fill the coffers of unworthy kings
These few and dastard folk in hardihood
In dire desperation snared and bound
Whose legacy unjust abandonment
From ruinous Empire is - Untimely flung
Unto the world's daemoniacal maw
Where hopelessness might hide the final hope
That from the Clootie-Man might gold be won
And wrastled from his avaricious grasp
Might all the hundred grails sacred be
That touched the lips of all the hundred Christs
And all the sacred pikes that speared them dead
And verdigris-encrusted crowns of kings
Who long have lain beneath the patient sod
Since giants overthrew their vaunting pride
Who rode against the titans of the dawn
And made the skies resound with heedless war

They gird their dauntless loins these feckless brave
They take up pitted hunting-knife and adze
And don their pilfered siege-caps 'gainst the stones
That faceless fiends who haunt the lonely ways
Oft hurl to dash out such unwary brains
As might not think to watch o'erhanging crags
They trudge the northward furrows gone to weed
And ravens follow them who kestrels are
Who bear a taloned will inside their breasts
And though in tattered fustian and hide
Do bear themselves like lion-mantled braves
That in archaic epochs did contend
With gorgon-whelps and fearsome anvil-kine
And vanquished with the thighbone of an ox
Entire armies clad in brazen scales
The slaughter-hungry fierce onrushing hordes
Like waves against unyielding rocks did crash
To dash themselves to ruin 'gainst such strength
As only in the dreams of man survives

To Empire's tattered brink they northward go
To hamlets made of wicker and of dung
And memories of the words of ancient law
That undefeated legions did enforce
And banners bright declaim and harpers sing
So tender were the rituals then and fierce
The shepherds of all souls to souls' reward
Did then enact that now all men forget
They caught the piercing beauty of the sun
To weave such webs of words that praised a truth
That held imperial majesty most high
And banished into darkness heathen things
But all are lost in echoes and the night
That follows after zenith - Now in dank
And furtive squalor do these pilgrims preach
Another revelation to the low
That nevermore would armies of the south
Give succor to those dwellers of the pale
Instead a slow retreat from northern climes
Would leave them lying naked in the storm
Had not a hundred omens come that told
Of doom unleashed from yonder darkest throne
Of prodigies that walk beneath the sky
That never should have woken in their tombs
Crops lost to blight and hexing-hags at play
And bargains made at crossroads with the damned
And only bitter will and sinew strong
And iron sharp and brightly burning brand
Borne into chasms 'gainst the hateful dead
Might win the precious plunder- Gleaming gold
And talismans of heathen sorcery
The keys to mighty kingdoms yet unfounded
Sequestered in the labyrinthine dark
Await the time their secrets are revealed

Then go they forth across the dismal fells
Through shattered principalities of stone
And tumbled wrack of bastion and fort
And harrowed by the desolation vast
Do stumble on through numbest grey fatigue
Arriving at the last to dreary ruin
Where yawns the portal odious and dark
That seven hundred thousand souls consumed
Who swindled to their deaths by charlatan lies
Must swell the ranks of legions of the damned
And count the gold and centuries of dark
In endless thraldom to His endless reign

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*But not your blog, the other blogs.

**Why not have pseudo-historical settings with derogatory racial caricatures and slavery and noxious gender politics? The prevailing orthodoxy that equates artistic investigation of problematic issues as problematic in itself deserves to be ignored and/or ridiculed.

Two posts in a week? I've cut down on coffee so am less insanely anxious and depressed and slightly more productive.

To both of the people who read this far, thank you kindly, it means a lot to me.