Elfquest Re-read, Captives of Blue Mountain: One Heart, One Mind

[swan_tower]

(This is part of my Elfquest re-read. There will be spoilers.)

It’s tempting to see Winnowill as an aberration, because in many ways she is. No character in this series, be they elven, human, troll, or Preserver, ever comes close to her level of persistent malice. But in focusing on her, it’s easy to lose sight of something else:

The Gliders as a whole are seriously messed up.

Let’s take a look at them individually. I can’t remember whether anyone else gets named in Siege at Blue Mountain and The Secret of Two-Edge (I think Reevol is the only one?), but in this volume we get Winnowill, Tyldak, Kureel, Aroree, Lord Voll, Egg, Brace, and the two Doors. The first is a villain; the second and third are arrogant jerks; Lord Voll is mired in complete passivity and then, when he rises out of it at last, kidnaps children as hostages for his dream. Aroree is the closest thing to a “good guy” in that lot, and she’s not what you’d call reliable about it. As for the others . . . on this re-read, I found myself trying to imagine their backstories. Egg I can kind of understand as an obsessive artist, losing himself in the beautiful, endless challenge of his work. Brace, though — with endless time to work in, he hasn’t managed to reshape things permanently to keep the mountain from falling on their heads? But the two Doors are the one that really boggle me. I can think of no image more emblematic of the Gliders’ social and psychological petrification than the Doors sitting in their niches, letting the centuries roll by while they do nothing other than shape the stone open and shut. How stultifying must their lives have been, to make devoting themselves to that job sound like a good idea?

It’s fascinating to me because although the Gliders are not High Ones in the strict sense — none of them, not even Lord Voll, remember the palace first-hand — their stated goal was to re-create those lost glories, and so they have a better claim to that title than anyone except Timmain. And what have they created? A sterile, claustrophobic world with so little to recommend it, some of their members would rather go into a trance for the rest of eternity than continue to engage.

And the thing is, we don’t know if that’s the Gliders Doing It Wrong or not. The other tribes speak of the High Ones with reverence. But does that mean they were good and wonderful people? Their own predecessors seem not to have been, what with using up their homeworld and all. I seem to recall the trolls later claiming that their rebellion happened because of how the High Ones were treating them — a claim that gets disputed, maybe? The details have slipped my mind, but I have this feeling that the High Ones were paternalistic toward the trolls, and not in any admirable sense of the word. Their crash landing on the World of Two Moons is their mythical Fall, but they weren’t necessarily innocent before it happened.

Because if humans aren’t all bad, the corollary is that elves aren’t all good. Cutter had his disputes with Rayek in the first volume, but that didn’t shake his belief in elven unity. (As well it shouldn’t: there must have been nasty interpersonal conflicts among the Wolfriders from time to time. Two-Spear, for example.) He comes into Blue Mountain with the conviction that anybody with pointy ears is not just a fellow member of his species, but someone with whom he shares “one heart and one mind.” That conviction takes a more or less fatal beating here, not just because of Winnowill, but because of the Gliders as a whole. They look on his tribe with contempt; Tyldak and Dewshine Recognize, but achieve no harmony between themselves; even Lord Voll, who is in some respects a sympathetic figure, sees nothing wrong with forcing his ambitions on everyone else. He could have shared his vision of the palace with them all when everyone was still in Blue Mountain, and they might have followed him willingly. Instead he absconds with their chief and two children, in a paternalistic belief that if they just follow him, they’ll see that he is right.

There is no real melding of the tribes, as there was with the Sun Folk. Aroree never truly integrates with the Wolfriders, and Dewshine doesn’t stay behind at Blue Mountain. The Gliders cannot change, not en masse and for the most part not individually, either. Their story as a tribe ends in death. (As Winnowill once knew it would: she tried long ago to persuade Voll that they needed to change and grow and engage with the outside world. But she failed, and this is the result.) And so we’re left with an unanswered question: how much like the High Ones were the Gliders? Bad copies, a mockery of not only the true power but also the true worth of their forebears? Or were they in fact quite a lot like the High Ones . . . implying that the change forced on their species by the World of Two Moons was, in the long run, a good thing?

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[sholio]

I had actually forgotten until rereading Siege that the end of the Gliders' story was mass death, and they were pretty much all okay with that. That's seriously dark! Winnowill essentially, if accidentally, created her own elven Jonestown at the end -- they were all so passive at that point that they were perfectly willing to do whatever anyone told them to do, including sleeping their way into their deaths.

As far as the Gliders vs. High Ones are concerned, I think you have a good point about the High Ones not necessarily being the paragons that the contemporary elves idealize -- however, I think the Gliders were also set up all along in comparison and opposition to the High Ones, in one of the series' many compare-contrasts. It was stated in a couple of places that the High Ones chose to keep their bodies and feel things because having bodies and feeling things was something they valued, and they went out into the universe to explore and learn new things rather than becoming completely isolated. The Gliders recreated the trappings of the High Ones' lost society without recreating its heart, the exploration/outward-looking aspect. They only looked inward, until they lost the ability to do anything else, and in the end it killed them.

[sovay]

The Gliders recreated the trappings of the High Ones' lost society without recreating its heart, the exploration/outward-looking aspect. They only looked inward, until they lost the ability to do anything else, and in the end it killed them.

That's very beautifully said and I agree.

[sovay]

Brace, though — with endless time to work in, he hasn’t managed to reshape things permanently to keep the mountain from falling on their heads?

I don't blame Brace for not being able to overcome the forces of orogeny, but also: it's not his job. That's the problem with the Gliders. His job is to maintain. Not fix, not alter, not find a new way around the problem. To keep doing the thing that preserves this graceful, beautiful structure with a deathly flaw at its heart. Sure, a skilled rock-shaper could close the stairwell and shape another archway elsewhere in the mountain that wouldn't be subject to the same stresses, but then the perfect, timeless, absolute preservation of Blue Mountain would be disturbed and that is unthinkable. The stasis has become its own end and justification. If Blue Mountain had just a little more ritual, it could be the really dark version of Gormenghast.¹

I seem to recall the trolls later claiming that their rebellion happened because of how the High Ones were treating them — a claim that gets disputed, maybe?

It's part of the fight Picknose has with Kahvi after the revelation of the Scroll of Colors: "It's a slave's right to rebel!"

Aroree never truly integrates with the Wolfriders

I view her less pessimistically, I think. As the last representative of the Gliders—I don't count Windkin, who has the genetics but not the culture—while it may be true that after the destruction of Blue Mountain she retains an essential melancholy that gives rise to her nickname ("Sad-Eyes") and, perhaps, some need to be told where she belongs, she commits to the Wolfriders in Kings of the Broken Wheel; she dens with them, stays with them when Kahvi and Tyldak move on, sleeps out the long centuries with them in wrapstuff until the Palace comes around. She may be damaged, but she's not incapable of change.

Or were they in fact quite a lot like the High Ones . . . implying that the change forced on their species by the World of Two Moons was, in the long run, a good thing?

I think it would be most accurate to say that the Gliders preserved and amplified the worst tendencies of the High Ones without any of their sense of adventure, wonder, or change. In the fight mentioned above, the epithet Picknose slings at Kahvi always stayed with me both because it's awkward in English and it's evocative: "Mocker with no true shape of your own!" The High Ones did not just hold themselves apart among the stars; they traveled from world to world, shaping themselves to the inhabitants of each, living unnoticed among them, learning their ways, returning to the stars, moving on. They were endlessly changing.² The Gliders froze their memory in the assumed shape of human legend and stuck to it until it destroyed them, never understanding (or, in Winnowill's case, caring) how badly they had betrayed the ideals of the forebears they claimed to imitate.

1. If I had any evidence that the Pinis had read Mervyn Peake, I would suspect Lord Voll of having been influenced by Sepulchrave, 76th Earl of Groan: tall, elegant, aquiline, remote, depressed almost to the point of paralysis, bird-linked, and ultimately mad.

2. And that would be the reason that Elfquest crossed in my head with Patricia McKillip's Riddle-Master when I was very young: I don't mean that I put the two narratives in the same universe, and the publication dates if nothing else argue in favor of coincidence, but the resonances between them in terms of immortality, shape-changing, science fantasy, and name are really strong.

[teleidoplex]

Great, now I'm craving Elfquest/Gormenghast crossover fic. Thank you for giving me a dream that will NEVER BE REALIZED (no really, I just did a quick search, and I think you managed to break Rule 34).

That's okay. I will tuck this away with my unsatisfied Elfquest/What the Dragon Said: A Love Story cravings ("Did you know, the earth used to have two moons?")

[sovay]

(no really, I just did a quick search, and I think you managed to break Rule 34).

Oh, my God.