Tying Three Loops: A Spell for the Modrybedd

Image of the chapbook page

Each year at Christmas I sew up some chapbooks for friends and family with bits of poetry or CNF I’ve published during the year. This piece poured out after reading Daniel Mendelsohn while thinking about my current WIP on fantasy. It’s not the sort of thing I can send anywhere, so call this blog a small Christmas gift. (please don’t take the footnotes too seriously—I didn’t… And excuse the extent of the allusions. They’re on purpose)

Tying Three Loops: A Spell for the Modrybedd

The farm boy stepped across the threshold into the den of the three modrybedd. They were purveyors of magic in a grotto smudged by tobacco and the steam of black sludge roasting on the burner until brown rings encircled the glass pot a finger’s width apart. That acrid knot of smoke and roasted coffee bound something up that slipped beyond its own moment and place. He’d been nervous to enter, not really knowing why, which is the way of young boys, but the shelves of books in spine-broken paperbacks with tales of adventure called. The front window had copies of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories with the muscled Cimmerian in a variety of flexing postures and titles in coloured inline and outline typefaces. It promised much more inside and on the shelves. Something beyond the Black River. Something to salve his disappointment in the unkept promise of Mundania.

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Daniel Mendelsohn’s Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate1 hinges on the role of ring composition, by means of which he revised his stubborn drafts for An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic.2 He also reflects at length on the traumatic experience of researching and writing his family’s history in the Holocaust.3 I knew him primarily from his translations of C.P. Cavafy4 and then our fleeting interaction about Lawrence Durrell’s translations of the Greek poet that I had edited.5 That’s what brought me to his slim book of reflections deriving from the 2019 Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia.6 I thought his nostos7 to Charlottesville might echo the homing pain of a dear friend who also made an odyssey out of returning to the Dell.8 For Mendelsohn, “In ring composition, the narrative appears to meander away into a digression…, although the digression, the ostensible straying, turns out in the end too be a circle, since the narration will return.”9 This derives from Homer, and Mendelsohn mostly dispenses with the repetition of “a formulaic line”10 in his own rings. In An Odyssey, these are certainly rings, but in Three Rings the reader cannot help thinking of how we teach braided form in the creative writing seminar.11 His three stories weave rather than encircle. Like many parts of the creative writing workshop, braided form is useful because it is teachable, like “show don’t tell” and “less is more.” For academics, however, these rings recall the chiasmus,12 and Mendelsohn’s frequent contrasts between Homer and the Bible may make us mindful of studies of chiastic structure in the story of the flood13 and even the Sermon on the Mount.14 While not exactly rings, these cycles of recurrence are familiar ground, and at the scale of Three Rings they feel distinctly more like a plait rather than the formal recurrences of the chiastic structure in Homer.

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The farm boy entered the world as a foundling. Swaddled like a tiny three-pound bundle of butter, he grew up not remembering the loving arms that held him for his first week. When he had grown large enough for adoption, a young couple chose him to travel north to a new home in a tiny village amidst the weavings of the Skeena River, nestled between soaring mountains capped in snow and rich forests of cedar and hemlock. He was also marked as an infant with a small, circular scar in the middle of his chest as if a tiny circlet had been raised on his skin from a missing chain hung around his neck. It felt like magic. Later they moved again to the Fraser Valley where the Village Bookshop in the centre of a grove of alder offered magic and dreams of a world larger and distant. No matter how far he travelled later in life, he always remembered the comforting smell of trees dripping in rain redolent of verdant evergreen and moss. He would climb, happy, in the trees and hide under them with a book, and the boughs around their home were fecund with apples, cherries, bitter plums, and the bright berries of the ash that can only be eaten after cooking. Only years later did he learn that the berries of the dogwood could also be eaten, like tiny, thin-fleshed lychee.

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Piers Anthony is one of the fantasy writers from my childhood, and I share with Dennis Wilson Wise a keen memory of his Author’s Notes at the end of his novels (Wise 86). These set me thinking of a writing life. I also share Wise’s hesitations over the hermeneutics of suspicion, or at least a recognition that authors earning a living wage will rarely chastise their readership’s biases for the sake of placating future critics. In his memoir How Precious Was That While, Anthony tells a story about Lester del Rey and his fellow fantasy novelist Gordon R. Dickson. It is hauntingly prescient of Mendelsohn’s meditation, as if some kind of rope bound the two together, both of them meditating on the writing labour of building a saleable book:

I read [Dickson’s novel The Dragon and the George] and liked it, though I could see where he had used a loop — that is, an inserted episode that didn’t relate to the rest of the novel — to lengthen it to exactly 100,000 words, to make Lester del Rey’s minimum for the fantasy line. (How 266)

His observation is that del Rey set a word requirement, neither under nor over, and this was part of the commercial target of the industry, parallel to its target market of pubescent boys. It was readers of fantasy buying by the pound and expecting weight to match the scale without any thumbs or lead dropped on to tip it over. The mechanism to meet this is the “loop” by which a separate short story makes up the necessary ballast to keep the book aright and stable in the rough waters of industrial production. Books need to be well-balanced on the wine-dark sea. And like shipping, the ballast can be tossed in or out as needed based on the cargo, with some name swaps and new descriptions to shift it over to another ship that’s too light on cargo to stay upright. We see it most often now in the trivial side stories or interruptions in TV or streaming shows that add length to meet the 45-minute hour.

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Perhaps the most surprising thing for Mendelsohn’s book is the primacy of the academic. Of his Three Great Rings of elven kings, the “Exile, Narrative, and Fate” of the subtitle, there is also One Ring to rule them all: an unnamed, unspoken ring of power. Sauron’s ring is scholarship — this can be no surprise to academics thinking of “Reader B” and the timelines of peer review (hint: slow…). The editor who suggested the ring composition form to Mendelsohn called him with feedback “within a day,”15 a process that made this scholarly editor laugh out loud at its implausibility for any academic who doesn’t occupy an endowed chair.

Beneath and behind all three rings of the book is a series of connections to the scholarly life of research, citations, academic power-plays, and the exigencies of library access and publishing. Fantasy novels trace the hidden lineage of the boy who would be king — academics trace the pedigree of institutional affiliation, supervisors, and committee members. Like the other rings in the book, this is truly a thread that weaves in and out of the braids. We are far closer to hair threading here with parallel braids of the three narratives sharing a common cotton threading to hold them all in place. His third person narration of the towering academic Eric Auerbach’s scholarship runs in line with gestures to Mendelsohn’s own research work and classroom preparations, as well as W.A.A. van Otterlo’s work on ring composition16 and various scholars’ work on François Fénelon’s novel The Adventures of Telemachus.17

The book is mercifully bereft of footnotes, but the academic reader can’t help but glance for them every other page. I later discovered that I’m also not alone in seeking annotations here.18 There’s also a lingering feeling that a less masculine approach might have lingered over Mary Douglas’ final book, Thinking in Circles: An Essay on Ring Composition,19 itself the product of the Terry Lectures20 established at Yale University over a century ago. Perhaps the secularism of Jefferson’s vision and the leaning of the Page-Barbour Lectures is simply incompatible with the sacred perspective of the Terry Lectures.

Academia, of course, follows the funding in a world of fellowships and endowments that remind us that the ivory tower is more costly than actual ivory. To be free from crass commercialism is to be a gracious and grateful guest in the house of patronage.

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Anthony also points to structure and commercial pressures in fantasy form. It is not, however, the Homeric form of ring composition that captures his eye. For his own commercial work, he recounts parting ways with the Del Rey imprint and having Lester del Rey as his editor. He asks himself,

Did I regret leaving Del Rey? I watched David Eddings fantasy series at Del Rey rise up and pass mine in sales, his income advancing accordingly, and yes, I was sorry to be gone. But I wouldn’t pay the price Eddings may have paid, sacrificing the integrity of my text…, even with such seemingly frivolous fantasy as Xanth. There are elements there the critics know nothing of. (How 168–169)

He rightly recognizes that “Lester del Rey was an apt editor who knew a commercial novel when he saw one… and became arguably the most successful book editor the genre has seen” (How 479–480). Yet behind the scenes, the David Eddings archives at Reed College21 show that the limping gait of his Belgariad books series derives from del Rey’s insistence that the trilogy Eddings wrote be marketed as five distinct novels. The outcome was a 60% increase in sales revenue from the same writing project but a narrative climax that only arrives a quarter of the way into the second book and another halfway into the fourth. Imagine, if you will, recutting the Lord of the Rings films this way. It would be even worse than what Peter Jackson did to The Hobbit. Let us also remember that the ubiquity of the trilogy form based on Tolkien’s magnum opus is likewise a publisher’s imposition based on market forces and the binding limitations of producing a codex commercially. The publisher and Reed College’s endowment fund certainly feel that del Rey made the correct choice because the money absolutely followed it like a hooked fish, but it does make some readers squint.

The prospect I wonder over is this meeting point between form, the hermeneutics of suspicion, and commercial forces of production. Hermeneutics of suspicion means that nagging feeling that a text means something other than what it says, like how we interpret (“hermeneutics”) everything our politicians say (“texts” if we’re generous…). This previous sentence is, of course, a telling rather than a showing, so some would say it’s an error in creative writing, but perhaps not you, my readers. I suspect that Anthony had the same instinct for his readers too. My New Critical suspicion wanders into the division between Anthony and Mendelsohn here. We expect a literary writer like Mendelsohn to mean more than his words are limited to. He exceeds language, or at least we hunt for clues hidden under the stones of his verb tense choices and vocabulary, just like my Homeric epithets earlier in this damp squib. So why not Anthony in his fantasy romp for juvenile readers with pimply 1980s hormones running wildly against our enlightened 2025 sense of gender parity? (Well, parity in name and tone just not in pay and security, because not all parities are equal…) Couldn’t my suspicions as a reader already be anticipated by a commercial author?

The answer was probably in the first Magic of Xanth book I read by Anthony, which wasn’t his first. The Source of Magic has the narrative voice step in and guide the reader by asking “Where was the ethical course?” (63–64), which shapes the reader’s focus. This is, under my professorial guise, an instance of free and indirect discourse, or a voice speaking without quotation marks or the tag “he said.” We readers tend to read this inside our minds as our own voice, so it’s naturally the voice to which we give the most credence and find most appealing.

In any case, this novel ends in an ethical dilemma with options weighed between three distinct hermeneutics of ethics: the deontological, the consequentialist, and virtue ethics. That is, does the young adventurer whose story is told for young boys find what is intrinsically good in itself, what is most good for the greatest number of people (shades of Star Trek’s rationalist futurism here), or does he act in a way that is true to his own inherent personal goodness? For the hero,

“I cannot let a living, feeling creature suffer because of my inaction. It doesn’t matter that the Demon would not free me, were our positions reversed; I am not a Demon, and shall not act like one. It only matters that a man does not stand by and allow a wrong he perceives to continue. Not when he can so readily correct it.” (Source 268)

When the young hero reflects on his integrity and its price, he wanders dangerously close to Socrates’ fate in Plato’s Phaedo and his contemplation of justice (which is itself a frame narrative tremblingly close to a ring). What must be surrendered to remain true?

“I would have respect for nothing, and love for nothing, if I did not respect and love justice. If I let personal attachments and desires prevail over my basic integrity of purpose, I would lose my claim to distinction as a moral creature. I must do what I think is right.” (Source 265)

It’s a tale sold by the pound to Walmart bargain hunters conscious of the shrinkflation hitting reading markets, yet we are left with Socrates’ willing self-sacrifice for a wrong judgment by his peers, because to evade justice when it’s wrong makes it impossible to seek justice when it is right. It’s a sentiment and source very much at home in Mendelsohn’s learned references but likely outselling it by miles and shaping hundreds of impressionable readers for every nodding approval of an academic who enjoys catching the clever gestures in Three Rings. My point isn’t to criticize Mendelsohn but rather to say our suspicious readings of Anthony should go beyond finding his flaws to also include where he too exceeds language and where his plans for his text mean more than what his words say.

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The farm boy came to the three modrybedd where they sat on the other side of a passage, a chancel marking the division between the room of books he could explore and the private space with an old table, three chairs, three mugs, and a single ashtray that was theirs alone. He deposited a codex of inestimable age on the rough, horizontal board that divided the two worlds, his and theirs. The book’s browned pages cracked at the edges, and he clasped it before setting it down, sensing the unreality of an entire world turned in a sideways dimension to fit between its covers. One of them groaned to her feet and stumped slowly to where he stood, looking with one eye slightly squinted at what he’d set down before her.

“Are you sure about that one?” He nodded.

She grimaced slightly. “Your books are safe. While you’re reading them you get to become Tarzan or Robinson Crusoe or even Bastian Balthazar Bux,” she said. “Afterwards you get to be a little boy again.”

He wasn’t sure what she meant and pointed at the ouroboros on the cover, “What does this mean?”

“You’d have to read it to find out,” she said, then added more forebodingly, “All sales are final.”

He nodded vigorously.

She licked one finger and turned the cover to the colophon, then tapped the clicking machine on her counter.

He rummaged six silver-coloured coins from his pocket and lay them on the board where she quickly wiped them off and into her pocket. It was a spell against taxation. With one foot slipping, she turned and stumped back to her table, the three of them going back to the blue haze enveloping them and the growling words they traded.

The boy turned and slipped out. He could sense a howling forest, a rockbiter, and the warp and weft of words woven into spells in a prose pile of great density. World without limit and story without ending. He had not yet realized that there is no “afterwards” to a story because every descent into narrative, every disguise we put on when we slip into a character and try on their costume of a world seen through their eyes, leaves us changed. We never get to be the same “little boy” again. We’re now a self who, mere moments ago, eluded a dragon, stilled an earthquake with a word, or whose silvery scar made a rushing sound inside the mind that allowed will and word to change a world. Just as we cannot step into the same stream twice because the waters have changed, so too is the self that steps made into something new.

His step out into the sun was like a return from an underworld, and he was changed, just like every moment he looked up from the dreaming world of a book.

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What we need, then, isn’t so much a loop as a braid, or rather a loop made up of braided rope. At one point, Mendelsohn says “It is as if there, at the beginning of the Odyssey, Homer were dreaming of Sebald…” (Three 102), a twenty-five century anachronism, and I can’t help but feel Anthony was dreaming Mendelsohn in a strange, uncanny way. How Precious Was That While appeared in 2001, the same year that Mendelsohn first visited Bolechow, the village of his family, to bear witness to the brutal murders of the Jewish community in the Holocaust. Mendlesohn’s book adores finding these synchronicities among his texts, and Anthony’s memoir recounts how he was being raised in a pacifist Quaker community in 1941, the same year as the horrors in Bolechow. Anthony was “in Spain as the German blitzkrieg swept south through France, stopping short of the border” (Bio of an Ogre 10), and he would also pause to remember how his own pacifism learned to be worldly, paralleling how the teachers in his Quaker school “wouldn’t have approved of the price of nonviolence had they taken the trouble to look into it. Reality can differ sharply from idealism” (How 29). It has Anthony “remembering” the future in Mendelsohn.

And ultimately, that is what my own short telling shows and now finally says: the braids here make the loops like bunny ears that knot together in the middle. That’s my modrybedd, the aunties of the Village Bookshop, whose gnarled and knotted grimaces, hair, and arthritic hands bind together Mendelsohn and Anthony with my farm boy self. The modrybedd’s books and coffee and acrid smokes were weaving a tapestry for young readers, passing along copies of both Fionavar and Castle Roogna, Shannara, the Mrin Codex, all weaving fate with a tangled skein. And why not refuse the too easy Gap Chasm between commercial property forces shaping fiction and the academic rituals of propriety and suspicion. Both demand loops, braids, and rings, and both work to serve the reader’s expectations. The truth that two readers differ is to be expected. As with allusions and Easter Eggs, we may find gold bullion hidden among the commercial ballast to avoid the eyes of tax collectors and editors.

For me, this all means that somewhere between the moment when Mendelsohn sees Homer dreaming of Sebald and my own reading journey, I could envision Anthony dreaming Mendelsohn… Reading is our slack tide in the river of time. In that moment, I had to admit that my own dreams may be the makings of the modrybedd dreamweavers looping a red thread guiding me to cross the highways of fantasy.

Works Cited

Anthony, Piers. How Precious Was That While. Macmillan, 2001.

———. Bio of an Ogre: The Autobiography of Piers Anthony to Age 50. Ace Books, 1989.

———. The Source of Magic. New York: Ballantine Book, 1997.

Mendelsohn, Daniel. Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate. U Virginia P, 2020.

Wise, Dennis Wilson. “Just Reading A Spell for Chameleon: An Appreciation with Caveats, and an Elegy.” Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 85–102.

  1. Mendelsohn, Daniel. Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2020. ↩︎
  2. Mendelsohn, Daniel. An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017. ↩︎
  3. Mendelsohn, Daniel. The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million. New York: HarperCollins, 2006. ↩︎
  4. Cavafy, C.P. The Complete Poems. Trans. Daniel Mendelsohn. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. ↩︎
  5. Durrell, Lawrence. “A Cavafy Find.” From the Elephant’s Back: Collected Essays & Travel Writings. Ed. James Gifford. Edmonton, AB: University of Alberta Press, 2015. pp. 123–128. ↩︎
  6. It is worth noting that the University of Virginia was founded, built, and designed by Thomas Jefferson, and it embodies the American Founding Father’s perspective on the world. The Page-Barbour Lecturers were established in 1907 and invite the lecturer to speak to their area of expertise rather than a defined theme or disciplinary field. ↩︎
  7. In Greek this is the turn toward the homeward journey, as in Homer’s Odyssey where Odysseus returns home to Ithaca. It is also the root of our English word “nostalgia,” which combines “home” from nostos with “pain” from algos. ↩︎
  8. The Dell is a small lake on the grounds of the University of Virginia. The reference here compares Homer’s Odysseus travelling across the Mediterranean Sea to the author’s friend Charles L. Sligh returning to this small lake at his academic alma mater. ↩︎
  9. Mendelsohn, Three Rings, p. 13. ↩︎
  10. Ibid. ↩︎
  11. Creative writing seminars ubiquitously focus on the most teachable elements of writing, which is not the same thing as the most essential or the most innovative. Hence, braided forms are ubiquitously taught even though they are of varying efficacy with readers. “Less is more” works even though (as I tell students) sometimes more is more… ↩︎
  12. A Chiasmus is typically an “X” pattern in writing where parts of the text mirror or link to each other in succession. “‘Tis pity ‘tis true, and ‘tis true ‘tis pity” has an ABBA shape. The chiasmus can follow this nesting pattern many, many times. It is also common in Biblical texts, such as “The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath” in Mark 2:27-28, which is again ABBA. Genesis is known for even more complex patterns, such as “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed” 9:6 with a ABCCBA structure. See note 14. ↩︎
  13. Wenham, Gordon J. “The Coherence of the Flood Narrative.” Vetus Testamentum, vol. 28, no. 3, 1978, pp. 336–348. ↩︎
  14. Lund, Nils Wilhelm. Chiasmus in the New Testament: A Study in Formgeschichte. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1942. ↩︎
  15. Mendelsohn, Three Rings, p. 12. ↩︎
  16. Van Otterlo, W.A.A. “Untersuchungen über Begriff, Anwen-dung und Entstehung der griechischen Ringkomposition.” Med-deelingen der Nederlandsche Akademie van Wetenschappen, ns 7, no. 3, 1944, pp. 131–176. ↩︎
  17. Fénelon, François. Les Aventures de Télémaque, fils d’Ulysse. Paris, 1699. ↩︎
  18. See Mendelsohn’s interview for the Harvard Book Store with James Wood as recorded on YouTube. https://youtu.be/ItDEVwwYu-g?t=2847. ↩︎
  19. Douglas, Mary. Thinking in Circles: An Essay on Ring Composition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. ↩︎
  20. The Dwight H. Terry Lectureship was endowed in 1905 and began in 1923 to address religion from a humanitarian perspective. ↩︎
  21. Reed College holds the David Eddings Papers in the Reed Library Special Collections. https://archivesspace.reed.edu/repositories/2/resources/45 ↩︎

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