All of these sources have been lost. What we have is a series of verse plays in Late Ontilian, which may have been based on one of the talkier Dwarvish song cycles, and an epic, if that’s not too strong a word, in rhyming verse by the pseudonymous Ninth Scribe of New Moorhope, and the Khroic ekshalva about Morlock, which purport to be based on direct visionary contact with the events they narrate.

I am not going to discuss the issue of whether the Ontilian plays are based on Dwarvish sources or whether they derive from a lost Mandragoric account of Morlock’s life. First, because Dr. Gabriel McNally and Reverend L. G. Handschuh have debated the matter at length in the columns of the Journal of Exoplenic Folklore, and their total inability to reach any kind of agreement indicates the matter is undecidable at our current state of knowledge. Second, because I don’t care.

I don’t care about the overly solemn lost Dwarvish song cycles, and I don’t care if there were any Mandragoric analogues or parallels, and I don’t care about the lost epic of the Seventh Scribe, and I really have no interest in daydreaming about the papers that may or may not be filed in the distant and inaccessible archives of the Graith of Guardians.

The only one of these lost sources that I regret is a version that is supposed to have been made in old age by Deortheorn for the benefit of his last son, Wyrththeorn. It would be good to have because Deor was a witness of and participant in many of these events, and someone who knew Morlock well enough not to idealize him. And it must have been Wyrth’s first real introduction to the career of his harven-kinsman Morlock. It must have had a great influence, and the time would come when Wyrth had a great influence over Morlock, both drunk and sober.

Some have questioned my attempt to re-create Deor’s lost account using the Khroic ekshalva as sources. Dr. McNally, indeed, has warned me that he will count me with the dead if I continue: he’ll never speak to me, write to me, or mention my name again on Facebook. That’s too much to hope for, but it would be reason enough to forge ahead on a task which has sometimes proved difficult.

Other reasons include the fact that I have a contract and have already banked the advance. But, though satisfyingly cynical, that doesn’t really account for my intermittent but persistent thirty-year quest to tell this particular story.

I think one reason I kept at it was an attempt to understand why: why the young hero Morlock syr Theorn became the old, embittered wonderworker and part-time monster Morlock Ambrosius. Maybe this is misguided: myth is multiform, and there’s no reason that characters have to be consistent between different versions. But if there was a Morlock, he took some particular path from his alpha to his omega, and this is my attempt to trace that path.

This reminds me of something Reverend Handschuh says about the Ambrosian cycle. He’s one of its most severe critics and considers it mere romance, not true epic. Like his hero W. P. Ker, and like many another gentle well-read scholar, he prefers the harsh, unforgiving world of classical or Germanic epic. In that tragic vision of life, heroes face their fate without hope of redemption or escape, and Reverend Handschuh rather scorns Ambrosian legend for its lack of tragic doom. “There is always hope,” he writes. “There is always hope.”

He means it as a criticism, but I don’t think it is a criticism.

About the Author

© J. M. Pfundstein

James Enge lives with his wife in northwest Ohio, where he teaches classical languages and literature at a medium-sized public university. His first novel for Pyr, Blood of Ambrose, was nominated for the World Fantasy Award in 2010. He is also the author of This Crooked Way and The Wolf Age, not to mention the Tournament of Shadows trilogy (consisting of A Guile of Dragons, Wrath-Bearing Tree, and the thing you’re reading here). His shorter fiction has appeared in the magazine Black Gate, in Swords and Dark Magic (Harper Voyager, 2010), in Blackguards (Ragnarok Publications, 2015), and elsewhere.