Three Hearts and Three Lions is a fantasy novel by Poul Anderson, published in 1953. The publication date alone makes it worth reading: 1953 is before The Lord of the Rings and many other stories that have come to define contemporary fantasy. Not only is Three Hearts and Three Lions a fascinating study in early fantasy, it is also an excellent adventure tale that is even today fresh, interesting, and fun.
Three Hearts and Three Lions is the story of Holger Carlsen, a Danish engineer during World War Two who is catapulted into an alternate universe of magic and myth where he holds the key to saving the world. (In case my readers feel compelled to complain about cliches, I will return again to my opening point: recall that this novel was written some years before Fushigi Yugi or the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon.)
The world into which Holger is hurled is skillfully conceived and described. It is, briefly, an alternate Medieval Europe, one brighter and more vibrant than our own world, where witches and ogres are as common as churches and knights. The world is riven by the eternal struggle between Law, represented by man and the Church (specifically, the Catholic Church), and Chaos, represented by sorcerers, faerie folk, pagans, and the power of magic. (One last reminder before the reviewer stops treating his readers like unread bumpkins: Three Hearts and Three Lions predates Moorcock’s Eternal Champion novels, and their Law vs. Chaos dichotomy, by about a decade.)
The setting appears at first like a mish-mash of fairy-tale tropes and mythical retellings of the middle ages, but it quickly emerges as more than that. Anderson ties together witchcraft, faerie magic, and Christianity into a tidy, elegant, and surprisingly coherent package. Magic, that fickle power of Chaos, is powerful, but fades like mist when exposed to Christian piety and the power of God: the faithful of this realm indeed wear the armor of God, proof against magic, unless they should fall into sinful and ungodly thoughts. Anderson’s world is less fairy-tale or modern fantasy and more a convincing re-creation of a Medieval world-view. Beneath this fantasy veneer lies a cosmology as sophisticated and coherent as any hard science fiction setting.
This inspired world-creation also extends to the main character, Holger. The secondary characters, such as Holger’s allies Alianora the swan-may and Hugi the dwarf, are drawn with bold, simple strokes (and also speak in thick, occasionally impenetrable Scottish dialect--perhaps the origin of the “Scottish dwarf” stereotype?), but Holger himself serves as both an interesting everyman and as a complicated character in his own right. He behaves in an intelligent, believable, and sympathetic fashion when confronted with his strange environment, and we are privy to his gradually dawning understanding of his place in the new world, both as he learns by experience and as he spontaneously recalls things from his hazy other life. Holger is an engineer, and approaches his problems intelligently and systematically; a far cry from the whiny, petulant teenagers of much cross-dimensional fantasy. He arrives in the world with nothing but a mysterious suit of armor, a horse, and a shield from which the novel draws its title, and though Holger clearly has a destiny, his triumphs feel due more to his intelligence, decency, and courage than to clumsily-handled plot momentum and vague prophecies.
Three Hearts and Three Lions is a short book, totaling about 240 pages of mid-sized text that flows very quickly. Anderson’s writing makes up in swift-moving simplicity what it lacks in poetic grandeur. Further, the story is divided into scene-like chapters, each only ten or so pages long, meaning that one can pick the book up, read a chapter, and put it away again without losing the thread of the tale. The novel’s events stick in the mind, since each chapter usually represents a single situation, monster, or challenge: the dragon chapter, the Faerie mound chapter, the witch chapter, and so forth. The whole novel could be finished in a leisurely afternoon, or read easily over half-hour intervals. This is no thousand-page monstrosity paced like a geological event, but rather a brief, pleasant journey into an alternate reality.
This novel deserves to be read. It contains the seeds of ideas that will eventually become genre tropes (from world-crossing heroes to the war of Law and Chaos to regenerating trolls), and it is written in a pleasant, approachable style that combines the energy of early fantasy tales with the talented world-building of a gifted speculative-fiction writer, energized by enjoyable characters, fun adventures, and a story that helped define the last fifty years of fantasy writing.
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