The Broken Sword

"The Broken Sword was written by a science fiction writer. He takes Norse and Anglo-Saxon mythology and writes about that with a science-fictional world-building eye. Fairy is a place, a magical world at an angle to the real world where you can go; but he has elves and trolls, which are very much the denizens of Fairy, as major characters. The two major characters in this book are changelings, both halves: the boy who was stolen into Fairy and brought up there, and the changeling who was left in his place in the mortal world. It’s England in about 1000, so we’ve got Vikings and Saxons, but we’ve also got this fairy thing going on – the wild and the numinous in the background – and that is what the book is really concentrating on, and doing in this amazingly Norse way. It’s almost as if it is actually a saga that was somehow written in 1954 instead of in 1250. It was also written before there was a publishing category of fantasy. Anderson wrote loads of very influential science fiction . He wrote just a few fantasies, which he got published by science fiction publishers because they liked what he was doing. But this was before there was really a market for it, so it was read by science fiction readers. It’s really different from Lud-in-the-Mist , but in a way, it’s the same, in that there wasn’t the space there for it to be read in the way that it is read today. I read it when I was twelve or thirteen, and it was very influential for me. I really fell into that world, and I really admired it. When I came back to it as an adult, I was almost afraid that it would be ruined, like children’s books sometimes are when your reader experience made them better than they actually are. But when I read it, I thought, ‘No, this book really is doing this. It really is great.’ Putting fairies in the past is a thing that comes out of fairy tales, which are set in the imaginary Middle Ages . You know, where there are woods that come right up to the village, and a miller with three sons, and a king with a daughter… And it’s quite interesting that both of these books are actually not doing that. They’re taking very specific past times and putting the stories there. It’s not that Grimm-fairy-tales background that you so often find in fantasy. I think that there is also a tendency to do it because, as Tolkien says in On Fairy Stories , the furniture gets moved into the nursery, and the stories go down to children. Similarly, we don’t walk around the streets and see changelings and fairies, but we want to tell the story, so we’re putting them into an imagined past, when we can pretend that they were real."