three hearts and three lions by poul anderson

The copy of Three Hearts and Three Lions which I own comes with a ringing endorsement from Michael Moorcock on the back cover, and it’s easy to see the influence of Anderson’s novel (and his other remarkable fantasy novel, The Broken Sword) on Moorcock’s own fantasy universe, or ‘multiverse’. They all embark on a quest to find the sword named Cortana, and to say more than this would be to attempt to summarise a short novel which really does pack a great deal into around 70,000 words or so. Holger and the swan maiden, Alianora, fall for each other, but our reluctant hero resists the urge to consummate their passion because he wants to return to the twentieth century, so he resists her, intent on ‘doing the right thing’. It’s as if this land has been expecting him: he finds all the paraphernalia a good chivalrous knight needs, including a shield emblazoned with three hearts and three lions, and is soon befriended by a swan maiden and a dwarf and, later, a Saracen named Carahue, who has been searching for Holger (a number of the characters appear to know Holger already, although he doesn’t know them). Three Hearts and Three Lions focuses on Holger Carlsen, an American-trained Danish engineer (shades of Anderson’s own Scandinavian-American identity here) who becomes involved with the Danish resistance to Hitler during the Second World War and, after being shot, is transported to a parallel universe modelled on early French romances of Faerieland. Instead it’s a novel that doesn’t even run to 200 pages in my edition ( Three Hearts & Three Lions (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) ).

Despite its title promoting the ‘rule of three’ not once but twice, this was not a huge three-decker novel on the scale of The Lord of the Rings, nor the first novel in a vast trilogy. That novel was Three Hearts and Three Lions. A year before that, however, Anderson had published another fantasy novel, which drew inspiration from Tolkien’s earlier The Hobbit but which moved fantasy into a new direction. One of these novels, The Broken Sword, was published in 1954, the same year that the first volume of Tolkien’s novel appeared. Tolkien published his landmark novel The Lord of the Rings, the Danish-American author Poul Anderson wrote two short fantasy novels which would have less of an influence on the course of fantasy fiction, but which now read as considerably more ‘modern’, in many ways, than Tolkien’s three-books-in-one epic. In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews a formative early work of fantasy fiction

Three hearts and three lions by poul anderson