At a wine and cheese social last November, my professor, Dorothy Bray, who taught a class on the fantastic in medieval literature over the Fall, began to talk to me about how Guy Gavriel Kay had ‘stolen’ material from The Fionavar Tapestry from an earlier author.

I was mildly scandalized that Kay, who has achieved the Order of Canada, should have stolen details from an earlier author of epic fantasy, and was curious about who that author might have been. Perhaps he could be forgiven this unabashed theft if it came in his earlier Fionavar novels, when the younger Kay had yet to iron out his style and voice.

The premise behind the novels is that five students from the University of Toronto get summoned, by an undercover wizard, to the court of Ailill, the High King of Brennin. When the wardstones holding back the grim evil of Rokoth Maugrim the Unraveller break, the dark lord unleashes war upon the free peoples of Fionavar. Meanwhile each of the five students have their own private destinies to fulfill, one as a seer, one as a warrior of the plains, and so on. (You can read more about books one, two, and three of The Fionavar Tapestry here.)

In January Professor Bray offered me a well-preserved Ballantine Adult Fantasy novel, Red Moon and Black Mountain by the wonderfully-named Joy Chant. In The Fionavar Tapestry, one of the university students, Dave Martyniuk, is separated from the other during the crossing from this world into Fionavar. Prof. Bray informed me that basically the same thing happens in Red Moon, Black Mountain, and offered it to me to read.

I read through Chant’s novel chapter by chapter while working on my Master’s thesis. I emerged pleasantly surprised. My experience was of a nostalgic tour through the classic tradition of fantasy. Chant really focused on the psychology of the child protagonists, and did so realistically,  while presenting an honest narrative about the experience of growing up and losing innocence in a war against great evil, a war where victory is never assured and even triumph buys only momentary reprieve.

I recall Kay telling the press (I forget the particular essay or interview) that the reason he emphasizes the cost of his characters’ choices is because he read too much epic fantasy where dire choices held no grave consequences. This perspective seems to me now to have a lot to do with the worldview projected in Red Moon and Black Mountain, where a fairy tale happy ending never happens without catastrophe.

All this was very suggestive to me. So I read the novel and compiled a list of similarities between Kay’s trilogy and Chant’s epic fantasy novel. Most points are superficial, no more than the usual kind of borrowing authors do. But the last example is a direct lifting from Chant–or as I prefer to think of it, a scene that was stolen productively.

The list follows:

1. A red moon and a black mountain.

Chant’s villain, the  sorcerer Fendarl, has been bound by magic within Black Mountain, close to where Penelope and Nick find themselves after crossing over into the land of Kendrinh, the Starlit Land. Kay also has Rakoth Maugrim locked up in a dark mountain–a volcano in fact. As for the red moon, for Chant, its redness signifies the growing power of evil, while the moon’s waxing represents the power of good. Kay riffs off the same idea when the red War Moon of the Goddess appears in The Summer Tree.

2. Massive black birds

When Paul hangs on the Summer Tree in The Fionavar Tapestry, he witnesses a white and a black wolf fight, representing the war between good and evil. In Red Moon and Black Mountain, there is an epic battle between white and black eagles near Black Mountain–the white eagles win, but at terrible cost. Kay also has giant black birds in his fantasy: the black swans, who are servants of Rakoth.

3. Portal Quest Fantasy

Just likeThe Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Red Moon and Black Mountain is about children who tumble through a portal into a magical world. In The Summer Tree, they are adults, and commit more or less willingly to travel to Fionavar, following the advice of Loren Silvercloak, a wizard. Both novels also have one character separate from the main group in the crossing: Oliver in Chant and Dave Martyniuk in Kay. Another interesting variation on the portal quest fantasy is how Chant depicts the rapid acculturation of the children to their new, medieval world. They even start to forget their own birth names, adopting the ones locals give to them. In Kay, the Torontonians gain alternative names too and adopt to their medieval setting so rapidly that I frankly deem it one of the faults of this early novel that it did not take more time to show their transition.

4. Plainsmen

Dave and Oliver both wind up among horse-riding nomads. In Fionavar, Dave finds himself among the Dalrei, which share similarities to Plains Indian culture. In Chant’s novel, Oliver finds himself learning the ways of the Hurnei, another nomadic tribe that punishes the unnecessary hunting of animals with banishment. Furthermore–and this demonstrates more than passing coincidence–Dave’s Dalrei friend is named Levon, an echo of Oliver’s name among the Khentor: Li’vanh.

5. Mythic horses 

Horses are a staple of many fantasies. But magical horses are nonetheless included in both Kay and Chant: Dur’chai is Oliver’s sublime steed, while Tabor, a Dalrei, rides on the red unicorn, which is a horse with wings.

6. Magic forest

The magic forest is yet another staple of fantasy. Nonetheless, I note it here: Kay’s perilous wood is Pendaran Wood, a place of deadly magic where the trees themselves conspire against unworthy trespassers, while Nelimhon is Chant’s wood of eternal spring, which is dangerous for its seductive faery-like beauty.

7. Sense of sacrifice

The general sense of necessary sacrifice in Kay and Chant reveals a similar moral tone in both their novels, whether it is Paul willingly sacrificing himself on the Summer Tree in The Fionavar Tapestry, or the Hurnei’s grievous wartime losses in the desperate war against the forces of the dark lord Fendarl in Red Moon and Black Mountain.

6. Wild magic that must be bound

In Red Moon and Black Mountain, the evil magic of Fendarl looses the wild magic of Vir’Vachal, an amoral earth goddess who cares only for the land itself and growing things, to the exclusion of human beings. In The Fionavar Tapestry, a magic horn summons the Wild Hunt, which descends on the battlefield where the Dalrei are fighting Rakoth Maugrim’s forces. The Wild Hunt slaughters amorally on either side and is only bound with the intervention of the hunter goddess Ceinwein, who cannot be counted on to intercede twice. Vir’Vachal, on the other hand, is bound back to the earth with Oliver’s sacrifice towards the end of the novel. Which brings us to Kay’s direct borrowing from Chant.

9. Adonis myth

There is a nearly beat-by-beat borrowing from Red Moon and Black Mountain in The Wandering Fire in how Kay depicts Kevin Lane’s sacrifice to the earth goddess. The passage in Chant that Kay borrows from happens when the Hurnei realize that a vast human sacrifice is necessary in order to bind Vir’Vachal and prevent a wider human catastrophe. Oliver realizes that if he volunteers himself as a sacrifice, no more Hurnei will have to die. He presents himself into the cave of the priestesses and participates in a ritual that involves stepping over a cliff to plummet into a (nearly) bottomless pit:

“A clear path lay before him, ending on a slab at the brink of the abyss. With fear and will both drowned in the pounding heartbeat, he walked slowly forward. She [The High Priestess] watched him come, and he looked at her, and was not afraid. With the gulf at his feet he stopped, and hot air rising from the deeps smote on his face. Less than twice his height parted from Vir’Vachal; yet this time she did not rob him of his strength. He was strong, strong as she herself, and he would bind her. Gazing back at her he stepped up on to the slab. The dark depths at his feet called to him, the eyes of Vir’Vachal drew him. He drew a deep breath and raised his arms. Then savouring the sweet terror of doing just what he desired, he laughed and sprang over the edge.

For an instant he seemed to hover above the gulf, then he plunged into darkness. Fast and faster he fell, while the air roared in his ears and light burst behind his eyelids. The heat smothered him,his blood thundered, and the darkness closed above him, filled him, enveloped and overpowered him, devoured him and destroyed him, and Li’vanh Tuvoi was no more. Vir’Vachal flung up her head and sank from the sight of mortals for ever; and in the cave the women beat their breasts and cried Rahai! Rahai!” (264)

Oliver’s laughter emerges like an ecstatic joy chant. If he were not a child, his reaction could be called a moment of nearly sexual pleasure: the symbolism of this scene is allegorical for a sexual awakening. The cave is a sign of the female anatomy, and Freud interpreted dreams of falling as being sexual in nature. By performing this sacrifice, Oliver has become an adult, at least symbolically: fully mature and introduced to womanhood. It is a sacrifice much like Kevin’s sacrifice in The Wandering Fire:

“Wordlessly, he turned, remembering the way, and crossing the wide chamber, bearing his blood in a stone bowl, he came to its farthest point. To the very brink of the chasm.

“Naked as he had been in the womb, he stood over it. […] and he poured out the brimming cup of his blood into the dark chasm, to summon Dana from the earth on Midsummer’s Eve. […]

“She was there and her arms were around him in the dark as she claimed him for her own. It seemed to him as if they floated for a moment, and then the long falling began. Her legs twined about his, he reached and found her breasts. He caressed her hips, her thighs, felt her open like a flower to his touch, felt himself wild, rampant, entered her. They fell. […] End of longing, with the ground rushing now to meet, the walls streaming by; no regret, much love, power, a certain hope, spent desire, and only the one sorrow for which to grieve in the last half second, as the final earth came up to meet him.

“Abba, he thought, incongruously. And met.” (398-9)

Ovid’s Metamorphoses tells of how Adonis was the lover of Venus. He was gored by a boar in the groin and died from his wounds, but from his blood, a new flower grew as a memorial: the anemone, noted for its red petals. In The Wandering Fire, Kevin was marked for his destiny likewise by a boar that tusked him in the groin. His sacrifice mirrors the death of Adonis and is in keeping with the mythologies of fertility and sacrifice surrounding the archetype of the Dying God that Sir James Frazer describes in The Golden Bough. The Dying God, like the Dying King, perishes for the sake of the land, and so, replenishes it and saves its people, much as Jesus Christ died for the redemption of sins.

Kay’s treatment of Kevin’s sacrifice does more than echo Chant’s depiction of Oliver’s sacrifice–it offers a gloss on the episode. The sexual symbolism not yet explicit in Chant finds explicitness in Kay, revealing how Kay’s later work holds conversation with the classic fantasy tradition.

Works Cited

Chant, Joy. Red Moon and Black Mountain. New York: Ballantine Books, 1970. Print.

Kay, Guy Gavriel. The Fionavar Tapestry. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1995. Print.