by Anthony Perconti
in Issue 80, September 2018
2018
The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term skald as “(in ancient Scandinavia) a composer and reciter of poems honoring heroes and their deeds”. (1) The ancient Greek counterparts of the Scandinavian skalds, poets such as Homer and Apollonius of Rhodes, composed timeless works of art chronicling the exploits of heroes from The Illiad, The Odyssey and The Argonautica, respectively. Over time, as with oral traditions the world over, the stories being recited underwent the organic process of change. The skalds and classical poets would add regional flourishes depending upon where they were working and a certain character’s deeds were highlighted over others depending on audience reaction. Those story tellers added nuance as they saw fit; essentially making fantastic tales even more so. In 2015, a new podcast premiered that took those old ways of storytelling and transferred them into the digital age. Skald is a ongoing weekly series that is written, produced and presented by Aubrey Sitterson and recorded in one flawless take. There is nothing quite like it being produced at this time. Sitterson makes it clear at the beginning of each episode that he is not reading us a story, but rather telling us one; just like the skalds of old. Instead of listening to a wandering bard’s tales of heroes and monsters by the hearth, we now consume them as they are pumped through our ear buds from our smart phones; Sitterson takes an old form and re-packages it in a novel way. The Skald podcast wades knee deep in the conventions of the sword and sorcery genre, which according to the creator is written with an eye towards such luminaries as Jack Vance, Michael Moorcock and (I think especially) Robert E. Howard. The podcast is broken up into sixteen episodes per cycle and at the time of this writing, ten cycles have been completed. This long form narrative allows Sitterson to explore the world(s) he has created in great detail. To put this series into proper perspective, one hundred and sixty installments have consistently appeared on a weekly basis over a three year span. This is quite an accomplishment considering the serial nature of the program. Each episode ends on a cliffhanger, practically guaranteeing that the listener will tune in next week to find out what happens next. Skald is an ambitious and vastly entertaining podcast that should be labeled with the health warning of ‘highly addictive substance, listen at your own risk.’
I listened to the first cycle of Skald over a two week period on my car ride to and from work. I admit that it did take about an episode or so to get into the feel of the presentation. I am accustomed to listening to podcasts and audio books, but the tempo and rhythm of Skald differs from those. If you’re not used to it, Aubrey Sitterson’s vocal performance can seem a bit jarring at first; this is primarily due to the fact that audio books and most podcasts are presented in an even, uniform tone. This is certainly not the case with Skald. Sitterson’s presentation is highly energetic, raw and brimming with emotion. His voice shifts from low growl one minute, to raging fury the next. Once the listener gets the feel of the story’s cadence however, they become completely immersed in this fascinating, secondary world.
Skald is the tale of Maul, the One True King of Men. He is a king bereft his throne; as a boy, he was robbed from his home world and taken to another. There, he was raised by the High Elves and adopted into their royal family. Due to a crime (the specifics of which are unclear in this cycle) that he committed against the crown, Maul was condemned to be tied to the World Tree and left there to rot. And rot he did, exposed to the elements, living off of the sap of that magical tree for sustenance for an entire decade. Skald’s first episode throws the listener into the tale in medias res. When we first meet Maul, he is fulfilling his end of a bargain to the entity that freed him of his imprisonment, an entity simply known as HIM. With his only weapon being a cudgel, shaped from a branch broken off of the World Tree, Maul delivers a bloody package to that malign entity. As we soon learn, Maul’s only purpose in life, his one guiding tenant is to get back to his home realm and recapture the throne. Attainment of the throne is so important to him, that the ends justify any means; if anyone or anything stands in his way, he simply kills them. Maul is the perfect specimen of a savage human, plain and simple. Armed with his cudgel, he wanders the landscape like a primeval version of Hercules; a demigod not for modern humans to venerate, but rather our remote ancestors. The character of Maul is certainly cast in a Howardian mold. Not as introspective as King Kull, nor prone to gigantic mirth as Conan the Cimmerian, I believe that the template for Maul is based upon a lesser known hero; Esau Cairn.
Cairn was the protagonist of the only sword and planet novel that Robert E. Howard ever penned, Almuric. It originally appeared posthumously in the pages of Weird Tales in 1939. Esau Cairn is a 20th century man born in the wrong era. “He was primitive in his passions, with a gusty temper and a courage inferior to none on this planet….Born in the Southwest, of old frontier stock, he came of a race whose characteristics were inclined toward violence, and whose traditions were of war and feud and battle against man and nature.”(2) Throughout his earthbound existence, Cairn had to hold back his natural disposition towards warfare and conflict. That is until he is sent to Almuric. Once on this savage world, Cairn is free of the bonds of the modern era. He is able to test his mettle against an indifferent wilderness and the various cultures of this planet. Due to his natural abilities, Cairn is accepted into one culture (the Guras) and wages war against another (the winged Yagas) and as these stories go, wins the hand of the beautiful tribal maiden, Altha, in the process. Due to their similar natures, it seems that Esau Cairn and King Maul could share a common family lineage. They are both representatives of humanity in its primal form. “At birth, a man is cursed with life and he’s cursed again with death. Everything in between is his for the taking.”(3)
For the blatant act of betrayal against HIM, Maul is banished to the Underneath, a primordial, formless realm that serves as the scaffolding to the Sundered Worlds; something very similar to the Greek notion of Chaos, or in modern terms, the quantum scale. Maul’s sanity is shattered due his exposure to the Underneath. Eventually, he is shunted onto another plane, a barrier realm, complete with twin suns. Many of the set pieces in Skald are influenced by Moorcock’s body of work; especially in Sitterson’s inclusion of mind bending, cosmic elements into the podcast. The dark entity know as HIM, of the great Underneath, antlered and sporting a rictus grin, could easily be related to Elric of Melnibone’s patron and Corum Jhaelen Irsei’s adversary, Arioch, of the Lords of Chaos. These beings callously treat living creatures throughout the multiverse like living game pieces (usually pawns), destroying lives, civilizations and even entire worlds to further their unfathomable designs. The same is so of HIM; “How I wish I could be done with you and your impertinent tone. But no. You’re still a piece on my board-you still have a role to play.”(4)
The cosmos that Maul inhabits could certainly fit into a corner of Moorcock’s expansive framework of the multiverse. “They walked for timeless miles, taking this path and then another through the great silver lattice of the moonbeam roads, while everywhere the multiverse blossomed and warped and erupted and glowed, a million worlds in the making…..”(5) The Sundered Worlds are a representation of this multiple universe cosmology. And running through the various worlds and realms, looms that great constant, binding them all together, the World Tree. “Though the Underneath was the seed from which the realms sprang forth, The World Tree was the source of that seed…” (6) In Norse mythology, Yggdrasil is the mighty ash tree that connects the nine worlds and is commonly used as a means of transportation between each. Sitterson’s use of a mythic tree that acts as a conduit or (moonbeam) road to many worlds is a natural fit given the roots (sorry!) of the podcast’s title. Moorcock utilized a variation of this idea of worlds being interconnected through plant life in his 1995 collection, Fabulous Harbors; “Where do you go Far-Seeing?” asked Melnibone’s lord? “I seek a galaxy called The Rose, whose planets form one mighty garden.” (7)
During its first cycle, Skald touches upon some fundamental human questions. The themes of free will, addiction, family relations, nature vs. nurture and the cost of blind ambition are all explored, albeit through the lens of a pulp fantasy. The podcast never comes off as preachy, nor does it make any moral judgments; this would be a difficult proposition considering the fact that Maul is a protagonist who kills, betrays, reneges on his word and does whatever he deems necessary in order to further his ends. In the latter half of this cycle, Maul acquires a traveling companion, who is also a magic user. Xylun is a disgraced monk who is exiled (and branded on the neck) from his order. Whenever he uses his talent, the brand on his neck flares to life, causing him great pain. The cause of Xylun’s dismissal from the monastery is due to the fact that he is ‘godless’, an atheist. “The most dangerous myth that’s ever been told is that the gods made man…not the other way around.”(8)
Due to the serialized structure of Skald, the author is relentless in throwing Maul into perilous situations for the listener’s amusement. Naturally, when Maul gets himself out of these predicaments, he only creates more enemies and consequences for himself in the long run, thereby creating new subplots. I have not been very forthcoming in providing plot details for this cycle; suffice it to say that you should check the podcast out for yourself to experience all the crazy twists and turns. Just to give you a taste of what’s in store, Sitterson presents us with Anchor addiction, ancient mutant cultists, open conflict with the Queen of the High Elves, a prehistoric jungle cat, the Fera Confederacy, a branded atheist monk, a suicide mission against the last unicorn, combat dream mages, cataclysmatons, a kung fu showdown, Maul trapped in his own damaged psyche and the eldritch Felldruun. Out of curiosity, I have jumped ahead and listened to an episode of the tenth cycle and Sitterson’s presentation just gets tighter and more psychedelic; he has introduced synthesizer effects into the podcast that sound like a cross between the Pink Floyd album Relics and the ambient sound design of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me and the Return. If you are a fan of old school sword and sorcery fiction, the current grim dark movement (as exemplified by author Joe Abercrombie), comic books or just quality long form television shows, you owe it to yourself to check out Skald. It has no equal in any of the Sundered Worlds.
END NOTES
1. Skald. The Oxford English Dictionary. Retrieved from https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/skald
2. Howard, Robert E. Almuric. eStar Books. LLC, 2012. (Originally published 1939) Kindle E- Book Location Page 1 of 95-1%
3. Sitterson, Aubrey. Skald. Episode 3. (2015, April, 12). Retrieved from http://skald.podomatic.com/
4. Sitterson, Aubrey. Skald. Episode 7. (2015, May, 6). Retrieved from http://skald.podomatic.com/
5. Moorcock, Michael. Fabulous Harbors. New York: Avon Books, 1995. Page 77.
6. Sitterson, Aubrey. Skald. Episode 1. (2015, April, 12). Retrieved from http://skald.podomatic.com/
7. Moorcock, Michael. Fabulous Harbors. New York: Avon Books, 1995. Page 75.
8. Sitterson, Aubrey. Skald. Episode 13. (2015, June, 18). Retrieved from http://skald.podomatic.com/
PODCAST LINKS
⦁ Aubrey Sitterson: http://aubreysitterson.com/tag/skald/
⦁ Skald @ Podomatic: http://skald.podomatic.com/
©September 2018, Anthony Perconti
Anthony Perconti lives and works in the hinterlands of New Jersey with his wife and kids. He enjoys good stories across many different genres and mediums.