The Fantasy Cycles of Clark Ashton Smith PART II: The Book of Hyperborea The Fantasy Cycles of Clark Ashton Smith PART II: The Book of Hyperborea By Ryan Harvey Copyright 2007 by New Epoch Press. All rights reserved. Legend says that after his exile from Iceland, Erik the Red voyaged to a frozen island and settled there in 982 C.E. Deciding not to scare away new settlers with an intimidating name like “Iceland,” he dubbed the place “Greenland.” We can scoff at Erik’s bit of dishonesty-in-advertising, and certainly any homesteaders who fell for his marketing ploy would have felt like cleaving Mr. The Red’s skull with a scramasax, but perhaps Erik knew something about Greenland’s deeper history: the lost chronicles that fantasy writer Clark Ashton Smith revealed in his stories about a far northern continent in its younger days before glaciers claimed it, when wizards and elder gods and wily thieves and greedy moneylenders crisscrossed its steamy jungles and ebony mountains and opulent cities. A vanished civilization known as…Hyperborea. Of Clark Ashton Smith’s three major fantasy series, Hyperborea had the worst sales record during his lifetime. Smith finished ten stories about the ancient continent, and most bounced back and forth from various magazines until they finally found homes. The majority ended up in Farnsworth Wright’s Weird Tales (sometimes after multiple tries), but others landed in ephemeral pulps or non-paying fanzines. Reading the Hyperborean stories today it is easy to understand why Clark Ashton Smith had such a burdensome time selling them: nowhere else in his canon does he so artificially elevate his prose style. Although the stories of Zothique swim in decadent and decaying imagery, Hyperborea drowns in sententious language that Smith uses for ironic effect. “The Coming of the White Worm” might rank as the most obtusely written of all his stories, and it only saw print after Smith considerably simplified the language. Posthumously, Hyperborea has gained stature among Smith’s works, and the stories appear frequently in anthologies. The continued popularity of the Hyperborea stories today comes from two factors: their links to H. P. Lovecraft’s famous “Mythos,” and their doses of grotesque ironic humor. Situating Hyperborea Exactly what, where, and when is Hyperborea? The concept originates with the Greeks; the word means “beyond the north wind.” Herodotus mentions Hyperborea as a land far to the north of mainland Greece, filled with joyous people who lived an Elysian existence under warm twenty-four hour sunshine. In some versions of the myth of Perseus, the hero seeks for the Gorgons after passing the land of the Hyperboreans. Smith includes little of this Grecian concept of Hyperborea except that of a northern land existing in a warm state, and borrows more from modern theories about the land. In the traditions of later literature, Hyperborea thrived coeval with the other mythic civilizations of Atlantis, Lemuria, and Mu (which all receive mention in Smith’s stories) that Helena Blavatsky promoted in Theosophy, a pan-religious gnostic movement she founded in 1875. Smith acknowledged his debt to Blavatsky’s bizarre occultism: Theosophy, as far as I can gather, is a version of esoteric Yoga prepared for western consumption, so I dare say its legendry must have some sort of basis in Oriental records. One can disregard the theosophy, and make good use of the stuff about elder continents, etc. I got my own ideas about Hyperborea, Poseidonis, etc. from such sources, and turned my imagination loose. (Letter to H. P. Lovecraft, 1 May 1933) In “Ubbo-Sathla,” Smith states that Hyperborea was “supposed to have corresponded roughly with modern Greenland, which had formerly been joined as a peninsula to the main continent.” The setting and geography agree with this assessment: unlike the other lost civilizations of Lemuria, Mu, and Atlantis, Hyperborea did not sink from sight but vanished under an advance of ice. It seems logical that the land mass still exists, and the glacier-covered island of Greenland, large enough to almost qualify as a continent, fills the Hyperborean bill. Smith mentions that the stories occur “in the last centuries before the onset of the Great Ice Age,” possibly meaning the last long interglacial period, the Eemian Interglacial (130,000-70,000 B.P.). The mention of mammals common to this epoch, such as saber-tooth cats, aurochs, and mammoths, further places the period as the recent Pleistocene, before the start of human civilization. However, in “Ubbo-Sathla,” Smith gives a different period in Earth’s history for Hyperborea: the Miocene Period, approximately twenty-three million years past, which concluded in a glacial advance. Dinosaurs, such as a Tyrannosaurus and an Archaeopteryx, appear in “The Seven Geases” alongside mentions of saber-tooth tigers and mammoths. With so many contradictions, it seems that locating Hyperborea in time serves little purpose. It exists in a n...