The influence of Harrison’s ideas on Mirrlees’ work is immediately visible once you start looking at Harrison’s extensive and groundbreaking work on ritual, myth, religion, and art—sometimes startlingly so, as in Lud-in-the-Mist—and I think anyone seriously interested in Mirrlees, and in Lud, should try to dunk themselves pretty thoroughly in Harrison. Not because it’s important to validate Mirrlees’ work by affixing it to the respectable texts of a more famous writer, nor because it’s useful (or true) to imply that Mirrlees ‘lifted’ her ideas from someone else, but because it opens up passages to the subterranean chambers of ritual and folklore that give Lud so much of its resonance. To those more interested in Mirrlees’ other works, a reading of Lud alongside Harrison’s work also reveals the womens’ interplay of ideas and casts more light on the extraordinary relationship the two women maintained until Harrison’s death.

There will doubtless be quite a few Harrison posts up here over the next few months, but for now, I just want to post an excerpt from Harrison’s 1925 incredibly charming autobiography, Reminiscences of a Student’s Life. This section falls toward the end of the book, which is short enough to read in a single happy afternoon, and resonates quite clearly with the inner life of Lud-in-the-Mist.

I have elsewhere tried to show that Art is not the handmaid of Religion, but that Art in some sense springs out of Religion, and that between them is a connecting link, a bridge, and that bridge is Ritual. On that bridge, emotionally, I halt. It satisfies something within me that is appeased by neither Religion nor Art. A ritual dance, a ritual procession with vestments and lights and banners, move me as no sermon, no hymn, no picture, no poem has ever moved me; perhaps it is because a procession seems to me like life, like durée itself, caught and fixed before me. Only twice have I seen a ritual dance, and first the dance of the Seises before the high altar in the Cathedral at Seville. It was at Carnival time I saw it. I felt instantly that it was frankly Pagan. Its origin is, as the Roman Church frankly owns, “perdue dans la nuit des temps”—we can but conjecture that it took its rise in the dances of the Kouretes of Crete to Mother and Son. The dance was accompanied by a prayer to the setting sun, a prayer for fight and healing. The movements executed by six choristers are attenuated to a single formal step. It is decorous, even prim, like some stiff stylized shadow. But it is strangely moving in the fading fight with the wondrous setting of the high altar and the golden grille, and above all the sound of the harsh, plangent Spanish voices. Great Pan, indeed, is dead—his ghost still dances.

Only last year I saw a wondrous ritual procession, a marked contrast to the Seville dance. It is held at Echternach each year, on the Tuesday after Pentecost. It is, I think, the most living survival of the ritual dance to be seen in Europe. Thanks to the kindness of a Luxembourgoise lady, Madame Emil Mayerisch de Saint Hubert, I was able to observe it in every detail. The dancing procession is held now in honour of our Saxon saint, St.Willibrord, but obviously it goes back to magical days. The dancers muster at the bridge below the little town and, gathering numbers as they go, dance through the streets, halting here and there and ending in the Basilica. As the dance is magical, it is essential that the whole town should be traversed. The clergy are in attendance, any one and every one dances or rather leaps, for it is a jumping step; like the Cretan Kouretes they “leap for health and wealth.” I saw an old, old woman, scarcely able to walk, but she “lifted her foot in the dance.” I saw a woman with a sick baby in her arms, and she danced for healing; but most of all it was the young men, the Kouretes, who danced.

The ritual dance is all but dead, but the ritual drama, the death and the resurrection of the Year-Spirit, still goes on. I realised this when I first heard Mass celebrated according to the Russian, that is substantially the Greek rite. There you have the real enacting of a mystery—the mystery of the death and resurrection of the Year-Spirit which preceded drama. It is hidden, out of sight; the priest comes out from behind the golden gate to announce the accomplishment. It is the coming out of the Messenger in a Greek play to announce the Death and the Resurrection. The Roman Church has sadly marred its mystery. The rite of consecration is performed in public before the altar and loses thereby half its significance.

I mention these ritual dances, this ritual drama, this bridge between art and life, because it is things like these that I was all my life blindly seeking. A thing has little charm for me unless it has on it the patina of age. Great things in literature, Greek plays for example, I most enjoy when behind their bright splendours I see moving darker and older shapes. That must be my apologia pro vita mea.

Mr. Swanwick has written a short biography of Mirrlees, Hope-in-the-Mist, that collects more information about her than any other public source to date and which includes an extended version of his wonderful “Lexicon of Lud,” a great introduction by Neil Gaiman, and an extraordinary frontispiece by Charles Vess. Its print run has sold out, alas, but it can currently be got used from a few booksellers online. He’s also written a series of blog entries on Mirrlees and her work, and his Mirrlees biography was preceded by a couple of shorter biographical essays as well.

Mr. Gaiman has written a wonderful introduction to Lud-in-the-Mist (and another to Hope-in-the-Mist) as well as posting a handful of journal entries mentioning her work. I get the sense that his steady references to Mirrlees over the years are the single biggest contributor to the relative popularity in the last decade or so of Lud-in-the-Mist, which is finally reaching a wider readership. I’m more grateful for his advocacy of Mirrlees and her work than I can say.

My thanks to both men!

To date, Mirrlees remains all but unknown in the literary world. There are a few stray academic articles that deal with her work (only two of much substance, both by Woolf scholar Julia Briggs) floating around, along with a lot of informal appreciations written by fantasy writers and readers. There’s a slowly growing Wikipedia article and another article on the Feminist SF wiki — and, as of this month, there’s a slender book on Mirrlees’ “extraordinary career and mysterious life” written by SF novelist Michael Swanwick.

None of these texts, valuable as many of them are, present a sustained analysis of Mirrlees’ work or of her position within the literary and cultural circles in which she moved. Some of the essays on Lud-in-the-Mist are excellent, and Swanwick’s book provides a small though precious horde of biographical details from letters and other archival documents, but I think Mirrlees’ work deserves more.

Furthermore, although I’m working on my own Mirrlees project—a master’s thesis on the uses of art, history, and transcendence in Lud—I’m well aware that there’s far too much for any single person to do. One of the most promising things about the current version of the web is that it’s very easy to collect and interlink information—and the cost of publication is tiny. In the process of researching my thesis, I’ve learned far more about Mirrlees’ work and cultural milleu than I’ll ever be able to use in a single article or thesis, and I know there are others out there working, quietly, on similar projects.

My aim here is to build a central place in which information on Mirrlees can be collected, analyzed, and discussed. Not because centralization is intrinsically better, but without a central list of resources, I fear that the efforts of our small community of readers and enthusiasts will spread so thinly as to be invisible. If you’re interested in contributing, please do send in relevant links and leads, and stick around as our discussions begin to develop. (Eventually, I’d love to publish some guest posts as well.)

Here we go.