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.

• Jo Walton, on Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell:
  

  Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is clearly written from an alternate universe where the great fantasy-defining genre-starting book of the twentieth century, after Dunsany, was not Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings but Hope Mirlees Lud-in-the-Mist. It’s not a great deal like Lud-in-the-Mist, but it’s much closer to it than it is to anything else, or than Lud-in-the-Mist is to anything else.

• John Clute, also on Jonathan Strange (temporary archive, do not bookmark):
  

  What Gaiman was pretty clearly not quite getting around to saying in clear was that, in his opinion, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell was the finest English novel of the fantastic since Hope Mirrlees’s great Lud-in-the-Mist (1926), which is almost certainly the finest English fantasy about the relationship between England and the fantastic yet published (a personal communication from Gaiman has confirmed this sense that Mirrlees was very much on his mind).

Also very useful, though encountered later:

• If I’d seen Elizabeth Hand’s review of Jonathan Strange, it would have increased the urgency of my search for a copy of Lud:
  

  However, the book to which Jonathan Strange owes its most obvious debt is Hope Mirrlees’s sui generis (not anymore, I guess) Lud-in-the-Mist, one of the greatest fantasy novels ever written. I suspect Gaiman’s canny use of “seventy years” rather than a hundred serves to ringfence Lud, a novel he much admires and which was first published in 1926. Mirrlees’s novel suffuses Clarke’s like a blush: the melancholic tone; the notion of antiquarian Mysteries coming to light and changing the nature of the world; the echoes of sad airs played upon antique instruments; the mournful conception of Faerie and its inhabitants. Clarke’s gentleman with the thistle-down hair seems a direct descendent of Mirrlees’s Duke Aubrey, just as the characterization of Lud‘s protagonist, Master Nathaniel Chanticleer, appears to have influenced Messers Norrell and Strange.

• Catherynne Valente’s review of Lud, which touches on most of the things I love best about the book:
  

  If Lord of the Rings is the big, bombastic Grandfather of modern fantasy, Lud is obviously the quiet, unassuming Grandma who showed everyone how to grow wild mint out back and jitterbug in the kitchen. In fact, given that Mirrlees published in 1926, some time before Dr. T’s opus, I would not be at all surprised if the Shire was full of Granny Hope’s patented mint. Look carefully at any work of fantasy in which urban worldbuilding, provincial farmlife, idyllic villages, or fanciful names figure largely, and you’ll see Mirrlees’ ghost peeping through the pages. She could even be called the mother of interstitial literature, since Lud combines the fantasy genre with horror and of all things, procedural crime drama and political philosophy.

• Michael Dirda’s superb essay on Lud for the Barnes & Noble Review:
  

  Like so many fantasies, Mirrlees’s book is at heart an exploration of humankind’s pervasive sense of rift, the unshakeable feeling that Things Aren’t as They Should Be. The world, our manner of life, or even the fundamental nature of the universe is somehow…wrong. Using both whimsy and mystery, Lud-in-the-Mist looks hard at the human condition and suggests how a sick society might be healed, how our divided selves gradually be made whole.

And here’s the first chapter. Have a taste.

The thing that the scanned image can’t convey is that the cover paper is tissue-thin, and the gold is a beautiful dull metallic color. It’s also, as Julia Briggs has pointed out, the same paper the Woolfs used as endpapers in the Hogarth Press first edition of Jacob’s Room.

Holding Paris at the Bodleian was such an extraordinary experience not only because I quite like the poem and am so interested in Mirrlees, but also because Virginia Woolf hand-set the poem herself, bound it in this delicate paper, and then hand-corrected the final copies. The copy I examined came in a little box with a receipt, also written in Virginia’s handwriting, for a quarterly subscription to Hogarth Press’s literary output. Benjamin was right, I think; as much time as I’ve spent doing academic research on Mirrlees (and Woolf), there’s nothing quite like holding the artifact in your hands.

The Free State of Dorimare was a very small country, but, seeing that it was bounded on the south by the sea and on the north and east by mountains, while its centre consisted of a rich plain, watered by two rivers, a considerable variety of scenery and vegetation was to be found within its borders. Indeed, towards the west, in striking contrast with the pastoral sobriety of the central plain, the aspect of the country became, if not tropical, at any rate distinctly exotic. Nor was this to be wondered at, perhaps; for beyond the Debatable Hills (the boundary of Dorimare in the west) lay Fairyland. There had, however, been no intercourse between the two countries for many centuries.

The social and commercial centre of Dorimare was its capital, Lud-in-the-Mist, which was situated at the confluence of two rivers about ten miles from the sea and fifty from the Elfin Hills.

Lud-in-the-Mist had all the things that make an old town pleasant. It had an ancient Guild Hall, built of mellow golden bricks and covered with ivy and, when the sun shone on it, it looked like a rotten apricot; it had a harbour in which rode vessels with white and red and tawny sails; it had flat brick houses—not the mere carapace of human beings, but ancient living creatures, renewing and modifying themselves with each generation under their changeless antique roofs. It had old arches, framing delicate landscapes that one could walk into, and a picturesque old graveyard on the top of a hill, and little open squares where comic baroque statues of dead citizens held levees attended by birds and lovers and insects and children.

It had, indeed, more than its share of pleasant things; for, as we have seen, it had two rivers.

Also, it was plentifully planted with trees.

—Lud-in-the-Mist

I’ve just posted the first chapter of Lud-in-the-Mist so that those of you who haven’t read it can get a sense of the book’s tone and rhythm. There’s some angst about the novel’s copyright status—it was published four years after the magical cutoff for U.S. exemption and was originally published in the UK and has been in the public domain and then out again—so I’ve held off posting any till now.

Thing is, there are several small presses and print-on-demand outfits selling awful (ugly, typo-ridden, ill-printed) copies on Amazon without troubling themselves about copyright, so I’ve decided to publish this chapter here and suggest that you purchase the authorized and very reasonably printed edition published by Gollancz in the UK for a good reading experience.