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"...a wonderful story. Michael Scott Rohan has conceived an interesting and
original fantasy concept. It is sure to gather a strong following."
Raymond E. Feist
"Rohan has created one of the major fantasy sequences of the 1980s, to stand
alongside Gene Wolfe's New Sun. This is one to satisfy the purists: strange beings,
magic powers and above all the living ice. With the Ice's purity and cruelty, smithcraft's
beauty and the story of Alv, this novel does not have everything; it just seems to have!
So much happens, but in a marvellously unhurried way. 'Pages turn as if by magic,' Jean
Auel; 'compelling reading.' Anne McCaffrey - need I say more?"
A Right Good Read series: Beyond the Looking Glass
West Yorkshire Library Services 1991
Awards
From the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts :
The 1991 William F. Crawford Award for the Best First Fantasy Novel, for the Winter
of the World trilogy.
The Winter of the World stories are set in a strange and hostile time, one of
the eras when the Great Ice spread out yet again from the polar caps, seeking to engulf
the world in its chill grip and scour it clean of contaminating life - and most of all the
first, and long forgotten, civilizations of men. But, as the Winter Chronicles record, men
were not wholly without friends; and they found in themselves strange and magical
abilities to help them survive and keep the lights burning against the encroaching dark.
Greatest among these was the working of metal to arcane effect, the power of smithcraft;
and the men in whom that power burned fiercest of all became the source of many legends,
the Mastersmiths of the Northlands.
Chiefest among the Chronicles is the tale of Elof, who rose from a nameless foundling
and serf to become a magesmith of ever-increasing art and power; and of the great skill,
great knowledge, great love and great folly of which his life was shaped, and the awesome
deeds he accomplished. How at first he fell into evil, was cleansed and, with the aid of
his fast friends and the strange figures who haunted him, undid his ill-doing; how with
those friends he sought a new home for his people across the breadth of a continent, and
found that in his quest he was also pursuing the girl he had long loved, bond-servant of
the Powers of Ice; and how he lost her once more, and went seeking her across the wide
oceans of the world to the ancient home of civilization, and there found the destiny of
the world in the balance; of these the first three books tell. And of how he won at last
the name of Elof Valantor, Elof of the Skilled Hand, mightiest of all magesmiths amid the
dark days of the Winter of the World.
But the world is shaped as much by commoner men as by the great, and at times even
lesser Masters could work extraordinary wonders, and hammer out destiny anew upon their
anvils, for the world and for themselves. And so their stories also are to be told....
The Winter of the World books have been my most popular so far. They’ve
been published in nine countries and eight languages, from Japan to Israel, and sold in
many more, from Australia and Canada to the Scandinavian countries and Finland. In several
they’ve hit bestseller lists, and in Britain have never been out of print in more
than ten years, except for the few months preparing for this year’s new edition.
That’s a particular pleasure to me, not just because I poured a lot of myself into
these books, and not just because of the money. It’s because I set out to
create a world whose atmosphere and nature struck a chord in me, in the same way as those
of the writers I most admired, Tolkien and Fritz Leiber among them. I set out to create
something I would want to read myself; and that so many other people across the world seem
to enjoy it is both encouraging and humbling.
Where it came from, and why, is a bit hard to say; there were so many ideas and
influences. The title, The Winter of the World, comes from the Icelandic historian
and mythographer Snorri Sturlason, referring to the Norse legend of the Fimbulvettr,
the Last Winter that is to envelop the world at the end of time. I’ve always
responded to the 'Matter of the North', not only the Norse myths but the less familiar
mythologies of Finland and Russia; I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know
them, probably due to the encyclopaedias in our family bookshelf, and especially the big
Larousse mythology my older sister brought home. But the world itself has always been with
me, in a sense, since I first heard of the Ice Ages (also at an age too early to remember)
and imagined those gigantic walls of winter, miles thick in places, advancing relentlessly
across the land with devastating weight.
Many parts of the world, Britain included, are still rising slowly, relaxing after that
weight has been removed. It always seemed to me to be a time for epics, a vast, turbulent
era of strife and change, a world scored by Wagner or Sibelius or Led Zeppelin. And the
more I found out about it - the way the habitable zones were crushed into a smaller
compass, and the equatorial zones actually became drastically hotter - the more it seemed
to be so. The glaciers drank up the very oceans, lowering the seas, exposing new land
along the continental shelves as fast as they covered what had been. This was a time when
legends could indeed be born. |
