Pre-Tolkien Fantasy #1: Three Lines of Old French

Here’s a thing I sometimes forget: Not all fantasy fiction involves a protagonist casting magic missile or swinging a sword at scaly and vastly larger foe.

The first story I read for the challenge was “Three Lines of Old French,” by Abraham Merritt. You can tell it’s clearly a fantasy, because it appeared in A. Merritt’s Fantasy Magazine. See? Fantasy is right there in the title. This was a reprint magazine, and clever naming aside, Abraham Merritt was almost certainly not the editor, as he had passed away 6 years before the first issue went to press. Although, that would be some delicious meta fantasy if he did edit it from the other side of the veil. Regardless, It only lasted 5 issues.

Also, I’ve always meant to read some of Merritt’s work, and the Pre-Tolkien Challenge offered a perfect opportunity.

“Three Lines of Old French” concerns a dreamlike, otherworldly experience had by a shell-shocked soldier in World War I. The soldier in question is on night guard duty, and he’s lost in thought. He sees two dead soldiers who have fallen on some barbed wire upon being shot. The barbed wire keeps them half standing, and now they dance as bombs explode around them. It’s too dangerous to retrieve their bodies (see the no-man’s-land scene in Wonder Woman for context of that kind of trench warfare.) This image is repeated during the story, and even got the illustration in the magazine. You can see a cropped portion above this very article. Don’t be disappointed when you find out that this grisly image is not the focus of the story. While thinking upon the atrocities around him, he slips into a trance and heads out on a mind trip/astral voyage thing.

I won’t dive into this otherworldly experience, but the story’s main question is, “Did the soldier actually go on that fantastic voyage, or not?”

So no bow and arrows or horseback riding, but it’s definitely fantasy, and it was an enjoyable read.

One other thing that stuck out to me was the story’s frame. Before diving into the soldier’s story, there’s a conversation between a surgeon and A. Merritt. The surgeon is the one who tells A. Merritt the story, who is now just relating it to us as he heard it. I don’t think I see this device being used too often these days. It didn’t bother me in the slightest, but I can see how it could delay getting to the meat of a tale.

I guess this sort of tale might be called “magical realism” today? I don’t know, everybody who uses that term around me is a hipster, and I can’t be bothered to google it.