This annotated bibliography was for another of my St. Andrews Uni assignments. Some of these sources were used to write the short story featured in my last post, The Talisman of Aubaum:
https://brologue.net/2024/12/05/the-talisman-of-aubaum/
Citation style is Chicago. Enjoy!
1. Introduction
What follows is the final cut of sources that illustrate a setting for a story I’m writing, as well as its main character, Courier B2-1, (herein “The Courier”). In a word: The Board is my Discworld tribute act. It’s a chess-themed world of fantasy, yet not unlike our own world, with the key difference that magic – “narrative causality” – is a universal fundamental force (like gravity). In this story, however, the idea of magic has been lost to the past. For example, if two sons set out to save the princess from her captor, and die in the process, then if the third one succeeds, then to anyone alive, that’s just a coincidence, because no-one has rediscovered the laws of narrative causality.
Politically, the Board is a mostly recovered post-apocalyptic civilisation that has unknowingly sleepwalked into a familiar social order – feudalism. The time period is an abstracted analogue of our historical transition from feudalism to merchant capitalism.
This annotated bibliography has been split into two parts: the first part will explore the Courier – his character, his job, his place on the Board; then we will zoom out and look at the society the Courier lives in.
2.1 Trickster, Messenger, Courier, Dwarf
Levinson, Richard and William Link, writers. Columbo. Season 1, episode 4, “Death Lends a Hand.” Directed by Bernard Kowalski, featuring Peter Falk, Robert Culp, and Patricia Crowley. Aired October 6, 1971, in broadcast syndication. Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, 2004, DVD.
Though not the first to be broadcast, this episode introduces Columbo’s (Falk) character to new viewers by contrasting his mannerisms to the killer. Everything Columbo is, Brimmer (Culp) is not. Columbo often deploys a bumbling, layman persona to trick witnesses and suspects into revealing more than they let on; Brimmer projects arrogance and confidence.
I’ve described my Courier as a ‘temerous Columbo,’ but there’s one major difference I must account for. Columbo is a cop, and this gives him the power to move between, investigate, and inquire about, areas and persons of interest that would be impossible for ordinary folk. This is a power the Courier cannot leverage through the same means. They do, however, present an anomaly to the people they interact with. If one assumes the state has approvedthis arrangement, then the Courier appears to be connected to a greater political power who could persuade the King to make an exception. Thus, one might let their guard down around the Courier, and tell them things that wouldn’t be said to a member of an equal or superior caste; in every other aspect, the Courier appears as powerless, or dimwitted, as any member of their caste, to apply any useful information with effect. On the other hand, more careful folk might take every effort to ignore the Courier. Would they – like Columbo – find a way in by badgering that person’s other connections?
Gran, Sara, “More about Columbo-as-Trickster.” The Abbott Gran Old Tyme Medicine Show! (blog), May 24, 2011, https://abbottgran.wordpress.com/2011/05/24/more-about-columbo-as-trickster/
A brief commentary on the court jester in European mythology – related, but not synonymous with, the trickster archetype. Jesters lack the executive powers of a monarch, and this powerlessness is precisely what allows a jester and their comedy act to serve as a monarch’s conduit for unsavoury truths.
Gran writes that both tricksters and jesters “tend to give us what we need. Which of course, is exactly what Columbo delivers to his murderers.” Her idea that we each have ‘murderer’ and ‘detective’ personas evokes doppelgangers and liminal states (i.e. being between castes in a feudal society). I think that Brimmer was, as Gran puts it, “enslaved to appearances and societal approval.” While powerful, he was powerless to act against Columbo and his tricks.
Would a Pawn in this society, clad in the trappings of the royal post, not be seen by others as a jester-like figure? The Courier is betwixt and between being enslaved and being free; between no power in dialogue, and armed with the words to change their world. Does their ‘act’ involve bringing cultural prejudices into reality and subverting them? If Pawns are ‘not seen and not heard,’ is the Courier invisible until they declare their presence?
Heffner, Ray L. 1976. “The Messengers in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra.” ELH 43 (2): 154-162. https://doi.org/10.2307/2872469.
Heffner analyses Shakespeare’s use of messengers in Antony and Cleapatra. They’re characters as much as they are a device – a means by which Shakespeare could sew together the plot threads in Rome, Egypt, Athens, and Parthia. It’s only through messengers that Mark Antony appears present in four places at once. It’s only through messengers that we exit our reality, stage left, and enter the reality of the play, where we accept that dramatic actions cause time to literally expand and contract as required. Shakespeare’s messengers allowed him to keep the drama confined to the same space as any of his other plays, and likewise expand the inner world further than most.
Because of stagecraft, even when the messenger’s journey is instantaneous, we do not question the actual time elapsed. I can take Heffner’s research in a fantasy-oriented direction: What if we reinterpreted the play as a fantasy, where some messengers really can move from Rome to Egypt in an instant? What if, in the messenger’s reality, time appears to pass normally, until they reach their destination and find that little real time has actually elapsed? How might other characters explain the cause of this – the gods, their own magic, demonic possession, and so on?
Stone, J.W.M, editor. The Inland Posts (1392-1672), First edition (London, UK: Christie’s-Robinson Lowe, 1987)
A collection of events recorded by the inland posts, from the Middle Ages through the reign of Charles II. In his introduction, the author clarifies that most of the events documented are from domestic posts (i.e. posting houses, with documents made by postmasters published elsewhere. It’s not comprehensive, but it does give us a unique window into the ordinary jobs that the average messenger carried out. It’s also not surprising to find that many of these records concern debts – be that issuing them, or repaying them.
Some historical events were recorded as they unfolded: One entry, dated 20th September 1649 details an “Act against Unlicensed & Scandalous Books and Pamphlets, and for the better regulating of printing;” another, some six months later, states “As affairs now stand, it is safe and fit that the office of Postmaster shall be in the sole power and disposal of Parliament.”
While this book serves as a reference for the everyday items a courier might be expected to deliver in my world, we don’t get much in the way of the postal system itself. Without Beale, this book would not be enough to create a world with a post that accurately emulates the time period.
Beale, Philip. A History of the Post in England from the Romans to the Stuarts, First edition (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 1998).
An expansive history book, Beale’s work fills us in on what was out of scope for Stone: what was it like to be a messenger in situ?
Across this 1000+ year span, no technology could deliver mail as efficiently as a horse and cart (though when delivering in bulk, oxen were more common until the invention of the horse collar), and paper only became widely available starting in the 15th century. Likewise, up until the industrial revolution, couriers either passed their message or cargo onto another messenger at the nearest post stage (placed every 8 1/3 miles), or, since every third stage doubled as an inn, made the journey personally.
Were my fantasy world to have similar infrastructure, then the Courier would certainly become a recognisable face at the stages. In their reality, they might take weeks to deliver something, the laws of narrative causality determine that they show up at the next inn precisely when the story needs them to – almost instantly. Does the Courier move a character-driven plot – or, does a character-driven plot move them?
Fisher, Mark. The Weird and the Eerie (Repeater/Penguin Random House, 2017)
Fisher’s fine distinction between the weird and the eerie gives me a frame of reference to explore how I might keep the Courier’s powers a mystery. It’s been my experience with fantasy, that it’s very difficult to write about a supernatural phenomena, and not ascribe it some cause that would make sense by that fantasy world’s rules. For example, a fireball that grows and gently fizzles into nothing over a quiet woodland can be explained by saying a wizard did it. The wizard explains away the weirdness by giving agency to the fireball.
Likewise, the eerie – “something where there is nothing, nothing where there should be something” – is also slippery to define in fantasy. When the birds begin to gather in du Maurier’s story of the same name, what brings them out of being another part of the world’s scenery and into a character all their own? The human characters each assign a cause based on epistemic heuristics – “the very structures of explanation that had previously made sense of the world:” the weather; a Soviet plot; BBC radio broadcasts suggest something is being done, but as time goes on, “authority structures disintegrate… there is no more a strategy to deal with the birds than there is an adequate explanation of their behaviour.” Were The Birds a work of fantasy, perhaps someone might suggest that the local witch was controlling them. How would du Maurier have developed the plot to rule this out?
The birds have implied agency, suggesting they attack with reason; the Courier in my story makes deliveries nearly instantaneously, and so other people in their life develop theories based on the Board’s authority structures. What form will those authority structures take? Is it possible to make the Courier’s powers eerie, in a universe where higher powers manifest, and narrative causality warps reality?
Pratchett, Terry. Hogfather. (HarperTorch, 1999), 74-5.
The Hogfather’s2 feats are possible because “Time [stops]. But duration [continues]… Somewhere behind the hours there was a place where the Hogfather rode…”
The narrator explains by way of metaphor: “When you diluted a glass of wine with a bathful of water you might have more liquid but you still had the same amount of wine.” My Courier doesn’t have the Hogfather’s agency. Time still appears to pass, but as if it’s borrowed a completely separate glass of wine from somewhere else. Duration stops, but time continues.
Reedy, Cara. “Dwarfism and Me,” YouTube video, 16 October 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmLvBfCBtHc
The video is a researched summary of prejudices that little people have faced. It is not an exhaustive, nor encyclopedic, history. Dwarfs have often been fetishised as objects of entertainment for their anatomy, be that in Vaudeville or midget villages, or even as commodities: there’s evidence of attempts to breed little people through eugenics, as well as cash offers from showmen, as though they were property. The history of dwarfism is a history of disability – and it’s one where average-height people have had more of a say in their bodily autonomy.
Getting the Courier’s character right is the most important element of this story. The non-dwarfism audience should see and empathise with examples of microaggressions the Courier suffers, but these should be seen from the POV of others. Microaggressions need to be understood by those who do not suffer them. Likewise, it should be those others who patronise the Courier – not the narrator, and certainly not the Courier themselves. As writers, we often believe we’re writing a story for a different audience, but blindness to one’s biases may result in a story for an audience similar to one’s own background.
2.2 Expanding the Board’s Myths and Beliefs
Cazaux, Jean-Louis and Rick Knowlton. A World of Chess: Its Developments and Variations through Centuries and Civilizations, (Jefferson, NC: MacFarland & Co., 2017)
Chess history spans back well over a thousand years; Cazaux and Knowlton offer its most contemporary account. They note that the historical record offers us a number of interpretations on who and what the game of kings was created for – tactical training, teaching rulers cause and effect, a form of gambling, or, at the very least, a feudal allegory. On the latter, several writers across 12th century Europe, independent of each other, interpreted the game’s pieces and rules as being symbolic – a moral allegory instructing us of our dedicated place in life. The historian H. J. R. Murray collectively referred to these tales as the Moralities (Murray, 1913). Of note is his translation of the Pawn’s movement and promotion abilities3: “Their move is straight, except when they take anything: so also the poor man does well so long as he keeps from ambition… how hard it is for a poor man to deal rightly when he is raised above his proper station.”
The ‘social inequality myth’ in my story involves a chessboard, which would be to the average Board inhabitant what Pictish stones are to us – conceived by a society that no longer exists, and meanings and purposes lost to time.
Graeber, David, and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (S.L: Penguin Books, 2021)
This book is not about the origins of inequality, but rather the history that led to the stories we tell ourselves about social inequality – in other words, “how did we get stuck?” Exploring archaeological finds such as settlements, burials, genomic data, and turning to politics, philosophy, history, and economic thoery, the crux of their counterargument is that that humans have always been capable of forming different social orders since prehistoric times. If we’re “stuck” in a capitalist mode of production, then this time period we’re all living through is an anomaly. Most, if not all discussion on inequality today leads back to Hobbes’ Leviathan or Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, but this is only parroting a caricature of the gamut of possibilities we can imagine.
Despite all technological advances, we are no more exceptional than those who followed the retreating ice and snow across Doggerland ten thousand years ago. I aim to explore this in my story by way of allegory. Why have people on the Board become stuck in a feudal mode of production? How will they unstick themselves through the rediscovery of magic? What shall surpass feudalism? I hope readers might see in the Board’s predicaments a reflection of our own.
Bibliography
1. Murray, Harold J. R, A History of Chess. 1913. Available online at: https://archive.org/stream/AHistoryOfChess/A_History_of_Chess_djvu.txt
2. Feinmann, Gary, Reframing Historical Rhymes from the Dawn of Everything. Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution. 2022. Available online at: https://doi.org/10.21237/C7clio0057267
Post-submission, I realise a passage from the Graeber and Wengrow annotation is missing a paragraph stating that they have been criticised for cherry-picking evidence. I cited Feinmann’s article. I could’ve sworn I kept it in…
- Image: Remi Mathis, CC-BY-SA 3.0 ↩︎
- Discworld’s analogue to our Father Christmas. ↩︎
- The Queen moved and captured one square diagonally; she did not combine the powers of Bishop and Rook until the 15th century, when an Italian variant – “Mad Queen’s chess” – spread across Europe like wildfire. ↩︎
Chessworld: An Annotated Bibliography of the Courier and Their World, ‘The Board’ is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.