Deryni Rising by Katherine Kurtz or How to Suppress Women’a Writing – The Fantasy Edition

I’m over at Galactic Journey again – for the second time this month and a third article is coming later this month, which must be a new record for me – to talk about Deryni Rising by Katherine Kurtz, a novel which was incredibly influential and yet isn’t remembered nearly as well as it should be.

For the actual review, head over to Galactic Journey. If you want to know why this novel was so influential – which I obviously couldn’t discuss from the 1970 POV of Galactic Journey – read on.

In order to discuss why this novel was so influential, we must take a look at the history of fantasy and the state of the fantasy genre in 1970.

Now a lot of common knowledge about the history of fantasy is actually wrong. There are still people who believe that J.R.R. Tolkien created fantasy out of whole cloth in 1955, completely ignoring that there was a there was plenty of fantasy fiction – though they did not yet use that term – published in pulp magazines like Weird Tales, Unknown, Strange Stories, Fantastic, etc… from the 1920s onwards. There was of course what would eventually become known as sword and sorcery, penned by Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, C.L. Moore, Clark Ashton Smith, Henry Kuttner and a few others. There was also a lot of what we would now calls urban fantasy, though again the term did not yet exist. There was quite a bit of humorous fantasy – Greek or Norse Gods in the modern world and the like. There was a lot of horror – genre boundaries were a lot more fluid at the time – both of the cosmic and more traditional gothic variety and even some early folk horror. There was a thriving subgenre of stories about haunted machinery – I review a great example here.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, there was a thriving tradition of ghost stories. There were also authors writing secondary world fantasy, often drawing on British and Irish mythology such as Lord Dunsany, Mervyn Peake, E.R. Eddison, Hope Mirless and a certain J.R.R. Tolkien who wrote a novel, initially aimed at young readers, called The Hobbit. Though there wasn’t really such a thing as a fantasy genre, not yet, there were just writers doing their own thing.

During and particularly after WWII, science fiction ruled supreme and the various fantasy subgenres mostly faded, especially once Unknown ceased publication in 1943 and Weird Tales in 1954. There still was fantasy, mostly of the heroic sort, published during this time – The Tritonian Ring by L. Sprague De Camp, The Broken Sword and Three Hearts and Three Lions by Poul Anderson, The Dying Earth by Jack Vance, but these works were few and far between.

Then in 1955, J.R.R. Tolkien published The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Tolkien wasn’t creating a genre and I would consider him in the tradition of writers like Lord Dunsany, E.R. Eddison, Mervyn Peake or Hope Mirless who were just doing their own thing. The Lord of the Rings was well regarded and those who were open to fantastic fiction generally loved the trilogy, but it’s influence was slow to spread, simply because it was a hardcover trilogy published in the UK, so particularly many American readers never even knew it existed. Neither did German readers, because Lord of the Rings was not translated into German until 1969.

Meanwhile, from the late 1950s onward, there was a slowly simmering revival of the still nameless sword and sorcery genre. There was a resurgence of interest in the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, which were never intended to be fantasy, but increasingly feelt like fantasy by 1960. Fritz Leiber returned to Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Michael Moorcock created Elric of Melniboné and editors Cele Goldsmith Lalli in the US and John Carnell in the UK were open to publishing such works.

Then in 1965/66 the double impact of the unauthorised US paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings and the Lancer reprints of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories with additional material by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter sent the simmering fantasy revival into overdrive. Both were enormously successful, proved that fantasy was a viable genre and paved the way for more fantasy on the bookshelves.

The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series brought a lot of fantasy from the first half of the twentieth century back into print – in colourful and affordable paperback edition. But the fantasy revival of the late 1960s and early 1970s also brought us a lot of sword and sorcery. The works from the first sword and sorcery boom of the 1930s came back into print and new authors entered the genre. Some of these new authors were doing new things with the old tropes – writers like Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelazny, Tanith Lee, Joanna Russ, Karl Edward Wagner, Charles Saunders. Others were penning Conan pastiches – the infamous Clonans – by the truckload. Some of these Conan pastiches were pretty good like Brak the Barbarian by John Jakes, others were a lot of fun such as Kothar, Barbarian Swordsman by Gardner F. Fox, others were quite bad and some of them like Gor novels by John Norman (which are technically sword and planet, not that it matters much) quickly wandered into BDSM erotica territory.

There also were some fantasy novels coming out during this period that were not sword and sorcery, for example The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle, A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin (both 1968), The Face in the Frost by John Bellairs and The Unicorn Girl by Michael Kurland (both 1969). You also had Thomas Burnett Swann’s mytholical fantasy in the 1960s. What we did not have, however, was a flood of Tolkien imitators. Both The Face in the Forst and The Unicorn Girl show some Tolkien influence, but they’re very much their own thing.

In fact, the glut of Tolkien inspired big fat fantasy did not start until 1977, when The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks was published to great success and opened the floodgates for epic fantasy boom that smothered everything else in its path. Tolkien cannot really be blamed for any of this. He never set out to create a genre and besides, he was dead by 1977. Terry Brooks also can’t be blamed, because The Sword of Shannara initially was just one blatantly Tolkien inspired book. Maybe you could blame Judy-Lyn and Lester Del Rey who – inspired by the massive success of The Sword of Shannara – flooded the market with epic fantasy.  Or you could blame rising paper costs and advances in paperback printing technology which made 400 or 500 page paperbacks possible and also appear like a great value for your money.

But whoever is at fault, the fantasy genre got a lot less interesting and varied in the 1980s, which also coincides with me becoming a serious SFF reader. When I started reading SFF and English books, the sword and sorcery boom was on its last legs, though you could still find sword and sorcery at the bookstore. However, big epic fantasy books in lengthy series by authors like Terry Brooks, Raymond E. Feist, David Eddings or Mercedes Lackey were dominating the genre. I did read some of them – I do have quite a bit of Feist in my personal library for some reason – but overall I preferred sword and sorcery to epic fantasy – and I definitely knew the difference, though I have no idea where I picked this up – and science fiction to both.

Which brings me to the actual topic of this post, Katherine Kurtz’s Deryni series. The Deryni books were on the shelves or rather in the spinner rack at Buchhandlung Storm (the “trusty import bookstore” mentioned in my Galactic Journey articles. They closed for good last year, though they have been a shadow of their former glorious self for a long time), when I started reading SFF in earnest. I did read some of them, including Deryni Rising, and remember liking them – more than I enjoyed some of the male written epic fantasy novels of the same era – but I mentally classified Katherine Kurtz as one of the many authors who came in with the epic fantasy boom kicked off by The Sword of Shannara.

When I spotted Deryni Rising in the list of upcoming books for Galactic Journey, I thought, “Wait a minute, this was published in 1970, i.e. it predated Sword of Shannara by seven years? I though it was from the 1980s. And it was originally a Ballantine Adult Fantasy novel?” Note that my personal copy had a typical Darrell K. Sweet 1980s epic fantasy cover, not the much cooler psychedelic Ballantine Adult Fantasy cover.

Since I remembered enjoying Deryni Rising, I agreed to review for Galactic Journey, even though I hadn’t read it since I was a little older than the boy king Kelson Haldane. Of course, revisiting books you read as a teenager always carries its share of risks – the suck fairy is a thing, after all. However, it turns that Deryni Rising not only held up, but it also was a lot more pioneering and influential than I realised when I first read it.

So did Katherine Kurtz kick off the Tolkienesque fantasy boom seven years before Terry Brooks? Not really. In her introduction, Katherine Kurtz does list The Lord of the Rings as one of her inspirations – as would pretty much everybody writing fantasy in 1970 – but Deryni Rising isn’t particularly Tolkienesque.

However, Katherine Kurtz did something even more remarkable. She pretty much invented the modern historical fantasy genre, fourteen years before Guy Gavriel Kay came onto the scene.  Not that there wasn’t historical fantasy before 1970 – Robert E. Howard explicitly wrote the Kull and Conan stories as history with the serial numbers filed off, while the Bran Mak Morn and Solomon Kane explicitly have historical settings. Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword and Three Hearts and Three Lions are historical fantasy, as are Thomas Burnett Swann’s works from the 1960s. And Mary Stewart’s Arthurian novel The Crystal Cave came out earlier in 1970. However, Deryni Rising is a lot closer to later historical fantasy works like the A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin, The World of the Five Gods by Lois McMaster Bujold or the works of Guy Gavriel Kay.

Particularly the similarities between A Song of Ice and Fire and the Deryni books are notable. Both are set in an alternate Britain, though Martin has seven kingdoms and Kurtz eleven. Both deal with court intrigue and royal succession struggles – Deryni Rising is basically about making sure that the fourteen-year-old heir to a murdered king will actually survive his own coronation. Two later books in the Deryni series also have weddings which end in blood and tears with the bride and respectively the bride and groom murdered at the altar.

A Song of Ice and Fire is a lot more graphic with regards to violence and sex than Deryni Rising, where the various assassinations happen either off page or are very bloodless – the bloodiest scene in the novel is probably when young Kelson has to pierce his own hand with a needle – which is duly disinfected beforehand – to unlock the magic potential resting inside him. As for sex, Deryni Rising has a single sex scene between the villainess sorceress Charissa and a traitor at court who sabotages the heroes at every turn. The door is firmly closed after the treacherous nobleman sits down on Charissa’s bed – though Charissa dryly notes that he had his uses, once she murders him after he failed to win a duel. I saw a modern review which called Deryni Rising YA. It’s not, but I can see how it might feel like YA to a modern reader due to the relative lack of sex and graphic violence and because the central character Kelson (though I wouldn’t really say he’s the main protagonist, because we spend more time in the head of his protector Alaric Morgan) is only fourteen.

Deryni Rising is very much a book about love, but it’s not romantic or sexual love, but the mutual affection between Kelson and his general and protector Alaric Morgan, the half Deryni Duke of Corwyn, which for me at least was what made rereading the novel so enjoyable. What can I say, I am a sucker for supportive and loving families, whether biological or found. Morgan’s relationship to Kelson is also influenced Morgan’s love – and yes, that word is explicitly used in the text – for his king Brion Haldane, father of Kelson. Morgan himself notes that Brion was father and brother to him, though rereading the book as an adult, I couldn’t help but notice that there was at least a hint of romantic attraction there as well. Morgan does get married in one of the later books, to the widow of a nobleman executed for treason, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.

Both A Song of Ice and Fire are also set in low magic worlds. There are no dwaves, elves, fae, etc… nor dragons and White Walkers in the Deryni books. There are only humans and humans with magical abilities, the titular Deryni. And the Deryni abilities are closer to the psionic abilities that science fiction was full of from the 1940s well into the 1970s and beyond. In many ways, the Deryni are closer to Marvel’s X-Men of the Claremont era, down to being feared and hated for abilities, than the likes of Gandalf, Elric or the sorcerers that Conan tangles with. Though I couldn’t draw the X-Men comparison in the Galactic Journey article, because Giant Size X-Men N0. 1 won’t come out until 1975. Was Chris Claremont familiar with the Deryni books? I have no idea, though it’s certainly possible. Is George R.R. Martin familiar with the Deryni books? It’s likely, sind Martin and Katherine Kurtz came up at around the same time.

The depiction of magic in the Deryni books is also interesting, because this isn’t the dark and dangerous magic of Robert E. Howard nor the powerful but vaguely defined magic of Tolkien. Deryni magic is very ritualised and systematised – long before magic systems were common. However, Deryni magic isn’t a Brandon Sanderson style hard magic system, probably because a lot of the modern fantasy magic systems have their root in Dungeons & Dragons, which didn’t yet exist in 1970.

Instead, Deryni magic is based on the ritual magic practiced by real world occult groups like the Rosicrucians or the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, except that it really works (no offence to any Rosicrucians or members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn reading this, but at least I have never been able to make any of this work). This does make sense, because occultism is the closest thing to “real” magic you can find in our distinctly unmagical world. I certainly have a nice selection of books on occultism and ritual magic in my collection for reference – in spite of anything new age or occult being deeply frowned upon in (West) Germany’s own version of the Satanic Panic. As a result, I hid away my occultism books until well into adulthood. And when I went into a New Age shop in Seven Dials in London (now long gone) with my Mom in tow, I told my Mom when she asked what sort of shop it was, “It’s a book shop.” Well, it wasn’t wrong – they did have a lot of books. And Mom was quite entranced by the crstals and incense burners and Tarot cards, while having no idea what they were.

One thing that is vaguely Tolkienesque about Deryni Rising are the various rhyming spells. In fact, I had forgotten how many rhyming verses there were in the novel. What is more, the whole middle chunk is taken up by the characters trying to decypher the poem which explains how to unlock Kelson Haldane’s inborn magical abilities, which he will need to defeat the villainess Charissa and survive his own coronation.

Ironically, Deryni Rising is the book that Ursula K. Le Guin skewers in her famous 1973 essay “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie”. Now I always had my issues with that essay, starting with the title, because from a German point of view “Poughkeepsie” sounds very much like some kind of fantasy realm as do many other American placenames derived from indigenous languages. I’m also pretty sure that when I first read that essay, I had no idea where Poughkeepsie was and that it was a town in the US.

However, until someone mentioned it in the New Edge Sword and Sorcery Discord server, I had completely forgotten that Deryni Rising was the negative example cited by Le Guin in “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie”. In fact, Le Guin considers Deryni Rising not fantasy, because the language is too modern for her taste, especially compared to the rest of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. Now I respect Ursula K. Le Guin as writer and critic, but I rarely agree with her opinions and I definitely don’t agree with her in the case of Deryni Rising. Yes, occasionally some overly modern terms creep in what was after all a debut novel, but it does not detract from the whole. I also find that I enjoyed Deryni Rising more than I ever enjoyed Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, which never did much for me, probably because I was too old when I first read it.

The influence of Deryni Rising and the rest of the Deryni series can be felt reverberating through speculative fiction until this day. Katherine Kurtz proved that there was a market for a more epic type of fantasy not written by J.R.R. Tolkien seven years before The Sword of Shannara came out, she pretty much created the historical fantasy genre and echoes of her work can be found in anything from A Song of Ice and Fire via Lois McMaster Bujold’s World of the Five Gods, Guy Gavriel Kay’s work, The Witcher stories and novels by Andrzej Sapkowski (which draw a lot on 1960s and 1970s fantasy mixed with East European myth and folkore) to Masters of the Universe, which was influenced a lot by the 1960s and 1970s SFF that the original creators read. I should probably do a post about that eventually.

As for why the Deryni novels by Katherine Kurtz, though influential and pioneering, are not nearly as well remembered as they should be, Kari Sperring offered an explanation in an article at Strange Horizons, which is the only critical appraisal of the Deryni novels I found aside from the Le Guin essay.  It’s the same old story. Women writers are forgotten more quickly than male writers, their contributions to the genre ignored, downplayed or attributed to me. Here’s a quote from Kari Sperring’s article:

Throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, [Katherine Kurtz] was popular and widely read. But at some point in the later 1990s, she began to slip from view within the genre. Modern accounts of historical fantasy focus on the men who followed her, notably Kay and Martin. A lot of current readers seem not to have heard of her at all.

It’s notable that a lot of the women fantasy of the 1970s and 1980s were fading and ignored by the 1990s (though the last Deryni novel to date came out in 2014 – completing a trilogy after an eight year gap). Also note what happened to Tanith Lee around the same time. However, Tanith Lee was just a little too strange and offbeat for an increasingly codified fantasy genre. Katherine Kurtz really isn’t. I find the Deryni books a lot more enjoyable than stuff like the Shannara series or The Wheel of Time, both of which are still very much around and discussed.

As it tends to happen to me, once I’d reread Deryni Rising for the Galactic Journey review, I continued to read onwards. I do have the second book in the first Deryni trilogy, Deryni Checkmate, but I don’t have the third, High Deryni. So I hopped over to Amazon only to realise that there is no print edition avaible, only an e-book edition. Which again illustrates the above point.

So do check out Deryni Rising and the rest of the series, if you haven’t read them already, because this is a pioneering that deserves more attention than it gets.