The Sharing Knife books: finding lessons there

My apologies to Lois McMaster Bujold, but I spent quite a bit of time reading her four Sharing Knife novels, which aren't short, and I'd like to muse some more about them.

The theme of the books is reconciliation. Here's Paul on that subject:
1 Corinthians 12:13 For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit. (All scripture quotations from the ESV.)

There is reconciliation even more important than two groups of people becoming reconciled to each other, though:
2 Corinthians 5:20 Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.

Getting your priorities right is illustrated.
In the fourth book, a wagon train is about to be attacked by a powerful malice, with its slaves. The Lakewalkers tell the farmers with them to run for cover. But some of them don't want to go.
"The wagons are all we have!" cried Grouse.
"You can't stop to defend things." (The Sharing Knife, Volume Four: Horizon. (New York: Eos, HarperCollins, 2009, p. 209. Grouse is a minor character. Dag is the one who answers him.)
Another man, a smith, is asked if he would rather save his wife or his anvil.

Mark 8:37 For what can a man give in return for his soul?
Luke 12:20 But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’

There is love and fidelity in marriage.
There are a number of happy married couples in the book, including the main characters, Dag and Fawn, but many others, some who have been married for a long time, like Fawn's parents, or Mari and Cattagus, are examples of long-term commitment, and unselfish love for another. (Mari is Dag's aunt, and, until he stopped patrolling, his most recent patrol captain.)

At one point, Dag is approached by a woman, who asks him to be unfaithful to Fawn. He doesn't even consider this, but refuses immediately. Cattagus is disabled, and unable to go on patrol when his wife does, but he and Mari are obviously in a mature spousal love relationship. Dag and Fawn have a number of conversations, throughout the four books. Except when Dag doesn't tell Fawn that he knows she is pregnant right away, there is no hint of dishonesty between them.
The Bible is full of admonitions and examples about this.

There are several examples of moral choices. Some characters make the right choice, some do not.

There is love for the natural world, without worshiping it. Dag shows Fawn his favorite place, a spot on the lake where there are lots of waterlilies. Fawn tells him that she loves milkweed flowers. These plants become part of their wedding cords, objects worn for the duration of a marriage by Lakewalkers.

I believe that stewardship of the natural world is part of God's plan for humans.

There is unselfish service to others. The Lakewalkers, who patrol their own lands, and those of the farmers, for malices, are usually considered to be some sort of freaks, cannibals, and the like by the farmers. The farmers are seldom grateful for this service, and many of them don't even believe it is necessary.

Dag, and other Lakewalkers with healing ability, often give of their time and energy, even putting their lives at immediate risk of being groundlocked, to fix injuries and diseases. Dag and Arkady do this not only for Lakewalkers, but for farmers.

There is a conflict between good and evil.
The evil beings, malices, attack at unexpected times and places, and in unexpected ways. They are able to subvert farmers, even Lakewalkers, to be their slaves, aiding their evil purpose, which is to destroy all that is alive and good. They use their slaves, without regard for their safety, or even their lives. This is much the way that the devil operates, according to the Bible.
As Paul put it:
Ephesians 6:10 Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. 11 Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil.

And, of course, the most important lesson: Freedom from evil comes only at the cost of a life.
There is no analogy worthy of comparison to the death and resurrection of Christ, the perfect sacrifice for sin, certainly not anything in these books that is so worthy. And there is no hint of a resurrection in them. However, the books do put forth a system wherein the only way to kill a malice is for part of a dying human's ground to be placed into a sharing knife, and that knife be used on the malice.

Thanks for reading. Read the Bible!

The post introducing these books is here. This post is on the theme of the books. This post is on ground, a unique aspect of Bujold's subcreation. A post, on religion in the books, is here.

The Sharing Knife, Religious Aspects

I do not know what Lois McMaster Bujold's religious beliefs might be. In an earlier post, I pointed out that one of her characters, in the Vorkosigan saga, seems to have been a Christian, and in another post, I have argued that Cazaril, in her The Curse of Chalion, is in some respects a Christ-figure. But I do not know for sure what Bujold thinks. My guess is that she is at least sympathetic to orthodox Christianity. In an interview, she said, in response to a question suggesting that fantasy and science fiction might be inherently antithetical to Christianity, ". . . religion or its absence is a matter of the writer’s world view, and will vary with the writer, not with the genre." She went on to say that she was opposed to fundamentalism, and, from the context, she probably meant fundamentalism associated with Young-earth Creationist beliefs.

In Bujold's Sharing Knife novels, there are some important religious aspects. I would like to discuss these works under a rubric established previously. In that post, I discussed some traits that might be used to determine whether or not a novel is a Christian novel.

1) Is there a Christ-figure? The Sharing Knife books have a number of Lakewalkers who might be considered Christ-figures, in that they allow their lives to be taken, so that sharing knives, to kill their greatest enemy, the malices, might be prepared. I have difficulty accepting this aspect of the book as showing a genuine Christ-figure, for two reasons. One, this is quite common among Lakewalkers. Bujold doesn't explicitly say so, but the books seem to indicate that this is the normal mode of death for Lakewalkers. Secondly, sometimes, a Lakewalker kills herself to prime a sharing knife. I have difficulty accepting that a sacrifice, even unto death, carried about by the person who dies, is like what Christ did. He did die so that others might live, as Lakewalkers do, but not by his own hand, and only one sacrifice, not many, was necessary.

2) Belief in orthodox Christian doctrine, such as belief in the Trinity. I didn't find this in the books. In fact, most or all of the Lakewalkers seem not to believe in any gods at all, except in "absent gods," a frequent expression of Dag, and others. Fawn does find that some Lakewalker music is hymn-like, but what that means to her is not explained. There is little or no explanation of farmer religious beliefs.

3) Prayer to a monotheistic god. There is a little mention of Lakewalkers praying, or wishing that they could pray, but no real prayer in any of the four books. If there was, presumably it would have been to the "absent gods," not to a single supreme god. It is as if Bujold has constructed a world in which the inhabitants wish that they could believe in a supernatural God, or gods, but don't really do so.

4) No one in the novels under consideration expresses a relationship with the God of Christianity, or with any other deity.

5) There is no acknowledgment of supernatural guidance in the books. However, the mission of Dag and Fawn, to begin to bridge the gap between Lakewalkers and farmers, sometimes goes so well (by no means always) and by such unexpected means, that it seems like it might well have been explained by providential guidance and assistance.

6) There is deliberate rejection of evil. Better put, there are some clear moral choices to be made by the characters. Some of both Fawn's and Dag's families cannot put aside their prejudices. Fawn's brothers participated in a scheme which, had it gone the way it was planned, might well have killed Dag on the night before his wedding to Fawn.

Crane, the renegade Lakewalker turned river bandit captain, has clearly made some very wrong choices. Dag and the farmer and Lakewalker group that ends the robberies and murders of Crane and his followers believe that the farmers who have chosen to follow Crane did not have to do so. Alder, who had been betrothed to Berry, but wound up as one of Crane's bandits, is told exactly that. Some farmers tried to escape Crane, but were killed in doing so. Alder didn't try.

Dag, while training with Arkady to be a healer, agrees that he will not treat farmers, because doing so might overwhelm the Lakewalkers with requests for their services as healers. But a farmer asks that he come treat a young relative, and he agrees to do so, knowing that he is breaking his word, but considering that it would be wrong to let a boy die a horrible death.

Neeta, a young Lakewalker woman, becomes infatuated with Dag, and tells him that he would be welcome in her bed, and that Fawn would never know. Dag refuses, and doesn't really consider the offer. Later, Neeta makes a very bad choice. Fawn is lying in a coma-like state, in the group of farmers who are attacked by a very dangerous malice (all the Lakewalkers in the group are trying to kill the malice) and Neeta directs that Fawn be buried, knowing that she is alive.

Barr, a young male Lakewalker, appears in the third volume, a self-centered, careless person. By the time the last book is ending, Barr has seen that he should take responsibility for his actions, in particular his brief affair with a farmer woman, which, he discovers, has resulted in a daughter.

These characters have clear moral choices to face. Some choose good, some choose evil. Barr, for one, changes from a person who doesn't care about the rights and wrongs of what he does, but about how it makes him feel, to a moral individual.

I wouldn't say that the Sharing Knife books are Christian novels. I would say that they do present clear moral choices, and characters who are both evil and good.

Thanks for reading. The post introducing these books is here. This post is on the theme of the books. This post is on ground, a unique aspect of Bujold's subcreation. The final post in the series, on how I found illustrations of important Christian ideas in the books, whether Bujold intended them or not, is here.

The Sharing Knife Books: Ground

In previous posts, I described the setting and the theme of the four Sharing Knife novels, by Lois McMaster Bujold. A later post, on religion in the books, is here.The final post in the series, on how I found illustrations of important Christian ideas in the books, whether Bujold intended them or not, is here.

I now expand on the setting, by describing one special aspect of Bujold's sub-creation, namely, ground. A Wikipedia author, in the article on Passage, the third book in the series, compared ground to the traditional Chinese concept of ch'i, or qi. The comparison seems to have some merit. I would like to describe Bujold's ground, as well as I am able. I do not think in those terms, myself.

All material objects possess ground. Living things have more of it than non-living objects, and humans have more of it than any other living things. Embryos and fetuses have especially active ground. Some adults have more active, or intense, ground than others. A person with groundsense can distinguish between people, using only this sense, which tells us that there must be some property, or properties, of ground that make it so distinguishable.

Lakewalkers all develop groundsense during adolescence. The amount of groundsense varies. Groundsense has a range. For Dag, this is about a mile, normally, although during some times when he has been stressed, it is much less. Most Lakewalkers do not have a range as great as Dag's. Some Lakewalkers are especially talented. They are healers, or makers of sharing knives. I described sharing knives in my first post in this series.

Some farmers have a little groundsense. Fawn's Aunt Nattie has some. Fawn, herself, has none.

Not only can Lakewalkers detect individual humans, other living things, and inanimate objects (such as hidden sandbars in rivers) but they can manipulate other objects with groundsense. They can, for example, make mosquitoes stay away from them. Dag, at least, can attract fireflies to himself. He can also fish and hunt using his groundsense, attracting game animals and fish to him, using his ground.

Dag puts a broken glass bowl together, using his groundsense. Healers, and even ordinary Lakewalker patrollers, can do some medical work with their groundsense. When doing so, they lose contact with the ordinary world, and sense details of the body to be healed that would not be perceptible to a person lacking groundsense. They can set a bone, remove infection, and other remarkable things. They don't seem to be able to sense microscopic objects, such as blood cells or platelets.

The loss of contact with the ordinary world gives the healer the ability to sense, as it were, a second, parallel world, the world sensed only by groundsense. The same ability, in a lesser degree, seems to be expressed on other occasions. This reminds me of the two worlds seen by some of Tolkien's characters. In The Fellowship of the Ring, just as Frodo is crossing the Ford of the River Bruinen, on the way to Rivendell, the house of Elrond, he sees that parallel world, rather than the ordinary one. Glorfindel, an elf-lord, and the Riders of the enemy are "seen" especially well by Frodo, his peers, and Aragorn, a human, less so.

There are dangers in becoming too obsessed with the parallel world shown by groundsense. A Lakewalker, especially a healer, can become groundlocked -- conscious only of the world shown by groundsense so long that she cannot come back to the ordinary world. If this happens, she dies.

Ground, as indicated above, can be detected by others. So, to a Lakewalker, being with lots of people can be like receiving too many radio broadcasts at once -- noisy and distracting. Lakewalkers can voluntarily shield their grounds from other people. When they do so effectively, they cannot use their groundsense.

Dag discovers that he can extend, and use, a hand he doesn't really have (he lost his real hand in a fight with a malice). Arkady, an accomplished maker, can also do this.

Dag also discovers that he can groundrip other objects -- remove the ground from them, so that they die, or if not living, lose their structural integrity. He uses this as a weapon, ground-ripping a small cross-section of Crane's spinal cord, which paralyzes Crane, and making a hole in the heart of a bat-based slave of a malice, thus causing its death.

Ground, and the story of Fawn and Dag, are essential to the Sharing Knife books.

Thanks for reading.

The Sharing Knife, theme

In the first post in this series, I attempted to set the stage, including some description of the two types of people in these books. A later post, on the subject of ground (unique to these books) is here. A later post, on religion in the books, is here.The final post in the series, on how I found illustrations of important Christian ideas in the books, whether Bujold intended them or not, is here.

In this one, I'll discuss the theme of the four books.

That theme is that Lakewalkers and farmers should, even must, get along, and respect each other and interact more. Does this have political overtones? Probably, but the idea could be applied to many pairs of cultures, religions, ethnic groups. Bujold has said that ". . . if romances are fantasies of love, and mysteries are fantasies of justice, F&SF [Fantasy and Science Fiction stories] are fantasies of political agency." (See here.)

Most obviously, this theme is set forth explicitly in action at the end of the second volume. Dag's mother insists that Dag is not really married to Fawn. She demands that he abandon her, and a council of Lakewalkers, from that particular area, is called to deal with the matter. When Dag sees that half of the council is going to agree with his mother, and believes that they are doing so out of prejudice, he declares that he is going to leave the camp with Fawn, and does. In part, this is out of protest, but Dag has also had conversations with the captain of the Lakewalker patrol, and with the most important healer, and told them that he believes that farmers and Lakewalkers are too distant from each other. Dag's mother is not receptive to such an argument, but the captain and the healer see that it has merit. The third and fourth volumes describe how Dag and Fawn connect with farmers and Lakewalkers, and how they get at least a few of these to see that Dag's vision is correct.

Why does Dag feel as strongly as he does about Fawn, his farmer wife?

One reason is because he sees Fawn as a woman with great ability. She cannot sense and manipulate ground, except that the bit of Dag's ground in her marriage cord tells her whether he is alive or not. Although she lacks this special ability, found in Lakewalkers, she has great courage, an ability to grasp what needs to be done, and can understand and articulate the heart of important issues. She is a loving wife, and a hard-working companion. Fawn is involved in each of the four malice kills described in the books. She personally killed the first one. The story of how Dag threw Fawn his sharing knife, and she killed that malice, the Glassforge malice, guided Dag's aunt, and patrol captain, Mari to throw her knife to Dirla, who killed the second malice in these stories, the Bonemarsh malice. After that malice was killed, Fawn sensed, from miles away, that Dag was in deep trouble, and rescued Dag and several other Lakewalkers, including an important healer, from the aftereffects of the encounter with the second one, acting in a way that no Lakewalker had understood how to do, namely using a sharing knife on Dag's leg. In the third encounter, she was nearby when Rase, working under Dag's leadership, killed a young malice. In the fourth encounter, she encouraged her brother, Whit, to make the actual kill, and crafted the weapon that did the killing. That weapon included a sharing knife, already made and primed by Lakewalkers.

If Fawn is so capable, in spite of her short stature, her youth, and her lack of groundsense, there must be other farmers who also have great ability.

Another reason for Dag's pursuit of a better relationship is that Dag sees farmer abilities as equivalent to the Lakewalker's ability to manipulate ground. In the first book, Dag and Fawn watch glassblowers in action. Dag examines the ground of a bowl that a farmer craftsman has made, and finds that its ground is well made, even though the farmer is not aware of ground. Later, he describes farmer commerce -- ordering goods from hundreds of miles away, and paying for them with coin minted by remote towns -- as a sort of farmer magic.

Also, Dag is afraid that, if farmers aren't taught about malices, and ground, and sharing knives, a malice will emerge close to a large farmer town, and, in enslaving a large group of farmers, gain energy, ground and knowledge that will make it impossible to destroy. But, if they are taught what to look for, and how to react to malice threats, most of the townspeople could escape, and they could warn Lakewalkers early, so that the malice can be killed. This argument resonates most clearly with Lakewalkers.

I believe that Bujold wants us to see that Dag's most important reason for trying to begin a fusion of the two groups is that Dag sees their common humanity. He understands and respects the farmers he has grown to know. He sees their hurts as worth as much care as Lakewalker injuries, and believes that their medical needs cannot be ignored, as they have been. In spite of prohibitions against explaining ground, and sharing knives, to farmers, he begins to do just that, in part so that farmers won't see Lakewalkers as cannibals or ghouls.

In all this, Fawn supports him. There are farmer prejudices against Lakewalkers, too, and she tries to combat those. The two of them have begun to achieve their vision by the end of the books. The last scene takes place in the home that Dag and Fawn share with Fawn's brother, Whit, and his wife, Berry. Dag has become a healer of all who come to him, using his ability to manipulate ground to repair their injuries. He does not always succeed, but usually does. Barr, who entered in the third book as a self-centered, immature Lakewalker, comes to them. He confesses that he had a fling with a farmer girl, and that he has discovered that the result was a daughter. The girl's mother doesn't want anything to do with Barr. Barr is disturbed, and seeks advice from Dag and Fawn. They tell him to not give up on the possibility of helping out his daughter, and Barr is eased by that. Then Fawn's infant daughter, also a half-breed, the future of the two cultures, must be cared for, by both her parents, as Barr observes.

Bujold doesn't sugar-coat the difficulty of getting along with people of a different culture. She indicates that doing so must be done on a one-on-one basis, and that both groups must make changes in their way of thinking. I think she has hit the nail on the head.

Thanks for reading.

The Sharing Knife tetralogy, by Lois McMaster Bujold

I have recently read the Sharing Knife tetralogy, by Lois McMaster Bujold. Bujold is one of the few authors who have won both the Hugo and Nebula awards, and also a Mythopoeic Award. The Sharing Knife books haven't won any of these awards, so far as I know, perhaps because they are low-key -- there aren't any major wars, there's no evil human wizard -- but they are well done, and I enjoyed reading them. They are fantasy literature. I expect to base my next few posts (except for a Sunspots) on these books.

I plan to summarize the books in this post, because some background will be necessary to set the stage for some additional posts. The four books are Beguilement (2006), Legacy (2007), Passage (2008) and Horizon (2009), all published by Eos (HarperColllins).

The setting appears to be North America, after some unspecified disaster, several centuries previous to the time of the books. The culture is pretty standard for sword and sorcery works, in that there is no gunpowder, and no internal combustion engines, and there is magic, or at least there are abilities and a sense that we don't possess. There are two types of humans. They speak the same language, exchange goods, can produce half-breed offspring, and live in close proximity. The Lakewalkers are taller, and live longer than the farmers. (Bujold does not capitalize "farmer," but does capitalize "Lakewalker.") The Lakewalkers can practice magic, although they don't call it that, and farmers can do little or none of this. The Lakewalkers usually see themselves as noble guardians of the ungrateful farmers. Farmers usually see Lakewalkers as proud and aloof, and, to some farmers, as cannibals and grave-robbers.

The main characters are Fawn, a farmer girl, who is eighteen, newly pregnant, and running away from home at the beginning of the series, and Dag, a Lakewalker who has lost most of one arm in a battle. He is over fifty. Bujold uses each of them about equally to establish her point of view, as the tale progresses.

To summarize the four books, Dag and Fawn fall in love, and marry, to some opposition from both groups, especially the Lakewalkers. They overcome four malices, the evil spirit beings that are the bad guys of the books. Dag decides that the two groups have been too separate, and should respect each other more, and work together. He and Fawn travel across hundreds of miles, first by boat, then by wagon train, and, in the process, begin to bring Lakewalkers and farmers more closely together.

What, you may ask, is a sharing knife? First, I need to discuss the concept of ground. Ground, in these books, is some sort of non-material property or essence that is possessed by everything in existence. Humans, including unborn ones, have ground, more than all other material living things. Animals, even insects, have ground, but not as much as humans. Plants, rocks, and even human-made artifacts have ground. Ground is said not be the same as a soul. Lakewalkers can sense the ground of other entities, whether they are animate, or even if they are underwater obstacles in a river. They can do this over a range, which varies from Lakewalker to Lakewalker. Dag's range is normally a little over a mile. That is exceptional, but not unprecedented. Lakewalkers can shield their grounds from other beings able to sense it -- which means that they also are curbing their own groudsense. They can also manipulate ground. Some of them are very good at this, and use this ability to aid their work as healers. When healing, a healer loses awareness of the visible physical world, but becomes aware of the parts of the body to be healed, in intimate detail, including, for example, blood vessels. A healer can connect blood vessels, and do other major repairs, through ground manipulation.

It is possible to rip the ground out of some organism, which kills it. (A similar operation can be done on an inanimate object, but is rarely done. If it were, the essential structure of that object would be destroyed.) When this is done, the victim's ground becomes a detectable addition to the ground of the manipulator, until fully assimilated. It is dangerous to rip the ground out of any complex and intelligent organism, because it may be difficult to assimilate that much ground.

It is possible to become ground-locked. That can happen during healing, when the healer, in effect, is unable to leave the state of heightened ground-senses required for healing, and return to the real physical world. If another person with skill at manipulating ground is not available to help, a ground-locked Lakewalker will die.

Another danger to farmers and Lakewalkers is that, when a Lakewalker does groundwork on a farmer, usually to heal, the farmer may become beguiled -- strongly emotionally attached to the Lakewalker, and desiring more groundwork by the Lakewalker, whether it is needed or not.

Now, I need to consider malices. A malice is a powerful evil being that lives by taking ground from other entities, including the very rocks and plants. An area where a malice has lived is unlivable, often for many years after the malice has been killed. Material that has had its ground taken out of it is gray and loses most of its features and structure, and an area of this type is called a blight. Blights are eventually healed by natural processes -- living things gradually invade and replace the blight. Malices live and grow by not only taking ground from other things, but by taking the attributes and abilities of vertebrates, including humans. They can gain the power of speech by capturing a human. They can use animals or humans as slaves, and are also able to change animals into an almost human form, making them more valuable slaves, in a ghastly metamorphosis. (They can also produce animals which are unlike anything normal, including extra-large wolflike beings, and creatures like bats, able to fly, but much larger, and with the power of speech.) These changed, or created beings are called mud men. They die quickly when their malice is killed. Malices can control the thought and actions of their slaves. Left unchecked, malices would destroy the world for all life. Malices seem to have originated during some sort of unspecified experiment, that went badly awry, probably connected to the disaster referred to above. This is apparently meant to have been a result of our own real civilization doing something stupid. They have been seeded throughout the land, and remain dormant, until they appear at unpredictable times and places. They start as sessile -- not moving. When they have grown for a while, they become mobile, taking their slave armies with them to better sources of ground, such as human settlements. Human children and the unborn have ground which malices find to be especially valuable.

A sharing knife is a device constructed by certain Lakewalker craftspeople. (Males and females are equal in both societies, or at least any position of leadership, or any craft, seems open to both sexes.) A sharing knife is made from one of the long bones of a dead Lakewalker. When another Lakewalker is about to die, he or she is, if possible, killed by such a knife, or commits suicide with a prepared knife. The death is with the consent of the dying person. Part of their ground goes into the knife, which, thus, has some part of two different Lakewalkers, and is both prepared, from a bone, and primed, with ground. A prepared and primed knife can be used to kill a malice, and is the only way this can be done. Malices do not die natural deaths. Groups of trained Lakewalkers patrol the entire land, as often and as thoroughly as possible. Each group must have at least one sharing knife. Because of these patrols, no malice has threatened to destroy the entire land. There have been malices that grew large, with large armies. As human populations get larger, the malice threat becomes more dangerous, as a malice might be able to capture the humans from a large town, and thus obtain lots of valuable ground, and a large army, which would make getting close enough to kill the malice difficult, perhaps even impossible. When possible, Lakewalker patrollers carry two sharing knives, one primed, to kill a malice, and one prepared, to be primed with their own death. The books do not consider the question of whether a sharing knife could be made from a farmer bone, or using a farmer's ground.

Lakewalkers use other weapons, including knives, swords, and bows and arrows.

In future posts, I hope to say more about the characters, and about religious aspects of these books. Thanks for reading.

The next post, on the theme of these books, is here. A later post, on the subject of ground (unique to these books) is here. A later post, on religion in the books, is here. The final post in the series, on how I found illustrations of important Christian ideas in the books, whether Bujold intended them or not, is here.