One Writer's Legacy
Champion #007
By
of Thin Air FictionMARIAN L. THORPE LIVES at the intersection of eloquence and understated.
She creates worlds rich in culture and landscape, while shunning lardy expressions and hyperbole. Her landscapes set moods and drive scenes forward. Her stories espouse themes of divided loyalties as she must have felt herself at times, having homes in Canada and the United Kingdom.
She calls her fiction work, such as the Empire’s Legacy series of eight books, historical fantasy, minus the dragons and magic. But they are much more.
Likewise, her short stories and poems are adept at transporting readers into the drizzle and sunshine, the mountains, rivers and villages of the Middle Ages, in lands reminiscent of Scandinavia, northern England and Scotland.
The short story Escape illustrates the simple beauty of Marian’s skill at creating mood and establishing pace. It’s on Substack at
The story, set in a Scandinavian-like place, lays down its marker in the first few paragraphs. Readers are shown a rugged landscape, as a captive bride narrates the gathering of the clans for her daughter’s wedding.
Readers are immersed in the culture of the people. They are dropped into the dark north, the isolation depicted in the landscape and in the determined, practicality of Lady Jordis of Eganstorp.
Yet for all its descriptive feel and sense of place and people, readers are not once jolted away from the central story by awkward recitals of the surroundings or back stories. It is all fluid, one cohesively told tale. It is a talent more writers should heed.
In this excerpt, pacing and the sounds of the words themselves elevate the sense of quiet and stealth as the escape unfolds:
I took off the new shoes: my feet were used to being bare, and I would be quieter. I pulled my shawl up over my light hair, and slipped onto the jetty. I could just see Dugi on his boat. Eganstorp, where I’d grown up, was a coastal holding. I knew boats. I slid over the gunwales, barely rocking the little craft.
As a footnote, Marian writes Escape was originally written as a writing group challenge to craft a story of hope. The characters were pulled from one of her novels, but it is a stand-alone story.
Then there is the Hrothgar and Hryllingur series, loosely based on Beowulf, a work of immense achievement.
This story is no modern retelling of the ancient tale. It is a new story based on three translations of Beowulf.
In it, Sorley, a young poet and musician, sings the story of a monster raiding on the marshes.
Here is an excerpt from the part when the monster Hryllingur crashes the hall and sets upon the sleeping guards:
Giving to the fates
Their futures, Heorot’s hall-guards
Drowsed in the dark. All but Bjarndýr:
Wakeful, watchful, waiting for his foe,
For his oath to honour.
Hidden by night came
Hryllingur, cloud-shrouded, hunting
Hrothgar’s hall, bright bale-fire burning
In his eyes; his heart angered, empty,
Holding naught by hatred.
In ire he wrenched wide
The door of oak and iron bars:
No barrier to doom. Blood lust
Leaping, Hryllingur laughed long
At warriors asleep:
So simple to slay!
Flesh for feasting; hunger quenched.
One sleeper taken, blood and bone
Devoured: Bjarndýr next to bear
The creature’s deadly claw.
Hrothgar and Hryllingur is a poem worthy of study. Marian’s trademark skill of ensuring every word hefts its share of the workload is spotlighted.
We find more examples of this in Marian’s informative, contemplative strolls through the marshes and fields of the English countryside.
A piece titled Walking to Snettisham takes readers down pathways near the English east coast. The piece describes the scenes as though readers were travelling with the author, while history strolls arm-in-arm on the journey. Marian’s father walked the route 100 years before.
The story blends present and past in a colourful mosaic. We see the present, hear the chirping in the wind, and feel the damp in passages like this:
There’s usually fair birding along here: finches and tits near the houses; green woodpecker and curlew in the pastures, sometimes oystercatchers. Buzzards hunt the rabbits, and red kites soar, hoping for roadkill. (The muntjac fulfill that hope, in spades.)
All the while, a much older story lurks underfoot. We’re told that about 14 separate hoards buried between 150 BC and 100 AD, were unearthed here, and make up one of the largest discoveries of prehistoric precious metal objects ever. A large collection of Celtic art was also discovered.
And to bring it home, Marian adds human touches.
Excerpt: The ploughman that found the first piece thought that he had ploughed up part of a brass bedstead. The Snettisham Treasure.
There is so much to love here — the feeling of a landscape infiltrating all, the vivid stories realized through the use of simple word choices, even while understanding that anything this good is never simple.
I leave you with the ending of Snettisham. It makes me feel like I am home, even though my home is nothing like it.
Permissive paths take us past a marlpit, now filled with trees, and across the old allotment grounds — where, to our delight, the first butterfly of the year, a peacock, flutters by. Two hares are boxing in the field of winter cereals, and a red kite is perched on a pole. We walk down a steepish lane where grain mills once stood, past the lumps and bumps of medieval water management in the neighbouring fields (which almost always have curlews), past the 17th century tithe barn and the jackdaws playing around the tower of the church where my great-grandparents are buried, and home again.
By Terry A. Fries
See below for Marian’s biography.
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Biography of Marian L. Thorpe
Once a scientist, once an educator, now a writer of poetry and prose, fiction and non-fiction.
I grew up in a small farming town in southern Ontario, reading voraciously and roaming fields and woods with my dog, not quite fitting in as a first-generation Canadian in a community settled by United Empire Loyalists, hearing the stories of “home” from my grandparents and parents.
Now I call both Canada and England home, and almost everything I write is informed by my love of landscape and place, and by the questions of divided loyalties and multiple loves, and the meaning of home.
I have written all my life. My first adult published work came in my mid-30s, with poetry, followed by a long unpublished spell, due partly to the demands of work and caring for my aging parents, partly due to a lot of travel, and partly due to my dissatisfaction with anything I wrote.
In the late 1990s, I began writing the book that became my first published novel, Empire’s Daughter. I retired for health reasons in 2015, the year it was published. Cutting-edge treatment (thank you, Canada’s universal healthcare) meant another 10 years of life (to this date), which I used to write another seven books, all in one series.
I have birded (and generally observed nature) all my life, since very early childhood. It’s an avocation that has taken me to witness the endless light at both ends of the earth: summers in the Antarctic and the Arctic.
I have taken part in foot safaris in Botswana among lions, visited mountainsides in Mongolia and was rewarded with the unbelievable sight of a snow leopard in the wild. Nature has taken me to the Platte in March surrounded by thousands upon thousands of sandhill cranes and snow geese, to the marshes of Norfolk and an equal number of pink-footed geese.
Now with that first fictional series complete, I find myself wanting to return to non-fiction, and specifically to writing about the intersection of landscape and history and nature.
This was, actually, my first venture into serious writing when I was 17, a study of the coming of spring that was cut short by mononucleosis.
I joined Substack with that in mind, got sidetracked by its fiction possibilities too, and the place-writing took a back seat.
I had two Substack publications: Landscapes of Memory; and History and Imagination. I set it up this way to separate place-writing from fiction. But that wasn’t working for a couple of reasons — Notes always come from my main site, which is History and Imagination (now renamed History, Birds and Imagination) —and I was simply holding back on the place writing, awed by the quality of the nature writing I was reading.
I’ve always changed directions about every seven years throughout my adult life, either changing jobs entirely or changing the areas of responsibility within a job. I’ve been restless for a few years now, and I recognize it’s time I did something different. Not that I’ll stop writing fiction — there is a new series well underway, but I need it not to be all that I do.
My books aren’t mainstream (or even tributary) reading. They have their niche following, they’ve won some awards, and I know I am at least one (unrelated to me) reader’s favourite author. I’m comfortable with that.
Assuming luck and medicine give me another 10 productive years, what do I want to do with it? That’s what I’m exploring right now, and largely on Substack.
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 | A guest post by
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Thaddeus, thank you for introducing me to Marian L Thorpe. The way she's described reminds me, just a little, of the wonderful Mary Stewart and especially her Arthurian books.
Marian's varied interests make her a rounded, curious observer of the world. We are often told to only write what we know. The answer that that rather limiting injunction is to follow Marian's lead and learn about what we don't know.