Three Hearts and Three Lions

• 1. Introduction

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  Three Hearts and Three Lions begins on the Elsinore shoreline. A small band of Danish resistance fighters is trying to cover the escape of a scientist to Sweden. The man they are protecting is described in the novel as evidently the nuclear physicist Niels Bohr. Among the fighters is Holger Carlsen, an American-trained Danish engineer. When the German force closes in, Carlsen is shot. He does not die. He finds himself in a parallel universe where Northern European legend is real.

  The shield waiting for him bears the image of three hearts and three lions. Beside it are the full equipment and horse of a medieval knight, arranged as if for his arrival. The armor fits him perfectly. The weapons respond to his grip. He can ride and fight and speak the local language, an archaic form of French, without knowing how he knows any of it.

  Poul Anderson first published this story as a novella in 1953, in Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine. He expanded it into the novel that appeared in 1961. The questions the book plants in its opening pages drive everything that follows: who left this knight's gear waiting, why does a Danish engineer feel at home in a medieval parallel world, and what ancient identity is hiding somewhere inside Holger Carlsen?

• 2. A World Divided

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  The Holy Roman Empire and the Saracens divide the human world of this parallel universe between them. Both serve the forces of Law. Opposing them is everything within the Middle World, including Faerie, all of it aligned with Chaos.

  The elvish Duke Alfric of Faerie presents himself as attractive and helpful. His actual plan is to lure Holger into Elf Hill, where time runs at its own rate. A prisoner inside Elf Hill would emerge to find that centuries had passed outside.

  Morgan le Fay operates at a subtler level of danger. She is Holger's ultimate adversary, and she is also his lover from a past life he cannot remember. Whatever their bond was in that previous existence, it did not survive his crossing into the twentieth century. She retains every memory.

  Anderson built this cosmological conflict with the Cold War in mind. The boundary between the human Empire in the West and Faerie in the East maps onto the real-world Iron Curtain. That line was cutting through real Europe at the very time Anderson composed the novel.

  The sword Cortana, which Holger must recover if Law is to prevail, lies in a ruined church. It is guarded by a nixie, cannibal hillmen, and a troll that heals almost faster than it can be wounded.

• 3. Science and Sorcery

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  Bertrand Russell's Theory of Types is not a medieval text, but Holger Carlsen uses it to make sense of the magical world around him. The novel takes seriously the idea that a mechanical engineer's training would not become useless in a world governed by magic. It would simply need new applications.

  The Rubber Handbook is one resource the story shows Carlsen drawing on. He applies his knowledge of magnesium's flammability to construct a weapon the novel calls 'The Burning Dagger.' The radioactivity experiments of Rutherford and Lawrence provide him with another conceptual framework.

  Anderson built into the story a historical argument about science and magic. During the medieval and Renaissance periods, scholars drew no hard line between natural philosophy and the occult. Both fell within the same intellectual project. Carlsen's engineering mind and the magical world he inhabits belong to a lineage of inquiry that the modern era has pulled apart.

  Carlsen's engineering mind can account for much in this magical world. It cannot explain why Carahue, a Saracen knight, has been searching the world for him by name.

• 4. The Identity Beneath

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  Ogier the Dane is the identity written in Holger Carlsen's body, accessible in his muscles and instincts even when his mind cannot reach it. He is not a visitor to this world. He is the champion of Law whose return was always expected.

  Ogier's complete identity lives in Carlsen even when Carlsen's consciousness cannot access it. The body remembers what the twentieth-century mind has forgotten.

  Cortana, once recovered from the ruined church, fulfills its purpose. Holger vanquishes the forces of Chaos and is transported back to the shore at Elsinore, arriving mid-battle. With a burst of superhuman strength, he defeats the German troops and enables Niels Bohr's escape. Bohr goes on to contribute to the Manhattan Project.

  Denmark is preserved in one world. France is preserved in the other. In both cases the victory is complete. In both cases it comes at a personal cost.

  Alianora is beyond Holger's reach in the aftermath. The magical forces that moved him between worlds showed no consideration for his love life. He searches old books of magic for any path back to her. His conversion to Catholicism is an outward expression of how deeply the medieval world has taken hold of him.

• 5. A Library of Legends

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  The Matter of France, the medieval cycle of legends built around Charlemagne and his court, provides Anderson with his central figure. Ogier the Dane belongs to that tradition, not to Anderson's imagination. The novel adds Arthurian romance, Germanic mythology, and the folk magic of Northern Europe to build out the world around him. Oberon, the fairy king of tradition, is reimagined within the novel as Duke Alfric of Faerie.

  Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene and William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream both feed into the novel's construction. So do Robert Burns's Tam o' Shanter and Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings leave their mark as well. Anderson references Mirkwood and wargs, both drawn from Tolkien's work. The novel also shares something with C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

  Anderson described the work as a pastiche of interwoven stories. The characterization is accurate and intentional. He treated the entire corpus of Northern European legend and related literature as a shared inheritance available to anyone willing to work with it.

  A Retro-Hugo nomination came to the novella version, signaling that its standing in the fantasy field was recognized by other writers from the beginning.

• 6. An Influence That Spread

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  Floyd C. Gale rated Three Hearts and Three Lions four stars out of five in 1962. The more durable measure of the novel, though, is in what it gave to other writers and game designers in the decades that followed.

  Dungeons & Dragons drew directly from the novel when constructing its original alignment system. That system divided all characters and creatures into two sides: Law and Chaos. The troll in Dungeons & Dragons heals its wounds at uncanny speed during combat, a trait drawn directly from Anderson's description. The swanmay, the nixie, and the paladin character class all trace back to the same source.

  Michael Moorcock cited Three Hearts and Three Lions as one of the works that most influenced his own fantasy writing. His work is similarly structured around an eternal war between Law and Chaos. He shared with Anderson the device of a man snatched from the modern world into a fantasy realm where he is already regarded as a legendary hero. In that realm, the man is celebrated as a figure from the world's own legendary past. That device reappears in Moorcock's 1970 novel The Eternal Champion.

  Holger Carlsen shows up in other novels as well. Anderson placed him in A Midsummer Tempest. There, he has finally escaped the twentieth century using spells from a medieval grimoire. He wanders among alternate timelines, arriving at an 'Inn Between the Worlds.' He cannot control where he lands. Robert Heinlein's The Number of the Beast includes him in a tournament alongside classic science fiction characters. Jack L. Chalker's And the Devil Will Drag You Under seats him in a tavern alongside what appears to be Conan the Barbarian.

  Harry Turtledove's 2014 short story 'The Man who Came Late' imagines what Holger found when he at last reached Alianora. The story appeared in Multiverse: Exploring Poul Anderson's Worlds, edited by Greg Bear and Gardner Dozois. Thirty years had passed. Alianora had believed Holger gone for good. She had married a village smith and built a life. She had two sons and a daughter, and passed the May Swan magic tunic on to the daughter. At the end of the story, Morgan le Fay reappears, seemingly ready to catch Holger now that Alianora has turned him away.