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She-Who-Must-Be-Read: The Platypus Reads Part LXXIII

Following my established routine, I've endeavored to expand my knowledge of Pulp this summer with a some selections from H.P. Lovecraft and Ridder Haggard.  Lovecraft will have to wait for his own post.  In the meantime, I'd like to take a look a truly seminal novel in the history of Pulp: Ridder Haggard's "She."

This one thin volume seems to have exercised a greater influence on subsequent works in a way only surpassed by "The Lord of the Rings."  A quick surface read will reveal familiar elements and scenes from "The Magician's Nephew," "The Lord of the Rings," Robert Howard's Conan stories, "Congo (though that's more Haggard's other great work, "King Solomon's Mines")," "Dune," and the Indiana Jones trilogy.  This is a powerful and diverse influence for a novel that spans only a little more than a hundred pages.

*very minimal spoiler ahead*

One of the great pleasures of reading "She" is Haggard's use of layers of carefully researched detail to build a believable secondary world.  For instance, many pulp writers today, the late Michael Chriton excepted, would be content to give a simple English "translation" of the legend of She and Kallikrates that serves as the protagonists' "call to adventure."  Haggard, however, provides not only an English translation, but the "original" Attic Greek, the revised Byzantine cursive Greek, abbreviated Ecclesiastical Latin, un-abbreviated Ecclesiastical Latin, abbreviated Early Modern English, and un-abbreviated Early Modern English together with a whole history of the transmission of the tale down to the present day.  I'm currently (trying) teaching myself Attic Greek and I can't tell you how much I enjoyed puzzling it and the other translations out.  This is just one salient example of the extra effort Haggard puts into his work to make it believable.  If you're not seeing shades of Middle Earth yet, you should be.

There's much more that could be said about this remarkable and seminal work, but if you haven't read it yet, I don't want to spoil the fun.  If you have read it, I invite you to consider again the links between it and subsequent works of adventure fiction.  Can you find Jadis, Charn, Galadriel's mirror, the Cracks of Doom, Sam Gamgee, the Fremen, the Temple of the Grail?  Can you add to this list? 

  

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