The lyrics to this fine song get tangled up in apparent non-sequiturs, making you ask questions, making your imagination work overtime. The whole story is short on details, but we feel like the narrator has told us more than he really has. The lyrics are heavy with suggestion like branches bent under the weight of fruit. Dylan makes us work to extract the meaning, and we are grateful for it.
For example:
But he started in to dealing with slaves/ And something inside of him died/ She had to sell everything she owned and froze up inside/ And by the time the bottom fell out I became withdrawn…
What does that mean? How does one thing lead to the next? Things are skated over in vague terms, as if the narrator is wary of the legal implications, doesn’t want to open a can of worms, or just doesn’t want to think about it all.
It’s not just the usual obscurity and symbolism of Bob Dylan lyrics. It feels as if someone drunk and a little maddened by hardships, charismatic in his way, has sat down beside you on the bus and begun to tell you their history with a red-haired woman you’ve never met. Or maybe you’re overhearing one half of a stranger’s phone conversation – you missed the start, you’ll miss the end and you’re only hearing the answers, not the questions.
The song has a consistent thread. It tells the story of a relationship between the narrator and a woman. They get separated, but they drift back together, get separated again, but maybe they’ll be reunited… Is her nickname Blue? Does she have blue eyes? Or is it a reference to Joni Mitchell?
She was married; he ‘helped her out of a jam, I guess/ But I used a little too much force.’ The narrator probably didn’t kill the husband but he must have beat him up or something. They headed off on a journey together but ‘split up on a dark sad night, both agreeing it was best.’ The narrator is lying; he was devastated by the separation, but he doesn’t tell us that directly, or why they split up.
They meet again in Louisiana years later. She is working at a strip club and reading Italian Renaissance poetry; she lives in a basement with the narrator and another man, the one who ‘started in to dealing with slaves,’ whatever that means.
On rare moments we get detail. The ‘dark sad night’ when they split up is seared into the narrator’s memory and when he tells us about it he is not summing up and skipping over, but quoting her in real time. ‘I heard her say over my shoulder/ ‘We’ll meet again someday on the avenue.’
Then we skip ahead years and thousands of miles, until the narrator and the woman who ‘never escaped his mind’ are by chance reunited. We get verse after verse, describing the reunion almost iin real time.
He’s not an expressive or emotive guy – ‘you look like the silent type;’ ‘I muttered something underneath my breath.’ But we can tell how he’s feeling. He hints and summarises and skims over most of his life but then gets drawn into fine detail when he’s talking about her. The specifics he gives us are not the ones lawyers or cops or journalists might want to know. They are the things that matter to him.
I think in that speech Dylan threw a sidelight on ‘Tangled up in Blue’ when he talked about Homer’s Odyssey and how he relates to it:
In a lot of ways, some of these same things have happened to you. You too have had drugs dropped into your wine. You too have shared a bed with the wrong woman. You too have been spellbound by magical voices, sweet voices with strange melodies. You too have come so far and have been so far blown back. And you’ve had close calls as well. You have angered people you should not have. And you too have rambled this country all around. And you’ve also felt that ill wind, the one that blows you no good.
The parallel lies not at all in the specifics – but in how he can find and bring out the epic and the immortal in the mundane, how he elevates his narrator to the status of a hero.
Baron Roman Ungern von Sternberg was a cavalry officer who hacked a bloody path through revolutionary Russia, drove a Chinese occupation out of Mongolia, and aimed to become a new Genghis Khan.
This biography by James Palmer gives an engaging and hair-raising account of Ungern’s life. A child of the Baltic German nobility, raised in an atmosphere of contempt for the Estonian peasantry whose labour sustained his family, he was expelled from every educational institution he set foot in, generally for violence. He only settled down to a steady life when the battlefield gave his brutality an outlet during the 1905-6 Russo-Japanese War. He joined the ranks and received rapid promotion to the officer corps in a Cossack unit. Later during World War One he displayed near-suicidal bravery, and off the battlefields he was prone to duelling and to administering drunken beatings to servants.
The young Ungern-Sternberg
Revolution & Civil War
As the war ground on, claiming millions of Russian lives, Ungern became part of a military scheme to recruit a unit of Buriats, a Mongolian people living within Russia. So when the Revolution and Civil War came they found Ungern on the Mongolian border commanding a large force of Buriats.
Ungern was a close collaborator of a Cossack officer named Semyonov. With the outbreak of Civil War, Semyonov became a key figure in the White Armies. He was a bandit on a large scale, a warlord whose cavalry forces dominated an area larger than many European nations, both an asset and an embarrassment to the Whites. Ungern was his right-hand man.
In 1920 when Admiral Kolchak’s White armies collapsed and the Red Army advanced across Siberia, Ungern and his thousands of fighters crossed the border into Mongolia.
From a pictorial map of the Russian Civil War, available at Wikimedia Commons and Library of Cognress. The three dark figures on horseback represent Semyonov’s forces. The single rider to the left is captioned ‘Ungern’s Detachments.’ He has fled across the border into Mongolia.
After a harsh winter in the wilderness Ungern marched on the then-capital, Urga/ Ikh Khuree, and drove out the Chinese occupiers in early 1921. The height of his power followed: the Mongolian Buddhist church officially recognised him as the god of war and as the reincarnation of an eminent religious leader from the early 19th century. However, inside of a few months Ungern was being challenged by socialist Mongolians led by Sukhbaatar and Chaibalsan, who, with major Soviet supplies and aid, seized the border town of Kiatkha. Ungern marched north to fight them, and met with a terrible defeat. Then, as Soviet forces advanced into Mongolia, Ungern led a straggling army through desolate swamps and hills until his own soldiers, horrified by his wild plan to invade Tibet, mutinied and turned him over to the Reds.
Ungern after his capture by Red forces
If you want to read more about the Russian Civil War, keep an eye out for my upcoming series, Battle for Red October. Subscribe for free to receive an update by email for my weekly post.
Violence
Throughout his career as a White leader, Ungern killed every communist he encountered, and their children too, so that nobody would be left to seek revenge. He also believed that he could sense, by staring intensely at a prisoner, whether they were secretly ‘a Jew or a commissar’, and if he divined that they were he would kill them too. Palmer details Ungern’s sadistic and disgusting methods of execution and torture, and the horrific scale on which he employed them.
During the heyday of the White Armies Ugern ruled the border town of Dauria, which became ‘The gallows of Siberia’, where the hills outside town became stained red with the blood of prisoners. These victims were sent to Ungern by other White leaders such as Kolchak who liked to pretend they didn’t know what he was doing.
Ungern had strange views about military discipline. Almost everyone close to him seems to have been on the receiving end of horrific beatings. A hundred blows to each part of the body was a standard punishment. Forcing a victim to shiver naked on a frozen lake was another. Execution and torture were normal.
Ungern, colourised. In battle in the later part of his career he preferred to wear a bright yellow Mongolian robe.
Palmer has travelled extensively in the lands which Ungern trod, and he conveys a real sense of the setting. He is an engaging narrator, capable of capturing the imagination, very self-assured, with footnotes that delve into his own interesting anecdotes and meditations. His description of Ungern’s seizing of Ikh Khuree is very vivid and will stick in my mind for a long time. He does a great job of conveying Ungern’s character, and of explaining the complex political-religious influences that operated on him. The book is very clearly aimed at British readers; while I’m not sure he always shows sufficient respect to the Mongolian people in his remarks about them, I’ll extend him the benefit of the doubt.
In general, Palmer doesn’t pull his punches on Ungern, but towards the end of the book he seems to go a little soft on him, claiming that ‘the Soviets… made him look like an amateur’ when it came to killing. Of course, he’s talking about events over a decade later after Stalin had seized power; there was no figure remotely comparable to Ungern on the Red side during the Civil War, and on his own smaller scale he gave Yezhov and Beria a run for their money. Palmer himself notes that the early Soviet regime in Mongolia was not marked by terror or coercion. They even kept in power the corrupt, murderous and utterly selfish priest-king of Mongolia, the Bogd Khan. It’s frustrating how an author can fail to notice the profound contrast between the early years of the Soviet Union and the later Stalinist regime of terror. Instead, as is the common practise of British writers, he telescopes it all together – the idea being that Stalin and the political tradition he exterminated were fundamentally the same. Far from looking like an amateur, Ungern’s violence gives us an insight into the form of proto-fascism that would have enjoyed a bloody reign over a disintegrating Russia if the Whites had been victorious.
The final paragraphs of the book left me with a bad taste in my mouth, as Palmer decided it would be a good idea to end this long horror story by telling us about a Mongolian woman he met who praised Ungern. ‘It would have pleased him,’ Palmer concludes with complacent magnanimity.
The Mongolian Steppe near Ulan Baatar.
Beliefs
While Ungern seems at first like a disturbing freak of nature, the truth emerges that he was in every respect part of broader trends, and that every facet of his weird amalgam of beliefs was connected to his lived experience and the institutions that shaped him.
To begin with, Ungern was a Baltic German aristocrat, conditioned from his earliest days toviolent, elitist and racist. To him it was obvious that ‘Slavs’ couldn’t rule themselves, and must be ruled by the firm hand of the Romanovs, or as a second preference by German nobles, if they didn’t want to be ‘led astray’ by ‘the Jews.’ But Ungern’s racism was awkward and unusual: he inverted the ‘Yellow Peril’, believing that Europeans were degenerate while ‘the peoples of the East’ were strong and warlike. His violence fell foremost on Jewish people, next on Europeans and Chinese, and least of all on Mongolians.
This bleeds over into his anti-revolutionary paranoia. He believed that the Communist Party was founded 3,000 years ago in Babylon and that it was a cosmic, satanic evil. The standard form of anti-communist bile in the 1920s was to explain that communism and revolution sprang from the ‘barbarity’ of ‘Asiatic’ Russia, but for Ungern Marxism was a product of modernity, of the degenerate ‘West’ engulfed in a ‘revolutionary storm.’ Other White leaders, who touted a constitutional monarchy or even a republic, disgusted him. For Ungern, only a new Genghis Khan could save the world. It appears that he couldn’t really tell the fundamental difference between, say, Lenin and Sun Yat-Sen: they were all evil ‘revolutionaries’ in his eyes.
Both Ungern and his collaborator Semyonov were mass-murdering sadists. But Semyonov was extraordinarily corrupt and luxurious, with a weakness for orgies and drink, while Ungern was intense and ascetic.
Ataman Semyonov
Ungern was a bore on the subject of how Mongolian medicine could supposedly cure diseases which ‘western’ science could not, and his religious beliefs mixed Buddhism with Lutheranism and Orthodox Christianity. The esoteric mysticism associated with Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophists also informed his religious convictions. It appears that he absorbed a whole lot of ‘occult’ and ‘magical’ readings before the war. The same basically confused, shallow ‘spiritual’ eclecticism was of course a feature of Nazi ideology, particularly in the case of Himmler.
Lastly, Ungern’s sadism and obsession with war were part of the wider tradition at the time of seeing war as something noble and ‘virile’, the antidote to a vaguely-defined ‘degeneracy’; and these attitudes were obviously further fed and fattened every day of his life by the brutality of Tsarist military discipline and by the trauma of the battlefield.
As opposed to a historical curiosity or mystery, the more I read about Ungern, the more I saw him fitting right into his historical context. His racialism and mysticism, far from being just eccentricities, were 100% of his time. His violence was the violence of counter-revolution. His orientalism was not ‘ancient wisdom’ – it was a very modern delusion, and he was an essentially modern figure, in so many ways emblematic of 20th century fascist and reactionary thought. He was on the edge of the White cause both politically and geographically – but the old regime and the White cause created him, and behind the ‘democratic’ facade carefully projected for the benefit of the Allies, beasts like Ungern lurked.
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This is Part Two of a three-part series on 2000AD’s Sláine. You’ll find Part 1 here.
This part is going to be a live commentary as I re-read Demon Killer. I’ll be typing my responses to things as I see them. The point of this is to show how the writer Pat Mills integrated a huge amount of myth and history into these stories without sacrificing fun, pacing or clarity. Sláine is pure fantasy, even – perhaps especially – when it purports to be dealing with real people like Boudicca or William Wallace. But even as we know it’s fantasy, we know it’s not just pulled out of someone’s arse either; it feels authentic and possesses a certain integrity.
Demon Killer was written by Pat Mills and drawn by Dermot Power, Greg Staples, Glenn Fabry and David Lloyd. All images are from that.
So here goes.
Right from the start we see ‘the triple death’ – Celts carried out ‘triple killings’ on their kings.
As king Sláine is forbidden from fighting – in contrast to other cultures, early Irish kingship institutions placed far less emphasis on violence and more on generosity, kinship and wealth
Geasa – taboos – yes, Irish kings had these taboos placed on them. Great mythical examples to be found in ‘The Burning of Derga’s Hostel’
Reading animals’ entrails to see the future – a Roman practise, as far as I know
Dead bodies getting up and speaking – a recurring motif in ancient Irish myths, though usually it’s a severed head
Sláine is to be killed at the end of his reign – plenty of evidence that this was done in Ireland – eg the bog bodies
The flashback to the battle of Clontarf – needless to say there was no warp-spasming warrior and no demon at that battle
Sláine has four wives – yes, polygamy was legally recognised is the old Irish laws, and was widely practised right up to the 17th Century
The magical cauldron comes from the tales of the Tuatha Dé Danann – see Gods and Fighting Men by Lady Gregory
Gold thrown into sacred rivers and lakes – yes, this was done in ancient Ireland, Britain and Gaul – but it seems to have stopped by 800-600 BCE whereas Boudicca’s rebellion was in 60 or 61 CE (Alice Roberts, The Celts, p 92).
This comic way overstates the ‘sacred gold’ angle – they dumped all kinds of artefacts of all substances in the rivers and lakes
When Sláine rises from the pool and Ukko introduces him – Ukko’s eloquence is very typical of Irish mythology: ‘A bone-splitter, a reddener of swords, a pruner of limbs who delights in red-frothed, glorious carnage… Your lives would be prolonged for getting out of his way.’
Sláine is in nothing but a loincloth, slaughtering guys in armour – this image of the wild reckless Celtic warrior is complicated by the fact that real Celtic warriors hid behind massive shields and specialised in hit-and-run attacks
Explanation for how the rebellion began: for the Romans, gold is tax; for the Celts, it’s sacred – no basis in history, of course, but it’s creative and fun
Boudicca says the Romans aren’t real men because they ‘bathe in warm water… anoint themselves in myrhh… and sleep on soft couches with boys… like their emperor who behaves like a woman… as is proved by the beautification of his person’ – OOF – this is the kind of ‘noble savage’/ ‘Fremen mirage’ stuff Sláine usually avoids. Based on what we know, the Celts were very proud of their appearance, adorning themselves with jewellery and dressing in bright colours. We know that the Gauls of Caesar’s time had make-up and fragrant soaps. Irish mythology is full of men describing each other as beautiful. ‘Personal adornments of bronze were abundant’ even among the prehistoric proto-Celts. (Nora Chadwick, The Celts, p 30.)And the casual 1990s homophobia is wide of the mark too – I’ve never come across evidence that the Celts looked down on gay sex or thought the Romans were somehow weird for doing it. Hmmm – and didn’t we see a gay couple in The Horned God?
It is true that Roman soldiers flogged Boudicca and raped her daughters.
Mona (Anglesey) was the druid stronghold but not ‘island of the witches.’ Women as well as men were druids so that detail is fair enough. The idea of them being naked in the cold of north Wales, the idea of them fighting naked, the idea of them playing with human organs, that’s what we call artistic license. But in the very same year as Boudicca’s rebellion, it is true, Suetonius Paulinus led a legion to Anglesey where he fought an arduous battle against the druids, massacred them and then for superstitious reasons set about uprooting their oak groves. Before battle the Romans were ‘paralysed with fear’ by ‘women dressed like Furies in funereal attire, their hair dishevelled, rushing about amongst the warriors…’ So there – they were dressed. In attire, no less. (The Ancient Paths by Graham Robb, p 250-257)
Elfric is clearly supposed to represent the luxury and licentiousness of the Romans – the old ‘noble savage’ theme again. Enjoying yourself in any way makes you weak, you see. But this goes against the theology explained in The Horned God.
Yes, Colchester was where the retired legionaries lived
‘Do not heed warriors who need to protect themselves with helmets and breastplates – such men are full of fear!’ – The Celts were brilliant metalworkers and never had any aversion to armour, though there are accounts of people who went into battle naked.
The druids’ magical herbs that cause hallucinations – a recent Blindboy podcast with Manchán Magan went into this, among other things. Very interesting.
Burning people alive in wicker cages – not the first time we’ve seen this in Sláine – which is apparently based on accounts by Caesar (Gallic Wars) and Strabo (Roberts, the Celts, p 182).
Women as well as men appear among the Celtic troops on the battlefield. I think this is a reasonable interpretation of the evidence of grave goods, history and mythology, which suggests women as prestigious leaders on the Continent, in Britain and in Ireland. I’ve read (I can’t remember where) that in early medieval Ireland women took part in fighting, perhaps a survival of the older custom. But earlier at Colchester Boudicca made a speech that seemed entirely addressed to the men in her army, so that’s odd.
‘You heard the boss!’ – the shield-boss, that is. Brilliant little touch. Classic Sláine.
So this comic, towards the latter half, goes into a bit of a warp-spasm with the killing and the slaughter. This is getting as mad as the ‘Volgan’ occupation of Britain in another Mills classic, Invasion. The craziest part is when Sláine and Boudicca build ‘the bone prison of oeth,’ a prison made of the bones of Roman soldiers. This is based on a story made up by the 18th century Welsh antiquarian Iolo Morganwg. According to Sam Lansman: ‘One of the most evocative of Iolo Morganwg’s forgeries was his description of Caer Oeth ac Anoeth as a dungeon built from the bones of slaughtered Roman legionnaires. This gruesome if impractical prison, the antiquarian claimed, was destroyed and rebuilt several times during the wars between the Romans and the Britons.’ But the 18th-century bluffer didn’t entirely make it up; it’s an interpretation of source material that is all catalogued here on Jones’ Celtic Encyclopedia.
‘The point is the Caesarian Empire provided a role model for future empires to rob and enslave native peoples… No empire ever gets away with it. … Countries built on blood cost the descendants… the injustice leaves a psychic scar… A sickness in their souls…’ You tell em, Nest. Excellent.
A detail I forgot. The gruesome prison of bones is so morbid it opens a portal for Elfric to return – suggesting that all this fury and slaughter is the ultimate cause of the rebellion’s undoing
All this slaughter is not just a trope of comic books. It’s also, to be fair, a trope of old Celtic legends. Read ‘The Battle of the White Strand’ – incredible numbers die left, right and centre.
‘The Omphallos – the Navel of Britain!’ – this is another motif that’s explored in Robb’s The Ancient Paths
‘Your majesty’ – hmmm… I don’t think Britons would have referred to their rather down-to-earth kings and queens by such exalted titles.
The battle is amazing – a mad mixture of the sort-of plausible with pure unabashed fantasy. Tremendous fun. Nothing really to say except that there were plenty of women as well as men among the Britons, who also had loads of trumpets like we see here, which terrified the Romans. I don’t think there’s any evidence the Britons were goaded into battle in the way we see here, but Graham Robb has a theory about how Boudica chose the battle site for scientific-religious-geographical reasons (Robb, The Ancient Paths, p 263)
Yes, the Britons’ retreat was impeded by their wagons; yes, even according to the Roman Tacitus the civilians were not spared. The cruel reprisals afterwards are accurate. ‘Hostile’ tribes had their lands laid waste.
The lament ‘Ochone’ is real, it’s Irish
The interior of the burial mound resembles real-life continental burials like that of the ‘Hochdorf prince’ – right down to the ‘bronze couch’
I don’t know if this claim about a planned conquest of Ireland is based on anything, but that could be my own ignorance. I will say that Suetonius Paulinus’ maps look way too accurate – the Romans didn’t have such technique in cartography. Their maps were terrible.
There is a little epilogue where Sláine returns to Ireland to find that his whole world has vanished with the passing of the years. This is brilliant, based on the myth ‘Oisín and St Patrick’ (In Gods and Fighting Men but also online here). In this story a legendary Celtic warrior argues with a Christian saint. It’s absolutely brilliant. The debate between Sláine and the priest is a faithful and creative interpretation of such ancient stories. There’s real authenticity in this little epilogue.
I expected to find like ten bullet points, not thirty-six!
Good thing I chose Demon Killer rather than The Horned God, or I’d have been here all day. The sum of all these little details is a major part of what makes Sláine work. I think the series has lost this over the years – never entirely, but to a considerable extent. Anyway, we’ll get on to that next week with Sláine: Part 3.
Books:
The Celts, Nora Chadwick, Penguin, 1972
The Celts: Search for a Civilisation, Alice Roberts, Heron Books, 2015
Gods and Fighting Men, Lady Gregory, 1904 (1970, Colin Smythe Ltd)
Over the first year of Covid I went through the back catalogue of 2000AD’s Sláine, for the most part reading the digital graphic novels on my tablet. At first I dipped in out of curiosity, but found myself enjoying it so much that I read fifteen titles cover to cover.
And I did not think it too many.
This is the first part of a three-part commentary tracing the high points and low points of the comic over the forty years of its existence. I will comment on each title in the series. The high points are magnificent and the lows are pretty shocking. My opinions will not be popular.
Sláine. I’d imagine most British people pronounce it as ‘Slain’ and, you know what, that’s fine. But it’s Slaw-nyah. However you say his name, he’s a character in the British comic 2000AD. He is a warrior with an axe who roams around Celtic Europe, leaping, shouting and chopping up bad guys. Roughly once per graphic novel, when chopping and shouting does not suffice, the raw power of the Earth goddess surges through him in a raging ‘warp-spasm,’ and he transforms into a grotesque and unstoppable beast.
From Demon Killer, written by Pat Mills, art by Glenn Fabry, Greg Staples, Dermot Power
But (at its best) there’s a lot more to it than that. Sláine is not a Viking or a Spartan or a medieval knight; he is a Celtic warrior, and that means he doesn’t fit neatly into the macho mould you might expect. He’s difficult to pin down and he’s got a lot going on. The two sides of Sláine are captured in The Horned God, when in a flash-forward Sláine’s chroniclers debate his legacy:
Ukko: Nah… Readers aren’t interested in all that fancy stuff. What they want is plenty of hacking and slaying.
Mor Runne the Dung Collector: Yurrr… I like hacking and slaying.
Nest: But there’s always been more to Sláine than just some muscle-bound barbarian. It’s an attempt to redefine the hero. To convey the matriarchal origin of myth.
Ukko: Take a tip from an old hack, dear, and stick to Sláine chopping off brainballs!
Mor Runne the Dung Collector: Yurr! I don’t like the comp… comp… complicated bits. I only like it when he’s killing people.
There are plenty of violent battles in Sláine – with Fomorians, Skull-Swords, Trojans and all kinds of demons and monsters. But the battle between a basic barbarian action hero and a deep, obscure Celtic soul is the most interesting of all. Over the next three posts I will examine this struggle. Part 1 will look at the first twenty years or so, Part 2 will take a deep look at one particular graphic novel, and Part 3 will deal with the latter half of Sláine’s career (including the really controversial bits).
The early stories from the 80s are collected in the graphic novel Warrior’s Dawn.
Sláine is a wandering exile in a mythical Celtic Europe called the Land of the Young – so named because few live to grow old. It’s a place as chaotic and fun as 2000AD’s Mega-City One. Flying ships powered by standing-stones ply the skyways. Dark magic corrupts the fields and forests into sourland, where prehistoric and inter-dimensional monsters roam. A stinking corpse named Slough Feg is the leader of a death-cult which burns captives in tribute to the maggot god. Sláine seeks to return to his own people, the Tribes of the Earth Goddess, a strange but relatively wholesome crowd whom Slough Feg seeks to conquer.
Writer Pat Mills does his homework when it comes to the Celts; many elements of this setting are derived from real history or myth. Not just Cuchulain’s riastradh, or warp-spasm. Whenever Sláine kills some great number of people and boasts that he ‘did not think it too many,’ he is quoting from the stories of the Fianna cycle. Part 2 will give further examples.
Sláine is not a boy scout. He is governed by obscure drives, sometimes dark or shallow, sometimes profound and selfless. His enemies – the Guledig, Slough Feg – are those who despise human pleasure, and the natural and material world which Sláine champions. He succeeds not through domination and destruction, but through submitting to the sublime chaos of the pagan world.
Sláine’s anti-authoritarian tendencies are not founded on ‘noble savage’ tropes or ‘don’t tread on me’ hypocrisy, but in an egalitarian, feminist and ecological spirit. Later in The Horned God we see that among the tribes of the Earth Goddess, marriages last for one year. The land is shared out equally and some set aside for the old and the sick. Kings (Sláine included) are sacrificed after a seven-year term so that they don’t get too big for their boots. Empires are seen as barbaric. Sláine makes no pretense that it is historical, but this depiction of Celtic society has plenty of foundation in the sources.
It is a myth of its own time. The Celts dress like punks (in later numbers more like metalheads). Ukko the dwarfish thief hates the egalitarian ways of the Celts, which he criticises in distinctly Thatcherite terms. Keep in mind that it’s the late ’80s, early ’90s, and the main bad guys, the Fomorians, are ruthless, callous tax collectors; we are duly informed that they live in a place called Tory Island (a real island off the coast of Donegal where, yes, the Fomorians of myth had their base). The hunger strike is portrayed as a venerable and ancient custom – just a few years after the 1981 hunger strikes in Ireland.
A lot of the above comes later, especially in The Horned God. But even in early Sláine, not a single episode goes by without some cool element of Irish, Welsh or Gallic myth figuring into the story somehow or other.
I like Sláine because (again with the qualifier, ‘at its best’) it chimes with what Michael Moorcock wrote about the great novels of Henry Treece. It is able
to capture the sense of raw passion of adult men and women who are not always mystically inclined yet dwell in a world of mysticism… [magic] is as much a part of life as the wild landscapes… as the stones and hills, the forests and the seas, the fortified townships and isolated villages dwarfed by the great grey skies.
Sláine is at its strongest when character and setting have room to breathe. It is at its weakest when it becomes simply a story of a man chopping up a succession of ugly monsters.
His time as king of his people is up, so he must be killed. From Demon Killer, written by Pat Mills, art by Glenn Fabry, Greg Staples, Dermot Power
2 and 3: Time Killer and The King
The stories collected in the second and third graphic novels (Time Killer and The King) see Sláine journey home and become the leader of his people, but for a while the reader is taken away on a bizarre detour. Sláine encounters the Cyth, inter-dimensional aliens who secretly control the destiny of humanity… and there’s a temple, a temple of terror or something… *yawns* … where was I? To cut a very long and jarringly episodic story short, Sláine travels through alternate dimensions, encounters strange aliens and trades his axe for a leyser gun. Yes, leyser. Like ley-lines. Get it?
It probably responded to some editorial and/or commercial need at the time, but I found the detour tiresome, a grind with no connection to the character or the setting I had become invested in.
No doubt some are reading this post to find out what are the best Sláine comics, which to start with, which ones not to bother with, etc. They might ask, ‘Should I just skip Two and Three?’
Ah, I must warn against it. The people on the business end of 2000AD have gerrymandered the graphic novels in a fiendish way. The sci-fi stuff is split fifty-fifty between the second half of Two and the first half of Three. If you pass on Two, you miss, among other great episodes, Sláine’s time-travelling intervention at the Battle of Clontarf. If you pass on Three, you miss out on Sláine’s return to the Tribes of the Earth Goddess, the story of how he becomes king of his tribe and of the first battles with the Fomorian sea demons. So the publishers have us in a bind.
Edit: see here for a very different (perhaps fairer) take on Tomb of Terror:
Classic 1980s black–and-white Sláine. From Time Killer, Written by Pat Mills, art by Massimo Belardinelli, Glenn Fabry, David Pugh, Bryan Talbot
4: The Horned God
This brings us to the pinnacle of the whole saga. The Horned God is the story of how Sláine unites the Tribes of the Earth Goddess to resist Slough Feg. More than that, it is a spiritual journey for Sláine as he submits to the Earth Goddess and becomes her faithful champion. Simon Bisley’s full-colour art is really beautiful.
The Horned God is deliberately slow to start, laying a solid thematic basis. Nothing in this story feels unearned. The story explores the motivations of Slough Feg and his death-cult. There’s a kind-of feminist theme as Sláine triumphs through becoming the Horned God, the champion of the Earth Goddess.
This champion ‘sees the ridiculousness of life. He never takes its pressures too seriously… Whereas the sun god is so serious… is obsessed with authority… with conquering everything… those heroes who follow his path are usually mindless and violent.’
The ingredients are in the right balance: action and spectacle combined with thematic depth and character development. There are stories within the story – such as the return of the Avanc, last survivor of an indigenous people wiped out by one of the Tribes of the Earth Goddess. Some parts are laugh-out-loud funny, but there are moments of real pathos – like when Sláine says goodbye to his son.
The Horned God is amazing.Despite some elements which have not aged well (including the male gaze stuff that I will deal with next week) it rewards reading and re-reading.
5, 6 and 7: Demon Killer, Lord of Misrule and Treasures of Britain
Pat Mills appears to be deft at pleasing his editors while also remaining true to his creations. As noted above, for some reason Sláine became an inter-dimensional battler of aliens for a while in the 80s – but rather than retconning or pretending it never happened, Mills does a graceful job of integrating the silly alien stuff into the story while keeping the focus on the themes and characters we actually care about. This enriches the stories collected in the next few graphic novels. In Demon Killer, Lord of Misrule and Treasures of Britain, Sláine travels through history and myth and time. These stories feature Boudicca, Robin Hood and King Arthur. Along the way he battles with old enemies: the Guledig and the sadistic demon Elfric.
From Demon Killer, written by Pat Mills, art by Glenn Fabry, Greg Staples, Dermot Power
Demon Killer puts the moral ambiguity of Sláine to the fore. Alongside Boudicca, he loots and razes a Roman city, killing masses of innocent people. Mills justifies this in the introduction (justifies it as an artistic choice, I hasten to add) convincingly in my view:
In many comics he would have doubtless made an excuse and left or tried to stop the massacre with some appalling hindsight speech: “No! No! Spare the women and children!” Fortunately, on 2000 AD, we don’t make such unconvincing compromises. The reality is that, as a Celtic warrior, Sláine would have participated because his people were driven to a fury after the Romans ethnically cleansed their land. And I feel this uncomfortable truth is preferable to reassuring but bullshit fiction.
(Pat Mills, from the introduction to Demon Killer)
It is consistent with Sláine’s character and his motivations. I said he wasn’t a boy scout. He is compelling because he attracts and then alienates our sympathies. But we’ll be taking a closer look at Demon Killer next week.
Lord of Misrule contains a moment very characteristic of Mills’ writing:
From Lord of Misrule, written by Pat Mills, art by Clint Langley, Greg Staples, Jim Murray
I don’t know if this is true or just a myth, and I don’t care. I like these little asides, and how they are well-integrated into the story.
In Treasures of Britain I found the story a bit unfocused. But the artwork is the most beautiful of these three comics, and there are many astute comments on Arthurian legend.
These are fun adventures, beautifully drawn, with thematic depth and character. I heartily recommend them.
That’s it for this week. Subscribe by email to get a notification when Part Two goes up. Next week we’ll look in depth at Sláine: Demon Killer. We’re getting into darker material in Part 3: some of the dodgy shit that has made its way onto the pages of Sláine, and why I hated Book of Invasions. But we’re also going to appreciate the finest artwork of the whole saga and take a look at my recommendations for the top five Sláine comics.
Maybe you enjoy reading about Sláine, and you didn’t think that too many. You should check out this great blog where the author Alex compiles a full list and ranking of all Sláine stories: slaineranked.blogspot.com
The above should be of profound interest to anyone who’s looking for solutions to the climate crisis. If they could do it in 1906, we can do it now.
Below are zoomed-in versions on each of the four provinces. But first, a map of today’s rail network for comparison. The comparison is not entirely fair as DART and Luas don’t feature on it. Even allowing for that, the contrast is striking.
I hit ‘Play.’ Within three minutes, Trotsky and Larissa Reissner are having sex on a train. She’s naked and he’s clothed head to toe in leather. She’s in the throes of passion and he wears a blank, pitiless expression; he doesn’t appear to be enjoying himself. The train plunges phallically through the Russian countryside. Reissner’s voiceover chants a poem about death.
Read this article – and many more – for just €5
Some of my posts are set aside as a special thanks to paying supporters. This is one of them. You can get access to this article – and the full archive of The 1919 Review for an entire year – for just €5.
The striking image above shows a glider-borne tank, tested unsuccessfully by the Soviet Union in the 1940s. The genesis of this idea was even stranger, like something out of a Command and Conquer game:
‘Tuchachevsky likewise paid particular attention to the Air Force. For some years he had studied the problem of combining the functions of aeroplane and tank in a machine to be known as the ‘flying tank,’ i.e., an armoured car which automatically or by a few turns of a handle could be transformed into an aeroplane and then changed back again into a tank that was ready to go into action as soon as it landed. There is also a compromise solution of this problem in the form of large-sized aircraft which can transport a tank by air and land it behind the enemy’s lines.
‘The study of the ‘flying tank’ led to successful experiments in the large-scale employment of special shock troops that could be dropped behind the enemy’s lines by parachute. It is no mere chance that this idea of aerial infantry originated in the brain of Tuchachevsky, the Commander-in-Chief of the first Red Army of workers and peasants.
‘The idea of dropping such detachments in the enemy’s rear presupposes that this area is peopled by inhabitants in sympathy with the aerial invaders, for otherwise such aerial shock troops as survived the attentions of the enemy’s anti-aircraft batteries would be wiped out by mechanized units hastily despatched to deal with them. The conception of a parachute corps is therefore closely connected with the idea of an international Socialist Revolution.’
From Erich Wollenberg’s book The Red Army – which is great as well as free to read online.
The genius of Tukhachevsky was such that even when he was preoccupied with a bizarre idea, like a plane that could turn into a tank, he ended up stumbling on a great idea – parachute soldiers. It’s also fascinating that the original inspiration for the idea of paratroopers was Tukhachevsky trying to figure out ways to help socialist revolutions in hostile countries.
In the Name of the Working Class is an account of the Hungarian Revolution by a leading participant. The author Sándor Kopácsi was the police chief of Budapest in 1956 during the workers’ and students’ revolution. In what must have been a first for world history, Kopácsi, a high-ranking cop, came over to the side of the insurrection.
The early chapters describe Kopácsi’s own experiences as a worker and socialist fighting the Arrow Cross fascists in the 1930s and the Nazi military in the 1940s.
Picture 1: Budapest in ruins after the Nazi occupation
Next the book gives a vivid account of terror and mismanagement under Rakosi. The middle chapters describe the 1956 revolution, brutally cut short by the Russian invasion. The final chapters of the book are appalling. The revolution crushed under the treads of Soviet tanks, what follows is a story of imprisonment, executions and farcical trials. The reader knows that the author will survive. But for many other revolutionaries the end was a shooting in a prison yard, the sound of gunshots and screams suffocated by the roar of idling truck engines.
Portrayal of Revolution
The book contains vivid portraits of key Soviet and Hungarian figures and first-hand accounts of revolutionary events. Kopácsi witnessed the moment when crowds shoved handwritten notes through the loopholes of tanks, winning over the Russian crews inside who mutinied and joined the revolution.
Picture 2: A Soviet tank in Budapest, 1956
It is an invaluable portrait of a revolution. He describes the government headquarters in Budapest at the height of the events. It
resembled Smolny Palace in Petrogad, the Bolsheviks’ centre in 1917, more than it did the Houses of Parliament in London… In Nagy’s anteroom, I met an old Hungarian Communist who had been one of Lenin’s personal guards soon after the Bolshevik Revolution. He said to me: ‘Kopácsi, I’ve read ten different histories of the party, each one as packed with lies as the last, and this is the first time I’ve experienced the true atmosphere of the ‘ten days that shook the world.’
-Sándor Kopácsi
I haven’t read much about the events of 1956, but the inescapable impression I got from schools and the media was that this was a liberal, pro-capitalist and nationalist uprising. That impression is thoroughly refuted by In the Name of the Working Class. This event has been misrepresented, first by the Stalinists, who said the whole thing was a fascist coup, second by the conservatives and liberals of the west.
I was somewhat aware that there was an untold story of workers’ revolution here. I read this book to look for confirmation or denial. The book confirmed it, and then turned the dial a few more notches. I found much more evidence of a working-class, democratic socialist revolution than I had expected to find.
Tragic Indecision
One major part of the story that I had never appreciated before was the indecision and resignation of Nagy and his government, including Kopácsi. It comes across powerfully in this account. During the insurrection, the cops fought the insurgents for some time before finally joining them, and Nagy did not agree to “lead” the revolution until the last minute. The revolution was really led by the workers of the heavy industries, by workers’ councils and militias. A sincere and genuine section of the ruling stratum – the likes of Nagy and Kopácsi – came over to the revolution after it was an accomplished fact.
They were sincere socialists and critics of Stalinism, brave and humanitarian individuals. But they never proved capable of anticipating or preparing for events. Theywere not as defiant or audacious as the masses or as the situation demanded. This is apparent on some level throughout Kopácsi’s memoir, but it becomes very clear in the chapters that describe the Russian invasion.
Khrushchev sends in the tanks
The USSR arranged a meeting with Hungarian delegates, ostensibly to discuss formalities associated with the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary – such matters as ‘whether the departing troops should be presented with bouquets by schoolchildren’! While dragging out these petty talks, the USSR launched a full-scale invasion. Hours passed. Tanks entered Budapest and started flattening city blocks with shells. Still the talks wore on! Finally the hapless delegates were, at a certain point in the proceedings, simply arrested.
The leaders of the revolution were not idiots. On that evening, Sándor Kopácsi was fully aware of what was happening soon after the fake talks began:
’Sándor, there are troop movements. Everywhere. And these reports aren’t just coming from our observation posts, they’re from individuals, from hundreds of phone calls coming from every part of the country. Here’s a map of the invasion, drawn up from the reports.’
He spread out a map of Hungary, with multicoloured arrows, on my desk. From the reports, we knew that ten divisions were on the move in key areas of the country. At least five armoured columns were converging on Budapest…
’Has the old man [Nagy] seen the map of the invasion?’
’He has it.’
-Sándor Kopácsi
They were not idiots. But they lacked will. Nagy continued to insist on the negotiations, though it was obvious, even to him, that they were a ploy. Faced with this life-or-death crisis, key figures in the armed forces were simply advised to go to sleep for a few hours.
In a dramatic and tense section of the book, Kopácsi describes the invaders closing in. He also portrays (and defends) his own government’s failure to react. Resistance would have been futile, he tells us; he has never admired Masada. But regardless, fierce fighting raged in Budapest for days. The armed workers and youth held out heroically against the tanks. The police chief went to the government HQ, where an enormous phalanx of Hungarian tanks awaited the approaching Soviet forces. But there was to be no battle: Kopácsi convinced the tank crews to lay down their arms and surrender without a fight.
Picture 4: ruin and destruction in Budapest testify to the fierce resistance of the Hungarian revolutionaries
Kopácsi, in my view, fails to justify this fatalistic and irresolute attitude. When we look at how fierce the fighting was in the end, and we tally up the missed opportunities, the toll of lost initiative, the military assets surrendered without a fight, we get the impression that a far more organised and resolute defence of Budapest could have been mounted and could have been successful. The Soviet Union was powerful, but not omnipotent. They had to take into account the willingness of their own soldiers and population to fight, and the global context of the Cold War. Every day and every hour counted. I have not read widely on the subject. But based on the information in this book, it seems to me that a few more days’ stiff resistance might have forced the Stalinists to back off and come to terms.
After this disaster, there followed for Kopácsi years in prison, listening to the gunshots outside the walls as his comrades were mowed down. It was worse than any Masada. His desire to avoid needless bloodshed is sympathetic on a human level (though it was a disaster politically, historically), and he did not know that such a massacre would follow surrender.
The title of this memoir is entirely sincere. Kopácsi wrote it as a refugee in Canada, still a true believer in socialism. It is absolutely compelling, and for the experiences and lessons recorded in it, worth its weight in gold.
During World War Two the British War Office produced a series of incredibly detailed maps of Ireland. These were to serve British forces in the event that they were to invade the former colony that had sent them packing twenty years earlier.
The British army donated these maps to the Irish defence forces long after the war. But most were destroyed in a fire in Kildare Barracks, some time in the early 2000s.
These maps cover the entire island and show every field and city block. The Irish army themselves did not possess such detailed maps. Such are the perks of being able to dispose of the revenues of a world-spanning empire. See the military details noted in the second image, below.
Of course, Britain had been in control of all Ireland until 1921. They would have possessed maps that were twenty years out of date. But the first image above includes the Shannon hydroelectric dam, which was built years after independence.
How, then, were these maps drawn up? My guess is, on the basis of old British army maps, updated with details supplied by spies on the ground or aerial photography.
In a few weeks I’ll be in a position to upload some better-quality images, so keep an eye out.
