Status
Available
Call number
Series
Genres
Publication
Ace Books (1963), Edition: First Edition, 222 pages
Description
Andre Norton enthralled readers for decades with thrilling tales of people challenged to the limits of their endurance in epic battles of good against evil. None are more memorable than her Witch World novels. Simon Tregarth, a man from our own world, escapes his doom through the gates to the Witch World. There he aids the witch Jaelithe's escape from the hounds of Alizon, only to find himself embroiled in a deeper war against an even deadlier foe: the Kolder.
User reviews
LibraryThing member ashleytylerjohn
I thought I'd read this as a kid, and remembered nothing except that it wasn't as witchy as I'd been hoping, and that it involved a family who went to an alien planet. Upon re-reading it, I'm wondering if my memory is terrible, or I'm recalling the wrong book, as this is about a single man who
People have their weird names, they're fighting some enemy from some place, yada yada yada, and I keep thinking "But Straub's The Screaming Staircase was so much fun, and I haven't read the new Naomi Novik novel yet, so why am I wasting my time on this one?"
Oh, and apparently it was written in the 60s, and is apparently mildly feminist in that there are women who do more than stand, serve mead, or scream. But other than that, it screams 1920s-30s to me, it's sword and sorcery and John Carter or any of those interchangeable swashbuckling manly heroes of the pulp fiction age.
So I stopped re-reading (or reading, depending on my memory) at the 25% mark. I'm getting better about stopping books since my father died this year and reminded me Life is Short. On the off-chance that I run out of better books and am still alive, I can always return to the ones left unfinished--but I think we both know that's never going to happen.
(Note: 5 stars = amazing, wonderful, 4 = very good book, 3 = decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. I'm fairly good at picking for myself so end up with a lot of 4s).
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essentially travels to another dimension. And, it's kind of boring. Not horrible enough for 1 star, just generically dull. (I'm a bit tired of the man-goes-to-place-and-instantly-connects-with-folks-in-power ... if someone ended up in our world, the chance that they'd become chummy right away with Bill Gates or Donald Trump (or Justin Trudeau or Shania Twain) is fairly unlikely ...) People have their weird names, they're fighting some enemy from some place, yada yada yada, and I keep thinking "But Straub's The Screaming Staircase was so much fun, and I haven't read the new Naomi Novik novel yet, so why am I wasting my time on this one?"
Oh, and apparently it was written in the 60s, and is apparently mildly feminist in that there are women who do more than stand, serve mead, or scream. But other than that, it screams 1920s-30s to me, it's sword and sorcery and John Carter or any of those interchangeable swashbuckling manly heroes of the pulp fiction age.
So I stopped re-reading (or reading, depending on my memory) at the 25% mark. I'm getting better about stopping books since my father died this year and reminded me Life is Short. On the off-chance that I run out of better books and am still alive, I can always return to the ones left unfinished--but I think we both know that's never going to happen.
(Note: 5 stars = amazing, wonderful, 4 = very good book, 3 = decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. I'm fairly good at picking for myself so end up with a lot of 4s).
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LibraryThing member marysneedle
I originally read this book back in 1985. I have to say I had forgotten alot of the story line however still fell in love with the witchworld all over again.
I finished it and can truely say it was like reading it for the 1st time. The story seemed a little familar but I must have forgotten alot of
Anyway I really enjoyed it and am looking forward to reading the rest of the Witchworld books.
The ending left it open for lots of possibilities without being a cliffhanger. That is probably what Andre Norton was going for.
I would recommend this book to anyone who loves mixed world type Sci fi and Fantasy.
I finished it and can truely say it was like reading it for the 1st time. The story seemed a little familar but I must have forgotten alot of
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the detail.Anyway I really enjoyed it and am looking forward to reading the rest of the Witchworld books.
The ending left it open for lots of possibilities without being a cliffhanger. That is probably what Andre Norton was going for.
I would recommend this book to anyone who loves mixed world type Sci fi and Fantasy.
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LibraryThing member jjmcgaffey
Fun as always. I remembered the barest sketch and had forgotten - or assigned to another book - many of the details. Simon the hunted, his escape through the Siege Perilous, the chase by the Hounds, and her choice at the end I'd remembered; Volt's axe I'd remembered but assigned to a different
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book; and I'd somehow forgotten Loyse and the adventure in Kars and the second romance completely (remembered them when they happened, but they surprised me). Good story and it's clearly been too long since I read it last. Show Less
LibraryThing member justchris
This was the book that started it all. Well, maybe not, but it is the first of all the Witch World books, Andre Norton’s longest, oldest and most beloved series. I suspect that it’s also one of the first stories to blend fantasy and science fiction elements, but don’t quote me on that. I have
The protagonist is Simon Tregarth, a WWII veteran of Cornish extraction who left the US Army on bad terms after being convicted of black market dealing while part of the Allied Occupation of Berlin, and has been living on the shady side for the last several years. This places the opening scene sometime in the 1950s, at the beginning of the Cold War, with the Holocaust atrocities of the Nazis and the rise of fascism very much a part of public consciousness. This context very much informs the themes and plotline of the story. Re-reading this after many, many years (and thus not remembering the specifics) and in the wake of Trump’s election makes the story all the more gripping for me, I guess.
Anyway, Simon is presented to us as a good man played by the unscrupulous or having bad luck at the worst moments so that he is on the run from a hit man. But he’s also a bad man, in the sense that he is dangerous and willing to kill to survive the mean streets of the underworld. Dr Jorge Petronius offers him an escape through the legendary Siege Perilous, linked to Arthurian legend, a mystical gateway to a new world.
Simon takes this one-way trip and finds himself on a moor, where he soon encounters a woman being chased by a pack of hunting dogs and hunters on horseback. He helps her escape and thus joins the forces of Estcarp, where most of the Old Race live and the all-female Guardian and Council rule, relying on their magical power and the Guardsmen to protect their borders. Estcarp is a country under attack, with the uneasy neighboring countries of Karsten to the south and Alizon to the north, and the mysterious Kolder encroaching from their beachhead on the conquered island of Gorm off the western coastline having originated from overseas somewhere.
Estcarp and the Old Race are presented as an ancient people with special connections to the land and its flora and fauna. Simon feels the weight of millennia in Es City that vastly exceeds any sense of the weight of history he once felt walking on old Roman roads in Europe. The people of Karsten are a mix of matrilineal nobility and mercenaries who have conquered and/or married into the landed gentry, as well as some of the Old Race who live among them. In addition to these, the Sulcar traders have established Sulcarkeep on a peninsula ceded to them by Estcarp, and the Falconers they brought as refugees working as marines for the Sulcar trade fleet from overseas have settled in the southern mountains between Estcarp and Karsten. Finally, the Tormen live in the mysterious and impenetrable wetlands between Alizon and Estcarp.
The Old Race are presented not quite as a dying race, but certainly not as a booming population. This is because any girls with any hint of Power are recruited and trained by the witches. The witches guard their names and take vows of celibacy to preserve their powers, thus reducing the number of marriageable women in the population, leading to a huge gender imbalance not unlike what China is experiencing as a result of its generational one-child policy and consequent gender-selective abortion trends. The Old Race and Sulcar are longtime allies who have successfully intermarried, while the Falconers were not welcomed, given their deeply misogynistic male military society with their women confined to breeding villages being abhorrent to a culture dominated by women.
Simon works to fit in, learning the language, signing up for guard duty, starting to use a sword while readily adapting to dart guns. He ponders the incongruities displayed by the different groups—swords and guns but no bows and arrows, horses and sailing ships and castles, but also remote communication devices and artificial lighting. And he feels a continuing connection to the witch he first met fleeing for her life on the moors, who is surprised to discover that a man seems to have some magical abilities in contrast to everything she’s ever understood.
In addition to Simon and the witch he meets and works with again and again over the course of the story, two others are central to the plot. First is Koris, formerly of Gorm. He is the offspring of the Lord Defender of Gorm and a Torwoman who is suspected of ensorceling her noble husband. Koris is considered monstrous, with a handsome face but an apelike poorly proportioned body as a result of his mixed bloodlines, and his stepmother and younger half-brother invite the Kolder to Gorm to back their coup in the wake of the old lord’s death. Koris finds refuge in Estcarp and becomes Captain of the Guard, while Gorm succumbs entirely to the Kolder and nothing more is known of its people. Second is Loyse, daughter of Fulke, lord of Verlaine, a coastal holding that has a long Wrecker history, enriching the lord by luring and looting ships and murdering any shipwreck survivors. Fulke married into the old Verlaine family but represents the brutal nouveau riche of former bandits turned landlords. He has political ambitions and arranges a marriage between Loyse and the Duke of Karsten, the most powerful lord in the land. The marriage ceremony is performed and witnessed by 3 representatives of the Duke, with an axe as a proxy for the groom (this ceremony appears in other stories set in this world), but Loyse has plans to escape during the drunken revelry of the wedding feast.
This is something of an adventure tale, with the characters moving from one conflict or intrigue to the next as skirmishes turn into battles turn into war. The story is arranged in four sections (Venture of Sulcarkeep, Venture of Verlaine, Venture of Karsten, and Venture of Gorm), each subdivided into multiple named chapters. It is clearly set up for its sequel Web of the Witch World, because the end of this story is a pause after the climactic (initial) confrontation with the Kolder, and Simon’s insight into their origins and purposes.
One could argue that the Old Race is modeled on the Jews, and that the Kolder are similar to Nazi Germany invading or manipulating the governments of other countries while persecuting the Jews and intent on world domination and the subjugation of “inferior” races. Certainly, events in Karsten are not unlike what happened in Europe in terms of the Jews being rounded up, and those discovered to shield or aid them being imprisoned or murdered in their turn by the Nazi regime. Or perhaps Estcarp is an inverse interpretation of Israel: instead of being a new country created by the European powers in atonement for the Holocaust but at the expense of Palestinians and resented and threatened by surrounding Muslim Arab countries, it is the original country surrounded by relatively recent immigrant nations who resent its history and fear and hate the special powers of the witches. Karsten sounds similar to England, with its mix of Anglo-Saxon followed by Norman invaders, its Welsh wrecker heritage, while the Sulcar might be considered cognates to the Phoenicians or the Scandinavians.
The story passes the Bechdel test, largely in terms of Loyse interacting with various women over the course of the story. Women are certainly key to driving the plot forward. Not much racial diversity, though. One nameless dead person at the end appears to be black, possibly also one legendary figure; everyone else in the story is described in terms of typical European ethnicities. Not much gender or sexual diversity either, but then this was written in the early 1960s—we’re lucky to have strong women characters even.
I enjoyed rereading it. The book is quick and generally fast-paced and full of happy coincidences that manage to line up neatly so that our band of heroes come out on top after sometimes harrowing and desperate moments. Sometimes the exposition bogs it down. I find it funny to see Simon Tregarth called an outlander repeatedly, ages before the bestseller and now TV series Outlander. The story explores universal themes of what it means to be human, alienation and exile, overcoming stereotypes and discovering the limitations of one’s own worldview, finding one’s own identity and place in the world, the dangers of forbidden knowledge, and more.
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the original 1963 Ace edition, which includes the title page illustration by Jack Gaughan (cover artist too). I went online today and looked up Norton’s entire bibliography, and it looks like this is her first fantasy novel, though some of her earliest historical/contemporary fiction may contain some fantastical elements (I don’t really remember the details of Ralestone Luck).The protagonist is Simon Tregarth, a WWII veteran of Cornish extraction who left the US Army on bad terms after being convicted of black market dealing while part of the Allied Occupation of Berlin, and has been living on the shady side for the last several years. This places the opening scene sometime in the 1950s, at the beginning of the Cold War, with the Holocaust atrocities of the Nazis and the rise of fascism very much a part of public consciousness. This context very much informs the themes and plotline of the story. Re-reading this after many, many years (and thus not remembering the specifics) and in the wake of Trump’s election makes the story all the more gripping for me, I guess.
Anyway, Simon is presented to us as a good man played by the unscrupulous or having bad luck at the worst moments so that he is on the run from a hit man. But he’s also a bad man, in the sense that he is dangerous and willing to kill to survive the mean streets of the underworld. Dr Jorge Petronius offers him an escape through the legendary Siege Perilous, linked to Arthurian legend, a mystical gateway to a new world.
Simon takes this one-way trip and finds himself on a moor, where he soon encounters a woman being chased by a pack of hunting dogs and hunters on horseback. He helps her escape and thus joins the forces of Estcarp, where most of the Old Race live and the all-female Guardian and Council rule, relying on their magical power and the Guardsmen to protect their borders. Estcarp is a country under attack, with the uneasy neighboring countries of Karsten to the south and Alizon to the north, and the mysterious Kolder encroaching from their beachhead on the conquered island of Gorm off the western coastline having originated from overseas somewhere.
Estcarp and the Old Race are presented as an ancient people with special connections to the land and its flora and fauna. Simon feels the weight of millennia in Es City that vastly exceeds any sense of the weight of history he once felt walking on old Roman roads in Europe. The people of Karsten are a mix of matrilineal nobility and mercenaries who have conquered and/or married into the landed gentry, as well as some of the Old Race who live among them. In addition to these, the Sulcar traders have established Sulcarkeep on a peninsula ceded to them by Estcarp, and the Falconers they brought as refugees working as marines for the Sulcar trade fleet from overseas have settled in the southern mountains between Estcarp and Karsten. Finally, the Tormen live in the mysterious and impenetrable wetlands between Alizon and Estcarp.
The Old Race are presented not quite as a dying race, but certainly not as a booming population. This is because any girls with any hint of Power are recruited and trained by the witches. The witches guard their names and take vows of celibacy to preserve their powers, thus reducing the number of marriageable women in the population, leading to a huge gender imbalance not unlike what China is experiencing as a result of its generational one-child policy and consequent gender-selective abortion trends. The Old Race and Sulcar are longtime allies who have successfully intermarried, while the Falconers were not welcomed, given their deeply misogynistic male military society with their women confined to breeding villages being abhorrent to a culture dominated by women.
Simon works to fit in, learning the language, signing up for guard duty, starting to use a sword while readily adapting to dart guns. He ponders the incongruities displayed by the different groups—swords and guns but no bows and arrows, horses and sailing ships and castles, but also remote communication devices and artificial lighting. And he feels a continuing connection to the witch he first met fleeing for her life on the moors, who is surprised to discover that a man seems to have some magical abilities in contrast to everything she’s ever understood.
In addition to Simon and the witch he meets and works with again and again over the course of the story, two others are central to the plot. First is Koris, formerly of Gorm. He is the offspring of the Lord Defender of Gorm and a Torwoman who is suspected of ensorceling her noble husband. Koris is considered monstrous, with a handsome face but an apelike poorly proportioned body as a result of his mixed bloodlines, and his stepmother and younger half-brother invite the Kolder to Gorm to back their coup in the wake of the old lord’s death. Koris finds refuge in Estcarp and becomes Captain of the Guard, while Gorm succumbs entirely to the Kolder and nothing more is known of its people. Second is Loyse, daughter of Fulke, lord of Verlaine, a coastal holding that has a long Wrecker history, enriching the lord by luring and looting ships and murdering any shipwreck survivors. Fulke married into the old Verlaine family but represents the brutal nouveau riche of former bandits turned landlords. He has political ambitions and arranges a marriage between Loyse and the Duke of Karsten, the most powerful lord in the land. The marriage ceremony is performed and witnessed by 3 representatives of the Duke, with an axe as a proxy for the groom (this ceremony appears in other stories set in this world), but Loyse has plans to escape during the drunken revelry of the wedding feast.
This is something of an adventure tale, with the characters moving from one conflict or intrigue to the next as skirmishes turn into battles turn into war. The story is arranged in four sections (Venture of Sulcarkeep, Venture of Verlaine, Venture of Karsten, and Venture of Gorm), each subdivided into multiple named chapters. It is clearly set up for its sequel Web of the Witch World, because the end of this story is a pause after the climactic (initial) confrontation with the Kolder, and Simon’s insight into their origins and purposes.
One could argue that the Old Race is modeled on the Jews, and that the Kolder are similar to Nazi Germany invading or manipulating the governments of other countries while persecuting the Jews and intent on world domination and the subjugation of “inferior” races. Certainly, events in Karsten are not unlike what happened in Europe in terms of the Jews being rounded up, and those discovered to shield or aid them being imprisoned or murdered in their turn by the Nazi regime. Or perhaps Estcarp is an inverse interpretation of Israel: instead of being a new country created by the European powers in atonement for the Holocaust but at the expense of Palestinians and resented and threatened by surrounding Muslim Arab countries, it is the original country surrounded by relatively recent immigrant nations who resent its history and fear and hate the special powers of the witches. Karsten sounds similar to England, with its mix of Anglo-Saxon followed by Norman invaders, its Welsh wrecker heritage, while the Sulcar might be considered cognates to the Phoenicians or the Scandinavians.
The story passes the Bechdel test, largely in terms of Loyse interacting with various women over the course of the story. Women are certainly key to driving the plot forward. Not much racial diversity, though. One nameless dead person at the end appears to be black, possibly also one legendary figure; everyone else in the story is described in terms of typical European ethnicities. Not much gender or sexual diversity either, but then this was written in the early 1960s—we’re lucky to have strong women characters even.
I enjoyed rereading it. The book is quick and generally fast-paced and full of happy coincidences that manage to line up neatly so that our band of heroes come out on top after sometimes harrowing and desperate moments. Sometimes the exposition bogs it down. I find it funny to see Simon Tregarth called an outlander repeatedly, ages before the bestseller and now TV series Outlander. The story explores universal themes of what it means to be human, alienation and exile, overcoming stereotypes and discovering the limitations of one’s own worldview, finding one’s own identity and place in the world, the dangers of forbidden knowledge, and more.
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LibraryThing member ikeman100
Norton writes pretty good SF. This one was supposed to be one of her best. It was pretty good but is it SF or just Fantasy. If you like fantasy it may be for you. I was hoping for SF.
LibraryThing member SeriousGrace
I always root for the underdog and in Witch World the heroes are misfits. Simon Tregarth is ex-military, a colonel who has been framed. He is on the run and needs to disappear quickly. Enter Dr. Jorge Petronius who knows exactly where to hide out hero...in the witch world of Estcarp. Petronius has
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a special stone he calls the Siege Perilous that can judge a man's worth and then send him to the world best suited for his soul. Simon was sent to a medieval land where its inhabitants are at battle; perfect for a military man. The action picks up from there. Show Less
LibraryThing member SandyAMcPherson
This book (and perhaps the series) is pretty dated. Maybe that's why it just came across as poor SF and didn't appeal at all as a fantasy. In all fairness, the storyline is pretty solid, but I was looking for more of a wizardly world so I couldn't find much to keep me captivated. Eventually it
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became a DNF, which is fairly rare for me. Show Less
LibraryThing member MarkLacy
Too much sci-fi in the story [wanted more fantasy]. Too many missing pieces toward the end. [Update, December 2, 2013: I did go on to read others in this series.]
LibraryThing member Karlstar
I really enjoy this classic fantasy novel. It starts out with a familiar trope - a man flees Earth to the world of his desires and ends up on a fantasy world, in the land of Estcarp. Estcarp is a matriarchy, the witches of Estcarp have magical powers - as long as they don't marry. A war is brewing,
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and Simon Tregarth joins the side of Estcarp against the various evil peoples who want to invade and wipe them out. What I like most about Norton's fantasy is the way that she takes the familiar and makes it feel alien. The book has good characters and good action in a great setting. Show Less
Awards
Hugo Award (Nominee — Novel — 1964)
Locus All-Time Best (Fantasy Novel — 28 — 1998)
Language
Original publication date
1963
ISBN
0441061974 / 9780441061976