Review: Ursus of Ultima Thule, by Avram Davidson

Review: Ursus of Ultima Thule, by Avram Davidson

by Rich Horton

Avram Davidson is one of my favorite writers, and I have up to now read almost all of his SF/Fantasy novels. (Though for all I know Seth Davis is set to publish some more -- he's already put out at least one previously unpublished non-SF novel, Beer! Beer! Beer!.) But there were two I hadn't got to -- Ursus of Ultima Thule (1973) and Marco Polo and the Sleeping Beauty (1988, with Grania Davis.) Recently I learned that my old friend from the glory days of Usenet, David Goldfarb, with whom I have again connected due to another shared interest (trivia), had recorded, for Wildside Press, an audiobook version of Ursus of Ultima Thule. I figured that would be a great opportunity to catch up with that novel, and so I bought it and listened to it. (David does a fine job reading it.)

Then I looked into the publication history of the novel, which is kind of interesting. It was originally published in (sort of) three parts. The first half or so of the novel was a novella in If, August 1971, called "Arnten of Ultima Thule". The remainder of the novel appeared the following year, in a two part serial in Fantastic, August and October 1972, called "The Forges of Nainland are Cold". The full novel was published by Avon in 1973. The quasi-serialized version is roughly 55,000 words, and the book version is about 65,000 words, due to an interesting chapter interpolated between the end of "Arnten of Ultima Thule" and the beginning of "The Forges of Nainland are Cold". 

The full novel was reissued in 2000 by Wildside, with the audiobook coming out in 2011. An outfit called Prologue Books published an ebook in 2012, and Gateway/Orion also did an ebook, for the UK market, in 2013. Finally -- I'll remark that my personal favorite title is "The Forges of Nainland are Cold" -- but I fully understand that Ursus of Ultima Thule is the more commercial title, and probably more representative of the whole book. 

The novel has been called "a tale of an Arctic Atlantis", and so Ultima Thule -- the original Ultima Thule -- is said to be a land now buried under the Arctic ice. This story is set in the far past, when Ultima Thule was warmer. We open with the hero, Arnten, still a boy. He is not accepted by most of his fellows for a couple of reasons -- his absent father, who is said to have been a bear; and also perhaps his unusual intelligence and curiosity. But he is allowed to come on a hunt of the wild horses, partly because Tall Roke, the band's best young hunter, is one of those who tolerates Arnten. But the hunt goes terribly wrong when they encounter a mammont, and most of the hunters are killed -- and Arnten is wrongly blamed. So he runs away, having been urged by his uncle to find his father.

In the mean time, the whole Kingdom of Ultima Thule is in trouble. The iron their society depends on -- especially for weapons -- is "sick" -- it quickly decays. The Nains who mine and forge it (Nains are essentially the same as the dwarves of Norse myth) don't know what to do. The king, Orfas, is likewise becoming sick -- there seems to be some sort of link between the health of the iron and the health of the king. And as his power declines, his cruelty and misrule worsens. 

Arnten does discover his father, Arntat, who is indeed a bear -- or, rather, sort of a were-bear. Son and father forge a bond, with Arnten realizing that he too has the bear nature within him. He also learns his father's back story -- he is a half-brother of the king, and eventually a rivalry grew, and Arntat was exiled. He has maintained his freedom by staying a bear -- but as he and Arnten travel together in human form, they are soon captured by Orfas' men, and sent to the mines to work with the Nains. 

That is the first part of the novel. In the second part, after Arnten has escaped the mines, with his father's, and the Nains', heroic assistance, he makes his way back to his home village. Soon he -- now coming into his manhood -- forms an alliance with Tall Roke, who has come back (mostly) from near death, and with others, including his uncle, a shaman of sorts. And they come to the realization that their weird is to travel to the land of the wizards, and feed the wizards -- and have the wizards break the spell on the iron. All this is accomplished -- the scenes with the wizards are deliciously strange, and inevitably the novel moves toward the already forecast climax, with Arnten claiming his true birthright.

It's an enjoyable novel, but it's not really Davidson at his best. His prose has the slant rhythms and odd turns of phrase and delight in unveiling of esoteric knowledge that we expect, but for me it doesn't quite sing here like the best Davidson prose. There are neat scenes -- an interlude with a strange creature called a "perry" (peri, I assumed?), the scene with the wizards, the stories of Arntat's adventures with Orfas, and some more. The plot is pretty straightforward, and doesn't really surprise much. I liked it, and I'm glad I read it finally -- but it's a fairly minor part of the Avram Davidson canon.