Overview

A wheel of ravens revelled loudly Over a bitter battle of bold fighters Who lost their lives and lay in mud, A feast of flesh for the frenzied birds... From Adam Bolivar, balladeer extraordinaire and author of The Ettinfell of Beacon Hill, comes a landmark volume of poetry that harkens back to the adventurous myths of the Anglo-Saxons and the Dark Ages... Alliterative verse was the traditional poetic form used in Old English poems such as Beowulf and The Wanderer, as well as in Old Norse sagas and the Poetic Edda of the Icelanders. Outlawed by the Normans as a symbol of nativist rebellion after their conquest of England in the year 1066, this ancient form is now all but forgotten. A Wheel of Ravens is the first ever collection of original verse written in the Old English alliterative style. Braiding together threads of early English paganism, folkloric elements-including a speculative pre-history of the storytelling tradition of Jack Tales-and the dream-cycle of H. P. Lovecraft, Adam Bolivar offers an intricate poetic tapestry bursting with myth and story, as unique as it is remarkable. This groundbreaking work will surely be of great interest to fans of Seamus Heaney's Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. With a foreword by Dennis Wilson Wise (a noted authority on Tolkien and epic fantasy), an introduction by the author, and a useful glossary. Richly illustrated with images of Anglo-Saxon artifacts, artwork and more.

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9781956702101

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Reviews

"""This is the work of a master craftsman, the owner of a true word hoard which he freely unlocks. We are led as a result into a world that is very much that of the Old North, in which the landscapes are of fjord and fen, mountain and moor, wood and wold. The winters are long and fierce, the summers fleeting and golden as youth. Upon this canvas move the full cast of primeval Germanic figures, human and divine, monstrous and alluring, remote and all too intrusive. The verse in which they interact is wrought as finely as a Dark Age sword, made for action and performance and not merely for the glass case of a page. I have chosen already the selections that I shall recite myself around seasonal campfires. This living, glittering poetry is a true gift to the modern age."" -RONALD HUTTON, Author of Pagan Britain ""Adam Bolivar's A Wheel of Ravens, containing his recent poems written in Old English alliterative verse, is a revelation. The skill and panache with which Bolivar has adapted this ancient verse form to the weird mode is exhilarating. We are thrust back into the Dark Ages of pagan gods and doughty warriors-but in their midst are witches, minstrels, dragons, and other baleful creatures. With every poem Bolivar casts a mystic rune that lures the reader into his primitive but fascinating world."" -S. T. JOSHI, Editor of Spectral Realms ""This book must be one of the single most original books that I have read..... How far are we from the Olympus created by the Mediterranean Sea and its culture. Welcome, dear reader, to a novel world!"" -DONALD SIDNEY-FRYER, Author of The Atlantis Fragments"

Author Information

ADAM BOLIVAR is a formal poet of dark fantasy, a weird fiction writer and a playwright for marionettes with a particular interest in balladry, alliterative verse and ""Jack"" tales. He is the author of The Lay of Old Hex (Hippocampus Press, 2017), The Ettinfell of Beacon Hill (Jackanapes Press, 2021) and Ballads for the Witching Hour (Hippocampus Press 2022). A second volume of his occult detective Ettinfell saga is due out from Jackanapes Press in 2024 and third is forthcoming. A marionette-maker, he has written and performed in several original marionette plays performed by puppet troupes in Boston, Berkeley, Portland and Salem, Oregon. A native of gambrel-roofed Boston, Massachusetts, he now resides in the gloomy dreamlands of Portland, Oregon with his golden-haired wife and son. DENNIS WILSON WISE is a professor of practice at the University of Arizona where he also serves as the English Department's Director of Undergraduate Studies. His research focuses mainly on epic fantasy, Tolkien in particular, and his work has appeared in Tolkien Studies, Law & Literature, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Gothic Studies, Extrapolation, English Text Construction, and more. In 2019 Wise received a R. D. Mullen Postdoctoral Fellowship from Science Fiction Studies to help support archival research into modern alliterative poetry. He has also earned awards for his teaching and his research alike, including the SFRA's Mary Kay Bray Award in 2023, and Wise was the reviews editor for Fafnir: Nordic Journal of SFF Research when it became the first academic journal to ever win a World Fantasy Award.

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