Creature Collections: Hidden Worlds

         Most of the Creature Collections I’ve featured over the years take the form of encyclopedias or field guides, listing a range of fantastical creatures said to be found in our world.  (If you’d like to see all the Creature Collections so far, look in the sidebar or here.)  Today I’m highlighting some books that play with the conceit of discovering different worlds of creatures.  Each of these books has actually been mentioned before in this blog, but I thought they deserved to be pulled together under the Creature Collections category.

        The Land of Neverbelieve, by Norman Messenger - This lavish book is the record of a visit to a mysterious island and the strange things seen there.  The watercolor and colored pencil illustrations are dreamlike, and the pages fold out to give even more room for pictures.  There is no story or apparent order to the information gathered here and Messenger's imagination has wandered freely, so there's a lot to look at.  Back when she was much younger my daughter T especially liked all the funny trees with their surreal shapes and produce.  I featured a few of these plants in my series of posts on the Botany of the Realms of Imagination: giant curly ferns, umbrella palms, and spaghetti trees.

However there are plenty of creatures in this book, as well!

Amarant, by Una Woodruff - This one reproduces the sketches and watercolors of a seventeenth century noblewoman whose travels brought her to the mysterious island of Amarantos, which was once known as Atlantis.  As a botanist, our artist was focussing her observations on plants, but the book finds its place among my creature collections because so many of the plants of Amarantos happen to be plant-animals hybrids with insects, birds, all kinds of other creatures, and even dragons.  This makes a fun coffee table book, excellent simply for admiring the pictures, however it dates back to 1981 and is no longer readily available.  I was lucky to find a used copy.  In past posts you can see the flower of immortality and a couple of insect-plants, as well as the Dragon Vine and Dillcorn.

        Codex Seraphinianus, by Luigi Serafini - This one is a little different in that it includes no story whatsoever, and all the text is written in an imaginary alphabet of some sort.  One chapter is on plants and you can see spreads of those illustrations here and here, but there are also chapters on machines and vehicles, cultural items, architecture, and of course creatures.  It’s another one that’s best for browsing through, and it’s beautiful, surreal, very weird, and definitely an oddity.  (Also first published in 1981, so clearly there was something in the air that year.)

        Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time, by James Gurney - The creatures in this book (followed by a series of books and other media) are not fantasy per se, since dinosaurs did of course actually exist.  But this is a fantasy version of dinosaurs, in which they have survived and evolved in intelligence but not form, and now are living in a collaborative society with humans.  As with the other books in today’s post, it’s the beauty of the illustrations that provides the appeal.  Like the others it’s in the form of an explorer’s notebook recording all the amazing things he discovers, and the magic of the book is in inviting us to immerse ourselves in the gorgeous pictures of wondrous things.  You can see mention of

Dinotopia along with some illustrations of these magical dinosaurs in a Steep Street, a Skybax rider, and Treetown.

        This is exactly the sort of book I was constantly devising in my childhood, with maps and short explanations, along with pictures of people, buildings, landscapes, and plenty of fantastical creatures.  Of course, my little booklets were neither as comprehensive nor as expertly illustrated as these!  If you’re in the mood for a strange and wondrous armchair journey, I recommend a look at any of these books, if you can find them.

[Pictures: Of Marsh and Stream, illustration by Norman Messenger from The Land of Neverbelieve, 2012;

Unicorn bird, illustration by Una Woodruff from Amarant, 1981;

Illustration by Luigi Serafini from Codex Seraphinianus, 1981;

Skybax Rider over Dinotopia, painting by James Gurney, c 1992 (Image from Heritage Auctions).]

G is for Green Girl and Garden

        (My A to Z Blog Challenge theme this year is Beyond Pomegranate & Thorns, my collection of short stories, poems, and art inspired by fairy tales, myths, and folklore – coming out on April 20!)

        The Green Girl is the narrator of one of the poems in the book, and it’s inspired by the legend of The Green Children of Woolpit.  This is one of the stories that, unlike “The Sleeping Beauty,” for example, is not exactly widely known.  If you want to learn about the legend and about my poem, go check out this prior blog post about them.  There you can read the background of the legend and also follow a further link to read the entire poem where it was published by New Myths in 2025.

        So to provide something new for today, G is also for Garden - the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, to be specific.  Here’s the explanation as it appears in the End Notes of my book: The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were listed as one of the Seven Wonders of the World by second century authors, but that was already long after they had apparently been destroyed by an earthquake.  Actual facts about this wonder therefore have to be supplemented with legend.  The hanging gardens were said to have been built around 600 BCE by Nebuchadnezzar II for his wife Amytis of Media, who missed the mountain greenery of her homeland.  Modern archaeology has found no evidence for such gardens in Babylon, and some scholars suggest other possible locations and histories, but the legend about Nebuchadnezzar II building the Hanging Gardens comes from Berossus in the early third century BCE.

        The inspiration for both my story and my artwork grew from the fact that “hanging gardens” always sounded so much more magical to me than mere plantings on terraces.  What if the gardens were actually hanging? 

        Clearly it would take djinn to create something like this, but what do you do when something goes wrong and the djinn aren’t around?  My short story imagines the adventure of Queen Amytis when her hanging garden blows away.

        As I mentioned back at B, yes, there are End Notes.  I wanted to give readers a place to find out which stories inspired each of the pieces in Beyond Pomegranate & Thorns, so I’m not leaving anyone guessing - if they don’t want to be left guessing.  But I also wanted to give the reader a choice of when (or if) to get that background information.  Do you prefer to read the story first and let it stand on its own before you find out the background, or do you prefer to know all the possible references as you read?  Of course some of the source stories are famous enough to be obvious, but some, like the Green Children, are less so.

        Also, the Green Children and the Hanging Gardens both fall into my category of “Other” folklore, so if you want to read more about that category, here’s my prior post on Giving Legends and Folklore a Kick.

        The moral of the Hanging Garden is to make sure your castles (and gardens) in the air are securely tethered.

        Also, don’t plant Enormous Turnips on your Hanging Gardens.  The two gardening styles do not mix well.

        Here in the northern hemisphere my thoughts are definitely turning to gardening as Spring is really getting going.  Would you like a Hanging Garden of your own?

[Pictures: Twilight in a Green Land, rubber block print by AEGNydam, 2025;

Hanging Garden, detail of a larger rubber block print by AEGNydam, 2021 (Images from Beyond Pomegranate & Thorns, but you can see the whole piece at NydamPrints.com).]

What’s Black and White and Green?

         First, to celebrate “Black and White” - It’s our Blogiversary!  Fifteen years ago I started blogging, and in 1,507 posts so far I’ve shared my thoughts, theories, and enthusiasm for relief block prints and speculative fiction, and of course Words of the Month.  My audience is small, and I’m really not much of a social media type, but I’ve appreciated the opportunity to connect with the folks who have found this blog over the years.  If you’re reading this, thanks for being here with me!

        In the past few years I’ve been posting a little less frequently, and I’ll admit that sometimes I really don’t have time for this.  But even though sometimes it feels like a chore, there are other times when I still really enjoy it.  So perhaps I’ll be scaling back my posts still further - but on the other hand, who knows?  I probably wouldn’t have guessed 15 years ago that I’d still be doing this now.

        In addition to Black and White’s fifteenth birthday, another item to celebrate today is the publication of another poem.  “The Green Girl Thinks of Home” just came out in the Summer 2025 issue of New Myths, and you can read it (plus the rest of the contents) here.  I hope you enjoy my poem - but it will help if you know about the legend of the Green Children…

        The character of the Green Girl comes from a folk tale from Suffolk in the East of England.  Some time in the 12th century two mysterious, green-skinned children were found near the town of Woolpit.  The brother and sister spoke an unknown language, were dressed in unfamiliar style,  and could eat no normal food except broad beans.  The boy soon died, but the girl eventually learned English and explained that she came from a land that was always in twilight.  While watching cattle in this green, twilit land, the children entered a cave, and following the sound of church bells, at length they emerged in England.

        Of course the motif of entering another world through a cave is a very common one in folklore, but it’s interesting that this time we are the strange other world.  Folklorists have come up with various explanations and interpretations: tales of aliens ranging from faeries to indigenous Britons to Flemish settlers to extra-terrestrials… or tales of ancient harvest rituals or metaphors of death and rebirth, or perhaps garbled tales of some historical event such as a kidnapping, arsenical poisoning, or hypochromic anemia…  According to the story, the Green Girl learned to eat other foods, was given a job as a maid, and eventually married.  I don’t know whether she had children.  A number of other writers have explored the story in various ways, but for me the interesting part is the defamiliarization of what our world would seem like to someone who had known only twilight.

        The idea for the poem and a first draft date back a long time, probably some 35 years.  But relatively recently when I started getting back into writing and submitting poetry, I came back to it and reworked it considerably.  However, the basic idea has stayed the same: everyone always says that enduring the “troughs” of experience is worth it in order to enjoy the “peaks” — but what if it’s better not to have any extremes at all?  Certainly someone from a land of perpetual twilight might think so.  What do you think?

        My illustration is a rubber block print that didn’t really turn out as I’d hoped.  I used the bad rubber and I had such a tough time with the printing that I don’t know whether I’ll even bother making an entire edition of originals for sale.  But I wanted to illustrate the poem because TEASER ALERT: I expect to include it in my next collection of stories, poems, and art, which now has the working title Beyond Pomegranate & Thorns.  Stay tuned for exciting updates in the coming months!

[Picture: “Then the Magic Happened,”cover art by Paula Hammond for New Myths Vol. 19, Issue 71, Summer 2025 (Image from NewMyths.com);

Green Girl at Twilight, rubber block print by AEGNydam, 2025.]

Z is for Zerzura

         (My A-Z Blog Challenge theme this year is Mythical and Imaginary Places.)

        For the final location in the A to Z Challenge we’ll stay in the desert and join the search for the mysterious lost oasis of Zerzura.  Zerzura comes from Arabic lore of the Great Sand Sea, one of the driest and least populated regions of the Sahara, where even to this day few people explore.  It straddles the area from Libya to Egypt, and is a vast expanse of sand dunes with few oases.  Tales of this region have abounded in Arabic lore for centuries, and Zerzura is first mentioned in an Egyptian document from the mid-thirteenth century.  The first detailed description comes from the fifteenth century Book of Treasure (Kitab al-Kanuz).  With a title like this, you know you’re going to have a fabulous story.  It is unclear whether any copies of this book currently exist, but it was apparently a collection of stories, spells, and incantations listing over 400 sites in Egypt where one could find hidden treasure.  One of those sites was Zerzura.

        Five days west of any track, the wanderer might find a road that follows a long wadi, or ravine.  At the end of the road is a city white as a dove, on whose gate is carved a bird.  You will find in the beak of this sculpted bird a key, and if you take the key you can enter the city.  The buildings all are white and beautiful, with springs and pools and an abundance of vines and palm trees, but the king and queen of this city are deep in an enchanted sleep.  You are advised not to go near them, but to take the treasure and leave.  However, there is also some mention of black giants guarding the city, so you may also want to watch out for them.

        The first that Europeans heard of Zerzura was in 1835, and was based on a report from an Arab who claimed to have found Zerzura while looking for a lost camel.  He said he had found an oasis with ruins, but I’m not sure the ruins prove that an enchanted king and queen couldn’t still be there, sleeping their magical sleep as their city falls ever farther into decay.  At any rate, it was not until the dawn of the twentieth century that exploration of the area took off.  A number of expeditions by both Egyptians and Europeans began explorations of 

the Libyan Desert (which stretches from the middle of Libya to the banks of the Nile in Egypt).  Automobiles and finally airplanes slowly began to make greater and greater expeditions possible, and a number of oases and other new features were discovered, as well as great advances in the scientific study of sand dunes — but nothing was discovered that could be identified as Zerzura.  And so we end the A to Z Challenge as we began it: with an ancient lost city of great treasure and splendor, that has disappeared into the unknown.

        I would love to have some medieval Arabic illustrations of Zerzura, but all I can find are modern digital works.  The first one has influences of Petra, while the second looks more Egyptian, and also shows the carved bird over the gate.  This one comes from an adventure puzzle game for the computer.  Next is a city with minarets and domes, and the final picture looks almost futuristic with its skyscrapers more than 25 stories tall.  Only the first two illustrations are really intended to depict Zerzura.  The other two are simply billed as fantasy desert cities.  I think this would be a fun one to try to illustrate myself, and I’d definitely take a little inspiration from Petra just because Petra is so cool, but also from some of the amazing desert ruins found in Egypt, Iran, and other areas.

        As a concluding place for this year’s theme, Zerzura echoes a number of the motifs we’ve seen throughout the previous 25 mythical and imaginary places: the lost or hidden city (Atlantis, El Dorado, Kitezh, Shangri-La), the city of incredible luxury, power, or beauty now fallen to naught (Atlantis, Babel, Eden, Xanadu), the city wherein the intrepid explorer can help himself to oodles of loot (El Dorado, Luilekkerland, Northrend, Santa’s Workshop?), the enchantment and presence of magic beyond our mundane lives (Camelot, Faerie, Middle-Earth, Neverwinter, Oz), the oasis in the midst of inhospitable territory (Isles, Shangri-La)…  What I like best about the story of Zerzura, however, is the mystery: we’re given so many intriguing and beautiful details, but no explanation about any of them.  In fact, the ancient stories of this place don’t seem to draw any lessons or conclusion at all, which is actually quite unusual.  But it won’t stop me from offering you

        The MORAL of Zerzura:  Sometimes mystery is its own reward.

              OR:  Lost camels may be the number one indicator of lost cities.

        So, what would you carve over the gate of your enchanted kingdom?

[Pictures: Zerzura, digital art by Prospero0404, 2020 (Image from Deviant Art);

Screenshot from "Lost Chronicles of Zerzura" by Viva Media, 2012 (Image from Adventure Gamers);

Desert City, digital art by J.J. Peabody, 2015 (Image from Deviant Art);

City in the desert, digital art by Mark Tarrisse, (Image from Mark Tarrisse).]

Y is for Yuwara Ul Sahd

         (My A-Z Blog Challenge theme this year is Mythical and Imaginary Places.)

        Yuwara Ul Sahd was, some 200 years ago, an empire that claimed the Central Desert, from the elvish forests around the River Tiarnath in the north to the Border Plateau above Minar in the south, and from the Sinbal Tribal Lands in the west to the Crest Mountains in the east.  For roughly a century, however, the empire has been eroded, leaving nothing more than the great crossroads city of Sisoa at its center, the small towns along the River Kazaarid, and the few trading posts on the southwestern border.  Or at least, that was until Queen Kahan Atar took the throne, and she is nothing if not ambitious.  She calls herself Empress, and has posted guards to reopen several of the border forts, claiming to rule the whole of the former territory of Yuwara Ul Sahd, including the lands of the nomads and the mesas of the sky dwarves in the eastern desert.  Of course, as they say in Sisoa, “My dog calls himself Emperor Wag…”

        Yuwara Ul Sahd is one nation of my own high fantasy world, invented for my Otherworld Series.  As hinted in previous posts, I started imagining this world when I was in middle school and high school, so it’s been in the works for more than 30 years, and although of course there has been a massive amount of revision in that time, many of the broad outlines remain the same.  Sisoa is geographically the center of the region of the Otherworld in which my stories are set, and culturally it is something like a hinge, connecting the various races and cultures all around it.  It is the most culturally diverse city in the region, and its most popular hobbies seem to be politics and haggling over commerce.

        The first picture shows Sisoa from the north, which was a bit of a cop-out as it meant I didn’t need to draw the large, messy, sprawling tent city that has sprung up around its gate in the southwest.  You can see on the map that the River Kazaarid flows away from Sisoa into the desert, supporting a few towns before it sinks into the sand.  The last picture shows a sketch and section of notes from my notebook, but this info has never really entered into the books.  I have also included a picture of two coins of Yuwara Ul Sahd, one recent coin featuring Empress Kahan Atar, and one old coin featuring Emperor Oru, whose legacy is an important plot point in the second book of my series, Sleeping Legends Lie.

        One of my favorite things in world-building is to think about proverbs.  What proverbs people use tells us a lot about them: the physical attributes of their world, the plants and animals and people they are familiar with; the attitudes they have toward various sorts of people or behaviors; the wisdom and morality they consider important to share; the things “everyone knows”…  In the proverb I quoted above, the never-spoken part is “… but that doesn’t mean he’s an emperor.”  In other words, just because you claim something doesn’t make it true, a proverb dear to the hearts of a people who love to make outrageous claims as they haggle over trade.  Another saying with a similar but less jocular implication is “Say the scorpion’s sting is impossible, but the scorpion won’t believe it.”

Here are some other Sisoan proverbs.  Can you guess what they mean?

   Even the watchful caravan master can’t count the sand he crosses.

   The merchant who peddled curiosity bought lamentation.

   He can smell fire when his robe burns.

   Where’s the merchant who tried to cross the desert on an expectation?

   You can tell a scorpion by its tail.

   You’re about to meet Error Haste-azh.  (The -azh suffix denotes a family name, so this is saying “Error of the Haste family.”)

        If you’d like a few more tidbits, here are some other posts related to Yuwara Ul Sahd:

Snippet about Jiriya, a young woman from Sisoa

Snippet about Lubun-Blue, a man from the eastern desert

Snippet about Yunib, a man from Sisoa

Ruin of Ancient Powers, sixth book of the series, set entirely within the borders of Yuwara Ul Sahd

        And of course I’d be delighted if you wanted to check out my Otherworld Series, about which you can always learn more here.

        The MORAL of Yuwara Ul Sahd:  You don’t need to travel when the world comes to you.

              OR:  There’s a special satisfaction to having the right proverb for every situation.

        So, all you other fantasy and sci fi writers, speak up.  Tell us something about the wondrous worlds you’ve created!  (Or if you're not a writer, 

what worlds are your favorites?)

[Pictures: Sisoa from the north, drawing by AEGN, 1995;

Map of Yuwara Ul Sahd, drawn by AEGN, c 2008;

Two coins of Yuwara Ul Sahd, depicting Empress Kahan Atar and Emperor Oru, drawings by AEGN, 2008;

Notes and sketch of temple in Sisoa, drawing by AEGN, probably early 1990s.]

X is for Xanadu #AtoZChallenge

         (My A-Z Blog Challenge theme this year is Mythical and Imaginary Places.)

        I know Xanadu first and foremost from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous poem describing this wonderland, its underground river Alph, its stately pleasure-dome, and its deep romantic chasm.  You can read my prior post specifically 

about the poem here.  Plus, that’s where you can see my own illustration of one small section of Xanadu that is mentioned in the poem.

        Now let’s look a little more closely at the history of Xanadu before Coleridge made it a mythical location.  The name is an early Anglicization of Shangdu in northeast China, in Inner Mongolia.  It was the summer capital of Kublai Khan in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, until it was burned down by the Ming army in 1369.  The ruins were named a World Heritage Site in 2012, making this the only place in my list of 26 that is historically verified and placed in an actual, known location.  There is a real Xanadu that is neither mythical nor imaginary.  Europeans first heard of Shangdu from Marco Polo, who travelled there in about 1275 and described its wonders, from twice eight miles of fertile ground with walls and towers girdled round, to gardens full of wild animals, fountains, and various pleasure palaces.  Polo was particularly impressed with a palace built of huge canes of bamboo, carved with dragons and gilded all over, and collapsible so that it could be taken down, moved, and put back up wherever the Khan desired.  It was all very opulent and luxurious, and descriptions of Xanadu (spelled in a variety of ways) appeared in many books about China, generally all derived from Polo’s account, as well as a few other travellers’ accounts.  I had to open with some fantasy pictures of Xanadu, but the second set of pictures today reflects Xanadu’s non-mythical origins.  They show a scene of the current ruins at the World Heritage site, a carved stone from the site, and an artist’s impression of what the city might actually have looked like in its heyday.  There’s also an illustration of the “pleasure dome,” revealing its real origins as a lavish Mongol yurt (called ger in Mongolian).

        Fun Mythical Place trivia connections: 1. Batu Khan, who was magically thwarted in his attempt to attack Kitezh, was a cousin of Kublai Khan who built Xanadu.  They were both grandsons of Genghis Khan.  

2. Kublai Khan’s mother, just like her father-in-law Genghis’s foster father, was a Keraite, the Mongolian tribal confederation that had converted to Christianity and was conflated for a while with the legend of Prester John.  (Plus there’s Coleridge’s Abyssinian maid, inexplicably playing her dulcimer so far from home.  Perhaps she knew Prester John, too.)

         And that brings us back now to Coleridge’s poem, which was responsible for launching Xanadu in the European imagination beyond a magnificent, exotic, but real historical city into a mythical symbol of fantastically lavish splendor.  With this new mythical status, Xanadu’s name was given to (among other things) the over-the-top mansion of mogul Citizen Kane in 1941, the high-tech lairs of superhero Mandrake the Magician (1934) and super-villain Xanatos (1994), a series of futuristic dream-houses built in the early 1980s, and a magical night club of neon and roller disco in the 1980 movie starring Olivia Newton-John.

        A place where nobody dared to go, the love that we came to know, they call it Xanadu…  And now, open your eyes and see, what we have made is real.  We are in Xanadu (a dream of it we offer you).  A million lights are dancing, and there you are, a shooting star, an everlasting world.  And you’re here with me, eternally, Xanadu, Xanaduu-uu-uu…  Don’t miss the classic song in all its glorious cheesiness here!  (Seriously, roller disco, zoot suits, tight-rope dancers, an aerialist, a glimpse of Gene Kelly, those 80’s fashions… three and a half minutes of sheer, magnificent whaaat?  Enjoy!)

        The fantasy illustrations of Xanadu, on the other hand, are interesting for just how non-Mongol, non-Chinese they look.  Most of them have a middle Eastern or Mughal inspiration, more reminiscent of the Taj Mahal in India than anything in China.  I suspect this is because Coleridge’s poem, published in 1816, was all mixed in with the onset of British colonialism in India, the Egyptomania spurred by Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign, and English translations of The Arabian Nights.  Europeans tended to lump it all together as "eastern exoticism."  I suspect it also has a lot to do with Coleridge’s term “pleasure dome,” since traditional Chinese architecture is not known for domes, but Islamic and Mughal architecture are.  So, imaginings of Xanadu are heavy on the domes, plus walls and towers, as specified by Coleridge.  Today’s first two illustrations both try to imagine the caves of ice where Alph the sacred river ran.  The first picture in the third grouping is probably the oddest,

imagining Xanadu in a European renaissance style, and up on a huge cliff, rather than down near a cave or an underground river.  Personally I think I’ve always had a sort of impression that the whole place was under a transparent dome, perhaps because it may be made of ice, as per Coleridge.  There’s no doubt, however, that all of these versions of Xanadu are splendid, opulent, and magical.

        The MORAL of Xanadu:  The right marketing can take your ordinary earthly palace to the giddy heights of mythology.

              OR:  Beware!  Beware those who have fed on honey-dew and drunk the milk of Paradise 

(… particularly if that’s a euphemism for opium.)

        So, how do you imagine Xanadu?  Mongolian ger, Taj Mahal-style domes and turrets, 80’s roller disco nightclub, or something else altogether?

[Pictures: Kubla Khan, frontispiece by Dugald Walker from Rainbow Gold by Sara Teasdale, 1922 (Image from carlylehold flickr);

The River Alph in Xanadu, illustration by Graham Greenfield from The Dictionary of Imaginary Places by Manguel and Guadalupi, 1980;

Unesco World Heritage Site of Xanadu, East wall of Imperial City and excavated dragon-patterned pillar (Images from Unesco);

Shangdu, digital painting by Sarel Theron, 2012 (Image from Sarel Theron);

Pleasure dome at Xanadu, illustration by Robert Byrd from Kubla Khan, The Emperor of Everything by Kathleen Krull, 2010;

A Fantasy of Kubla Khan’s Palace, ink and watercolor by Albert E. Richardson, 1915 (Image from Christie’s);

The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan, watercolor by Ebenezer Wake Cook, undated c 1875-1925 (Image from artnet);

In Xanadu, illustration by Patten Wilson from Coleridge by Andrew Lang, 1898 (Image from Hathi Trust).]

W is for Workshop (Santa's)

         (My A-Z Blog Challenge theme this year is Mythical and Imaginary Places.)

        For the third post in a row, we’ll be spending time in the far, frozen north.  However, today’s place is an interesting sort of modern folklore.  Its appearance in our mythology is quite modern, yet it is the product not of a single author’s vision, but of the blending of ideas from many many people, some identifiable individuals, some corporate committees, and many anonymous.  To find out a bit of history and who some of these contributors were, read

the post about Santa’s Workshop.

        I have to confess that while I absolutely love Christmas, I’ve never really been much of a fan of Santa Claus.  I mean, I don’t really see the point: whether from a religious or a secular standpoint, there are so many more important and wonderful things to celebrate about the Christmas season that it seems like a waste to bother with this bloke, however jolly.  On the other hand, if I imagine a truly steampunk-style toy factory and fantastical creatures in the stables, all hidden far away in a magical land, I could start to get a lot more interested.  But let’s have a look at some of the depictions of the North Pole that have gotten other artists excited.

        I shared one of the older depictions of Santa’s Workshop in the original post, so I begin today’s selection with a confection by Eric Dowdle, an artist I was unaware of before covid-19.  He is best known for his designs on jigsaw puzzles, of which I have assembled a few myself in the past year.  His stock-in-trade is nostalgia, which is why he is well-paired with the scene of the interior of the workshop by George Hinke, whose Christmas scenes were enormously popular in the 40’s and 50’s.  Both artists emphasize humorous detail and feel-good charm.  This style seems perfect for Santa’s Workshop, which should be both enormously busy and full of happy cheer.

        Next I have exterior and interior scenes from a Disney “Silly Symphony” cartoon short from 1932.  The elves working outdoors at the reindeer sheds seem pretty traditional, but the indoor elves painting toys are clearly artistes, complete with smocks and berets.  They also buck the tradition of red and green outfits for bright magenta.  Nevertheless, this vision of Santa’s Workshop is wholly in keeping with expectations.  Apparently, however, while US versions tend to place the Workshop and other buildings on the snowy surface of the earth, as Dowdle and Disney have done, UK versions are more likely to imagine them as being built in grottoes beneath the ice.

        I end with two depictions from recent (relatively speaking) movies: an exterior shot of a very attractive art deco Workshop from 2002, and an icy futuristic Workshop command center from 2011.  There are dozens of Christmas movies in the past few decades, with Workshops ranging from cheap back-lot sets to CGI extravaganzas, and Workshop concepts ranging from minimalist workbenches to frenetic casts of thousands doing a hundred chaotic things at once.  You may well have your own favorite depictions of the North Pole, but I have actually never seen any of these movies (see my Santa Claus complaints above), so I can’t give any opinions as to which are best.  I will say that my lack of strongly-held convictions frees me up to embrace innovations and imagining new things.  Santa’s Workshop as a spaceship?  

Why not.  Mrs Claus - or maybe a reindeer - as the inventor behind the new toys?  Why not.  The elves as yetis?  Why not.  Santa actually based at the South Pole with that whole North Pole myth as misdirection?  Why not.  Rudolph as a flying motorcycle?  Why not.  The elves as gingerbread people baked by Mrs Claus and brought to life by magic?  Why not.  The Workshop as an aircraft-carrier sized ship afloat among the icebergs?  Why not.  The naughty-and-nice list fully automated using advanced AI?  Why not; it’s creepy anyway.  (But I still like steampunk best.)

        The MORAL of Santa’s Workshop:  Everyone ends up moving with the times, even the magnetic North Pole itself.

              OR:  Better be good for goodness sake.

        So, how do you feel about Santa Claus: beloved jolly old elf, or annoying bloke in the mall?

[Pictures: Santa’s Workshop painting by Eric Dowdle (Image from Dowdle Folk Art);

Santa’s Kitchen, painting by George Hinke, as reprinted by Ideals Magazine, 1961 (Image from Wurlington Bros);

Stills from “Santa’s Workshop” animated short directed by Wilfred Jackson, 1932, Disney (Image from Fandom);

Scene from “The Santa Clause 2,” Walt Disney Pictures, 2002;

Scene from “Arthur Christmas,” Sony and Aardman Animations, 2011 (Images from Wurlington Bros).]

V is for Valhalla and Vaikuntha

         (My A-Z Blog Challenge theme this year is Mythical and Imaginary Places.  Be sure to check out the Master List for a plethora of other A to Z blogs with myriad other themes.)

        While we’re in the dark and frozen north, let’s have a look at Valhalla, the great hall of Asgard, home of the Norse gods.  I think you can tell a lot about gods by where they choose to live.  As befits a warlike culture, Asgard is fully fortified, and Valhalla is one big celebration of all warriors all the time.  It is a huge, magnificent hall, shining gold, with spear-shafts for rafters, shields for a roof, coats of mail strewn over its benches, and light provided by glowing swords.  Although I tend to picture it as one great dining hall, Valhalla actually has 540 rooms within it, including the apartment of Thor and his family.  Valhalla is chiefly inhabited by those slain honorably in battle, brought to Valhalla by the Valkyries, and permitted to spend the rest of eternity (or at least until Ragnarök) drinking mead and wine, feasting, playing games, and of course fighting, all while being served hand and foot by beautiful battlemaids.  This heavenly home was dreamed up by gods who knew what they liked, and what they liked was getting drunk and fighting.

        By contrast, Vaikuntha, the home of the Hindu gods Vishnu and Lakshmi, is full of gardens of fragrant fruit and flowers, singing birds and humming bees, as well as the golden palaces without which no home of gods seems to be complete.  The beautiful residents (both male and female) are peaceful and smiling, and travel about in aerial vehicles made of jewels, which is an excellent amenity.  To me, this sounds far more appealing altogether than Valhalla.

        Let’s look at some other homes of gods — with the caveat that as this is a survey post, I have done only superficial research on any of this!  I will also note that my theme is both imaginary and mythical places, so I am not saying that these places must be purely imaginary.  Although it is my belief that none of these places is literally, physically true, other people have different beliefs and it is not my intention here to state that they’re wrong.

        Many traditions place the homes of gods on the tops of mountains.  Mount Meru appears in the mythology of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism, and is the center of the universe, as well as being the home of gods such as Sakra, ruler of heaven.  Many temples in India, Bali, Thailand, and more are shaped like mountains to symbolize the importance of Mount Meru.  In Manipuri mythology in the northeast of India, the God Lainingthou Koubru and Goddess Kounu live on Mount Koubru.  In Chinese mythology the Kunlun Mountain is the home of gods and goddesses including the Supreme Deity and Xi Wangmu the Queen Mother goddess, as well as other immortals and lots of interesting magical plants and animals.  It is also a pillar of the sky, and is associated with reaching immortality.  Ol Doinyo Lengai is a volcano in Tanzania, and its name means “Mountain of God” in the Maasai language, but I don’t have any information about its mythology.

        Olympus, the home of the Greek gods, is a bit vague.  It was originally seen as a physical mountain peak, but it is high enough to be above the clouds, and later seemed to be more heavenly.  There is certainly an implication of beauty and ambrosia, but few stories actually take place in Olympus.  Generally speaking, the Greek gods are out and about pursuing their various hobbies and vendettas, and mortals almost never come to Olympus, even after death.

        Mesopotamian and older Hebrew myths place their gods as living in Heaven, but also living physically in the temples dedicated to them on Earth.  The Mesopotamian Heaven was a dome made of stone, sandwiched between the dome of the stars below and the ultimate dome of the god of the sky above.  Unlike these Near Eastern views, early Christian myths began to describe Heaven in much more detail as the home of God and a whole array of different ranks of angels, and also, like Valhalla and Vaikuntha, as a place where the virtuous dead 

might live, as well.  It is often imagined as being up in the sky among the clouds, reached through a pearly gate.  Takamagahara, “High Plain of Heaven” in Japanese mythology is also located in the sky, a world of pure and radiant light.  It is connected to Earth by a floating bridge, which I think is a lovely concept.  (To be fair, Valhalla in Asgard is also connected to the mortal world by a rainbow bridge, which is possibly the only element of sweetness and light in all of Norse mythology.)

        Aztec mythology has no fewer than thirteen heavens, the highest of which is Ōmeyōcān, the home of the supreme Dual God, while Maori mythology generally also has multiple heavens in which various gods dwell in the different levels.  However, I have not seen any descriptions of what these heavens look like.

        It does seem extremely common that gods like to live in high places, either mountain-tops or right up in the sky.  They also very commonly like their bling: golden palaces, jewelled accessories, and the like.  Compared with the light and leisure of many gods’ homes, Valhalla seems rather dark, noisy, smelly, macho, and altogether not my scene.  Luckily, however, as I very much hope not to die in battle, I am unlikely to end up there.

        The MORAL of Valhalla:  One bonus of being a god is getting a home that caters to all your favorite things.

              OR:  If heaven is like a frat party, I don’t want to go.

        So, how would you like a job as architect and interior designer to the gods?  Do you have any fresh ideas you could suggest to Odin?

[Pictures: Heimdall at the gate of Valhalla, illustration from Icelandic Edda, 1680 (Image from handrit.is);

Walhalla design by Hermann Burghart for “Das Rheingold” by Richard Wagner, 1878 (Image from Wikimedia Commons);

Detail of Valhalla, illustration from Melsteds-Edda, 1765 (image from handrit.is);

Krishna unveils Vaikuntha to the Gopas, illustration from Bhagavata Purana, Pahari school, c 1775-1799 (Image from Scroll.in);

Vishnu outside his Vaikuntha Palace with the seven Kumaras, attributed to Ranjha at Chamba, c 1790-1800 (Image from Francesca Galloway);

Vaikuntha: The Abode of the Supreme God Vishnu, illustration from Bhagavata Purana, Rajasthan, mid 19th century (Image from eye burfi);

Mount Meru, illustration from Thai Buddhist manuscript, 1894 (Image from British Library);

Lamp Representing Kunlun the Realm of Xiwangmu, sculpture from Eastern Han dynasty, 1st-2nd century CE (Image from Yale University Art Gallery);

Olympus, illustration by Steele Savage from Mythology by Edith Hamilton, 1940;

Heavenly Host, wood engraving by Gustave Doré from Dante’s Paradiso, c 1868 (Image from Project Gutenberg);

Christ the Redeemer in Glory with the Heavenly Host, fresco by Niccolo Circignani in the Basilica Santi Giovanni e Paolo, Rome, 1588 (Image from Basilica SS Giovanni e Paolo);

Detail from The Assumption of the Virgin, painting by Francesco Botticini, c 1475-6 (Image from The National Gallery);

Izanami and Izanagi on the Floating Bridge of Heaven, woodblock print by Utagawa Hiroshige I, c 1849-50 (Image from Museum of Fine Arts);

Detail from Welcome… to Valhalla!!! panel from DC Action Comics #761, artists Garcia, Rubinstein, Whitmore, 2000 (Image from Random Thoughts).]