Thongor and the Wizard of Lemuria by Lin Carter

"We must reach the Mountain of Thunder before dawn, for the old year has ended and the new year begins--and in a few days the Dragon Kings will summon the Lords of Chaos from their dark abode beyond the Universe, to trample all Lemuria down into the slime from which it rose!" 

Back in July, I bought a stack of Lin Carter paperbacks in West Virginia, animated by low prices and Jeff Jones and Frank Frazetta covers.  (I've already read one of these, The Black Star, and blogged about it in September.)  Five of these books have "Thongor" in their titles, but I didn't actually buy the first Thongor novel on that day.  Technically, the very first Thongor book is 1965's The Wizard of Lemuria, which has a cover by Gray Morrow featuring two of our favorite things, a dragon-like monster and a space ship-like flying machine.  But Carter revised the novel a few years later and it reappeared in 1969 as Thongor and the Wizard of Lemuria with a cover by Jeff Jones featuring two other of our favorite things, a bound woman and some kind of reptile man.  I have been hoping to come across one of these Jones printings of Thongor and the Wizard of Lemuria in a used book store or flea market or someplace, but the gods have not so favored me, so I eventually purchased a 1976 copy of the novel with a cover by Vincent DiFate which has the same subject matter as Morrow's cover of a decade before, though a mountain town and the moon have been added.  (Thongor's debut was apparently popular and has gone through numerous editions, including Japanese and Polish printings.)

There is lots of Thongor material out there, I think six novels and a number of stories by Carter, plus additional stories by Robert M. Price, Biblical scholar and executor of Lin Carter's literary estate.  Let's see what we think of this first Thongor volume, and get an idea of how much of the rest of our lifetimes we want to devote to consuming further Thongor capers.

Thongor lives like half a million years ago, a muscular barbarian from the North of Lemuria, a continent in the Pacific where Mesozoic reptiles were still to be found.  Over his youth Thongor has been a hired killer, a thief and a soldier, and been in and out of the prisons of most of the towns of Southern Lemuria.  When we meet our title character at the start of Thongor and the Wizard of Lemuria he is a mercenary in the army of the ambitious ruler of Thurdis, Phal Thurid, but a few pages later he is in Phal Thurid's dungeon, having killed his captain in a tavern brawl after said officer, an arrogant noble, welched on a bet.   

A pal frees Thongor, who escapes the town by stealing Phal Thurid's prototype flying machine, a boat that has almost no weight because it is made of "urlium."  (Phal Thurid had plans to conquer Lemuria with a navy of such aircraft.)  An attack from flying reptiles damages Thongor's conveyance and there is a crash landing in a jungle teeming with giant carnivorous reptiles and blood-sucking plants.  Thongor is rescued by the greatest wizard in Lemuria, Sharajsha, who has been watching the barbarian in his magic mirror.  Sharajsha has an underground fortress, complete with dinosaur stables, a well-appointed laboratory and a world-class library, under a mountain that borders the jungle. 

Sharajsha tells Thongor the story of how reptile people who worship the Gods of Darkness AKA The Lords of Chaos ruled the world seven thousand years ago, and then the human race was created by the Gods of Light.  After a war of a thousand years, the snake men were defeated.  But some of these "Dragon Lords" slunk away to their secret island in an inland sea surrounded by impassable mountains to plot their revenge on humankind.  These scaly creepos endeavor to summon the Dark Gods to our Earth and return our world to primal Chaos.  This summoning can only take place when the stars are perfectly aligned, and after five thousand years, that alignment is nigh!  Sharajsha asks Thongor to join him on the quest to acquire the necessary magic weapon and then foil the summoning.  Thongor signs on with Team Sharajsha without even negotiating pay and benefits.  

Sharajsha repairs the flying boat and our heroes travel to the city of Tsargol, to steal the sacred meteorite of the Red Duids, which rests in a tower that turns out to be guarded by huge snakes with the heads of women.  These feminine constrictors capture Thongor, who is thrown into the arena along with a dissident Tsargolian noble.  Thongor and the noble, Karm Karvus, kill the venomous monster set against them and then king of the town, leading to a civil war between the Red Druids and the supporters of the temporal establishment.  (One of the few thoughtful recurring motifs in the very stripped-down narrative of Thongor and the Wizard of Lemuria is how each city is riven by competing factions--different noble families contend for power and the religious establishment and the royal establishment also compete for authority.)  Thongor and Karm Karvus are rescued by Sharajsha, who swoops over the arena in the flying machine.

The heroes proceed to the city of Patanga; Karm Karvus mans their getaway flying boat while Thongor and Sharajsha sneak into the crypts under the Temple of Fire of the Yellow Druids; at a volcanic vent where burns a super hot fire, the wizard forges a piece of the meteorite into a sword--the Star Sword.  Then Thongor and Sharajsha get captured.

Carter introduces a new character, Princess Sumia, a beautiful young woman who has refused to marry the top Yellow Druid and thus been condemned to be sacrificed to the Fire God.  She is the rightful ruler of the town, but the power of the Druids is waxing and they are abolishing the monarchy and setting up a theocracy.  Demonstrating an au currant contempt for the gender binary, the Druids throw Thongor and Sahrajsha into the very dungeon where Princess Sumia is spending her last hours; they are to be sacrificed along with the young beauty.

Such is Thongor's tremendous strength that, as the ceremony of sacrifice begins, he breaks free of his bonds and in turn liberates Sumia and Sahrajsha; with his magic the wizard holds off the attack of the guards until Karn Karvus can bring the flying machine into the temple to carry off the three as well as the Star Sword.

Next stop, the Mountain of Thunder, to the peak of which Sahrajsha must go alone to summon the lightning bolts which will energize the Star Sword.  There is a brief love-triangle thing, Thongor lamenting that he, a barbarian, cannot talk to Sumia as an equal as can Karn Karvus, a fellow noble; Thongor doesn't realize that his courage and his broad chest already have Sumia swooning for him.  Then, while the wizard is busy, a flying reptile attacks, seizing Thongor and carrying him out of sight. 

Assuming Thongor has had it, his comrades proceed to the island of the Dragon Kings, only to  immediately fall into the nine-foot-tall reptile men's seven-fingered hands and find themselves on the top of the local human sacrifice schedule.  Fortunately, the flying reptile nest from which Thongor extricates himself after killing the three hungry baby monsters whose meal he was to be, is right here on this island!  The barbarian finds the Star Sword (the people who capture our heroes never think to lock up the magic sword they are carrying around), sneaks into the castle of the Dragon Kings, and appears in the temple moments before his friends are to be sacrificed.  Lightning bolts from the Star Sword make quick work of the villains, saving the world.  The Epilog gives us the idea that Thongor and Sumia are now an item.

Thongor and the Wizard of Lemuria is a simple and straightforward pastiche of Edgar Rice Burroughs  and Robert E. Howard elements and themes (the flying boat in a world where kings are called "sarks," distances are measured in "vorns" instead of miles and the dinosaurs have names like "grakk" and "zamph;" the Northern barbarian with a black mane), with a pinch of Lovecraftian spice tossed in (e. g., the castle of the Dragon Kings is said to have been "designed according to the geometry of another world.")  There is very little personality or atmosphere, though Carter tries to provide a sense of history by including lots of childish poetry; each of the fifteen chapters has an epigraph from a fictional primary source, like Thongor's Saga or Diombar's Song of The Last Battle or The Rituals of Yamath:

The naked virgins on thine altars plead
As scarlet flame on pallid flesh doth feed!
Lord of the Fire, drink down young lives like wine.
Hearts, limbs and breasts--their very souls--are thine!

and Thongor sings from the war songs of his people as he fights. 

Carter doesn't seem to be offering any commentary on politics or society or anything like that in the novel, attacking or defending the bourgeoisie or Christianity or feminism or socialism or whatever, as these adventure stories sometimes do.  When Carter tells us that, because he is a barbarian, Thongor can pull off some feat like climbing down the face of a glass-smooth mountain, the attempting of which would mean instant death to a city-bred man, you don't feel like Carter is making some comment about civilization, you feel he's saying this kind of thing because Burroughs says this stuff about Tarzan and Howard says this stuff about Conan on the regular.

It is easy to see Carter's influences and he doesn't do anything innovative or original; this is a mediocre thing.  Yet Thongor and the Wizard of Lemuria has a spirit of fun, and I never found it boring or annoying--it isn't slow and it isn't overwritten.  I smiled indulgently at its silly bits rather than groaned in irritation.  I can't deny I enjoyed it and am looking forward to reading the second Thongor book, Thongor and the Dragon City, so I am judging it worthy of a mild recommendation to those interested in such a thing.  Stay tuned to MPorcius Fiction Log for more Lemurian hijinks.