Dragonwriter (20 page)

Pern is a post-literate world. Early on in Pern's colonization, the technology settlers brought with them began to fail for lack of fuel or resources, or else became irrelevant to life as the descendants of the original settlers know it. By the time the series begins, reading and writing, previously eclipsed by computer technology, are no longer available to most inhabitants. With no written communication to inform people of events past and present, the harpers, who travel from hold to hold, are the newscasters and the message carriers of their planet. They do more than just play music; they provide information and education for the people they visit.

Although the Harper Halls are very selective and their tests quite strict, vocal quality is not the only or even the most critical qualification. Singing and/or playing is important, and being a good storyteller is essential, but it is also necessary that a harper be a good listener and something of an investigator in order to learn about events so they can be remembered, dramatized, and retransmitted as songs. The harpers' songs often celebrate or mourn recent victories and losses, particularly the brilliant deeds of the dragons and their riders, and by compressing these complex adventures into comparatively short songs (“it's only forty verses and I won't detain yez long”), they help the news spread quickly and be remembered easily. Because of the harpers, the culture of the heroic dragons and their riders is preserved and brought forward, just as the culture of Camelot was preserved by bards long after its enemies brought it down. Because of the songs and stories, Camelot remains. Without them, not even the name would remain. Similarly, without the harpers, the history of Pern would be forgotten.

When the supercomputer AIVAS is discovered, making much of the wisdom of the pre-Harper Hall past recoverable, there is no need to fear that the years between colonization and rediscovery of AIVAS will be lost. It's been well-recorded in harpers' songs. (It helps that the same class of people who compose and perform dragon-related songs are the ones who help assimilate the “new” knowledge as well.) At some future point in Pern's development, reading and writing would probably have made a comeback, but meanwhile, it's a story with a rhyme, a chorus that repeats itself, and a catchy tune or haunting melody that keeps the dragon lore—and everything else—fresh in the hearts and imaginations of the young and the memories of the old.

Diplomacy is also a necessary trait; Pernese harpers are often guests in the homes of powerful and influential people who may use them as impartial sounding boards for critical decisions. Their input, especially that of Master Robinton throughout the earlier books, is sought after and valued in many cases. (Perhaps this is partly because everyone wants to be remembered well in the ballads that they hope a harper will someday compose about them.) Master Robinton at times seems to take on the role of a spy and at others, a diplomat. This seems a natural role for someone who knows and understands more about the planet's history and how its problems have been discovered and overcome in the past. Also, as a performer, Master Robinton and the other harpers are used to “working” audiences, to getting and keeping a crowd's attention. The manipulative skills a harper needs are useful in local politics as well.

None of this is entirely separate from the harpers' function as entertainers. In a world without books, letters, or newspapers, as in medieval days when live entertainers were the only readily available diversion, any change, including juicy gossip, serves as entertainment. People provide what entertainment there is, be it harpers with songs, traveling actors, or games devised by both children and adults for relaxation. News and stories from other places, stirring songs of derring-do, songs making fun of foolish behavior or decisions, are wonderful sources of entertainment. New tunes to whistle, new ballads to sing, new scraps of news presented, perhaps, with a new viewpoint are all welcome diversions. The skilled harpers provide all of these nourishing entertainments for the holds and weyrs.

Although traveling harpers act as a sort of musical glue to hold the far-flung communities of Pern together, not all harpers travel or continue traveling after a certain age. Some take up permanent residence in hold or weyr, acting as teachers and historians and inspiring new generations to dream of things they otherwise might not. Think of Menolly's desire to become a harper, in defiance of the life her family and her hold want her to embrace. It's due to the influence of old Petiron the harper that she knew some of the history of Pern, giving her a broader perspective on what her life could be.

In other words, harpers are the culture bearers of Pern, from their personal influence as teachers of young people like Menolly, to their planet-wide influence as recorders and transmitters of history and culture. Harpers' music is about, by, and for ordinary people, not something apart. Unlike contemporary times, where the majority of life is devoid of music except for that on recordings or in concerts by professional musicians who are personally unknown to their listeners and sung about people equally unknown to them, on Pern, harpers often live with their audiences, and music underscores life from the cradle to the grave. Harpers' talented fingers dip into almost every phase of life on Pern.

Whether or not a harper is in a specific scene or chapter, each Pern book generally includes some reference to music, and chapters often start with a chorus or verse from a song. Thanks to the harpers, every Pernese person knows at least some songs. They are part of each citizen's childhood and upbringing. Just as American children learn the “ABC” song, Pernese children receive their society's most basic information in the form of songs.

For instance, in
Dragonflight,
Lessa knows from songs of old that the warlord who has taken over her hold, orphaned her, and made her disguise herself as a kitchen drudge, is imperiling the hold by disobeying the ancient rules about keeping the grounds free of vegetation that will spread fire during Thread-fall, even though she has not seen a Threadfall during her lifetime. Since Threadfall is unpredictable and occurs only once in a generation or so, it's crucial that the people of Pern, as a culture, remember how to fight it and prevent it from damaging their homes.

The Harper Hall trilogy and the first three Pern books contain most of the songs characters refer to in later books. The songs serve not only as examples of the harper's art, but to move the plot forward, foreshadow events, and convey those events' emotional impact. In subsequent books, for the most part, these earlier songs are quoted. Sometimes, as with “The Ballad of Moreta's Ride” (which we first learn of in
Dragonflight
), those original songs served as impetus for Anne to tell the story behind them, as she did years later in
Moreta, Dragonlady of Pern.

Anne made up Pern, but she didn't entirely make up harpers. There are sources she drew from among harpers' counterparts in our world. Earth has a long tradition of musician/storytellers—in Ireland, Scotland, and England, but also in the rest of Europe and in Asia and Africa—and these court musicians and storytellers, like Pernese harpers, entertained, taught, and even served as informal political advisers. The equivalent of the European minstrel in the Tsongan tribe of Africa, for example, held a special place politically; the Tsongan fool (or
jongleur
in French) was the only person allowed to criticize or make fun of the king/chief of his tribe, rather like a musical political cartoonist.

Anne's Pernese harpers most closely resemble their counterparts, also called harpers, from her beloved Ireland. One of the most famous traditional Irish harpers is Turlough O'Carolan (1670–March 25, 1780). Blinded by smallpox, he traveled throughout Ireland with the help of a guide and a horse, living in the homes of patrons, composing songs and melodies for them. Quite a few of these songs are titled “Planxty ______” (Gaelic for “thanks to” or “a tribute to”) followed by the name of the host or patron who was providing for O'Carolan while he composed, played, sang, and entertained.

This isn't the only time Anne has used the Irish music tradition in her work. In the Petaybee or Powers series, Anne and I crossed the folk traditions of the Inuit with those of the Irish, as the culture was a mixture of the two peoples. Like Pern, Petaybee is a post-literate world. Inhabitants use songs in their rituals when they commune with their planet and also to talk about their personal experiences. Following Inuit tradition, most songs are owned by the person who made them and only that person can sing them without permission. On Petaybee, songs are a way of establishing individual identities on a sparsely populated world where people spend much of their time heavily bundled or isolated from each other by severe weather conditions. They have no harpers, but everybody makes up and sings songs during communal celebrations, so their lives also have “background” music. The Irish tunes make the personal Inuit songs easier for the mixed population to sing.

Pern's music draws heavily on the tradition of the bards, minstrels, and harpers of medieval times on Earth. While serving similar purposes to their predecessors, Pern's harpers have some marked differences in their approach to the bardic tradition.

In his book
The Songman, A Journey into Irish Music,
Tommy Sands, one of the foremost contemporary songwriters in Ireland, writes of this bardic tradition in Ireland that it

    
is one of the first and greatest forms of preserving and sharing culture . . . the complicated and beautiful stories of unbreakable spirit . . . developed a degree of sophistication with the addition of meter and rhyme. More influential than even the poetry, however, were the great storytellers and musicians that passed on legends and histories from tribe to tribe. Enigmatic entertainers, these sages communicated carefully constructed tales through lyrics and rhyme without cultural prejudice or politics. Wearing the colors of all lands, but under the thumb of none, these men of strong voice and heart became known as the bards.

Like the bards Sands describes, Pern's harpers are great storytellers and musicians who, as discussed, pass along histories from hold to hold and weyr to weyr. However, though they owe allegiance to no specific hold or weyr, they are not entirely independent agents, as the early bards were, because they are part of a guild structure that trains and educates them in their music studies and also in the duties the hall expects of them. No raggedy wayfarers, Pernese harpers often seem to have assignments, almost like government agents, and go from one place or another (sometimes by dragonback, a great privilege among nonriders) to suss out a situation.

While Pernese music carries on the bardic tradition in many particulars, the ideas expressed in the songs of the planet are more sophisticated, less full of primitive beliefs, magic, or superstition than the Child Ballads, a comprehensive collection of 305 Scottish and English songs once sung by medieval minstrels, gypsies and travelers, pub singers, court performers, and ordinary people as they worked and played. (The “child” in “Child Ballads” was folklorist Frances James Child, who published the annotated songs as
The Scottish and English Popular Ballads
between 1882 and 1898.)

Pernese harper ballads lack, for the most part, the
Jerry Springer Show
aspects of many of the older ballads and the body count of those Scottish and English ballads. Most of the deaths recounted in Pernese songs are those of riders and dragons who die during Threadfall, more akin to Arthurian knights than to the characters of murder ballads, such as sisters who kill each other over a man, brothers who kill (for various reasons) men their sisters love, or spouses slaying each other because of sexual betrayal. Pernese ballads offer no tales of unquiet graves or locking hearts “in a box of golden,” though there are laments for dragons or human friends who've gone between. While the songs do a terrific job of conveying emotional experiences such as the joy of riding a dragon or impressing one, the grief when a loved one disappears “between,” or the fear of Thread, we don't see many examples of other emotional content. There are few more personally emotional tales of “passion, bloodshed, desire, and death . . . everything, in fact, that makes life worth living,” as the bartender in
Irma La Duce
put it.

This strikes me as odd, when I think about it, since Anne has written romantic stories on Pern and her other worlds and was a passionate and earthy sort of person. Anne's musical passion was first and foremost for opera. It and operetta, like the old ballads, are used to tell a story, but the songs within them are usually only one fragment of the story or are told from one viewpoint, using the music to display vocal pyrotechnics and convey the emotions of the characters involved in the story. Certainly Helva, the spaceship with a human brain, sang that way, often from sheer joy and once, at the loss of her friend and pilot, from overwhelming grief. (The story is one Anne could never read aloud without crying, especially when she got to the part where Helva sang at the burial of her beloved. Though it doesn't say so in the story, the song was Taps, and the story was her way of expressing her grief over the loss of her father.)