Hello, and welcome to the Folklore & Fiction newsletter. At the summer and winter solstices, I mimic the sun and pause to reflect on my own creative work. In this edition, I'm bringing sea monsters to your holiday season with a discussion of folkloric elements in a poem entitled "Leviathans," published nearly a decade ago in Strange Horizons.
Leviathans
It was not enough; the Hafgufa,
whale-eater, ship-swallower,
rock-toothed maw of the deep,
insouciant crusher of vikings
into bone splinter and driftwood.
It was not enough; the Lyngbakr,
heather-backed false island,
splitting fathoms to air its blossoms
and diving again, like any heedless behemoth,
with Örvar's luckless men on its shoulders.
Those krakens of saga, primeval beasts,
implacable as deepwater currents,
birthed from the World's abyssal womb
to chasten sailors who fouled Her blood;
they were, in the long telling, not enough.
"As far as scientists can tell, the undersea oil is actually a witch's brew of crude mixed with dissolved methane, stretching 15 miles long, 5 miles wide, and 300 feet thick in the case of one plume detected by the Pelican, and 22 miles long, 6 miles wide, and 3,000 feet thick in the case of a plume found by University of South Florida researchers aboard the WeatherBird II last week. The latter plume reaches all the way to the surface."[1]
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