171. THYRA. A ROMANCE OF THE POLAR PIT. Henry Holt; New York, 1901, ill. E. L. Blumenschein. Lost-race adventure and romance, or H. Rider Haggard exaggerated.
* The expedition to the north pole consists of the narrator Dr. Godfrey; Thord, a sevenand- a-half foot tall Icelander; Balderston; and Black, Balderston
* s black batman. They have made good progress, but the ice is beginning to break up, and they will soon have to turn back.
* But by an extraordinary chance a free-floating balloon drifts by. They capture it, load their gear and weapons into it, and are borne by the winds far to the north, almost to the pole.
* There they come upon a great depression surrounded by mountains. The climate is more or less subtropical, the vegetation is dense, and the land teems with survivals of early fauna— mammoths, sabertooth tigers, pterodactyls, dire wolves, etc.
* Also present are the Dwerger, savage, vicious subhumans, paleolithic in culture, who have too much to say about what goes on in the lost land.
* The explorers arrive at exactly the right time to save Thyra, a beautiful six-foot blonde, from a cave bear. This establishes friendly relations with a lost race descended from ancient Icelanders.
* The Icelanders are divided into two nations, the Runefolk and the Thorlings. The Runefolk (Thyra's people) live in the more temperate region. They are semisocialistic in culture, are greatly concerned with aesthetic matters, and live communally in a gigantic longhouse. The Thorlings, who live down in the dense jungle, are less civilized. They are ruled by an absolute monarchy.
* Several themes emerge from this situation. The outsiders pair off with suitable women: Godfrey with Thyra; Thord with the princess of the Thorlings; and Balderston with the Vala, a clairvoyant priestess. Black, as a black, must remain unmated. )
* The religion of the Thorlings and the Dwerger, however, determines the course of the story. They worship the Orm— a remarkable, fantastically constructed gigantic idol in the form of a dinosaur— and make human sacrifices to it. Such is the power of religion that when the Dwerger designate Balderston as a sacrifice, the Icelanders can do nothing about it. To rescue Balderston, the outsiders determine to blow up the Orm.
* A surviving monument of a lost civilization antedating the Norsemen, perhaps thousands of years old, it turns out to be filled with secret passages, hidden rooms, trick devices for either killing or saving victims, and treasures.
* A climax comes when Thord blows up much of the Orm with fulminate, and the outsiders and their women flee down the inner passages to escape the raging subhumans. They eventually come to a polar sea, where they see a moesosaurus, apparently the model for the Orm. Up above, battles rage, culminating in the near extinction of the Thorlings by the Dwerger, and the Dwerger by the Runefolk. The land is now at peace.
* The author has tried seriously to create a culture in which an idealized old Scandinavian chivalry prevails. There are echoes of the Eddas, the works of Richard Wagner, and, of course, H. Rider Haggard, although everything is wrapped up in a conventional romance.
* Since the author glorifies physical stature so much in this novel, one wonders whether he was either very tall or very short, or whether this insistence is a literary device.
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