Wolfwinter by Thomas Burnett Swann. Ballantine Books, 1972.
Table of Contents
Swann Returns to Ballantine
Reading Wolfwinter
Parting Thoughts
Swann Returns to Ballantine
Thomas Burnett Swann’s seventh novel, Wolfwinter, is a wonder. Of the nine Swann novels I’ve read so far, I think it’s his second-best novel after Lady of the Bees. It is quiet and contemplative, romantic without being saccharine, and it subtly, beautifully develops Swann’s recurring themes while bringing forward new ideas and changing some aspects of his typical storyworld, namely in his characterization of the Fauns.
Before reading it, I knew Wolfwinter simply as Swann’s Sappho novel, since it is often cited as an example of his many works that feature poets, and often queer poets, Sappho among them. Sappho, however, is a relatively minor character who makes two (admittedly plot-pivotal) cameos in Wolfwinter. But because of the novel’s association with Sappho, I thought it might be another example of Swann’s queerer output. This is sadly not the case—though gay, lesbian, and even poly relationships are regularly spoken of in the novel with respect as a normalized part of life on Lesbos—and Wolfwinter is instead a beautiful meditation on love and on women’s self-discovery. Of course, these topics are not not queer and Swann’s novel challenges pervasive heteropatriarchal norms by focusing on his protagonist Erinna’s journey, the choices she makes, and how she ultimately saves herself and everyone else by virtue of the person she has chosen to become.
Importantly, Swann doesn’t reduce Erinna’s journey of self-discovery to seeking the fulfillment of a heterosexual relationship. Erinna rejects the one normative heteropatriarchal relationship she is wedded/sold into, preferring instead to flee civilization entirely for the forest and for the love of a Faun, to protect her half-Faun child, and to assert her freedom to choose whom she loves. Through Wolfwinter, Swann ultimately argues that choice—in love, in life, in moral decisions—is the defining characteristic of a fully realized person, but he doesn’t paper over the fact that a chosen and mutually loving relationship is great too. Wolfwinter is thus a fitting ode to Sappho’s legacy and a testament to Swann’s abilities as a writer, his careful attention to love’s undeniable power.
Wolfwinter was Swann’s longest novel, at just over two hundred pages, and his second and final novel with Ballantine. That he published with Ballantine at all signaled a shift in his career and a recognition of his works’ literary value, as much as it signaled Ballantine’s desire to continue growing their list in fantasy while still experimenting with the emerging genre’s market viability through the (mostly reprint-focused) Ballantine Adult Fantasy series (1969–1974). Ballantine labelled The Goat Without Horns (1971) as “Fantasy Adventure” and clearly intended it to resonate with its other fantasy titles. It was also intended to be a shift away from Swann’s oeuvre to date, since it was set in the Victorian period and was (ostensibly, according to Swann) a satire of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic novels. It was a highly intertextual novel referencing a wide range of Gothic and Romantic fiction and poetry—and it uncritically embraced the abiding racism of the British Empire. The Goat Without Horns was generally poorly received by reviewers but it nonetheless garnered Swann a second book with Ballantine.
Wolfwinter was infinitely better but this time branded on the cover as “Science Fiction.” An inexplicable label to readers today, it actually underlines the inconsistency in branding, marketing, and selling fantasy fiction in the period of its emergence in the late 1960s and early-to-mid 1970s, before publishers began to regularly slap “Fantasy” on novels’ spines starting in 1976–1977. After the enormous, essentially blockbuster success of several fantasy novels in 1977—a story I’ve briefly told in several places; see the “Prelude” section of my essay on Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn (1968) and the intro to my essay on Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World (1990)—and the subsequent founding of award categories specific to fantasy (e.g. by Locus), most mass market paperback firms began publishing a fantasy list, making the genre an essential category in the US fiction trade by 1980. But as late as the mid-1970s, publishers were still putting the label “science fiction” on what we think of as obviously fantasy (DAW, for example, kept their “DAW=sf” logo, despite publishing plenty of fantasy and horror, until they phased out the yellow spines in 1984). In any case, Ballantine’s cover copy and the wonderful wraparound painting by Gene Szafran make clear what kind of novel Wolfwinter is.
Reading Wolfwinter
Wolfwinter takes place in the early sixth century BCE, sometime during the latter half of Sappho’s life (c. 630–570 BCE). Most of the novel is set in the Forest of the Fauns outside of the Greek colony of Sybaris in southern Italy. This places the novel significantly later than many of Swann’s other novels about the ancient prehumans—Fauns, Dryads, Centaurs, and other beings of ancient myth, realized and historicized in Swann’s fantasies as remnants of an older, gentler world that is drowning in the violent, rising tide of human civilization—since most of them take place during the late Bronze Age, some four hundred or more years prior to Wolfwinter. Of Swann’s ancient historical fantasies that I’ve read so far, only The Weirwoods takes place later than Wolfwinter, around the (semi-mythical) time the Romans drove out the last Etruscan king and established the Republic c. 509 BCE. The ancient Mediterranean world of Wolfwinter, like that of The Weirwoods, is one in which the prehumans have largely disappeared from the settled eastern half of the Great Green Sea, where a Faun on the small island of Lesbos is something exotic. Meanwhile, in Italia, Estruscan, Latin, and Greek settlements have grown into a networked, urbanized, cosmopolitan foothold of civilization in the Western Mediterranean. Only the vast, uncut forests (shortly to be chopped down during the Republic’s and then the Empire’s consolidation of regional power in Italia) remain as the last bastion of the prehumans.
The overall shape of the story is incredibly simple but enlivened by small complexities and a few surprises that change Swann’s ancient prehuman storyworld to date. In the simplest telling, Wolfwinter is a novel about Erinna, who assures us in her first-person narration that she is not the Erinna mentioned in Sappho’s poems; she also doesn’t appear to be the later Greek poet Erinna, whom Swann might not have known about (her writing is rather obscure, even today). Swann’s Erinna is the daughter of a wealthy merchant from Lesbos. She is married off to a distant cousin in the Greek colony of Sybaris, but leaves her cousin-husband and his life of “languid luxury” in Sybaris for life in the forest among the Fauns (27). Why? Because before her marriage she slept with the last Faun of Lesbos and, once arrived in Sybaris, she bore his half-human, half-Faun son and named him Hoofless (Swann’s names often leave much to be desired). Erinna’s Sybarite husband doesn’t care that she was not a virgin (“I married you for your dowry, not your maidenhead,” 23), but a half-human child—“this animal” (31)—is too much to bear, and so he sends Hoofless out of the city to be exposed and eaten by wolves. Erinna flees Sybaris and her husband, rescues her baby from a massive white wolf (but not before Hoofless is bitten), and escapes to the forest, where she is rescued by an unnaturally white-skinned Etruscan, Tages. After a night of mutual pleasure, he helps Erinna find the Fauns.
The Fauns’ ancient (for a Faun) leader agrees to help Erinna get word to her unnamed Faun lover on Lesbos and Erinna goes to live with an orphaned Faun youth, Skimmer. Erinna, Skimmer, and Hoofless—along with Iskos, one of the aloof robed figures from the East called Telesphori and, more colloquially, Healers (they differ considerably from their later appearance in Lady of the Bees)—form a tight-knit found family living idyllically in the forest. Eventually, Erinna’s Faun from Lesbos, Greathorn, arrives in the company of her wealthy friend, the poet Sappho. But Greathorn is now aged and horribly sick from travel; Erinna nurses him as he dies slowly and quietly in the arms of his beloved. After Greathorn’s death, Erinna recognizes her romantic affection for Skimmer, who in the intervening year has grown into a respectable and mature Faun, the wonder of the forest. Fauns live short lives. A year for Erinna is almost a decade for Skimmer, and hence the proud, strapping Faun Erinna loved on Lesbos had passed into senility by the time he reached Italia.
But just as things seem to be wrapping up nicely for Erinna, her one-time lover Tages—whom she rebuffed at his second appearance, and who took the rejection badly—arrives and takes her and Hoofless captive, revealing that he is one of the sinister, mysterious White Ones. These worshippers of Hades guard the white wolves that plague the forest each winter. More importantly, the White Ones are undead bodies inhabited by the spirits of those who pledge themselves to Hades in exchange for life-after-death, with the quality of their un-life as a White One determined by the severity of their sins against Hades in life. In a demented version of the Hindu karmic or Buddhist samsara cycle, the White Ones work off their sins through successive incarnations in new dead bodies, each body getting more and better privileges.
Erinna, then, has a choice: to stay in the White City—a necropolis, terrifying in its lifelessness—as Tages’s bride or to have the wolves unleashed on the Fauns. Either way, Hoofless has to die, since he was marked as a soul belonging to Hades by his wolf bite. Erinna recognizes that this proposition offers no way to protect her son and so is hardly a choice. Stuck between a rock and a hard place, Erinna offers something else: she will become a White One herself, giving Hades her soul for as long as he requires, and in exchange for her soul, Hoofless will go free and the Fauns will be unharmed. Skimmer, however, shows up with an army of Fauns, Centaurs, Dryads, and even Telesphori, who threaten to invade the White City. But it is nearly impregnable. Casualties will be high. And Erinna loves the forest, doesn’t want its people hurt on her account. To protect Skimmer and the Arboreals (Swann’s word in this novel for the prehumans), Erinna pretends to have fallen out of love with Skimmer, and ensures him that if he leaves and takes Hoofless, all will be well, but she will stay with her new old lover, Tages.
The novel’s climax is harrowing and demonstrates Swann’s unsung prowess as a writer of horror. In fact, the horror of this scene is so good that it makes his efforts to write a supposed satire of the Gothic in The Goat Without Horns all the more confounding, for that novel shows little of the Gothic’s atmosphere when it is very clear that Swann can write in such a mode. Here, Erinna undertakes a katabasis of sorts, taking on the role of heroes like Odysseus and Aeneas, but she descends to Hades sacrificially, to give herself over to death. Erinna meets Cerberus in near total darkness, only his eyes glinting in the scant light, his jaws clacking and slavering, his coarse fur brushing threateningly against her skin. Hades speaks to Erinna “with the intimacy of a brothel-keeper to one of his girls” through the mouth(s) of Cerberus (194), declaring that she has sinned against him more than most, for she dared to love—and so many times—and in doing so offended death:
“[Your sin] is monstrous. You have ignored me[,” Hades said]. [“]You have served two goddesses, both of them abhorrent to me. The Lady of the Wild Things and the Foam-Born. You have loved a Faun who, briefer than a man, has dared to live as if he would never die. You have desecrated my name. I will give you a body proportioned to your guilt. My servant [Cerberus] is loyal and lonely. I will give you a body like his; I will give you to him.” (195)
Ignoring—spurning—death and its master, Erinna preferred instead to live in her partnerly love of Greathorn and Skimmer and her motherly love of Hoofless, transcending time and the seasons through her love, laughing in the face of death. Hades, then, will have hold of her soul longer than any of the White Ones currently enthralled to him and will turn her into what Cerberus is. But Swann’s Cerberus is not what we think. When Erinna gets a look at him, she sees not a three-headed hound, but
Composite of horrors: legs of writhing fur, red mandibles gashed against the bloated white body, spinnerets like skulls. How else would the god who commanded the wolves incarnate himself than in the form of a wolf spider, who does not need a web to catch his food, who tracks his prey like a wolf? Whose legs, outstretched, could have reached the further corners of Skimmer’s tree house?
I could understand why those who had seen or felt him in the dark—Hercules and other heroes of an older, stauncher time—could have mistaken him for a many-headed dog. The fur. The multiple eyes. The hooked legs, each like a mouth with fangs.
Arachne became a spider because she displeased a goddess. Creature of vaults and graves, who feed upon moth and dragonfly, the winged and the free. The ultimate degradation. (196, emphasis in original)
For Erinna, the wolf spider is antithetical to the world of love and free choice: it is vicious, predatory, hates life and freedom. Erinna has spent the novel growing into her own, learning to make choices that fulfill her desires, and coming to love love, almost living through her romances as a servant of love. She has grown wise in love and loved exuberantly, powerfully, and without sacrificing herself and her autonomy. In essence, over the course of Wolfwinter, Erinna has become an acolyte of Aphrodite. And so Aphrodite intervenes, sending “light: around and under and over me, moondust becoming sunburst” and she speaks through Erinna as Hades spoke through Cerberus:
“Foolish old man, my uncle, do you and your creature lust for my beloved [Erinna], she who with Sappho has sung my praises from girlhood? She who has loved twice freely and once truly? Mistress, wife, mother, giver of life, lady of laughter? I know your dark-browed visage. I know how you stole your bride from the fields of Enna because no goddess would willingly yield the sun to dwell in your windowless towers. You shall not steal a second bride.” (197)
Aphrodite rebuffs Hades for his designs on such a loyal servant, refusing him his second bride, another Persephone. And she smites Cerberus with her holy light, letting Erinna free to return to the forest, to build a life with Skimmer and her son and their friends.
Erinna’s heroism is the heroism of small choices intentionally and lovingly made. Choices in service of love, desire, self-fulfillment. They are also moral and ethical choices, ones that she makes not just out of personal interest, not just because she wants to, but because they are good for her and for others, because they forward the greater good, because they protect others and allow others to pursue their own self-fulfillment. Notably, Wolfwinter is the first (and only?) of Swann’s novels where the gods are actually real, where they speak to mortals and directly intervene in their lives. The gods’ presence here is thus a rather momentous narrative choice for Swann. After all, Aphrodite does not intervene in the life of her son, Aeneas, in Swann’s version of his story (though she does in Homer’s Iliad and Vergil’s Aeneid) in Green Phoenix, the novel directly preceding Wolfwinter. But here in Wolfwinter Aphrodite intervenes on behalf of one who might seem unheroic, unimportant, largely inconsequential in this period far removed from the “older, stauncher time” of heroes—Erinna emerges as the hero for her choices, for how she chooses to love, for the fact that she chooses to love at all, and to love so wholly.
This further backs the argument in my essay on his 1968 novel Moondust that Swann’s fantasies are a kind of anti-sword-and-sorcery fiction deeply uninterested in the hypermasculine hero ethos of that subgenre. Indeed, if the revival of sword and sorcery in the 1960s and its fixation on the hypermasculine, hyper-individual male hero can be said to be symptomatic of cultural and political backlash against the nascent gains of the feminist movement, then Swann’s novel about a heroine rejecting the heteropatriarchal culture of civilization, here represented by the excesses of Sybaris, and embracing the free-loving, queer society of the forest and its raunchy Fauns—a novel about a woman’s choosing to choose, and being made a hero for it—is equally symptomatic of the feminist movement’s gains and its effects on American culture by the early 1970s. Wolfwinter, as many of Swann’s novels, is very clearly tapped into the zeitgeist of sexual revolution and feminist rhetorics of choice. In that way, it’s almost a rebuke, or at least a clarification, of the much messier novel Green Phoenix, which can’t really decide where its gender politics fall.
While reading Wolfwinter and reflecting on Swann’s admiration for love as an end in and of itself, both here and across his oeuvre, even from his earliest novels, Day of the Minotaur (1966) and The Weirwoods (1967), I often found myself wondering why I was so attracted to Swann’s presentation of this theme—living in service of love, of Aphrodite—but repulsed by E.R. Eddison’s articulation of the same as the primary philosophical force behind his Zimiamvia trilogy: Mistress of Mistresses (1935), A Fish Dinner in Memison (1941), The Mezentian Gate (1958). The key difference between the two, despite their equal obsession with Aphrodite, is that for Swann, love of Aphrodite—that is, simply, to love another person—is a moral act. Loving makes us human and therefore has ethical dimensions. Perhaps surprisingly, this point is made obvious in Green Phoenix, with the largely reprehensible figure of Ascanius, who is chided by Mellonia for failing to see women as people, as individuals who can and should be loved, rather than as mere sex objects, tools for pleasure. While Swann does little in that novel to change Ascanius (one of my frustrations with the novel’s messy politics), the point is clear, purposeful, and sincere. For Eddison, by contrast, love is beyond morality; this renders a terrifyingly amoral universe where ethics are irrelevant and what is “good” is whatever serves Aphrodite’s whims.
Love is clearly the central and guiding theme of Wolfwinter. Love, romance, and sex(uality) are woven throughout the tapestry of Swann’s writing, as important a preoccupation across his novels as the theme of city versus forest, civilization versus nature, human versus nonhuman (or prehuman). But nowhere else is love so strong, so front and center, as in Wolfwinter. It takes priority here and allows Swann to pen scene after scene of sensitive, emotionally complex, and deeply romantic interactions between Erinna and her (would-be) lovers. But rather than overshadowing his other themes, Swann’s heavy emphasis on love—his theorizing of love, really, and what makes it a powerful if not potentially liberatory force in our lives—deftly threads through them, so that love is integral to Wolfwinter’s elaboration of the city/forest theme and to Swann’s symbolic imagery of death and time. The latter, too, makes careful use of Swann’s city/forest theme by expressing death through the metaphor of winter and time through the metaphor of the seasons’ cyclicality.
Swann’s Fauns in Wolfwinter connect all of these themes, both narratively and symbolically. Importantly, this novel revises his characterization of the Fauns across the previous six novels. With the exception of a single Faun in The Forest of Forever (1971), who plays a minor role as the friend of Eunostos the Minotaur, Swann’s Fauns to date have been dirty, horny bastards. Real shits. They are raucous and rude and unpleasant. They seem to be always in tension with the other prehumans. Swann presents them as a gang of bohemian toughs in The Forest of Forever and as serial rapists in Green Phoenix. But here they are noble beings, among the last of the prehumans. They are, yes, horny and free-loving, but they are not pushy, rapey, or unkind. Instead, they are the soul of the forest in Wolfwinter, the antithesis of the values of luxury, control, hierarchy, and possessive sexuality found in Sybaris and the wider, cosmopolitan ancient Mediterranean world Erinna has escaped.
Erinna’s friend-turned-lover, Skimmer, quite literally embodies the forest’s symbolic opposition to the city. Though he is at first a tempestuous and jealous teen, he grows in his too-quick Faun way into a passionate, patient man. And when his and Erinna’s love is finally consummated, Erinna tells us, “The body of a Faun is a little forest, a place of terror and splendor and tenderness. The body of Skimmer was a forest without wolves, terrible only to those who would harm me” (152–153). This passage beautifully captures the excitement and fear that dwell together in the forest as much as in one person’s yearning for another. Here, Swann wonderfully unites the theme of forest versus civilization with his commentary on love, and notes how love born in choice, and not performed out of duty, can be as freeing and safe as a forest without wolves. When Sappho claims that “all [men] are much the same in their treatment of women,” Erinna observes, “Not the Fauns” (136). The Fauns of Wolfwinter are everything that human men in heteropatriarchal society are not. For Erinna, the forest and its Fauns become “my home. I chose it myself” (149). And the Fauns allow that choice, allow Erinna to be not just a woman equal to everyone else, but to be a person.
But time, for the Fauns, is fleeting. Their loves and their lives pass swiftly. Winter comes too quickly to the Forest of the Fauns; wolves prowl, seasons change, boys age into manhood and into senility, and die—while Erinna remains largely unchanged. Death stalks the novel before ever we meet its master in the climax. To love a Faun is to be sure of heartbreak at his too-soon death, but what is a life without that love? Swann takes on one of the greatest romantic themes, emphasizing the tragedy inherent in all romance, that no matter how strong or serious or true or fated the love, love is, as Aeneas put it in Green Phoenix, “like a dragonfly.” This imagery is referenced several times in Wolfwinter and stated outright by Sappho. But Sappho is quick to remind Erinna that, though some loves are like a dragonfly, “There are many kinds of love, and each of them is exquisite” (143). Wolfwinter refuses the tragic; refuses, as Erinna does, to give in to the changing of the seasons, the passage of time. Love has meaning in and of itself, regardless of how short-lived it is. Love changes us, remakes us, or perhaps just makes us more into who we are.
Parting Thoughts
By the time Wolfwinter was published in 1972, Swann was facing his own mortality and confronted with the possibility that his life might also be short-lived. Not even 50, he suffered regularly from multiple medical conditions, including cancer, and was something of an invalid. He devoted his life so furiously to writing that he called off his short engagement to another professor, Ann Peyton, whom he described in a letter to a friend as being unable to cope with the jealousy of sharing Swann with his mistress, the Muse (I suspect, however, there were other reasons the wedding didn’t move forward…). Wolfwinter seems like the novel Swann needed to write. It is beautiful, contemplative, sensual, and finely written—some of his best work. In it, Swann’s unlikely hero confronts death’s master and is given reprieve for having served the Goddess so wholeheartedly. Swann served her too, perhaps seeking his own reprieve. In the four years that followed before his death in 1976, he wrote nine more novels.
Wolfwinter—and to a lesser extent Green Phoenix, which shares a lot in common, thematically, with this more artistically accomplished and thematically assured novel—reads like a turning point in Swann’s writing, a maturing of sensibility and theme honed over the previous six novels. It is also a remarkable novel in its own right. Wolfwinter is explicitly concerned with how patriarchy affects women, destroys their lives, strips them of agency, punishes them for their sexuality, and more. But it also offers an alternative, a means of resistance, a way of embracing choice and freedom and desire, to think and live queerly, like the Fauns, in the forest, in service of love, and in honor of Sappho’s radical embrace of “many kinds of love, […] each of them […] exquisite.”
Swann will follow this line of thought in more radical directions in his next novel, probably his most (in)famous novel, How Are the Mighty Fallen (1974)—an explicitly gay retelling of the tanakhic story of Jonathan and the shepherd youth who becomes King David of Israel. To be sure, queerness is all over Swann’s novels prior to How Are the Mighty Fallen; it is referenced in just about every novel and always in tones that normalize queer desire. But queerness in Swann before How Are the Mighty Fallen was often coy, liminal, a wink: in the closet. While Sappho’s presence in Wolfwinter doesn’t lean in any way toward the lesbian (though Sappho openly notes her enjoyment of women lovers), queerness is crucial to the novel.
You see, Wolfwinter has a frame story: a youth has come to an aged Sybil to seek advice in the wake of a tragedy. That Sybil is Erinna, decades after Skimmer’s death. She is a wise woman and prophetess of Aphrodite now. And this young man wants to know if the dead are truly dead, if the “friend” he loved so dearly, recently killed in a fight, could ever come back to him. This is a gay man grieving the death of a lover: a beloved gone too soon. The story Erinna tells, the bulk of the narrative of Wolfwinter, this tale of love and death and choices and self-fulfillment—all of this is in service of queer desire, helping a queer youth process and understand the death that left a hole in his heart.
Wolfwinter ends with the youth looking up at Erinna, who has declared that where love is concerned, time has no meaning—it moves in cycles, like the seasons, rebirthing love anew—and death is not a boundary. The nameless youth sees beauty in Erinna’s aged face and “wondered if he would ever see a face more woundingly beautiful. Except the face of his friend” (203). The novel’s last line is a melancholy, yes, but also life-affirming and time-bending paean to the beauty of queer love.
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Sean Guynes 
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