The time: 200 B.C. The settings: The Scythian town of Marob on the west shores of the Black Sea; Sparta, Greece; and Alexandria, Egypt. We begin with Erif Der, the Spring Queen of the title. She is a witch. She marries Tarrik, who is the Corn King, and together they manage the seasons in Marob, from Plowing Eve in the spring to Midsummer Eve to the Harvest Play. Erif and Tarrik are presented as real people, with hopes, worries, and conflicts, but they are also gods who perform the rituals that assure the harvests and continued prosperity. Naomi Mitchison does her best to give us their world in their terms. So Erif’s magic is not presented as sleight-of-hand or hypnotic suggestion but as a real power, because this is how Erif and her tribe would have understood it.
But Erif’s witchcraft is neutralized when she travels by ship, down the coast of the Black Sea, through the Bosporus, to Greece. A stoic philosopher, Sphaeros, has shipwrecked in Marob and become friends with Erif and Tarrik. When Sphaeros departs for Sparta to answer the summons of his former pupil, King Kleomenes of Sparta, Erif and Tarrik go with him. The Scythians know that Greece is the center of the world—Tarrik even has an alternate Greek name, Charmantides, which he assumes like a formal suit of clothing when he must interact with sophisticated Hellenes.
Neither Erif nor Tarrik is completely at ease in their dual roles as leading citizens and gods. They have become a little bit self-conscious and can no longer completely turn off their Greek-ified rational minds when they assume their mythic identities.
I learned about The Corn King and the Spring Queen when I was reading Black Sea by Neal Ascherson. Here is how Ascherson described Mitchison’s book:
Naomi Michison’s astonishing historical novel The Corn King and the Spring Queen is concerned not with ‘otherness’ but with multiple identity—with culture switching. She introduces an elite of semi-Grecianised Scythians, living in the third century BC in a Black Sea village…. They still take the lead in the fertility rites which their tribe requires (the ritual death of the king, mass copulation the fresh-sown furrows )… but they also venture confidently into the Greek world.
I was impressed enough with Ascherson’s book that I tracked down a copy of Mitchison’s book online. Mitchison wrote The Corn King and the Spring Queen in 1931. A fascinating figure in her own right, Mitchison wrote historical novels in the 20s and 30s, science fiction in the 50s and 60s, and memoirs in the 70s and 80s. She died in 1999 at the age of 101. She was also a prominent social activist in Scotland as well as a good friend of J.R.R. Tolkien, for whom she proofread The Lord of the Rings.
Pushing further into The Corn King and the Spring Queen, we spend less and less time with the Scythians and more and more time with the Spartan king Kleomenes and his circle. Kleomenes seeks to restore the purity of Spartan society, and he pursues this goal by slaughtering the bureaucrats, elevating former slaves to full citizenship, and redistributing wealth evenly among all citizens. But just as Mitchison presents Erif and Tarrik on their own terms, she presents Kleomenes and his advisors without any apparent misgivings about his rather extreme methods. If 200 B.C. is a long time ago, so is 1931 A.D., when the idea of radical economic reforms and redistributions of wealth were not yet a red flag, so to speak.
Another remarkable thing about The Corn King and the Spring Queen is its depiction of sexual love between men as a natural and wholesome aspect of life. In Mitchison’s Sparta (as perhaps in the historical Sparta), older men took older adolescent boys as protegés—and lovers. As these protegés matured and came into full adulthood they typically transitioned into heterosexual relationships, though some seem to have transitioned more completely than others. Mitchison gives us no graphic descriptions of sex, heterosexual or homosexual, but she does give us a very frank and convincing sense of a different and less constraining sexual morality.
In The Corn King and the Spring Queen, Mitchison gives us a Tolstoyan canvas of wars and empires, friendships, romances, and adventures. Cecil B. DeMille could have made a great five-hour technicolor extravaganza out of The Corn King and the Spring Queen, only with a few rewrites to avoid any offense to the moral sensibilities of the moviegoing public.
