1816, The Year Without a Summer Gave Us Frankenstein, and it also birthed the Dying Earth Genre

[00:00:01][music] [music] [music] >> Hello fellow lovers of the liminal and the weird and welcome to another video by Liminal Spaces.

[00:00:21]Today I want to talk about the oldest piece of literature I found that includes the dying Earth trope. The idea of writing about Earth so far in the future that the Earth is at its final stages of life and humanity is slowly dying out. And I first came across this motif in The Book of the New Sun and then I traced that back to Jack Vance's Dying Earth and then of course Clark Ashton Smith. I don't have my Clark Ashton Smith up here cuz I can't put my hands on it right now.

[00:00:53]And then Marcel Schwob did The Death of Odjig and that goes all the way back to like 1892.

[00:01:01]But in researching this motif, I came across a much earlier earlier example of this kind of literature and my copy of it is in this tome, which is Byron's Poetical Works.

[00:01:14]>> [snorts] >> So, we are going to be discussing today a poem. Wait, do not click away. Give me just a chance. Trust me, it's not a long poem and even though it is a poem, it is also a really cool meditation on the concept of the dying Earth and it happened in 1816.

[00:01:36]And it would make sense that this year is the year that this specific poem with this specific motif would come out and I'll tell you more about that after we read the poem. But let's start with the poem. Again, I promise this is just a couple of stanzas. And this poem is called Darkness.

[00:01:53]I had a dream, which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguished and the stars did wander darkling in the eternal space, rayless and pathless, and the icy earth swung blind and blackening in the moonless air. Morn came and went and came and brought no day, and men forgot their passions in the dread of this their desolation, and all hearts were chilled into a selfish prayer for light. And they did live by watch-fires, and the thrones, the palaces of crowned kings, the huts, the habitations of all things which dwell were burnt for beacons. Cities were consumed and men were gathered around their blazing homes to look once more into each other's face. Happy were those who dwelt within the eye of the volcanoes and their mountain torch. A fearful hope was all the world contained. Forests were set on fire, but hour by hour they fell and faded, and the crackling trunks extinguished with a crash, and all was black.

[00:03:03]The brows of men by the despairing light wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits the flashes fell upon them. Some lay down and hid their eyes and wept, and some did rest their chins upon their clasped hands and smiled, and others hurried to and fro and fed their funeral piles with fuel and looked up with mad disquietude on the dull sky.

[00:03:50]>> this idea that the sun is going out, so the earth is in darkness. So, humans burn everything that they can find just to see, just to see each other, to sit around the burning remains of all the beautiful civilizations they've built so that they could look at each others faces. And I love this loop where we return to just, you know, people sitting around a campfire. And beautiful visuals in this poem. So, like I said earlier, this poem was written in 1816, which is called the year without a summer. And this was a very unique year for the entire world, really, because Mount Tambora erupted and basically threw the earth into a volcanic winter.

[00:04:40]So, there was no summer that year. The sky was dark. It was the coldest year on record since the 1700s. Crops failed. It was a wild, wild year. And of course, in literature circles, what the 1816 year without a summer is most famous for is Byron and Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Polidori all hanging out and drinking laudanum and making a bet of who could write the best ghost story. And of course, from this came Frankenstein and the vampire. And this is all wonderful, and they credit the gothicness to a lot of the work that was created because of that bet with the surroundings, with the, you know, year without a summer.

[00:05:26]But I think >> [snorts] >> this poem, Darkness, which was also written in 1816, shows a more direct connection artistically to what it must have been like for Byron to be experiencing this really strange year where summer never came and where the sky seemed dimmer. And [clears throat] all of this led to him having this dying Earth vision, which makes perfect sense and is an incredible way to look at how a genre began, right? That there was this volcanic eruption that made it seem like the end of time and Byron writes this short poem birthing the idea of the dying Earth. Now, I do have to say that I don't know if this is the earliest piece of literature that has the dying Earth motif.

[00:06:26]This is the oldest that I've been able to find so far. If you guys have older ones, let me know, but yeah, this is the oldest one that I've been able to find so far and I think that it is absolutely beautiful and really a perfect start to that motif.

[00:06:42]All right, that's all I got for today.

[00:06:44]Thank you for sticking with me even though we read poetry. I think it was good poetry. I actually really do love poetry, but I know a lot of people, right, when they hear poetry kind of turn off. So, thanks [clears throat] for sticking with me. Click the like button if you like this kind of content and click subscribe cuz I'll be making a lot more of it and I'll see you on the next one.

[00:07:07]>> [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] >> Hey.