Merlin's Wood - Short Story Plot Summaries

Short Story Plot Summaries

Earth and Stone

This story first appeared in a 1980 work titled Interfaces, edited by Ursula K. Le Guin and Virginia Kidd. Earth and Stone was subsequently revised for inclusion in Merlin's Wood to take into account archaeological discoveries made in the interim. This short story takes place in Ireland where six thousand year old earthen mounds, or tumuli and monumental carved stones mark various tombs. The specific area is Knowth in the valley of the River Boyne in Ireland.

The protagonist, John Farrel, who is in his late 20's, travels back in time (from a presumed future date when time travel is possible) to the third millennium B.C. to investigate first-hand the archaeological sites to-be. The story takes place over the period of seventeen days. The story is told in episodic form and switches back and forth from first person narratives (relayed to the future in eight separate transmissions) to third person narratives. Farrel plans to meet a fellow archaeologist, Burton, in the past, but soon learns that Burton is missing or dead from Tig, a lone boy from an abandoned local village. (Holdstock also has used Tig as the name of a mythago who briefly appeared in Mythago Wood and played a prominent role guarding a mausoleum and creating mischief in Lavondyss.) Farrel's conversations with Tig are conducted in an awkward megalithic or stone age language. The narrative provides parenthetical translations of the conversations throughout the story. Eventually John is led to a necropolis where the members of the village have been buried in shallow graves, yet remain alive due to highly suppressed metabolisms. Eventually these villagers wake, bathe and take up building the largest of the local tumuli. John discovers Burton buried as well, but determines Tig has murdered him with a sharp femur bone. John fears for his life, but is not murdered by Tig. Rather, he is compelled to be buried himself and comes to grips with being buried alive before it happens. Once buried alive, he absorbs the wisdom of dying gods including Earth, Wind, Water, Fire, Sky, Serpent, etc. Upon waking he has been greatly enlightened and has no intention of returning to the future. He then joins the local villagers in building the tumulus, or temple to the earth.

The Silvering

This short story first appeared in a 1992 work titled Narrow Houses, edited by Peter Crowther. The Silvering is a reference to one of the ten wooden masks Tallis Keeton creates in Lavondyss.

In this story the protagonist, Peterson, is the lone survivor of a bomber crash. Peterson saves himself by parachuting to a small deserted island while his companions crash headlong into the nearby ocean. Peterson lives in a small dwelling which he has built from bits of flotsam and materials brought to him by selkies, a mythic race of creatures who can transform themselves from humans into seals (and back again) by using an external skin as a mechanism for transformation. In The Silvering if this does not happen in a timely manner, an inner wood-based self (called a nagig) will destructively shed the humanoid exterior and the creature will take root as a tree. Peterson has been stealing and hiding the skins from selkies as they emerge from the ocean to prevent their return to the ocean. However, he eventually falls in love with one of the selkies who returns to land every year for several years to be with him. Eventually she fails to appear, and Peterson tricks another selkie out of her skin and dons it himself, undergoing a painful transformation in order to become aquatic himself and search the sea for his missing love. It turns out she has morphed into a killer whale and eats him before entering another phase of metamorphosis herself.