Sir Harold and The Gnome King - Differences From Earlier Harold Shea Stories

Differences From Earlier Harold Shea Stories

In previous tales Harold indulged his yearning for romantic adventure; this one brings his more practical characteristics to the fore. It also marks a major change in both the fantasy worlds de Camp chooses for his protagonist to visit and the manner in which they are portrayed.

Hitherto Harold was sent primarily to venues based on mythology or pre-modern fantastic literature; these were depicted faithfully according to the original sources, and much of the action involved puzzling out and becoming proficient in the magical systems holding sway in them. Now the venues are drawn from modern fantasy and are reimagined in a way that strips them of what de Camp regards as their more absurd aspects. Thus, exploration of the source material is displaced by a revisionist view of it, while the protagonists’ interest in figuring out the local physics gives way to the pursuit of more immediate goals.

In the present tale Harold displays no intrinsic interest in the magic of Oz, but only in how it might further his objectives. The "absurdities" dispensed with include the agelessness of the Ozites and Ozma's youthful innocence and strict sense of justice; the former having been eliminated by Dranol Drabbo's misuse of magic and the latter, recharacterized as childish foolishnesses, by Ozma having outgrown them with age and experience. De Camp's abandonment of an ageless Oz has one literary precursor in a similar visit to Baum's creation related in a work of his colleague Robert A. Heinlein, The Number of the Beast, in which some of the problematic aspects of agelessness are expounded.

De Camp's revisionistic tendencies would become even more pronounced in his subsequent Harold Shea tale, "Sir Harold of Zodanga".

In an inconsistency between the present story and previous entries in the series, the era in which it takes place seems to have been silently revised from the 1940s of the original tales to the 1990s in which it was written. For instance, Harold and Belphebe are able to learn the gender of their unborn child through a test unknown in the 1940s; Harold also displays knowledge of the 1986 death of L. Ron Hubbard and Hubbard's authorial connection with the world of The Friendly Corpse — even though the Hubbard story was published in the 1940s and takes place after Harold's visit to that world in the present tale!