A travel guide to Yorkshire's Weird Wolds: The Mysterious Wold Newton Triangle by Charles Christian

Author:Charles Christian
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Urban Fantasist
Published: 2015-05-08T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

The Hinterland (1) - Wold Newton in Modern Myth and Reality

From Burton Agnes, we are going to retrace our steps back to the Woldgate Road, then head a few miles north to explore the hinterland of the Wold Newton Triangle, beginning with the origins of the Wold Newton Family (sometimes also called the Wold Newton Universe) an elaborate literary concept devised by the science fiction writer Philip José Farmer (1918-2009).

Wold Newton in Fiction

You can decide later whether Farmer’s story is any more far fetched than those told by William of Newburgh 800 years earlier but, as we shall see, like many good sci-fi tales, behind the fiction lies a nugget of science fact.

In the early 1970s, Farmer was engaged writing the ‘biographies’ (as if they were real-life people) of two well-known fictional characters, namely Tarzan and Doc Savage (the latter is better known in the US than the UK). Farmer was toying with the idea of whether they and similar superheroes of pulp and popular fiction were in any way related since, if they were real, their paths would have inevitably crossed in life. (If you are familiar with Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comic books or the subsequent movie, you will have encountered a similar concept.) In addition, Farmer was intrigued with how these characters initially gained these superpowers.

His suggestion, explained in Tarzan Alive (1972) and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life (1973), was that in 1795 a radioactive meteorite fell near Wold Newton, with the radiation causing genetic mutations to the occupants of two passing coaches, which were passed on to their descendants in the form of extremely high intelligence and strength, along with an exceptional capacity and drive to perform either great good – or evil.

According to Farmer, 19 individuals “were riding in two coaches past Wold Newton... A meteorite struck only twenty yards from the two coaches... The bright light and heat and thunderous roar of the meteorite blinded and terrorized the passengers, coachmen, and horses... They never guessed, being ignorant of ionization, that the fallen star had affected them and their unborn.”

The people in the first coach were John Clayton, the third Duke of Greystoke, and his wife Alicia, nee Rutherford, sister of the eleventh Baron Tennington; the eleventh Baron himself, George Edward Rutherford and his wife Elizabeth Cavendish; Honore Delagardie and his wife Philippa Drummond; and Fitzwilliam Darcy and his wife Elizabeth Bennett. (And you thought Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice was just fiction!)

In the second coach were Sir Percy Blakeney, better known as The Scarlet Pimpernel, and his second wife Alice Clarke Raffles; Sir Hugh Drummond, brother of Philippa, and his wife Georgia Dewhurst; and Doctor Siger Holmes and his wife Violet Clarke Raffles, the sister of Alice. A friend of Holmes, a young medical student called Sebastian Noel, was accompanying the coaches on horseback and there were also four coachmen present: Louis Lupin, Albert Lecoq, Arthur Blake and Simon MacNichols.

As these families intermarried in the years that followed, this

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