The Shield Ring

You couldn't make it up...

...and in fact I didn't. You may have assumed that HK & Hollywood bigged together their women warriors from a couple of Joan of Arcs, like General Hua Mulan. You'd be wrong, it was common practice for ancient and mediaeval Chinese military families to train their daughters in the martial arts, and folklore abounds with famous women bandits, like Emerald Sword and Flying Dagger (cf "Maid Marian", sigh). Not to mention the strange, highly ambivalent true story of Colonel Jin Xing (Gold Star)

A girl is a boy, a woman is a man.

"The man had talent. His description of falling into madness through the grain of the polished wood of his bedstead is admirable..."
   Besides his unstable wild man credentials, sexual nihilism and his charming pet rocks, John Ruskin seeded his right-wing utopian revolution by founding the futuristic artisan Guild Of St George, on which the Shield Ring Guild of "Rainbow Bridge" is loosely modeled. Find out more at Brantwood.


There is no wealth but life

GHOSTBUSTERS (you couldn't make it up #n=we'll have to call this normal...)
I'm not completely sure what this thing is, but you can get any amount of ghost detecting USB devices from the store & it is not alone. Further proof that the tech is neutral, and will happily help the world gallop back to the Magical Age, thus (either) hastening its own demise, (or) creating the substrate for our first attempts to break the mind/matter barrier. Ghosts are the mind's response to cues in the environment says the bbc. A very flexible position.

"The Sun that knows no setting, that ever giveth light" (eerily apposite text on the wall of Burnmoor Lodge)


Deep they delved us, high they builded us...... and to many people it's an act of dreadful folly. "The main route to Scafell is disfigured by the dumping of tons of gravel, which is already sliding down the hillside ...almost everywhere paths are crazy paved, and any excuse for building steps which upset the natural rhythm of a walker..."
Okay, but maybe there are worse follies around here...


 

A horror gripped him, his right hand was full of blood, a bolus of solid blood... it's called transient psychosis,
WORLD DOMINATION

The Game of Risk has been a character in this story from the start. For other references see Bold As Love, Band of Gypsys, and especially Castles Made of Sand, on the beach at Roaring Water Bay

A Game of Risk

Golden Age of Children's Literature Strand
My mentors in adventure fantasy were RLS, Walter Scott and Kipling, but before that I was a child at just the right time for the official Golden Age. Everything's so different now. Narnia is mass market. But Rosemary Sutcliff isn't as fêted as she should be, not yet. The Lanternbearers, her first Arthurian novel, was a myth of origin for Bold As Love. (Not so sure about "Sword At Sunset") And then there's The Shield Ring: The Normans have conquered. High up among the fells of the Lake District is a secret valley where the Northmen have their last stronghold - or shield ring...