Allan and the Ice-gods
Doubleday Doran (US) | |
Publication date | 1927 |
|---|---|
| Preceded by | The Ancient Allan |
| Followed by | Allan Quatermain |
Allan and the Ice-Gods is a novel by H. Rider Haggard featuring his recurring character Allan Quatermain,[1] based on an idea given to Haggard by Rudyard Kipling.[2][3] The story details Quatermain's past life regression to a Stone Age ancestor and the various adventures involved.[4]
This was the fifteenth and final Allan Quatermain novel to be published, although the events of the novel Allan Quatermain occur after it. It is also the final Allan Quatermain novel in the trilogy involving the taduki drug and Lady Luna Ragnall, following The Ivory Child, and The Ancient Allan.
The novel has been noted as a treatment of the topics of eugenics and evolution in literature and culture.[5][6]
Plot
Allan Quatermain, feeling awkward toward Lady Luna Ragnall after their recent taduki-induced vision in The Ancient Allan, in which they were nearly married, refuses three invitations from Lady Ragnall to return for another vision and has vowed never to use the drug again. Lady Ragnall herself informs Allan that she has used the taduki once more and discovered that their ancient counterparts, Amada and Shabaka, were indeed married.
Allan reads in the newspaper that Lady Ragnall has traveled to Egypt for the winter. Six weeks or so later, Allan has a psychic experience and later learns that Lady Ragnall had died of heart failure at that moment at the site of her husband’s grave in the Temple of Isis. Allan inherits her estate, coveted by Lord Ragnall’s next-of-kin, Mr. Atterby-Smith. He distributes it to charities except for a box containing the taduki drug which Lady Ragnall had left him. He is tempted to break his vow and use it, but finally resolves not to when his friend, Captain John Good, calls on him. Good is able to persuade Allan to use the drug and the two enter into their vision.
Allan awakens as Wi, a civilized man living in the barbaric Ice Age. He belongs to a culture that reveres a man and
A tribe of red-bearded warriors attacks and is defeated. Wi also kills an aurochs. When he rejects the ice-gods for Laleela's faith, the tribe demands someone from his household be sacrificed. After some deliberation, Wi offers himself as sacrifice. Before the sacrifice takes place, the ice-gods thaw and the glacier they were frozen in plows through the tribe. The Ice Age is ending. Wi and his companions leave the tribe and sail south but are caught in the rapids. Wi, noticing that their boat is overburdened, stays on an ice flow. Pag swims back to him. It is at this point that Allan and Good awaken.
Allan and Good discuss their adventure. They determine that Good was Moananga, Laleela was Luna Ragnall, and Allan’s sometime companion Hans was the outcast Pag. Allan surmises that they are not actually experiencing past lives, but that the taduki drug has “the power of awakening the ancestral memory which has come down to us with our spark of life through scores of intervening forefathers.” He also guesses that Wi and his companions dwelt in Ice Age Scotland, 500,000 or 50,000 years ago, and that Laleela came from southern Ireland or northern France.[7]
Reception
David Pringle gave Allan and the Ice-Gods two stars out of four.[8]
References
- ISBN 978-0415674188.
- ^ "Reviews In Brief". The Hartford Courant. 29 May 1927. Retrieved 30 April 2013.
- ^ "RIDER HAGGARD; ALLAN AND THE ICE-GODS. By H. Rider Haggard. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co. $2". New York Times. 29 May 1927. Retrieved 30 April 2013.
- ^ "Allan & the Ice-Gods, David Pringle". Archived from the original on 14 November 2012. Retrieved 7 February 2013.
- ISBN 0838755550.
- ISBN 0838755763.
- ^ Haggard, H. Rider. "Allan Quatermain and the Ice Gods".
- ISBN 0886875374(p. 11).
External links
- Full text of Allan and the Ice-gods at Project Gutenberg Australia
- Allan and the Ice-gods title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database