Jotunheim

Jotunheim is a 26th-century collection of poetry written by L. R. Goodnight, a pen name of author Hayden C. Clayborne. The volume's subjects have mainly to do with the lives of farmers and their struggles on dedicated , which were often treated as tertiary by the in terms of importance. While writing the poems, Clayborne spent two years working and traveling alone across the distant colony of in order to get a genuine understanding of life so far from the where he was born. While many of the poems are idle portraits of the ag-world's idyllic beauty, some managed to drive at the rising problems of debt and poverty among the farming inhabitants, and the complex, unanswered questions that were behind the quickening spread of the .
In order to complete the semblance of the work being written by a colonial author, Clayborne published under the Goodnight pseudonym and had it released only on Harvest, as an experiment in the strength of his own work independent of his already-established name. To his surprise, it was picked up by spacer communities who ran freighters between ag-worlds and the colonies they supplied, and became a widely-disseminated and well-known work in its own right, noted as an important piece of pre-Human-Covenant War 26th-century literature. Clayborne only revealed his being behind the book in his private memoirs, which were kept secret in accordance with his will.
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==Forward==
I'm through with Harvest, and I think, it's through with me. It's not a place for poets, I've come to realize. The rolling hills of Edda and unbroken face of the Bifrost would've called to the hearts of Emerson and Thoreau, but that's exactly the problem. Poetry is so conceited, and this world has no time for those concerned with only themselves. The "great" poets of our time, who lay in ivory halls to write of their childhoods as if they had no other life experiences would come here to sit on a veranda of some elegant country villa built for the express purpose of sitting and sipping wine as they write insipid verse about this world as no more than a series of pretty images. There's so much more to Harvest, and the people who've come to call it home.
By they, I mean the people who would be glossed over in a poet's dreamy view of the landscape, those who stand all day in the agriculture world's hot climate, hands in the dirt or the guts of some farming machine until innumerable cuts and scrapes reduce their fingers to jagged talons. The classical poet would abhor such simple, ugly things. But it's why this world rejects them. This is the land of the farmer, who wakes up before the sun has cleared the horizon and works until long after it has set; and the farmer's spouse, who feeds them with a home-cooked meal when they stumble back inside, drunk with exhaustion; and the farm kid, the next-generation already balancing schoolwork with the half-duty of a farmer, the full weight of which they will one day pull. It's not that they wouldn't welcome a poet. To these people, a stranger is always welcome at the dinner table, no matter how much it strains the family to set it. How can a poet compare to them, making a living on the strength of their backs and their own two hands? You can't eat a poem, unless we speak metaphorically, which seems to be all we're good for. No, Harvest has chosen its people.
And they've made their claim to it. As far as the eye can see, the land is shaped into rectangular plots where every farmer grows their crop for sale, to be taken away to feed the hungry maws of inner worlds too covered in asphalt and permacrete for anything green to live. As I go by, the only difference in the plots is what crop is being grown. Potatoes next to corn next to grapes, on and on 'til Ragnarok. And every field plays host to a monster. A giant of agriculture, towering over a wavy sea of stalks in the breeze, making their daily rounds through irrigated rows to tend the land. They carry an array of weapons diverse enough for armies, be it the rows of scythes in a harvester which slash formations of stalks by the thousand, or the planter that buries the seeds at even intervals over whole square kilos at a time for the next year. The people of Harvest have a name for these fields, and the presence of these giants is what gave it that name.
They call it Jotunheim.
==Poems==
<tabber>
Rivals of Atlas =
:Upon the back of Atlas rests the Earth
:But on a , so much more depends.
:Its muddy, tired legs bear burdens
:gods have never known to fear;
:had they been mortal, would've caused their knees to bend.
:Upon the brute of agriculture's shoulders,
:yokes of loans and mortgage lie,
:while in her cab, her source of life
:has but three cares: tractor, child, and wife.
:And which, do you suppose, upon the other one rely?
|-|
Days of True Knights =
:What I would give to have back,
:the days of true knights.
:When the line of good and evil
:was a simple dark and light.
:And the men in shining armor
:rescued every life to save,
:without a cause for guilt
:for sending dragons to their grave.
:But now the armor's faded
:to an ugly moral grey,
:and all the wyrms have mouths to feed
:and dues they have to pay.
|-|
A Road Abandoned =
:These twisted branches cast
:one wicked shadow 'cross the floor,
:but I know there'll be many more
:before the journey's end.
</tabber>
==Trivia==
*Gavin Dunn owned a weathered first-edition copy which he kept in his cabin aboard the Chancer V.
Category:Books