Ruins

In going through the equivalent of an "series binge" of Andre Norton, I realized how large a part ruins play in so many fantasy and science fiction stories.

Ruins permeate so much of the science fiction and fantasy landscape:  old buildings which dot landscapes and planets, oftentimes without a hint as to why they were put in place.  In Andre Norton they appear as ruins of the Old Ones in Witch World or the Forerunners in her science fiction.    In Tolkien they are the remains of the Men of Númenor at Amon Sul and The Argonath and Amon Hen or the Mines of Moria of Durin's folk.  In Edgar Rice Burroughs they are the dead cities of the Orovars, built on the shorelines of receding oceans.  In Robert E. Howard they are the nameless brooding buildings (filled with rumors treasury) that abound in Hyperborea.  In H. Beam Piper, they appear not so much as ruins as in the remnants of a civilization (The Federation).  And in post-apocalypse novels, they are the remains of the modern world as we know it (depending, of course, of whenever the collapse actually occurred).

Ruins provide several functionalities in these stories.  They can be the point of the quest, or serve as a sort of brooding background to the characters as they move through the landscape.  They are a thing of mystery and speculation:  usually little is known about the builders or their purposes or, if both are known, it is acknowledged by the characters that such things cannot be built again by those in their day.  They serve as sentinels of a past age, now lost, at best forming a location of perilous comfort, at worst a place of danger.

Our own ancestors were not immune to these things; in Old English there was actually a word for this, dústscéawung, literally "contemplation of the dust".  We have at least one work in the Old English corpus of work called "The Ruin", in which the author contemplates the remains of the Roman works that existed in his time:

Wrætlic is Þes wealstān;       wyrde gebræcon
burgstede burston;                 brosnað enta geworc.
Hrōfas sind gehrorene,          hrēorge torras
hrīmgeat berofen                   hrīm on līme
scearde scūrbeorge                scorene, gedrorene,
ældo underetone.

"Wonderous is the masonry;                    the fates broke and 
smashed the city;                                     decayed the work of giants.

Roofs are fallen,                                      fallen towers,

the frosty gate destroyed,                         frost on the stone binding,

chipped the protection from storms,        rent and collapsed,

undermined by age."

In all of this - fiction and fact - lingers the questions:  Who were these folk?  Why did they build what they built?  And happened to them?

Sadly, this is yet another item that we lack in our modern society.

Oh, we have ruins:  Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Mayan, Polynesian, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Pagan.  And we have excavated them and catalogued them.  We know a great deal about those who built them.  Also, they are (for the most part) safely corralled in parks and preserves and sites.  They do not brood over us as guardians or sentinels, but have become almost like theme parks:  places we go to take pictures and walk about and perhaps ponder - but only for a bit - the makers of them.

We have lost the sense of the numinous, that sense of something being outside of our space and time but infringing into it.  For that is what ruins in all of these worlds represent:  the past pressing into the future in a way that cannot be catalogued or fully explained.  We have explained it, as we explain everything else, down to the molecular level.  The mystery is gone; we only have the buildings at artifacts as items to be toured and looked at, not pondered and viewed with a healthy mix of questioning and awe.

There is one other thing that ruins serve as in all of the stories I have mentioned:  they represent the pinnacle of some civilization, their highest point of art and architecture and science.  At some point after that, destruction always occurs, leaving only the remains for the future to wander through in wonder and fear and awe.

I do not wonder if the fact we no longer have such "ruins" is that we believe ourselves to be beyond the need for such things.

Pride, it is said, always goes before the fall.