Reading

The Corn King and the Spring Queen is one of Naomi Mitchison's earliest books, and What A Book it is! Seven hundred and some pages of fascinated swings and roundabouts, both for the protagonists and for my feelings about what she was doing with them.

Set mostly between the years of 229 and 222 BCish, The Corn King and the Spring Queen follows two thematic plotlines, emblematized by two young women:

- in Marob, an imaginary Scythian state where magic works and is real and the good of the community is reliant on rites and rituals as performed by the semi-divine-incarnate Corn King and Spring Queen, a young woman named Erif Der becomes Spring Queen and bespells Tarrik the Corn King into marriage at the behest of her ambitious father, who is planning a coup. Erif and Tarrik both have Many Personality Problems, but despite the mutual violence of their initial relationship and the following deadly power struggles between Tarrik and Erif's family, their marriage grows into something real and important to both of them, even as it destabilizes the necessary magic of Marob.

- in Sparta, a real historical Greek state where magic does not work and is not real and the good of the community is reliant on political revolution, a young woman named Philylla, the favorite teen handmaiden of Agiatis of Sparta, enthusiastically supports the radical reforms of Kleomenes III and enters into a long patriotic engagement with Kleomenes' boyfriend in a sort of king/king's boyfriend/queen's favorite handmaiden/queen sedoretu situation. As Kleomenes attempts to bring his revolution across the Greek world, Philylla struggles to convince even her own family of the desperate necessity of persistent social change.

These characters intersect first when a stray Stoic philosopher washes up on the shore of Marob and, after some time tutoring Tarrik in philosophy, asks to be escorted back to Sparta to assist with the radical revolutionary reforms. In consequence of that first trip, Tarrik and Erif struggle to reconcile modern Greek ideas with their semi-divine roles in Marob, and Erif's artist brother Beris falls in hopeless love with Philylla in the course of attempting to convince her that art and aesthetics have value for their own sake, which unfortunately for him is a very un-Spartan point of view. (Though by the end, it's Erif's love for Philylla that is arguably truer, more romantic, and more significant.)

Then history happens, which I valiantly did not look up at any point over the course of the book despite being desperate to know how tumblr Naomi Mitchison was being in her characterization of heroic gay socialist King Kleomenes -- and the answer is, not very, actually! By which I mean, any time I started to squint at the book like 'Naomi are you sure about this heroic gay socialist king of Sparta,' Naomi would do something to remind me that she knew very well that the rules of the ancient world are neither the rules of her time nor of mine, and that there's no such thing as a bloodless revolution or a powerful man without abuses. All of her protagonists are deeply human and sympathetic and struggle relatably and love deeply and also do terrible things. All of them make decisions for the best of reasons that end up with the worst of consequences, but all of them also sometimes do something absolutely shitty just because they're having a bad day and they can. It's the year 229 BC. The Spring Queen can kill a slave if she wants. The king of Sparta can force a captive woman if he wants. Philylla ... okay Philylla is actually a pretty perfect revolutionary cinnamon roll .... no, Philylla despite her dedicated solidarity for the Spartan working class can be a Spartan supremacist if she wants.

There's a kind of fascinating double-anthropological vision in reading this book in 2025: here's Naomi, doing her best with the information she has to imagine how people living in 229 BC thought and acted as driven by their own particular social concerns and understanding of the world, and here's me, doing my best with the information I have to imagine how 1930s ardent upper-class free-love socialist Naomi Mitchison is bringing her own particular social concerns and understanding of the world to this vision of 229 BC, and how she wants me to read what's happening in it. This book is profoundly about 1930s politics. It's profoundly about her understanding of the world as a deeply unfair place, and herself as a person who's been very privileged within it; about her belief that revolution is necessary and yet cannot come without cost and it's very hard to say when the cost becomes too high to pay for the revolution, especially when it's women in particular who get crushed in the gears; about her struggles with the good of the individual versus the good of the community, about art as ideology vs art as something worth pursuing in and of itself; about her ideas on marriage and successful and unsuccessful polyamory! I could write multiple dissertations on the sexual politics of this book alone.

Because it's Naomi Mitchison it is of course magnificantly tragic but also sometimes very funny. One of my favorite bits is when Erif and Beris go visit the Oracle at Delphi and have a very charming Ancient World Tourism experience; another is a series of letters written by a jaunty young Athenian playwright who ends up in Marob for a while having a Very Scary Adventure with Tarrik during which he almost dies multiple times and goes through several long dark nights of the soul, which does not stop him from cheerfully adding that he is getting on like a house on fire with his play: I seem to have accumulated ideas in all that time away from the manuscript. A new comic character has turned up, and the heroine has really made one or two quite smart epigrams! As a matter of fact I shall probably have to rewrite a good deal; some of the early speeches look simply childish now. And what a lovely lot of new metaphors I've picked up! (One has to suspect this is a little bit of Naomi joke on herself.)

And then there are the darker jokes, as when, for example, in the section Kings Who Die For Their People, an adolescent Spartan prince grimly girds his loins and goes to offer sexual favors to the Ptolemaic pharaoh in exchange for military assistance and it all goes embarrassingly wrong and he has to get smuggled out of the palace by snickering concubines. Kings die for their people in this book in all kinds of ways. Including, of course, the literal ones. Naomi is a socialist, of course she doesn't believe in kings, but maybe, if they're martyred, it's okay ....? Or maybe it isn't. Maybe the cost is still too high. But oh, boy, is it sexy; and oh, boy, what ideological art you can make of it --!

Anyway this post is already too long so I'll stop it here, though I haven't even touched on the half of what's interesting about the text; I really want to argue with her about really quite a lot of it but there's so much meat there to argue with. It's a book worth arguing with, and worth arguing with people about.