Other Dark Towers

Choosing a title for a work of fiction is always tricky – especially when, as is the case with The Dark Tower, your title is one that has been used by many others for their, otherwise entirely different, works. If, as I did, you’ve chosen to call your book after the title of a famous poem, which is itself a quotation from an even more famous play, then your problems are compounded. And of course the Dark Tower, as a mythological image, pre-dates even King Lear (first published in 1608) – in which it appears as part of Edgar’s ‘mad’ ravings in Act III scene iv, and is clearly a reference to a much more ancient ballad or folktale:

Child Rowland to the dark tower came,
His word was still: Fie, foh and fum,
I smell the blood of a British man…

The story, of which earlier versions exist, both in the Scottish fairytale, ‘Child Rowland’, and in Scandinavian mythology, describes the eponymous hero’s quest to rescue his sister from the clutches of the Elf-king, who lives in the Dark Tower – which is also a green hill. The tale was collected in Joseph Jacob’s English Folk and Fairy Tales, published in 1892, and illustrated, in a later edition (which I read as a child), by the wonderful artist Pauline Baynes.

Before this, of course, Robert Browning adapted the story for his own purposes, in his poem, ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’, published in Men and Women (1855) – the idea for which, Browning said, came to him in a dream. In this dark and haunting work, a lone traveller journeys across a blasted landscape, in search of the Dark Tower – although what he hopes to find when he gets there is never explicitly stated. The prevailing sense of guilt and existential anguish is intensified by the mysterious nature of both the quest itself, and of the narrator, whose identity we, the readers, can only guess at. Is the narrator in fact the ‘Roland’ of the mediaeval chanson de geste, ‘The Song of Roland’ – an Arthurian knight, in search of honour and glory? If so, why does he seem so ambivalent towards his quest, and why is the mood of the poem so full of foreboding?

Thus, I had so long suffered in this quest,
Heard failure prophesied so oft, been writ
So many times among ‘the Band’ – to wit,
The knights who to the Dark Tower’s search addressed
Their steps – that just to fail as they, seemed best,
And all the doubt was now – should I be fit?

The troubling, sinister mood of the poem seems to have influenced a whole raft of other poets and novelists, each in search of their own ‘dark tower’. In 1916, the novelist, Phyllis Bottome – perhaps most famous for The Mortal Storm, (1938), published a novel with that title. The poet WB Yeats – who actually lived in a tower – published a collection called The Tower, in 1928, containing several poems which reflect on that image:

May this laborious stair and this stark tower
Become a roofless ruin that the owl
May build in the cracked masonry and cry
Her desolation to the desolate sky.

His near-contemporary and fellow poet, Louis MacNeice, wrote a radio-play called The Dark Tower, in 1946, with music by Benjamin Britten. There is of course a ‘Dark Tower’ in JRR Tolkein’s epic saga, The Lord of the Rings (1937–1955). His fellow ‘Inkling’ CS Lewis also wrote an – unfinished – science fiction work about time travel called The Dark Tower in 1977. More recently, novelists as stylistically diverse as AS Byatt and Neil Gaiman have incorporated ‘dark tower’ references into their works (Possession, 1990; and The Children’s Crusade, 1993, respectively) – while the author Stephen King has published his ‘Dark Tower’ series of fantasy novels (1978 – 2004) about a lone ‘Gunslinger’, Roland Deschain, battling against the forces of evil, in order to reach the mythical Dark Tower, said to be the nexus of all known universes.

On a lighter note, there have been several films called The Dark Tower – including, bizarrely, a circus film starring Herbert Lom (1943) and – perhaps more appropriately – a horror film, starring Jenny Agutter and made in 1987. There have been videogames, and electronic board games with the same title. The twentieth anniversary episode of Doctor Who – the one with the five Doctors (1983) – also centred around a Dark Tower. But perhaps my favourite ‘dark tower’ reference – or second favourite, after King Lear – is the one from PG Wodehouse’s The Code of the Woosters (1938). Ordered by his aunt Dahlia to steal a silver cow-creamer she believes is rightfully hers from the terrifying Sir Watkyn Bassett, Bertie and Jeeves arrive at Totleigh Towers:

Having turned in at the gateway and fetched up at the front door, we were informed by the butler that this was indeed the lair of Sir Watkyn Bassett.
‘Childe Roland to the dark tower came, sir,’ said Jeeves, as we alighted, though what he meant I hadn’t an earthly. Responding with a brief ‘Oh, ah,’ I gave my attention to the butler, who was endeavouring to communicate something to me…

Wodehouse aficionados will know that there is a further ‘Dark Tower’ reference in The Mating Season (1949):

Subsequent inquiry revealed that this Roland was one of those knights of the Middle Ages who spent their time wandering to and fro, and that on fetching up one evening at a dump known as the Dark Tower he had scratched the chin a bit dubiously, not liking the look of things…

Shakespeare, Browning, Wodehouse… Even if I was aware from the start that the title of my novel wasn’t exactly original, I knew that, having chosen it, I was in good company.