I will admit, I did not know the name Manly Wade Wellman when I began this "Witches of Appendix N." Yes, I had read the name in the list, but that was all that I knew.
I have put in the hours for this issue of The Witches of Appendix N, though. I have made it a point to spend some time with Wellman: reading his John Thunstone tales and Strangers on the Heights, working through what is in Sin’s Doorway and Other Ominous Entrances, and, as is fitting for the subject at hand, getting to know Silver John and The Old Gods Waken.
Wellman has an unquestionable claim to be here. Gary Gygax put him in the original 1979 Dungeon Master's Guide by name, right there in Appendix N. But Gygax did not single out any one book the way he might with another author; he just said, "Wellman." That leaves us with a good deal of ground to cover.
In this "Witches of Appendix N," I am going less by books and more by themes and ideas. Manly Wade Wellman produced a ton of material in his life. I read books I could get my hands on, and audiobooks I grabbed from Audible. I began following the themes, and oftentimes the stories would flow from one to the other, right outside my Appendix N cut-off dates. I found, though, that I really, really enjoyed his tales and, just as importantly, his characters.
He has traveling Bards, urbane occult investigators, retired judges, students of the Black School.
And there are plenty of witches here, and they are not all the same.
A World Where the Folklore Is True
After so much Wellman, one thing is plain: his world does not have a neat taxonomy for the supernatural.
You have your witches and sorcerers, devils and old gods, ghosts and haunts and whatever makes its home in the mountains. There are things that could be demons or pagan deities or something older still. Christian prayers are effective, as is silver or an old song or a magical sign. An educated occultist may have the answers, or an old woman in the hills, or someone who just heeded what their grandmother said. No one is carrying around a *Monster Manual* and no one seems to mind if these elements do not conform to a tidy cosmology. In my view, this is great. It is better than having a nice tidy universe.
Modern fantasy tends to demand an explanation for magic, complete with schools and metaphysical laws and well-defined species. You won’t find that in Wellman.
The folklore is simply true.
Take Silver John, or John the Balladeer as he is also known. For the witch I am looking for in these posts, he is perhaps Wellman’s finest offering as a protagonist. He is not a D&D Magic-User, nor really a wizard in the conventional sense. He is not even the Bard as some have claimed. He is a wandering man with a silver-stringed guitar, carrying his songs, stories, and signs. He can tell when something is amiss, but he is not portrayed as having all the answers. The difference is important.
John gets by because he is a listener. He respects warnings and will not overlook an elderly woman whom others would put aside. He knows that some piece of mountain lore which an outsider might find preposterous could be the very thing that sees him through the night. It is a fine model for fantasy witchcraft.
Magic is not an alternate form of technology. Here, magic is a matter of tradition.
In that respect, The Old Gods Waken comes in handy. Published in 1979, it is on the edge of my time period for Appendix N, but it is useful as the first Silver John novel. The Southern Appalachian backdrop allows Wellman to put his stock ideas on display: ancient powers and pagan holdovers, local lore and Christianity, and the kind of folk who have a far better grasp of their country than an outsider would credit them with.
The supernatural elements in his work have no use for the labels people put on them, a fact I keep in mind when I am at work designing witches or tending to the Sunny Valley accounts. A witch need not be able to explain the why of her magic; knowing that it works is enough.
The Witches in the Hills
You will find Wellman’s mountain witches are something of an actuality compared to the fantasy-game variety we have since grown used to. Theirs is a local, personal brand of magic. They are aware of cures and curses, of signs and the plants that count. They know what is best left untraveled after dark and what makes its home on the mountain. They can tell you what your grandmother was up to thirty years back and why you are still suffering for it.
Some are good, some evil, though such terms often don’t do them justice.
With "Vandy, Vandy" or "Nine Yards of Other Cloth," one gets the impression that supernatural knowledge is part and parcel of the Appalachian terrain. It is not a separate world that now and then makes an incursion into the everyday; it has been there from the start, and the locals have made their peace with it. In how I view witches, Wellman is perhaps one of my greatest "new" influences.
The witch is not defined by having the most power but by what she knows. She is the "wise."
Occult Investigators and Monster Hunters
Judge Keith Hilary Pursuivant. John Thunstone. Silver John the Balladeer. Lee Cobbett. Longspear. All these names are for a type of character at home in the occult universe of Manly Wade Wellman and D&D.
What unites all these characters is not hard to put your finger on. For one, they do not content themselves with being onlookers to the supernatural. They are men of action.
Sure, it might start with a bit of research or an old book, a song, some folklore, or a scrap of history from memory. But in the end there comes a point where someone has to make their way into the haunted house or up the mountain, face down a sorcerer, or put himself in harm’s way to protect an innocent from what has emerged from the dark.
In that respect, Wellman’s heroes are not unlike the kind of adventurer D&D would come to define. Yet he does not write them as the professional monster hunters of D&D or even Chill or Call of Cthulhu. You will find no organization handing out assignments, no headquarters with its case files, no locker for standard-issue gear.
They are semi-professionals of a sort. They have the experience to know which questions to put to you and when a detail is of consequence. If the situation deteriorates, they are prepared to act. It is an important mix. In Wellman’s world, knowledge by itself will not see you through; the old lore may tell you what you are up against, but it takes courage to get in the door.
Perhaps that is the clearest distinction between him and D&D: the occult scholar must at some stage become an adventurer.
Judge Pursuivant
Judge Keith Hilary Pursuivant preceded John Thunstone, but I read him afterwards.
As another of Wellman’s occult investigators, Pursuivant is an older and more erudite sort. He has the assurance that comes from a lifetime of amassing odd bits of knowledge when he sets about a supernatural matter. Though he is a judge in retirement, in Wellman’s telling one finds that there is still ample time to put in with witches, demons, or any number of haunted locales that have gone unobserved in the modern age.
One can appreciate how well Pursuivant puts in place the kind of world Thunstone will eventually be found in. There are those for whom the occult is no fiction, and they have made a study of it over the years; they are the type to compare cases, recall an old tale or a name, and not let some seemingly preposterous detail pass without consideration.
That is part of the "lived-in" feel I find in Wellman’s work. You do not get the sense of isolated stories with characters like him, Thunstone, Longspear, and the rest. They seem to be going about their business in the same broad supernatural landscape, and now and then their paths will cross simply because there are not many who are privy to what is truly out there.
Then you have Thunstone, who is younger and more given to physicality, tending to confront danger head on. Pursuivant is the scholar who has likely already read up on how things went the last time someone made such an attempt.
John Thunstone
John Thunstone is another matter.
Silver John is a wandering tramp; John Thunstone orders room service and eats in fine New York restaurants. Where Silver John is traditional, Thunstone is the antithesis. Academic, urbane, educated and sophisticated, he has seen the world and is deliberately engaged in occult matters. He is the type who researches and puts a name to an artifact.
I have to admit I took a liking to him almost immediately. Yes he can be rude, abrasive and even an erudite and pompous jerk. BUT he gets things done and he knows that he is often the thing between the innocents and the dark.
He has a working knowledge of magical history and appreciates that there are very dangerous men who take their craft in earnest.
Rowley Thorne is chief among them.
Rowley Thorne
Wellman has created a fine occult villain in Thorne. He is no old mountain woman the neighbors might call a witch. He is a sorcerer, and the distinction is key.
Thorne is deliberate in his use of occult forces. There is a kinship here with the ceremonial magician or warlock of the old stories. In this way, Wellman provides two distinct models for the practice of magic. On one hand, the folk ways of the hills and Silver John; on the other, the learned approach of a man like Thorne. D&D would come along and put those in separate spell lists and classes. Wellman has them coexist.
Which brings me to a problem of my own making. Wellman and I both have a character named Thorne.
Rowley Thorne is introduced to us in the same tale that introduces us to John Thunstone; The Third Cry to Legba. So if there is a Sherlock-Professor Moriarty feel to their relationship, I am very certain it is intentional.
Thorne also caused a rather interesting problem for one of my own witches, but I am going to save that for another post.
The Third Cry to Legba CollectionThis collection of earlier John Thunstone tales is also the one that caught my attention the most. I started with Strangers on the Heights, but these are the tales I enjoyed the most. This collection largely covers his "Weird Tales" era of the John Thunstone tales. These are squarely within the time frame of Appendix N, as opposed to the now-more-current "The Complete John Thunstone" book. The collection "The Third Cry to Legba and Other Invocations" is named after the first John Thunstone story.
Here, in addition to Rowley Thorne and a coven's worth of other witches and warlocks, we are introduced to Longspear, an indigenous American native who is as intelligent as he is wise.
I can forgive some cultural faux pas with Wellman's portrayal of Longspear. It is obvious that this is a character he likes, respects, and tries to portray as authentically as possible. Wellman is trying to do the right things here.
Longspear is described as a chief and a medicine man. Today, we might just call him a shaman or something. Who is to say which is more correct? Longspear, like many of Wellman's characters, comes in and out of his tales. Sometimes he is the star; other times he is just a background character. It gives his tales a solid "lived-in" feel. There is a universe here.
Other witches include Lil Warren, who was a witch, died, and came back as a vampire.
Again, Wellman's categories refuse to stay where we might expect them.
The Black School
I should give the Black School some consideration, having brought it up before. Wellman is fond of returning to the notion of formal training in the occult, of institutions where magic is presented to a student rather than left to be acquired through folklore or bloodline. It serves as an apt counterpoint to what one finds with Silver John and his mountain ways. There is an inherent sinisterness to a school that has such matters on its syllabus, the very sort of thing prudent people have been cautioning against for generations.
To the D&D player this will be old hat; the wizard must be schooled somewhere. But Wellman is at pains to point out that not all magical education takes place in a proper academy with its robes, towers, and tests. Some schools are there simply because someone is set on passing on the forbidden arts. In that light the Black School is hardly Hogwarts. It is more of an occult apprenticeship, and one with an alumni association you would do well to question.
This also highlights Wellman's scholarship without turning it into an occult lecture. The Black School is a redressed Scholomance.
Strangers on the Heights
Strangers on the Heights has been on my list as well. One might not find this as immediately applicable to a conversation about witches, but for getting a handle on the supernatural world Wellman has put together, it is hard to beat.
There is more than your fair share of psychic phenomena and occultism here, along with some odd cultic practices and forces that defy simple categorization. The ambiguity of it all is what is important. Wellman is under no compulsion to pause the narrative and inform us if we are in the presence of something demonic, alien, or purely psychic; he leaves that open. The characters form their own opinions on the matter, as does the reader, but the universe need not oblige by confirming them. I have come to value such an approach to worldbuilding.
It also is a sign of Wellman's strength as a storyteller.
What Can We Use for D&D?
What can be made of Manly Wade Wellman for a game of Dungeons & Dragons? A lot. Gygax saw that, now you can too.
To start with, there is no requirement for a cohesive theory of magic. A witch will know that rowan is protection against one thing and silver another, that a particular song will undo a spell, and that one does not answer when called from the woods. Why any of it is so is not for her to say. Then there is the matter of locality. An eighty-year-old grandmother who has lived next to a mountain will likely understand what is at its base better than the finest scholar of the occult.
Magical traditions need not be identical in practice or in cosmology. The mountain witch is well advised not to do things the way Rowley Thorne does. And sometimes the old ways hold sway simply because they are old. Not on account of some universal energy field or equations long since forgotten, but because someone put two and two together a long time back and found it was enough to keep the darkness out. They work because people believe they work.
Wellman also makes the point that a witch is at her best when she is confronted with questions she cannot answer. She ought to be in the know more than anyone, but never in possession of all the answers. That is perhaps the most useful takeaway. That is true for Silver John, Judge Keith Hilary Pursuivant, John Thunstone, Longspear, Prof. Enderbe, Lee Cobbett, and even Rowley Thorne alike.
Appendix N has its share of writers who will supply you with spells and demons and whole systems of sorcery, or even great magical societies. Wellman offers something else: a sense of accumulation. Christianity may have come to town but the old gods did not pack up and go. There are books of ceremony, to be sure, but also the kind of songs a grandmother puts in your head. A sorcerer like Thorne can devote his life to the mysteries and still miss what an old woman in the hills already has figured out.
That is the Wellman type of witch.
Where her knowledge comes from, a book, her mother, or some whisper from the woods, is anybody’s guess. But once the sun is down and there is scratching at the door, everyone is going to want to hear what she has to say. To my mind, that is the essence of D&D.
The Shonikins
The Shonokins are another of Wellman’s creations that I feel I should mention, but I will put off any in-depth talk of them until my next post.
In some ways they are the better example of his ability to put together a piece of work that has all the hallmarks of both folklore and weird fiction. You do not find just another monster to be filed away with the rest; rather, they put forward an older history that runs under our own. They are close to humanity in appearance yet distinct enough to be profoundly disquieting.
I have use for them as well when I come to examine the part Wellman has played in shaping my own settings, Sunny Valley in particular. It is one thing to say there is a monster in the mountains, quite another to make the case that something was there before we were.
Truthfully, I love the idea and need to do a lot more with it.
Closing Thoughts
Wellman surprised me. I mean, yes, all the Appendix N authors I was not aware of gave me something I had not expected, but Wellman was an honest delight. His tales were great, with some great bits of fantasy and horror, and there was just so much of it. But most of all, it was his characters that appealed to me. His occult investigators, his wandering monster hunters, and all his witches, warlocks, and evil wizards were great.
I wanted to read more about them. I smiled when someone would make a guest appearance in someoneelse's tale. When Longspear appeared in John Thunstone's tales, he was great; when shown on his own, he was great as well.
I think what Wellman offered D&D, vis-à-vis Gygax, is the idea of the semi-professional monster hunter. Not to mention all the magic, wizards, and even a holy sword.
What did I get out of it for my settings? I'll discuss that more in another post.
