#the wind crosses the brown land; unheard. the nymphs are departed. (midworld)

[dcschain]

MID-WORLD FOLKWAYS. 

stranger, it’s late. you’ve travelled many-a wheel to be here, and we’re not the kind of folken to refuse a man his cup o’soup. so sit. by the fire. we’ll sing. 

TRACKLIST + EXPLANATION UNDER THE CUT.

PART ONE: THE LAND IS POISON.

i. munly & the lee lewis harlots | big black bull comes like a caesar. 

a dark, moody song, sung as far as the shavèd mountains and beyond. mid-world is harsh and unforgiving. so are its folken and their songs. 

ii. tom waits | briar and the rose.

though the general populace of mid-world don’t know much about the tower beyond mere superstition, the rose is still a symbol of the white, and of gilead. 

iii. american murder song | unwed henry.

there’s a few folk songs about the man in black, and what terrible things he can do. this is one of them.

iv. rihannon giddens | poor wayfaring stranger.

the trail can be unforgiving, whether it’s a gunslinger’s trail or a trapper’s path through the irradiated mountains. music makes it easier to remember the crooked beauty of home. 

v. those poor bastards | these are hard times.

mid-world is an irradiated wasteland. sometimes it’s hard to look on the brighter side of life.

PART TWO: THEN WHAT ELSE IS THERE TO DO BUT DANCE?

i. agnostic mountain gospel choir | buried them in water. 

mid-world can be an ugly, dark place. sometimes you have to sing about it as happily as you can. a gunslinger favourite, fast-paced and physically demanding. 

ii. american murder song | mary.

a popular drinking song or dancing song. sung everywhere, from gilead to mejis. dancers like to show off their skill dancing to it.

iii. the brothers bright | shake it up.

if you thought “mary” was a hard song to dance, try “shake it up”. another gunslinger favourite.

iv. american murder song | july.

this one is particularly popular in the outer baronies, especially those ravaged by extreme radiation sickness.

v. the dead south | gunslinger’s glory.

no explanation needed, really.

bonus secret track.

:)

[dcschain]

MID-WORLD, AND AN APOCALYPSE (OR TWO).

TL;DR: While Roland, and all characters related to him, operate in what appears to be an adaptation of our world’s historical West, it is an interpretation of the West filtered through a post-apocalyptic lens. It combines the idea of the West as a dying thing, destined to be swallowed by the inexorable processes of time, with it being the last dregs of a world gone terribly, irreparably wrong. Roland’s West (represented, chiefly, by the gunslingers themselves) is not dying because of progress, a trope typical of neo-Westerns (looking at you, RDR2), but it is dying because the world itself is dying as a consequence of some great cataclysmic event which happened in the past. The threat is not the threat of progress (which annihilates the West anyway), but of a complete loss of self.

It’s known that Roland’s world is a dying world. In Stephen King’s own words: “The world had moved on since then. The world had emptied.” Things we’d think as normal, even typical of a Western setting are scarce. There’s barely any coaches or carriages, for example, and paper is as rare as clean water or non-mutated animals. Guns, rifles and bullets are scarce, too, especially following the fall of Gilead -- Roland is really the only one left with guns of note. Mid-World is certainly a twinner of the American West-- but it’s the West after the apocalypse. What’s even more important is to remember that there hasn’t been just one cataclysmic event that made Mid-World what it is, but two. One centuries before Roland was born, and one in his youth. 

The way these two apocalypses interact (or rather, interlock) shapes much of mine and @cllgood​‘s world-building. 

In neo-Westerns the slow end of the “Wild West” and its frontier values is heralded by the virtually inescapable march of modern progress. The key word is nostalgia: the West, uncivilised, violent, animalistic, must necessarily die in order for modernity to thrive, yet with its death comes the death of R/romance and heroism, a deep-rooted connection to nature that modernity, while necessary, will destroy. This is, of course, a false dichotomy: the nostalgia is for an idyllic albeit violent world that didn’t really exist, built on the backs of enslaved people and indigenous people: a violence narrativised as simplicity. The grizzled outlaw is in the West only because he was promised riches beyond compare, and those riches were to be taken from a land painted as virgin and untarnished -- never mind that people had been inhabiting it for millennia before the colonisation of North America began. (Good) neo-Westerns are aware of this idiosyncrasy and attempt to either resolve it or emphasise it, and usually achieve a mix of both, constrained as they are by their own cultural history, biases and writing.

“Progress”, in typical neo-Westerns, is the plot point that allows the audience to recognise that this advancement is, for better or for worse, ushering in a new age, most often technologically more advanced: steam engines, paved roads, transcontinental railways, so on and so forth. The loss of the untouched frontier (in and of itself, at least originally, an act of progress to tame the “savage” west) is a tragedy, but one that, for better or for worse, is acknowledged as both necessary and inevitable.

Post-apocalyptic fiction, on the other hand, can show us what that progress can wreak when left unchecked. The disasters that cause the wastelands that post-apocalyptic fiction populates are man-wrought, and often the result of a war, a nuclear accident, a massive polluting event. The post-apocalyptic genre serves as a criticism of the progress neo-Westerns try to grapple with -- and it isn’t a coincidence that some of the best post-apocalyptic books and movies rely heavily on neo-Western tropes, such as The Road and The Book of Eli.

The world of The Dark Tower is, obviously, part of the latter category: a post-apocalyptic world with a Western flair. Instead of being threatened by progress, Roland’s world is threatened by the fallout of not only its own hubris, but that of those who came before him and his people. The two apocalypses are both due to human error, and the second cannot exist without the first.

The first one is the one that, ultimately, sets the events of The Dark Tower in motion, and is grandfather to the second one. The Great Cataclysm is the reason Roland’s world is irradiated, crumbling and generally inhospitable. While not much, if anything, is known about what this Cataclysm was, the scars of it are ever-present, from traces of ancient technology much closer to our own (atomic batteries, monorails, robots) to the aforementioned widespread nuclear waste that causes most animals (and some people) to suffer the aftermath of terrible radiation poisoning.

And while it may have been cataclysmic in nature, it was not final, nor was it the death knell of the world. Recovery is slow: Arthur Eld, Roland’s ancestor, manages to pull the land together by the skin of his teeth, and unite it into what would eventually be known as All-World. He founds an order of knights, who then become the gunslinger order once guns are discovered, and who are tasked with protecting the land against chaos, man-made and magical both. This leads to a difficultly-held prosperity.

By the time Roland is born, it is abundantly clear that this prosperity, while instrumental to the gunslingers’ rise as the ruling class, is fleeting at best, and destined to crash and burn at worst. Gilead, the seat of the gunslingers’ power and the ancestral seat of Eld’s throne, is the only true city left. Things we take for granted, and which were taken for granted in the American 19th and early 20th centuries, are scarce or entirely absent: sugar, telephones, trains and paper, to name just a few.

Regardless of the nature of this prosperity, the long-term effects of the Great Cataclysm are inescapable. While Eld was able to unite the land, he lacked the tools to cure it, as did every ruler after him. The land was poisoned by the Old Ones then, and it remains poisoned now: a fact which, with the passing of centuries, was less and less central to the gunslingers’ understanding of their own power. The sickness of the land is what causes the class disparities in Mid-World. The discontent that Walter o’Dim uses to stoke the fires of revolution in Mid-World is not misplaced, quite the contrary: where New Canaan is still prosperous, the barony is not generous with its boons, and the rest of the kingdom must make do with what it has.

The revolution that culminates with the complete eradication of the gunslingers and their way of life causes what is known in-universe as a “beam-quake”. Great events of massive importance either strengthen or weaken the beams which hold up the Dark Tower (and, therefore, reality itself). The fall of Gilead is an upset of such magnitude that the Eagle-Lion beam breaks as a consequence of it.

As the beam is now broken, so reality in Mid-World begins to fully falter. The beam-quake is the second apocalyptic event, and one that is a direct consequence of the first. The land was poisoned by the Old Ones, and the gunslingers that came after failed to see how this fully pertained to them. In their hubris, they caused the Outer Baronies to starve and succumb even further to the inhospitable nature of Mid-World. While they are not at fault for the original pollution and nuclear waste, the gunslingers are at fault for ignoring it as long as they did. 

The beam-quake’s effects are immediate. Time begins to shift, becoming unreliable: days can pass in a moment, months can pass in what feels like decades, and so on and so forth. Space, too, is impacted, as north, west, east and south can shift at a moment’s notice. The barrier between worlds is thinner, and magic creatures, such as speaking-demons and apparitions, become more common. 

Where the Great Cataclysm was mostly an apocalypse of matter, the beam-quake is an apocalypse of philosophy. While the Great Cataclysm could be counteracted, to a certain extent, and was successfully contrasted by Arthur Eld’s actions, the beam-quake causes a complete breakdown not just of the people and their ideology, but of the very fabric of reality. There is no return from it and there is no going back from it, much like progress in neo-Westerns can never be stopped: the difference here, of course, is that it isn’t progress, but a slow, inexorable death.

The world moves on, but it moves on in a flat circle: the endless climb of technological advancement has been stilled. Roland navigates a world grappling with its own mortality, and, much like our West in the face of modern times, can scarcely find a satisfying answer. 

[dcschain]

the stag will cross deep water for the one who sings at dusk.

martin shaw, “scatterlings.”