‘Ring the Bells’: Sound and Silence in Garth Nix’s Old Kingdom

Abstract

Australian author Garth Nix has set six critically acclaimed and internationally bestselling novels and several shorter works in and around the fictional world of the Old Kingdom, beginning with Sabriel (1995) and continuing most recently with Terciel & Elinor (2021). This loose series of texts, with its bellringing protagonists, is the prime contributor to his reputation as an author of high fantasy fiction, although he is also marketed as and known for writing science fiction and other related subgenres. Most notably, his work prominently features elements of the Gothic. This aspect of his work and the ways in which it creates tension within the “high” fantasy genre becomes increasingly apparent when examined through the lens of sound—a critical method that has potential for charting the entanglements of this genre with other popular genres of fiction.

1. Introduction/Overture

The work of Australian author Garth Nix is primarily described as belonging to the fantasy genre (Ivan 2017; Mills 2009) and its subgenres, including high fantasy, low fantasy/picaresque heroic fantasy (Kaveney 2012, p. 214), dark fantasy (Kaveney 2012), science fantasy (Lukianova and Zinchenko 2019, p. 114), and other modes of the fantastic for adults and younger readers.1 His short stories and novels, many of which are set in the fictional world of the “Old Kingdom”, have been nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award among others, and have won Aurealis Awards, Ditmar Awards, and a Mythopoeic Award, the last for writing in the spirit of the Inklings, the literary discussion group which included J R R Tolkien and C S Lewis among its members (Science Fiction Awards+ Database n.d.). With global sales in excess of six million books across 42 languages (Bonnier Books UK n.d.) and multiple appearances at or near the summit of bestseller lists, including the prestigious The New York Times (York 2023, p. 14), the impact of his works is significant and widespread, with endorsements by cultural powerhouses such as Margot Robbie and Sarah J Maas for his creation of “wonderful fantasy worlds and… strong, clever heroines” (Robbie 2023; Maas 2020). Critically, his Old Kingdom series has been praised as “[a]n important mythopoeic work” featuring “a combination of medievalish [sic] and more modern backgrounds”, “a variety of fascinating magical systems”, and “beautifully written, complex plots” (Levy and Mendlesohn 2016, pp. 144–45). Nix is further lauded as “the first writer of children’s fantasy from Australia to really make an impact in the US and UK markets”, beginning with his Old Kingdom series (Levy and Mendlesohn 2016, p. 169).

Nix’s Old Kingdom writings include six novels, the earliest being 1995’s Sabriel and the most recent Terciel and Elinor in 2021, along with a number of novellas and short stories, the most recent of these “One Wyverley Summer” published in the 25th anniversary edition of Sabriel. These works, like much commercial high fantasy fiction of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, explore the history and inhabitants of an invented world that will be familiar, in broad strokes, to readers of Lewis and Tolkien in that it is “medieval in one sense or another” (Dell 2011, p. 171)—and, more specifically, “a magnificent high-fantasy realm of sword-wielding royals and magicians” (Olver 2022, p. 68), where “society and technology resemble that of medieval Europe but… augmented by and imbued with a complex magic system” (Rosegrant 2024, p. 167). Although Nix fondly confirms Tolkien as a key influence on his Old Kingdom novels, acknowledging the impossibility “for a writer to escape the influence of the great books they read growing up” (Nix 2024a, 2024b), and although this influence is observed in critical analyses (e.g., Levy and Mendlesohn 2016, p. 145), he is not a slavish Tolkien epigone. Nix’s Old Kingdom is distinguished from other worlds of the high fantasy genre by the prominence of two key elements.

The first of these elements is the existence, beyond one of two known physical barriers surrounding the eponymous Old Kingdom (in which most of the events in these stories take place), of a second invented country called Ancelstierre, where magic largely does not function. The society, technology, and armed forces of Ancelstierre resemble that of England in the early twentieth century (Rosegrant 2024, p. 167) (suggesting another connection to J R R Tolkien, who served in the First World War). The existence in these texts of two secondary worlds, one magical and the other ahistorical, complicates any reading of these texts as uncomplicated reiterations of the high fantasy “default” mode (Butler 2006, p. 20), particularly when characters move from Ancelstierre to the Old Kingdom in a manner common to quest-type portal fantasies—another default mode of fantastic literature (Baker 2016, p. 471; Mendlesohn 2008, p. 43). This confuses generic expectations and to a certain extent sabotages them (Mills 2001, p. 15), undermining the categorisation of these works as exemplars of high fantasy.

The second key distinguishing element in Nix’s work is the use of common Gothic tropes such as premature burial, grotesque revenants, unspeakable terrors, and the uncanny (Mills 2006; Roberts 2012) among those of high fantasy (Alter 2012). Castles and ruins, graveyards and tombs, dark waters, and wildernesses dot the landscape of the Old Kingdom (Alter 2013, p. 189), in which the practice of necromancy takes centre stage—alongside a form of anti-necromancy, by which means the restless dead are returned to death: as Alice Mills notes, the scenarios of Nix’s Old Kingdom novels often sound like horror texts, featuring “a good demon-hunter seeking to restore a proper boundary between the living and the dead” (Mills 2001, p. 15). The foregrounding of these Gothic and horror tropes, along with the persistent use of oppositional meanings, creates an atmosphere of unsettlement that defies the expectation that at the end of a successful high fantasy quest lies “the cure to the world’s pain” (Kaveney 2012, p. 216) and complicates the simplistic depictions of good and evil often found in popular texts of this kind (Robinson 2003, p. 30). These unsettlements and complications again confound simplistic categorisations of the Old Kingdom books as high fantasy, without, however, placing them in alignment with works by outspoken critics of the mode, such as Michael Moorcock, China Miéville, or George R R Martin (Kaveney 2012, p. 216). Instead, Nix’s texts draw on “a culturally entrenched literary and filmic repertoire of Gothic imagery to paint the mysterious and unsettling world of The Old Kingdom” (Alter 2013, p. 191) while retaining sufficient elements of high fantasy to engage with both genres at once. An alternative categorisation of these texts might be “Gothic fantasy” (Mills 2006, p. 51; Mills 2008, p. 145), except that the overlap between Gothic fantasy and commercial high fantasy is arguably so large, particularly in contemporary literature for young readers (Zipes 2008, p. 1), that, like “dark fantasy” (Clute and Grant 1997, p. 338), the distinction is functionally meaningless—revealing that Nix is not unique in his investigation of high fantasy through the addition of elements from adjacent forms, among them, but not confined to, the Gothic.

Although this comingling or entanglement of genres in Nix’s texts has been remarked on before, his frequent employment of music and noise has not been thoroughly analysed. This paper undertakes a detailed analysis of Nix’s Old Kingdom stories and novels in order to highlight the utility of interrogating generic features of Gothic and high fantasy literature through the lens of sound and the potential insights this may provide both to Nix’s work and to the fantasy genre as a whole.

2. Sound in Literature: A Brief Overview

Angela Leighton addresses the complex challenge of mimicking “the labor of the ear” when using only letters on a page that are themselves silent (Leighton 2018, p. 3). Reading any written text naturally evokes the sound of the spoken word, through imagined associations with written language, but it also asks us to recall and recreate through more idiosyncratic imaginative efforts sounds from the world around us, as well as sounds that we have never heard before or sounds that might even be impossible to hear, by means of metaphor or simile. Examining depictions of sound and music in literature can thus provide insight into the times in which these works were written (Ratail 2021), particularly those in which audio recordings did not exist. Analysing the way such evocations are deployed in fiction also unlocks understandings of affective tropes, since the evocation of sound and music is “particularly adept at tapping into the emotions” and “has the power to engage not just the readers’ attention, but their feelings” (Layton 2001, p. 19), as well as to elaborate the worlds in which a text’s characters are situated. In mimetic fiction, for instance, musical details may serve as a commentary on individual experiences within societal frameworks, particularly in times of conflict (Harling-Lee 2020, p. 375), while in speculative fiction, music can assist in othering one or more aspects of a setting or character (Stock 2021, p. 14) or provoke conceptual questions around the creation, replication, and dissemination of sound (Delgado et al. 2012).

The depiction of sound and music is arguably even more important in the genres of the fantastic, where sound can be used in the service of mythopoesis as well as emotional affect. On the non-generic depiction of sound in literature, and echoing the familiar and oft-misattributed line that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” (Quote Investigator n.d.), Leighton notes that “sound lends itself to a vocabulary of the preternatural” (Leighton 2018, p. 4). This insight can be reversed to suggest that the preternatural lends itself to the vocabulary of sound. The use of music in high fantasy in particular supports this proposition, and can be traced at least as far back as Lewis, who brought Narnia into being through song in The Magician’s Nephew, and Tolkien, for whom music was an essential part of the evocation of Middle Earth and the entirety of its invented history: indeed, the creation myth that sets Tolkien’s sequence of stories in motion introduces music before matter itself—which begs the question of how sound or music can exist without a medium to carry it, if not by preternatural means. Music is “the ultimate power in the cosmological history of Middle-earth” (Eden 2003, p. 188), and furthermore an “expression of joy, like laughter and smiling” (Chapman-Morales 2020, p. 68) that hints at “a blissful, paradisal state” (Dell 2011, p. 171). In The Lord of the Rings, consonant music and beneficial higher powers are frequently aligned, through the innate musical ability of the elves, the song that Tom Bombadil gives the hobbits if they find themselves in danger, the summoning of Shadowfax by Gandalf’s three whistles, and many other examples (and conversely by the dissonant sounds of factories and the languages of villainous castes). Perhaps it is unsurprising, while at the same time being noteworthy, that in a genre that draws deeply on oral traditions of storytelling (Attebery 2013, p. 97), song and other consonant forms of music are most usually aligned with forces of Good (Chapman-Morales 2020, p. 62). This alignment of harmonious sound and moral authority evokes Boethius’ musica universalis or “music of the spheres”, an inaudible harmony that delivers a state of divine ecstasy to all who appreciate it (Reilly 2001, p. 14)—and it is interesting in this regard to note that in The Silmarillion, the primary compendium of Tolkien’s mythopoeic writings, “there is no direct reference to the use of instruments”; rather, Tolkien emphasises vocal singing, a detail reinforced by author Martine Bates: “Just as an opera would not be the same without the libretto, in the same way high fantasy cannot be what it is without music” (Bates 1999).

Sound in Gothic literature, however, distinct from high fantasy, is most frequently employed to elicit in the reader “sensations of excess and terror” (Wikle 2020, p. 7) through extremes of volume (e.g., thunder, screams) and by obscuration (e.g., smothered whispers and half-heard footfalls) (Ratail 2021, p. 10). The genre’s preoccupation with soundscapes that evoke feelings of dread, nostalgia, and the uncanny (Schlauraff 2018), often denoted by disharmonious sounds of human activity and an interruption of the natural order (Ratail 2021, p. 5), serve, as these sounds do in other forms of literature, as metaphors for characters’ internal struggles, fears, and desires. Adam Roberts evocatively paints the Gothic as “one of the major vehicles by which Romanticism poured out to dominate literature”, the “barbaric energies of an imagined past… flowing disruptively through previously established canons of classical taste” (Roberts 2012, p. 7), and in this disruption, we can glimpse a literary assault on Boethius and Johannes Kepler and their orderly but inaudible music through a discordant cacophony of sounds. “Sounds to wake the dead”, writes David Toop in this context (Toop 2010, p. 141), possibly employing the phrase’s two distinct meanings in English, both of which are relevant to this discussion of Garth Nix’s use of sound in the Old Kingdom: the first concerning the traditional vigil held for someone recently deceased (“to wake” in the sense of “to hold a wake”); and the second, and more familiar to contemporary readers, describing noises so loud as to rouse a corpse back to life (Grammarphobia n.d.). The acts of watching and waking those who no longer number among the living are Gothic activities prominent in Nix’s Old Kingdom fiction, as are sounds associated with both activities.

3. Music in High Fantasy: A Capella Cosmic Prog

Given the genre with which he is most often associated (high fantasy) and his acknowledgement of Tolkien as a source of inspiration, it is perhaps unsurprising that Nix’s Old Kingdom texts feature music in several key ways. This is apparent from the cover art alone, which reveals that bells play prominent roles in these narratives, in both the Old Kingdom’s magic system and its mythopoesis. A close examination of their positioning in the centres of these narratives reveals them to be instruments of both consolation and the uncanny, reflecting tensions between high fantasy and the Gothic in these texts that make them distinctive.

Two magical practices operate in Nix’s Old Kingdom, each relying on a tamed and potentially corrosive form of “Free Magic”. One practice takes the form of “charter” marks that appear as mobile forms independent of a material matrix. The other is practised through the making of sounds by the human body (e.g., whistling, clapping) or by musical instruments (e.g., pipes, bells) to play specific tones and rhythms. Since Charter marks can occasionally be whistled, the magical protagonists of these texts are required to be already musical before their training begins: “able to whistle, to hum, to sing” (Nix 1995, loc. 1568). Pipes are used by apprentice magic-users, while the principal instruments played by experts are handbells: specifically, seven different-sized bells with distinct timbres (but not always defined or consistent pitches, beyond the relative as implied by their comparative sizes). These handbells, unlike other instruments in the Old Kingdom, are not played but wielded, and are treated with the same cautious respect as weapons. Akin to some historical bells and swords (Calvert 2022, p. xvii)—and swords that also appear in these narratives—the bells are named, and they are worn in leather bandoliers, in the fashion of musketeers, in order to ensure that they remain silent until needed. When these bells sound—individually, simultaneously, or in sequence—they have varying magical effects on anyone within hearing, living or dead, as in this example from Lirael:

The single note slid between Sam’s fingers and into his ears, filling his mind with its strength and purity. Then the note changed and became a whole series of sounds that were almost the same, but not. Together they formed a rhythm that shot through Sam’s limbs, tweaking a muscle here and a muscle there, rocking him forward, whether he liked it or not.

Desperately, Sam tried to purse his lips, to whistle a counter-spell or even just a random noise that might disrupt the bell’s call. But his cheeks wouldn’t move, and his legs were already stumping through the water, carrying him quickly towards the source of the sound, towards the wielder of the bell.

(Nix 2001, p. 145)

These bells and the sound they and their wielders make, and the abilities they possess, are central to Old Kingdom narratives. In the Old Kingdom, and in regions of Ancelstierre close to the boundary separating the two countries, usual distinctions between life and death are blurred, with trained members of the living able to journey “from Life into Death” (Nix 2003, loc. 431) and necromancers able to summon the dead back to life, usually for wrongful purposes, among other feats. Nix’s stories often centre on the inherited role of the Abhorsen, the most powerful bell-wielder of a particular era, who is dedicated to maintaining the natural order of life and death. Abhorsens use their bells to control or repel the dead who have returned to life, ultimately to return them to the river that separates the living from those who are permanently dead. The bells may also have deleterious effects on the wielders themselves, if rung carelessly or unwisely. The proper way to wield each of the seven bells is conveyed to each Abhorsen by magical tomes, such as The Book of the Dead and The Book of Remembrance and Forgetting. How evil necromancers learn these skills is unknown, although Nix implies that some belonging to the Abhorsen bloodline need no book learning at all to use bells of this ilk:

“I don’t know how to use the bells,” said Clariel. She kept staring at them. Was it her imagination, or could she hear the instruments faintly humming in their leather shrouds? Calling to her? “I know no necromancy. I haven’t read The Book of the Dead.”

“You need nothing but your will and the instinct in your blood”, said Mogget. “These bells are Free Magic things, not wound about with Charter Magic. Take them up, speak to them. They will answer to you, teach you their use, their strengths and foibles.”

“I could go into Death?” asked Clariel.

“Anyone can go into Death”, said Mogget, with a smirk. “Coming back again is the difficult part.”

(Nix 2014b, loc. 352)

Although the intricate relationships between the bells of the Abhorsen, a necromancer’s bells, and Free Magic is beyond the scope of this paper, it is important to note the centrality of such bells in these texts and the engagement with natural and unnatural mortality that they represent. As an example of the latter, note in the excerpt above Nix’s careful use of the word “shroud”: the bells wear death’s raiment, and should be inanimate, yet they sound of their own accord (among other things) as though alive.

The choice of bells as the primary magical weapon of a high fantasy text concerned with violations of natural laws is curious, and yet apt. Bells are musical instruments, but that is not how they are usually encountered in everyday life, in the readers’ world as in the Old Kingdom. Clock chimes, and before them church bells, have marked time for centuries, “sounding out the death of the hours” (Rodenbach 2007, p. 61) and serving in fiction as a metaphor for the passage of time and the cycles of life and death (Ibrahim and Kheirbek 2023, p. 247). The transformation of mercurial, invisible time into discrete, audible reality (Toop 2010, p. 159) is an alchemical process perfectly aligned with both religion and high fantasy’s desires to give gods and other supernatural beings agency in the material world. The ringing of bells denotes significant moments, such as birth and death, natural disasters, and the end of wars, just as readily as they announce a call to worship or the end of the working day. Bells also have precise ritual purposes in religion, such as the “bell, book and candle” methods of excommunication and exorcism, through the long-standing belief that the ringing of bells will dispel malevolent forces (Ibrahim and Kheirbek 2023, p. 247). Nix himself has revealed (Nix 2014a) that he chose bells because of these ritual practices:

I wanted my heroine to have a particular kind of magic, but I didn’t want it to be the typical sort of things where she had a spell book or a wand, I wanted something different.

I was looking into different myths and beliefs at the time about how people dealt with evil spirits and laying the dead to rest, and one of the most famous things I came upon was exorcism by bell, book and candle which I liked the idea of… I didn’t want her to be looking for matches or a lighter every time an evil spirit was nearby. So then I was left with bells, which to me seem to possess a sort of magic anyway in their ‘voices’… I did some more research into the history of bells, naming and baptising bells and the mysticism that’s often associated with bells.

(Nix 2015)

Thus, bells, through their place in ritual, real and imagined, fill the double role of maintaining the status quo while at the same time of warning when the status quo is breached—a contradiction that is particularly apposite in the context of the Gothic.

Such familiar, if often unconscious, layers of associations, from consolatory to foreboding, contribute a sense of the uncanny that winds its way through these texts, evidence of which can be found in this and other “disconcerting interplay[s] between opposing meanings” (Mills 2001, p. 18) such as, most obviously, living/dead. Another includes fixed/fluid: the Abhorsen’s body typically become encased in ice when entering the fast-running waters of Death. Another is present in the detailed ways in which bells are portrayed by Nix in the Old Kingdom texts.

Bells are musical instruments, and they are named as such by Nix, but, as previously noted, in these stories they appear more like weapons than music-makers and possess a degree of agency that renders them especially dangerous. Despite clarity surrounding the nature of each bell (the seven key bells are described in consistent ways across all of these narratives) and their use as essential tools for those intent on maintaining the natural order of life and death, the sounds they make and the effects they have on those around them are to an extent unpredictable: when a bell is loosed, the reader knows that the wielder might easily fall foul of the bell’s effects along with their intended targets. Furthermore, the suggestion that the bells are literally wilful is made many times in these texts: they are entirely described as having voices rather than chimes; they sometimes move in their wielder’s grip; and they will take advantage of inattention or accident to achieve different ends to those intended, suggesting agency and individual personalities that might act in defiance of the Abhorsen:

Belgaer was the name of the fifth bell. The Thinker. Belgaer could mend the erosion of mind that often occurred in Death, restoring the thoughts and memory of the Dead. It could also erase those thoughts, in Life as well as in Death, and in necromancers’ hands had been used to splinter the minds of enemies. Sometimes it splintered the mind of the necromancer, for Belgaer liked the sound of its own voice and would try to steal the chance to sing of its own accord.

(Nix 2003, loc. 440)

This suggested agency is confirmed through the mythopoeic elements of Nix’s Old Kingdom texts, which reveal that the Abhorsen’s bells contain fragments of seven powerful Free Magic beings from deep history “who possessed the conscious thought and foresight that raised them above all the tens of thousands of Free Magic beings that clamored and strove to exist upon the earth” (Nix 2021b, loc. 5313). In defiance of the natural order from which they emerged, these “Free Spirits of the Beginning” (Nix 2003, loc. 2746) independently created life, such as the humans who live in the Old Kingdom, and some of their own life persists in the bells:

“They put a great deal of their power into the bloodlines, but not all their being”, replied the Dog. “But I suspect they were perhaps less tired of conscious, individual existence. They wished to go on, in some form or another. I think they wanted to see what happened. And the Seven did have names. They are remembered in the bells and in the pipes you have in your belt. Each of those bells has something of the original power of the Seven, the power that existed before the Charter.”

(Nix 2021b, loc. 5321)

What preceded the Bright Shiners in Nix’s world is not revealed, and neither is the role that music had in their creation or in their own creative activities, beyond their choice to inter much of their psychic remains in nominally musical instruments. There is no mistaking, however, that these instruments are not intended for quotidian musical purposes: the words “harmony”, “harmonic”, and “melody” do not appear in the Old Kingdom texts at all, as though making entirely clear that the purpose of any instrument is to exert power over the living and the dead rather than to carry a tune (although as noted below, music is enjoyed in other ways in these texts). One of the bells has a “melodious” tone and is also the only one specifically described as being “musical”, but use of the bell “grant[s] speech to the dumb, tongue-lost Dead… give[s] forgotten words their meaning… still[s] a tongue that moves too freely”: nothing, then, that relates to actual musicality (Nix 1995, loc. 788). This handbell, like the others, is a magical tool only.

This critical understanding of the double role of magical bells in the Old Kingdom—evinced through their centrality to Nix’s mythopoesis, as well as to the sense of the uncanny in these texts—is confirmed in two further ways. Seven Bright Shiners are revealed to be confined in part to the Abhorsen’s bells, but there were originally nine Bright Shiners. The eighth remains an active Free Magic agent in the Old Kingdom that takes many forms, one of them feline and exhibiting the same tendency for self-absorption and unpredictability as a cat (and its sibling bells). When “bound” by Charter magic, that binding takes the form of a miniature handbell hanging from their collar, a potent magical trinket that at other times might hang from this being’s belt or some other form of constraint. Here we see, again, a bell employed in service of uncanny mythopoesis and for a purpose that is not musical, specifically to confine an elder being of great power to ensure it conforms to natural law.

The ninth Bright Shiner is inimical to all life except its own and functions as a major antagonist in the Old Kingdom texts. Orannis, “the Destroyer”, is imprisoned in the form of two metal hemispheres that aspire to join, thus forming a single metal sphere from which Orannis ultimately plans to escape. While at first glance, this may suggest that Nix’s mythopoesis is not entirely consistent with respect to the Bright Shiners and their prisons, it is worth noting that Suzui and Kane bells used in Japanese Shintoist and Buddhist ceremonies are hemispherical and spherical, respectively. Some Western church bells are hemispherical, too—in this form, they can be stacked, which saves space in a cramped belltower—as are the bells of traditional alarm clocks. Spherical bells appear on sleighs, Christmas trees, and jester’s caps—and cat’s collars. Here, we see bells again at the heart of the Old Kingdom uncanny mythopoesis, and that they are not limited to the campaniform.

It is interesting at this point to compare Nix’s mythopoesis to Tolkien’s. The Silmarillion’s opening chapter—“Ainulindalë” or “Music of the Ainur”—depicts how the universe’s first creations, angelic beings, were taught the art of song by the all-powerful Eru. The music they make becomes the material world, all who live in it and all its history, but it is not instrumental music (Eden 2003, p. 190). Nix, too, at times draws on voiced music to capture elements of the sublime (literally, in this case):

Together, the bells and Dog sang a song that was more than sound and power. It was the song of the earth, the moon, the stars, the sea and the sky, of Life and Death and all that was and would be. It was the song of the Charter, the song that had bound Orannis in the long ago, the song that sought to bind the Destroyer once again.

(Nix 2003, loc. 4913)

However, it becomes clear in an analysis of Nix’s texts that music is predominantly present through instrumental forms, and that this music acts as the apparatus of a magical force that has no clear allegiance to the sublime. Although Nix’s Bright Shiners set other forms of life in motion, as did Tolkien’s Ainu, they have largely abandoned their agency in exchange for an ongoing existence tethered to musical instruments or other forms of containment and, as above, employ this force to similarly contain another of their kind who threatens their secondary creations. When humans attempt to wield this power in service of maintaining or restoring a natural order, the Bright Shiners may act against them, suggesting that they lack the more morally centred and unanimous natures of the Ainu—or at least possess a different moral centre to humans. When they sound in singletons, pairs, and trios, bells cast hazardous but useful spells; only when all seven magical bells sound in concert do they create the music of high fantasy, usually evoked as a signifier of ineffable bliss and well-ordered nature.

“No matter how many times the word [song] repeats”, Catherine Olver notes, “readers cannot hear the cosmic song” (Olver 2022, p. 69). This is an important point that Olver emphasises: “textual sound effects risk striking readers as disappointingly faint compared to the all-encompassing grandeur of the cosmic music described” (Olver 2022). The inability of these texts to precisely describe the sound of such music is one shared by many high fantasy works, and is not a failure, however, since what is being portrayed is actually the listening experience:

[one] that all of us have had throughout our lives. A song that has become special between one and one’s spouse or lover, music in a film that moves us to cry or draws us into the storyline, the tune that we hum throughout the day that we heard earlier from the radio—all of these experiences and more are a part of our daily lives.

(Eden 2003, p. 188)

Bradford Lee Eden’s examples here highlight the fundamental role of music in present-day storytelling, as well as position this aspect of the evocation of music with respect to high fantasy. As with Tolkien, ordinary, uncomplicated music is not absent from the Old Kingdom texts: minstrels and musicians are referred to in the Old Kingdom, along with songs and instruments apart from bells, such as pianos and mandolins, reed pipes, drums, clavichords, and zithers; furthermore, non-magical Ancelstierre contains phonograms that are, given that world’s clear relationship to our own, likely used to play music. It is simply that no evidence exists in these texts of handbells and other kinds of bells, for all their centrality to Nix’s mythopoesis, ringing in service of actual music.

4. Noise in the Gothic: OG Clockpunk

In Nix’s work, then, the high fantastic representation of music is evident, as well as the mundane. They are, however, paired with oppositional representations that introduce elements of the uncanny. Neither are they the only representations of sound critical to understanding these texts. Another key application of oppositional meaning and the uncanny is important here, that between “music” and “non-music”. As noted earlier, the Gothic brought new kinds of sonic textures to literature, among them the dreadful and the terrifying produced by both nature and by humans. Lucie Ratail’s insightful analysis of the expansion of everyday experience of sound during the period in which early Gothic novels were written—when new sonic sources were introduced to the masses as a whole, via steam engines, microphones, growing cities, and other social, technological, and scientific developments—highlights the importance of sound to the creation of a literature that captures feelings of unsettlement and anxiety in both its characters and its readers. Sometimes, the use of sound occurs alongside visual elements of the text (a lightning flash accompanying a clap of thunder, for example), but sound alone may be employed to great effect, as in Beckford’s Vathek, which “resonates with a variety of sounds, music, and shrieks… [evoking] dreadful events without reference to sight” (Ratail 2021, p. 7). Sounds are described using terms more often restricted to beings with physical agency, and, as in Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, can cause madness and derangement (including in one instance an auditory hallucination of bells ringing) (Ratail 2021, p. 9). David Toop notes that “Sound is a haunting, a ghost, a presence whose location in space is ambiguous and whose existence in time is transitory”, and this is even more so on the silent page, where historically, authors employ a variety of punctuation techniques to keep their readers immersed in Gothic sensibilities, such as Walpole’s “frightening and surprising” dashes (Ratail 2021, p. 6) and Poe’s “mellifluous repetition” (Toop 2010, p. 162) in “The Bells”. Silence, too—perhaps in response to the increasingly normalised noisy world of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—is often portrayed as something to be feared rather than desired. This is achieved through the absence of normal sounds—a potent signifier of the uncanny (Van Elferen 2012, pp. 29, 63)—and also through the appearance of manifestations that are non-vocal (Ratail 2021, p. 4). “People’s silence is hardly ever a good sign in gothic fiction, since it is the sign of the unsaid” (Wright 2021), and neither is the untethered voice, as in the comingled and echoing vocal “uproar of contention” that echoes through the dungeons of Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho.

While music in Gothic literature, like high fantasy later, “still advocated the use of voice to elevate the mind and speak to the soul” (Ratail 2021, p. 11), as at several points in Shelley’s Frankenstein, instrumental music plays a more complex role, sometimes evoking consolatory instances of everyday life (street performances, marching bands, etc.) while at other times “mirroring the characters’ melancholy feelings, or introducing demonic appearances and terrible deeds” (Ratail 2021, p. 5). In both these instances, clear parallels exist between Gothic works and the Old Kingdom texts:

Bell sounds are used by narrators to enhance the feeling of remoteness in time and place, and to give rhythm to the characters’ lives. The music of the Church is particularly developed in gothic, with bells, choruses, prayers, and other punctual evidence of clerical life. These sounds are so numerous that they eventually give punctuation to the stories themselves: Radcliffe’s heroine appreciates the landscape at twilight, around the sound of the vesper bell (which is often struck at midnight), and Lewis articulates the tale of the Bleeding Nun with bell-tolls of ‘One’ and ‘Two’, delimiting ‘The Ghostly hour’ (Lewis 164) when terrifying events occur.

(Ratail 2021, p. 5)

The Gothic, thus, creates a tension between music, which is intended to console (unless interrupted or obscured), and non-music, which is intended to unsettle. Gothic authors, and authors like Nix who embrace the tools of the Gothic, frequently employ these sonic textures and tensions to engage readers and, through the ability of sound to evoke emotion, to help readers “see, hear and feel what is true about fantasy worlds” (Layton 2001, p. 19). Despite Nix’s choice of a musical instrument as a key instance of magical technology, and the occasional appearance of vocal music as an ineffable (and indescribable) force, it might seem obvious to examine his work through the lens of Gothic sound. However, previous analyses of Gothic elements in Old Kingdom texts have focused solely on the ocular (e.g., Alter 2013), almost certainly because that is how scholarship of the Gothic normally views (pun intended) its subjects. Analysing the centrality of Nix’s uncanny depiction of bells alone, as well as his general use of sound, provides further insights into the relationship of these texts to the Gothic.

Catherine Olver’s comparison between the two magical practices in the Old Kingdom texts is useful here, noting first that

Ringing the bells is an aural skill that very few people can learn: the tragic narrative of Clariel illustrates that the bells corrupt anyone who rings them, even with good intentions, unless they are from the correct bloodline and have been selected to fulfil the official role of Abhorsen.

(Olver 2022, p. 76)

Accordingly, in Clariel and elsewhere, the Old Kingdom texts “consistently [associate] aural magic with unpredictability, danger, and freedom”. Along with possessing musical abilities, magical protagonists must also be attentive listeners to the world around them, as well as to their bells, because slight changes in their immediate sonic landscape can signal personal danger or salvation (Olver 2022, p. 75):

Still they heard the tumult from behind, the howling, drumming, shouting, all magnified by the water and the vastness of the reservoir. Then another sound began, cutting through the noise with the clarity of perfection.

It started softly, like a tuning fork lightly struck, but grew, a pure note… till there was nothing but the sound. The sound of [the bell] Astarael.

(Nix 1995, loc. 3673)

Even Charter magic, which is feasibly learned by anyone, comes with its own risks. Charter magic is usually employed through written or engraved spells with accompanying gestures and visualisations, but it can also employ whistles, and as mentioned earlier, Charter marks can travel through the air, like a visible form of sound. Free Magic lies at the basis of both magical practices, and like sound, and through sound, it will constantly attempt to evade all forms of constraint. An inexperienced magic-user can thus quickly lose control of the more accessible practice of Charter magic, and even when used expertly, the result may be one of unease, as in this instance demonstrating the interplay of Charter magic and music:

She raised her hand, fingers spread wide, and whistled five separate notes. With each whistle, Charter marks flew from her mouth to cluster on each finger. After the fifth note, Sabriel closed her hand, bringing all the marks together in one glowing ball, which she threw high in the air, whistling again, the five notes joined in an eerie tune.

(Nix 2016, loc. 4844)

These tensions between constrained and free, fixed and fluid, ease and unease echo the tensions between high fantasy and Gothic present in the Old Kingdom texts through Nix’s descriptions of magical music. Bells (and pipes, when wielded by magic-users) exhibit qualities and abilities that ordinary instruments do not possess: a single instrument might, for instance, multiply their voices (Nix 1995, loc. 968), shift in pitch (Nix 2003, p. 337), or generate notes that linger even after the literal sound is gone (Nix 2016, loc. 302). While the work of a magic-user might sometimes produce “a sweet, restful peal of notes” (Nix 2021b, p. 303), “a lively, infectious jig”, or “a merry tune” (Nix 1995, loc. 2620), as often the ringing might be “discordant” (Nix 2021b, p. 305), “unearthly” (Nix 2021b, p. 46), or emitting “one terrible single note of doom” (Nix 2016, loc. 5162) or “the sound of a dying scream” (Nix 2016, loc. 5270). The effects of these magical instruments may emulate violent actions, striking “like a savage, physical blow to the head” (Nix 2021b, p. 305) or “as if she were pierced all over by a thousand hair-fine needles” (Nix 2016, loc. 5157); they can make “skin crawl and… hair lift with static electricity” and drown out all other sounds (Nix 2021b, p. 312). While, as stated, magic-users of the Old Kingdom must be musical, with or without magical instruments—since “their vocal skills were a weapon of last recourse” (Nix 1995, loc. 1571)—there remains the very clear sense that magical music in the Old Kingdom is neither simple nor safe. The fourth magic bell, Dyrim, is described as simultaneously the “most musical” and the “most difficult to use” (Nix 2003, p. 39)—making explicit a link between musicality and difficulty that is repeatedly reinforced. No wonder each Abhorsen struggles to retain complete mastery of their bells, even with the knowledge contained within The Book of the Dead, in which magical tomes are descriptions of bell-ringing techniques and patterns that past Abhorsens have found effective against the dead and other inimical forces.

The Book of the Dead contains whole “chapters on music and the nature of sound in the binding of the dead” (Nix 1995, loc. 510). The slight distinction here between music and sound is telling. “Sound” refers to all things audible, and includes both music and non-music, so while music is a special case in the magical practice of the Abhorsens, it is not the entirety of their practice, and this is reflected in the way their magical effects are perceived. Notes alone may form an important part of the spells—since voice alone can bring about the desired end, by imitating the sound of the bells (Nix 2021a, loc. 891)—but so can rhythm, through the clapping of hands (Nix 1995, loc. 275–76). The distinction between musical sound and non-musical sound is thus entirely and uncannily blurred in these texts. Outside of situations involving magic, too, Nix frequently deploys non-musical sound as part of an affective strategy designed to maintain tension within his unfolding narratives. These non-musical and non-magical sonic elements arise out of the landscapes of the Old Kingdom and its neighbour, Ancelstierre, often triggered by human activities within them, and are frequently as much a part of the reader’s everyday life as being transported by familiar music into a heightened emotional state. Unlike a cosmic song that arises from combined magical efforts and is impossible either to represent in words or to imagine, these carefully articulated noises combine to create a complex soundscape that is comprehensible and therefore strategically unsettling and uncanny, in the Gothic sense, often affecting a single, isolated character, usually those eponymous in each novel. Olver particularly notes Nix’s emphasis on sound in the twentieth-century analogue of Ancelstierre, where magic does not work, in theory (Olver 2022, p. 75). Between the two nations, however, lies a narrow and changeable “No Man’s Land” in which magical wind-flutes created by the Abhorsens whisper “a song redolent with the same power of her bells, helping to close the border between Life and Death”. Sinister wind is “arguably the most frequent [element] in terror writing” (Ratail 2021, p. 3), alongside threatening animals, earthquakes, and storms (all of which also appear in the Old Kingdom), and when the same wind that powers these wind-flutes blows into Ancelstierre, magic may gain a foothold, allowing Charter magic and the dead purchase, if briefly. In these perimetric spaces, a secular military presence operates, providing an additional barrier to magical incursions should such take a physical form, but usually proving ineffective. Internal combustion vehicles, the telegraph, guns and other weapons, and other familiar forms of modern technology are unreliable too close to the Wall—although at times, Nix implies, through the mechanical sounds they make, a similar half-sentience to the bells wielded by the Abhorsen: e.g., “the car coughed and spluttered into life, a tenor accompaniment to the bass cacophony of the trucks and tanks” (Nix 1995, loc. 4074).

Even when not enlisted to maintain the reader’s awareness that, in these stories, non-sentient things can approach sentience, sounds normal in Ancelstierre are similarly portrayed with a conceptual slippage between artificial and natural, depending on who is listening. Ever-present, too, is the possibility of danger:

There was a lot of noise outside now—shouting and the crash of hobnailed boots on the road—but behind all that there was also a constant dull booming. In her half-asleep state, it took a moment for her to understand it wasn’t thunder, which she half-expected, but something else…

The booming noise was coming from farther south, and there was a faint whistling with it. Lirael could see bright flashes on the horizon there, but it was not lightning. There was thunder as well, to the west, and the flashes from that direction were definitely lightning…

“What is that noise, and the lights?” she asked Sam, pointing south…

“Artillery”, he said after a moment. “Big guns. They must be far enough back, so they aren’t affected by the Old Kingdom… Um, they’re sort of like catapults that throw an exploding device several miles, which hits the ground or blows up in the air and kills people.”

(Nix 2003, p. 341)

This multi-layered portrayal of sound as familiar and unfamiliar, commonplace and yet dangerous, is an essential part of Nix’s Gothic strategy.

Nix’s recruitment of silence in this strategy is similarly in line with other Gothic writing, as outlined earlier. Transitions from sound to silence and vice versa occur abruptly and unpredictably, to “cracking” and “ominous” effects (Nix 1995, loc. 3637, loc. 3634), and occasionally triggering sensations “like a sudden chill” (Nix 2014b, loc. 112) or “a harsh slap across the face” (Nix 2003, p. 501). Sound is frequently absent in situations where it would normally be found: for instance, characters living and dead frequently scream and sob soundlessly as dire threats approach; and for magic-users and the unlucky alike, the journey beyond life takes them along nine stages of a river that is often, appropriately, as “[s]ilent as the grave” (Nix 2003, loc. 4525) while at the same time “silently raging” (Nix 1995, loc. 3326) and “swirling around and down in silent frenzy” (Nix 2021b, p. 318). As Ratail notes, “absence of sound thus becomes uncanny presence, ideal incarnation of the spectral fear of the characters” (Ratail 2021, p. 4), demonstrating Nix’s use of sonic textures to generate affect.

Even through this Gothic effect, however, the reader glimpses a return of high fantasy’s musical mythopoesis. The Old Kingdom texts’ chief antagonist, Orannis, exemplifies the proposition that silence is the opposite of life, through the uncanny evocation of an ideal form of anti-music: “soon the world will fall asleep”, it reveals to one of its minions, “and it will be my dream that all will dream, my song that will fill every ear” (Nix 2021b, loc. 6752). This song, however, is one of “terrible, absolute silence”: “all living things must fail, till silence rings me in eternal calm, across a sea of dust” (Nix 2003, p. 501). Thus, while the threat of sound is ever-present in the machinations of the bells and other uncanny presences, so too is the threat of silence by means of cosmic collapse. “Paradoxically”, Ratail observes, “the louder the gothic, the more present the silence” (Ratail 2021, p. 4), and this is particularly true when delivered with the weight of the high fantastic behind it.

One can even find an echo of the music of the spheres in the cosmic architecture surrounding the Old Kingdom. It becomes clear through these texts that each “country” (e.g. the Old Kingdom, Ancelstierre) is in fact an entirely separate world, with unique seasons, moons, and so on. Characters visit three of them, each separated from the others by apparently physical barriers, two named: the Wall and the Great Rift (creating another complex and uneasy duality, one of separateness and connectedness). It is easy to imagine that there are other worlds in this cosmos, nestled around each other like the series of celestial, hemispherical bells proposed by Plato et al. If so, their harmonious orbits have been misaligned, bringing them into unplanned contact, damaging each other in the process. The music emitted by these cracked bells is no longer one of ineffable consolation, but of complication and contradiction—an apt metaphor for the mixture of high fantasy and the Gothic so evident in these texts, and in contemporary literature.

5. Conclusions/Coda

Lucie Ratail observes that, while

the prototypical gothic soundscape may be seen to follow a general ‘recipe’, the most successful examples of the genre developed their own sound signature to acquire a specific tint, which provides an insight into individual appreciation of sounds and noises.

(Ratail 2021, p. 5)

The interplay of sound, music, and noise in the Old Kingdom texts has, by virtue of their critical and commercial success, and in light of the observations here, certainly earned Nix the right to claim a “specific tint”—although perhaps “timbre” might be a more suitable term when applied to such a strong aural signature. While musical instruments have been employed as magical weapons or plot devices in other stories, ancient and recent—the child-stealing pipes of Hamelin, for example, or the ‘Clamouring Hour’ bells of Frances Hardinge’s 2005 novel Fly By Night—Nix creates his own unique iterations by layering mythopoesis over existing and significant religious and cultural traditions of bellringing. His magical handbells can be wielded as instruments of the sublime as well as of horror, allowing the reader to glimpse in these texts both the consolation of high fantasy and the uncanny of the Gothic. While a detailed analysis of Nix’s lexicon and syntax in the service of these aims lies beyond the scope of this article, it is important to note Alice Mills and Catherine Olver’s separate beginnings in that area, and that this line of research has already generated insight into Nix’s delight in the entanglement of several other key dualities, such as human and nonhuman voices (Olver 2022) and naming systems that, unlike Tolkien, contain contradictory elements (e.g., Abhorsen/abhorrent) (Mills 2001, p. 18). These contradictory entanglements are ones Nix carefully maintains through descriptions of sound across all of these texts.

This analysis, thus, highlights the utility of sound, not just music, as a means of interrogating generic alignments and influences. Returning to Jack Zipes’s observation of the overlap between children’s fantasy and Gothic tropes (Zipes 2008, p. 1), and in light of ongoing debates regarding the relationship between the many different forms of the fantastic to each other, there is much to be uncovered by employing sonic analyses of high fantasy texts, not just in Nix’s Old Kingdom books or his wider opus, but across the genre as a whole. Scholarship of Tolkien’s work, for instance, contains detailed discussions of musical mythopoesis, alongside some ocularcentric analyses of Gothic tropes (e.g., the Nine Riders, the Mines of Moria, and Gollum in The Lord of the Rings) (TERRANOVA 2017), but little examination of sonic textures in service to the Gothic, such as the silent screams of the watchers of Cirith Ungol, the sinister creaking of trees in various forests, or foreboding drums in the deep. It is entirely possible that an aural examination of seminal high fantasy texts might, as with Nix’s work, reveal connections to the Gothic and terror fiction of a kind not generally acknowledged. It may also be that, as Ratail ascribes to Gothic literature, the “definitory instability” of the fantasy genre might find a similar explanation “in its multiplicity of sound signatures, exhibiting a conflict between universality and specificity” (Ratail 2021, p. 6). A more thorough investigation is beyond the scope of this paper, unfortunately.

To paraphrase and expand on Nicol Alter’s conclusion concerning ocular tropes (Alter 2013), then: sonic repertoires of both the Gothic and high fantasy are at work in Nix’s Old Kingdom novels. How these repertoires articulate against each other, and against other sensory repertoires, gives these narratives unique and lasting relevance in an increasingly crowded literary landscape and signal a way towards deeper understanding of the field as a whole.