The return of the Tolkien-derived series The Rings of Power is days away. Winter Lost is the new Patricia Briggs novel that might satisfy the cravings of those who like their Dungeons and Dragons as literature, not as larping or gaming. It’s the 14th in Briggs’ continuing best-selling occult fantasy mystery series featuring Mercy Thompson, her shapeshifting, half Native-American auto mechanic, a butch but petite girl who was raised by werewolves and has now married a handsome fellow who’s also the Alpha of a werewolf pack.
Thompson, over the series of the 14 novels in which she appears, is a kind of Buffy, a nice young girl who’s always underestimated until she kills the monster that follows her into the alley. She’s also a take on Wonder Woman, though her absentee father isn’t Zeus, but Coyote, the Native-American Trickster deity. She’s akin to the character Suki Stackhouse (shapeshifting mechanic, telepathic waitress), created by Briggs’ writer friend Charlaine Harris in the “Dead” books from which was derived HBO’s True Blood series.
But in this recent book and many of the previous 13, Briggs also has a lot in common not just with her sister writers (Harris, and Kim Harrison) who have spunky supernatural heroines, but also Tolkien. Briggs’ education is a little like Tolkien’s, in that she studied German and European history, albeit at a state university in the Rockies, not Oxford. Her recurring characters include German-speaking (medieval German speaking) fae from European fairy tales, though she adds a new supernatural, or a supe from a new culture, with every book. In one book a Golem appears, in another a volcano god from the Canary Islands. This time around it’s Nordic Frost Giants (Jotunn), relocated to the mountains of the Pacific northwest (like her fae they immigrated along with the European settlers who once feared or worshiped them).
Like Tolkien, Briggs uses magical artifacts to move her plots along. Tolkien had “the precious” and the rings of power; Briggs has a variety of artifacts, everything short of Plato’s Ring of Gyges and Aladdin’s lamp (though I won’t be surprised to eventually see Mercy Thompson deal with them). Also like Tolkien’s hobbits, dwarves, elves and men who compose the Fellowship of the Ring, Mercy Thompson is always in multicultural political negotiations, trying to get the humans, the fae, the vampires, the werewolves and whatever else, to come to agreeable terms.
The current story involves a magical lyre or harp stolen from a Frost Giant, which leads him to obliterate the Pacific Northwest with a massive winter storm until the instrument is returned. Eventually one of the suspects is his own fae/Frost Giant canine, Gymir. Simultaneously a wedding is scheduled at a lodge and the groom can’t make it through the storm. A wedding that’s part of a fae spell that must be renewed every 144 years to keep the Jotunn from overrunning the world and remaking it in their own frosty image.
Winter Lost shows a heavy Tolkien influence, conscious or unconscious, particularly the two Tolkien satirical novellas, now published together, Smith of Wooten Manor and Farmer Giles of Ham. It’s funny that in Norse mythology Frost Giant Gymir is “the protector” but doesn’t appear in canine form. But Briggs makes him a magical canine who’s been bespelled by the Jotunn into human form as a kind of simpleton, only until the 144-year wedding spell is recast. In the Tolkien tale “Farmer Giles,” Giles’ talking dog, Garm, helps him ward off a dragon (who was awakened by a Giant from the northern mountains), along with a magical artifact, a sentient dragon-slaying sword, Tailbiter. Mercy Thompson is beloved by a reappearing (seven of the 14 books) sentient fae artifact, which first appears as a walking stick, created by Lugh, a long-dead Lord of the Fae, but which transmutes when needed into a sword, including in Winter Lost. Tolkien’s Smith of Wootton Manor involves the King and Queen of the fairies inserting a small artifact into a small English village’s celebration that occurs every 24 years, so as to grant luck and success to humans they wish to reward.
For those many critics of the streaming Rings of Power, you could always see if Patricia Briggs’ Mercy Thompson is more palatable. But that won’t work if your criticism is that the series has elven queen Galadriel as a female warrior.