Castle Tzingal: A Poem

by Fred Chappell

With this poem, Fred Chappell takes his readers far from the southern landscape and familiar passions of his acclaimed Midquest tetralogy. He tells instead of a forbidding medieval castle ruled by a mad king and peopled by bitter, scheming grotesques and melancholy weaklings who cower at the sound of the sweet, sad voice of truth that haunts their nights.

Castle Tzingal is a fairy tale without moral or happy ending, a tale in which lies and self-deceptions take the place of ogres and in which moral corruption is the dragon to be slain. In a series of highly formal dramatic monologues, Chappell presents the corrupt longings and fears of the court’s manipulative astrologer, its forlorn queen, a pensioned admiral, a seductive page, and the homunculus―born of chemicals and fire―who spies on them

What things I might say if I so inclined!
The astrologer’s passion for a comely page
Is news; Queen Frynna has no peace of mind
Since a nimble harpist sojourned here
Last twelvemonth; there’s a wealthy vein of silver
Runs beneath our Castle Tzingal; the magpie
Singing in the courtyard wicker cage
Is a transformed enemy sorcerer.
This kind if information finds its flowering
In time; all knowledge becomes of use,
And when it does I bear it to the King.

Ruling over this monstrous court is King Tzingal himself―self-proclaimed “great lord of toads”―whose only power is hatred and whose reign can only be ended when his dismal kingdom is finally overrun by truth, by poetry.

Set in a mythical kingdom in a mythical age, Castle Tzingal is a political fairy tale that speaks with the vivid, sometimes harsh truth and knowledge of our most fevered nightmares.

Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Fred Davis Chappell retired after 40 years as an English professor at University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He was the Poet Laureate of North Carolina from 1997-2002. He attended Duke University.

His 1968 novel Dagon, which was named the Best Foreign Book of the Year by the Academie Française, is a recasting of a Cthulhu Mythos horror story as a psychologically realistic Southern Gothic.

His literary awards include the Prix de Meilleur des Livres Etrangers, the Bollingen Prize, and the T. S. Eliot Prize.

Reviews

[Dan Clore · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fred Chappell is a mainstream literary writer who occasionally creates genre work of high quality as well, such as his Lovecraftian novel Dagon. Castle Tzingal: A Poem is a full-length work of horror / weird fantasy verse much in the manner of Clark Ashton Smith. It gives a series of dramatic monologues by various characters in the titular castle--a homunculus, an astrologer/wizard, the insane king (who dubs himself "lord of toads" and "load of turds"), the disembodied voice of a beheaded poet, etc. The style is archaic, and the free verse cadenced in a manner that often approximates iambic pentameter, and rhyme occasionally appears as well. While it is not a play in form, it is reminiscent of Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedy and later imitations like Beddoes' Death's Jest-Book, as well as to modern weird fantasy poets such as Clark Ashton Smith and Donald Sidney-Fryer, to whose fans it should appeal.

This Castle Tzingal and its surly principate
Is not well, Cousin; I shall never come
To love of it. Some dark infection
Shadows all its goings, and a grim
Pustule of rank humor mottles its complexion;
It is a ground of nettle, nightshade, and toadwort.

[Milford Public Library Library · Rating 4 out of 5]

Castle Tzingal is populated by a diverse array of characters: a mad king, a love-lorn queen, an astrologer, an admiral, the disembodied (and preserved) head of a minstrel, and a homunculus.

Written as a series of monologues & dialogues, regional author Chappell leaves behind North Carolina and turns his poetic talents towards fantasy with this interesting collection of verse, which could easily be adapted to the stage as a short play.