Hadon of Ancient Opar
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| Hadon of Ancient Opar | |
 Cover illustration of Hadon of Ancient Opar |
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| Author | Philip José Farmer |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Series | Opar series |
| Genre(s) | Adventure novel |
| Publisher | DAW Books |
| Publication date | 1974 |
| Media type | Print (Paperback) |
| Followed by | Flight to Opar |
Hadon of Ancient Opar is a 1974 fantasy novel by Philip José Farmer, first published in paperback by DAW Books. It and its sequel, Flight to Opar, both purport to fill in some of the ancient prehistory of the lost city of Opar, created by Edgar Rice Burroughs as a setting for his Tarzan series.
[edit] Plot
The novel deals with the expedition of Hadon, a young Oparian warrior, to the Outer Wilds and as far as the mysterious Outer Sea, which would one day be called the Mediterranean, with the strange woman which he meets and brings with him, and with the cataclysmic civil war which breaks out on his return and which he partly (and completely unintentionally) helps touch off.
The ancient society of which Opar is a part is a matriarchy (a reasonable inference from the culture of the later-day Opar encountered by Tarzan). A delicate balance between the genders is maintained, symbolized by the co-rule of the High Priestess and the King (whose main authority is command of the army) - which corresponds to some theories of sociologists and historians on the way actual matriarchal societies may have worked. The same scheme is repeated on a smaller scale on the local level, where towns are co-governed by a local Priestess and the commander of the local garrison.
The current King tries to subvert this immemorial system and establish exclusive male power, which incidentally would force an incestuous relationship upon the current High Priestess, who happens to be his daughter. The "foreign witch" that Hadon brings with him and with whom he falls in love is used as a pawn in the King's power game; the xenophobic suspicions aroused about her are used in an attempt to undermine the position of women in general.
Hadon and his male and female friends rally to the High Priestess' banner against the King's evil schemes. The attitudes of Hadon and his fellow warriors are somewhat reminiscent of those of warriors in the service of the matriarchal realm Estcarp in Andre Norton's Witch World series.
[edit] Setting
Opar is the first and most frequently re-visited of the many lost cities and cultures which Tarzan discovers in Africa. Burroughs may have taken the name from the Biblical reference to Ophir, whence King Solomon supposedly received a cargo of "gold, silver, sandalwood, precious stones, ivory, apes and peacocks" every three years, via the Red Sea, which was presumably somewhere in Africa, but of which hardly anything else is known.
As portrayed by Burroughs, Opar is ruled by the high priestess La, with whom Tarzan develops a prolonged love/hate relationship. The city itself is a decayed remnant of ancient greatness; it is suggested, though not conclusively, that it is a cut-off colony of Atlantis.
Farmer seizes on Burroughs' ambiguity over the issue to recast Opar as a member city of an otherwise unknown local civilization that flourished in central Africa during the last Ice Age. It was supposedly based on a pair of now vanished inland seas connected by a narrow strait, with a surface roughly equivalent to the Mediterranean. The two seas facilitated the appearance of a mercantile culture, technologically similar to Ancient Greece, while the rest of the world was still deep in the Stone Age.
Farmer shows this culture at or near the peak of its ancient glory, more than 10,000 years ago. It comprises numerous thriving (and sometimes warring) city states and empires, one of which is Opar. Opar is, in fact, far from the most important of these cities. The Opar described in the Tarzan novels is depicted as a "former colony of Atlantis" and this is adhered to by Farmer, though "Atlantis" in this context — the capital of the empire of which Opar is a province — is located on an island in the African inland sea, not in the Atlantic Ocean.
Eventually, subsequent to the period of his story, the two seas drain off into the Atlantic and the culture dependent on them decays and disappears, leaving only the remnant of Opar forgotten in the jungles where Tarzan will discover it. The seas' modern remnants are represented to be the much-shrunken Lake Chad and the Congo River basin. In effect, Farmer turns the Atlantis myth upside down - Atlantis, in this version, did not perish by being engulfed under the waves, but by the sea draining away and leaving it "high and dry".
While originally derived from the Tarzan series, the world created by Farmer is given its own independent literary existence, with the sociological and cultural aspects worked out in meticulous detail, and a long historical annex added at the end, as in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.
