Talk:Sir Harold and the Gnome King
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Reading about the Harold Shea series, I was struck by a connection that I have not seen remarked on anywhere [emphasis added]:
- The original series: ... L. Ron Hubbard's misuse of their hero in his novella The Case of the Friendly Corpse (1941). (De Camp would finally address the latter issue in "Sir Harold and the Gnome King".)
- The second series: The impulse for the continuation [i.e., creating a second series] appears to have been de Camp's desire to tie up the main loose end from the original series, in which Walter Bayard had been left stranded in the world of Irish myth, and to resolve the unaddressed complication introduced by Hubbard. Both of these goals were accomplished in "Sir Harold and the Gnome King" (1990).
- Sir Harold and the Gnome King (introduction): [One of the issues that de Camp addressed in the story] was a long-standing plot complication introduced by L. Ron Hubbard's "borrowing" of Shea for use in his novella The Case of the Friendly Corpse (1941), previously ignored by de Camp and Pratt.
- Sir Harold and the Gnome King (Plot summary): The Oz he [Shea] encounters is greatly changed from the land of which Baum had written, the enchantment that had kept its inhabitants ageless having been broken through a misuse of magic by a dabbler in spells named Dranol Drabbo some years prior.
It seems to me obvious that the character of Dranol Drabbo is intended as a Tuckerization of L. Ron Hubbard. (Although I read the story, it was years ago, and all of my information is based on the Wikipedia articles cited.) My reasons:
- The names are similar: "Dranol" is an anagram of "Ronald", Hubbard's middle name, and "Drabbo" spelled backwards is "Obbard", very close to "Hubbard" (but maybe -- this is a guess -- different enough to avoid a libel suit).
- The actions are parallel:
- In the real world, Hubbard used the Shea character improperly. In "Sir Harold and the Gnome King", Dranol Drabbo used magic improperly.
- Hubbard's story created complications in the Harold Shea universe. Drabbo's dabbling destroyed the immortality spell in the Oz universe.
However, the names are different enough so that this inference counts as original research for Wikipurposes ;-), so I am only putting this as a speculation (back) here on the talk page.
