Just the thing for a dull Monday, a new two and a half hour LibriVox recording by Phil Chenevert for Witch of the Demon Seas by Poul Anderson. It was the only Planet Stories tale he didn’t use his own name for, possibly because he also had another tale in the same January 1951 issue.

There’s also an existing paid audiobook, which has this enticing blurb…

an entertaining romp with pirates, witches, wizards and bizarre sea aliens [and] an intriguing brand of “magic” [which] eschews the typical supernatural underpinnings in favor of the more scientific.

The journal Amra (February 1977) observed…

Witch of the Demon Seas (January ’51); a damn good heroic fantasy, beautifully and accurately illustrated by Vestal.

A recent account of a reading of “Witch” by Mporcius has way too much plot-spoiling summary to risk linking, but he usefully observes…

Anderson’s story totally lives up to the sex and violence reputation of Planet Stories … Even though its full of dragons, sea serpents, witches and swordsmen, this is a science fiction story, not a fantasy. What the characters seek is not a pile of treasure, but knowledge.

It all sounds quite positive to a Conan fan. The main character is even called Corun. But there’s more. Anderson had similar Planet Stories tales in 1951, “The Virgin of Valkarion” and “Swordsman of Lost Terra”. “Swordsman” is also available in a 2021 Librivox audiobook — though with a different reader than “Witch”, and you may want to tweak the AIMP player’s pitch settings to get a deeper voice.

These three pulp tales obviously gave the author a taste for the approach, and they were followed in 1954 by what is said to be the very superior dark fantasy novel The Broken Sword. This apparently drew heavily on much the same sources as Tolkien, resulting in a ‘Norse Vikings vs. Elves’ situation that was actually slightly pre-Tolkien and all the more interesting for it. Dark World notes that in the 1970s Anderson returned to do more writing for the Broken Sword world, following a successful 1971 re-issue of his by-then-forgotten novel. Of this original novel Dark Worlds observed…

perhaps the finest American heroic fantasy, with good characterizations, excellent surface detail, good plotting, and an admirable recreation of the mood of the Old Norse literature.

A note on Asimov’s Foundation series in the BBC audio of 1973. Available on Archive.org, which some may be downloading about now in order to complete the story as the author intended, now the ongoing TV series is getting such poor reviews. The BBC’s ‘Radiophonic’ electronic music was found deafeningly loud by many, compared to the series dialogue.

I’ve found a more suitable way of listening to it, on headphones. Simply get the free AIMP Player, and then use its “Headphones” preset. Presumably this emulates more closely a typical 1970s kitchen-radio speaker, as in the original audio broadcast. The preset dampens the sharps of the music enough (the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop, at their most future-dissonant) to make it quite listenable. Just tweak the graphic equaliser settings.