Re-Telling the Primordial Myth

An Interview with A.J.R. Klopp about "The Toll of Fortune"

A few months ago, when I began my campaign of counter-spoliation, my friend John Carter introduced me to A.J.R. Klopp, the author of The Toll of Fortune. John had reviewed The Toll of Fortune on his own substack and offered it high praise, and thought I might enjoy interviewing A.J.R. Since I hadn’t yet read the book myself, I had to postpone the interview for a bit.

I’ve read the book now and, to paraphrase Shakespeare’s Mark Antony, “I come not to interview Klopp, but to praise him.”

A.J.R. Klopp’s The Toll of Fortune is one of the most remarkable debut novels I’ve read in years, and perhaps the most ambitious. Set on the Pontic-Caspian steppe around 3300 BC, it follows a hunter named Wolf through a world rendered with a combination of deep archaeological fidelity and high literary craftsmanship. The Yamnaya ride with hemp ropes rather than bridles, they wield stone axes with thin slivers of copper on their blade, and they encounter real groups from real history that we know only through recent breakthroughs in paleo-genomics and excavation. The opening chapters immediately carry the reader into the primal moral universe of our Proto-Indo-European ancestors, and the entire narrative is delivered with an epic prose style that marries the high cadence of Tolkien with a mythic vocabulary reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.

To describe The Toll of Fortune as an excellent work of historical fiction would be accurate, and yet it would also understate what Klopp is actually doing. The novel functions simultaneously as both a compelling narrative and an ethnographic legendarium of the Indo-European world. It’s a serious literary project rooted in the deep past of our own civilization, written for men who still want that past to matter. It’s a book that a specialist can find rewarding, and that a casual reader can find enjoyable; but a certain sort of reader, the sort Klopp is really speaking to… they will find it inspiring.

I certainly did. And so, not surprisingly, I decided that I would indeed interview Mr. Klopp. Without further ado, let’s get into it.

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1. The opening chapters of The Toll of Fortune revolve around the protagonist, Wolf, going on a hunt to kill dogs. To call this a bold move would be an understatement. There is a famous book on screenwriting called Save the Cat which instructs storytellers to begin their stories with the protagonist “saving the cat”. The idea is that you need to establish the merit of your protagonist early on; since everyone loves animals; the easiest way to establish a character as a virtuous protagonist is to show him saving an animal. He can then be a flawed, miserable lout in other respects, but we know he is our hero because he saved the cat.

But your protagonist starts the book by killing the dogs! This immediately told me two things. First, that A.J.R. Klopp does not give a shit about being optioned by Netflix. Second, that you are going to be telling a story grounded on a moral code that is entirely unlike contemporary morality. Would it be fair to say that you wanted to immerse the reader in, not just the world of the Indo-Europeans, but in their worldview?

That’s funny, I have that book, read a few pages and then dropped it for lack of interest. Maybe that says something.

Surely Netflix was not on my mind - though the book is written in a style that I think is easily adaptable for the screen. I won’t waste your readers’ time explaining why modern Hollywood is unsuited for the purpose of masculine literature, they already know. Yet you are certainly right that the moral code of my characters is very ancient; primal, really. The intent was, as you stated, to let the reader see the world from the POV of our most remote ancestors. The “undiscovered country” isn’t some far off shore (as it was in Tudor times) but the preternatural past when many of the most relevant cultural and civilizational preferences and inclinations were set in stone.

Now, the dogs. These aren’t just any dogs that are being killed in the first chapter, they’re sick. I’ll let the reader decide what they think is going on here, but the idea was to take something that is rather well-known today and look at it through the prehistorical lens. I do this throughout. Just about everything would seem like magic back then and the only satisfying explanations would have be divine. Yet the events aren’t fantastic either - a modern reader can grasp the materiality of what’s going on.

Dogs were sacred to the Proto-Indo-Europeans, however we do know they practiced dog sacrifice at a certain time of year. David Anthony has actually done some very detailed work on the subject, and later on in the novel you see what I think is a very archaeologically faithful reproduction of what happened, and possibly why.

2. Once I got past my shock at Wolf killing the dogs, I started to notice some other unusual things in the book. The writing style of The Toll of Fortune is utterly unlike almost anything being published today. It’s not the breezy first-person style of Zoomer young adult fantasy, nor is it the close third-person emotional narrative of GRRM’s grimdark fantasy, nor is it even the pulp style of the old or neo-pulp writers. If I had to compare it to anything, I would compare it to the high language of JRR Tolkien’s Return of the King and Ursula K LeGuin’s Wizard of Earthsea. It uses all of the stylistic tools of contemporary fiction, with point of view, scene and sequel, but it marries it with high, rich language. What motivated you to write in this style? Did you find it difficult?

I suppose it’s just the only style I know how to write in. It can be difficult to put the words on a page as I’m trying to be as concise as possible. I want the reader to imagine what it looks like because that’s what they’re gonna do anyway - I don’t generally like a lot of description. I was also motivated a lot by Cormac McCarthy. I find his style is almost taciturn, but he hovers over certain details. When I write, not only does every element of the narrative have to be committed to the scene/chapter/story’s teleology, but every descriptive word or bit of dialogue as well. You have to play 5D chess with yourself to get it right.

3. I have an exceptionally large vocabulary and reading grade and even so, I had to stop at several points throughout the book, sometimes to look up an obscure word, and sometimes to just admire the breadth of your vocabulary. You’ve got sentences like “He saw a great battle ensue, between the neanic orogeny and the coming of the sea” and “A covenant only neglect can break: Synallagmatic cenotaph toppled by amnesiac wake.” It would be easy to dismiss it as merely Lovecraftian purple prose, but over time I realized you were systematically combining archaic, almost hieratic vocabulary (”sigil” “cenotaph” aerie”) with extremely precise modern jargon drawn from evolutionary biology (”bradytelic”), zoology (”annelid”, “tunicate”), mineralogy (”spessartine”), jurisprudence (”synallagmatic”), sociology (”anomie”), astronomy (”sideral”) and more. There’s no way that was coincidental. So my question for you is “why”? I have two theories.

My first theory is that you are implicitly acknowledging that science is the language of our modern myth, and myth was the language of ancient science (so as to speak) and so by wedding scientific terms to mythic terms, you are giving each the rightful gravitas of the other. Science is magic is science.

My second theory is that it’s a nod to the overwhelming complexity of Proto-Indo-European, which as a language that seems to emerge from nowhere with virtually impossible complexity of grammar, inflection, and vocabulary; the heroes speak like super-geniuses because the PIE speakers must have been just that, so as to speak.

Look, for some readers the vocabulary might be a turn-off, but as someone who’s read plenty that I didn’t understand it’s safe to move along as you’ll still understand what’s happening. Btw most of the hapaxes you mention are used only in the poems, where I feel free to rain my readers with lexicon. Poems, to me, are like mysteries to solve - I don’t like to make them too easy. In most other cases I use a lot of rare words because they’re both the most precise and concise words to use. In a couple cases I made words up for the same reason and for poesy.

I like your theories. I’m not sure that was my intent but I like your interpretation. I have a very interdisciplinary background ranging from astrophysics to law and sometimes I grasp for the right word or concept and it only exists in disparate fields of study. It asks a lot of the reader, but I think nowadays a lot of readers appreciate the exposure. I’m never afraid to say, “I don’t know what that means”, so I hope readers will feel the same and if they care too, they can look up the meanings.

I also like to use rare words because we have so many in English and they deserve their day in the sun. A lot of words are never used anymore because they describe things that the modern man has little connection to. We talk about the Inuit having a million words for snow, but English is like that for most objects. We’ve lost connection to a lot of natural words, like the many words we have for different types of “valleys”. I feel it’s incumbent to use them.

I also have a secret dictionary of rare and complex and interesting words. Maybe one day I’ll publish it.

4. One of the quotes above is from a poem in the book called “Typhon”. I usually am not a fan of poetry in fiction, as most authors are not good poets and, well, most poetry today is not actually poetry as I use that word. But you wrote actual poetry. You’ve meter that seems to reconstruct PIE poetic forms. It’s got dactylic and anapestic lines, it’s got these heavy four-footed cadences which feel like the Greek lyrical style. Tell me a bit about what went into the poetry. Why did you include it? What were the inspirations?

Avoiding purple prose isn’t always easy, and poetry is hard to judge. The poems are puzzles, the meaning of which can be solved. That makes them rather mechanical, but the stylistic embellishments help to bring it back to art. I included poems partly to reintroduce the genre - you don’t see a lot of it anymore - but also to instill the connection with spoken meter. The Indo-Europeans were incredible storytellers. Many of their stories are still with us, many more have multiplied and evolved. To them storytelling was a way to achieve immortality. If glory and fame were the bulwarks against oblivion (as Beowulf states) then you need storytellers to repeat it. However they were exclusively oral. Indo-European languages weren’t written down for the first 2000 years. Thus I used the poems to emphasize the aural aspect of the words. I also do this a little in the text. I love alliteration. It’s an homage to the original style in which these tales were told.

5. The Typhon poem ends with the line “ Only then the phoenix grasps sidereal ophiogeny.” This is Calvert Watkin’s reconstructed PIE dragon-slayer formula. HERO grasps SERPENT. The phoenix grasping the cosmic serpent is Indra killing Vrta, Zeus defeating Typhon, Thor meeting Jormungandr. If you don’t have the vocabulary, if you don’t read the poem, and if you don’t know the reference, this all is just fluff. But it’s not fluff at all! And that’s literally one line at the end of one poem packed with meaning. You do this throughout the book. It feels like to really appreciate all the references you’d need to have done PhD level studies in Bruce Lincoln, Georges Dumézil, Kim McCone, M.L. West, Marija Gimbutas, David Anthony, J.P. Mallory. What’s your personal background? How did you arrive at such a deep understanding of Indo-European culture?

Unironically, those are all books I relied heavily... my library is pretty big at this point! All of those references are correct. The word “ophiogeny” is invented, I’ll admit, but refers to the genesis of serpents among the stars (sidereal). The preceding words in the poem describe the conditions precedent for the hero to vanquish the serpent, which is the personification of Chaos.

My background is varied. I studied physics as an undergrad and then did a Masters in Astronomy. Fascinating stuff but low-stakes. I moved on to law and got two law degrees, practicing as a corporate attorney. The study of law was interesting more as a study of how formalisms are used to mediate the infinite variety of human behavior. Practicing law was a wake up call as well. As dreadful as corporate law was, I came to understand a lot about how power works. Ultimately it was too low-stimulus for me (my inner steppe cattle-rustler?) and recredentialed myself with a graduate degree in quantitative finance. I then worked as a trader, including on the infamous bond desk at BlackRock. That’s where I really saw how the world works. Throughout this time I’d always consumed a lot of history and was especially fascinated by the connections that certain authors made between anthropological societies and modern ones, especially in how they fall. Joseph Tainter, Peter Turchin, etc, even popular writers like Jared Diamond and Francis Fukuyama made similar connections. But it was only after David Reich’s team put paleogenomics on a sound footing that I started understanding the connections. That lead me to David Anthony (whose book predates Reich’s by a decade and is still mostly vindicated) and then I couldn’t stop.

The Indo-European mindset is unlike any other before it (or since). It doesn’t seek harmony through universal “State” control like Sinnic or Semitic cultures. It glorifies taking risks. It doesn’t view the serpent as evil, though most of its interactions end badly for man. It seeks Chaos as an opportunity creator and it reifies those things that enable man to take advantage.

6. At the end of the book you actually took the time to give the reader an explanation of what ancient culture every group in the book actually represented. For instance, the Wolf Valley People are the Proto-Vucedol, the Valley People are the descendants of the Varna, the Hill People are remnants of Western Hunter-Gatherers. What's interesting is that these are groups that are only known to us because of recent advances in both archeology and genetics. You've essentially synthesized the findings of these disparate fields into an ethnography or legendarium of the world of the Indo-Europeans 6000 years ago. To what extent would you say you've hewn to the real facts? How much is creative liberty?

I’ve almost entirely stayed true to the facts, especially in the look and feel. The Yamnaya (the archaeological culture to which my characters belong) rode horses but most accoutrements of riding (the saddle, stirrups, spurs, bit, bridle, etc) were invented MUCH later. So instead you read of them riding with a blanket and a hemp rope to steer. Likewise for metal objects which were still relatively rare on the steppes in 3300 BC. When you think of an axe you think of some giant metal semi circle. For them it was an inch worth of soft copper tied to a stick. But it was still a giant leap technologically.

Where I do take liberties I try to make it plausible. Wolf attempts to have a prophesied weapon forged. He uses a gift of meteoric Iron-Nickel which is then hot-forged into steel (along with some other techniques). I’m pushing the envelope here but even the ancient Egyptians knew of meteoric iron and the “other” techniques I describe were still possible then. I’m asking the reader to suspend a little disbelief and imagine there was sacred knowledge whereby those techniques were used. Metallurgy was discovered in Europe in the mid 6th millennium BC by hunter-gatherers, so it’s not impossible that 2000 years of trial and error could have generated an immense canon of practical knowledge (lost in their aftermath).

The upcoming questions contains informatoin about the book’s plot.
Readers who wish to avoid spoilers should skip ahead until the next pull quote.

7. The central character of The Toll of Fortune is Wolf, the hunter. It therefore caught me completely off guard when I realized that the hero of the story is not Wolf, it's Wolf's son, Bear. And in Bear, you constructed the PIE ur-hero. He is the hero from whom all of the descendant dragon-slayers branch. It's actually an origin story for the entire Indo-European myth cycle. The clearest parallel is with Beowulf, that was the one that I first latched onto. Beowulf is "bee wolf," a kenning for BEAR, and halfway through the book you feature a hall invasion at night, when Bear tears the arm off a titan/neanderthal. It mirrors Grendel at Herot almost point for point. The great burial mound at the end is Beowulf's barrow, the PIE kurgan. But he's not just Beowulf. He's Bodvar Bjarki., "Little Bear" from Hrolf's Saga. He's Arthur (from the Welsh word for bear, arthi), he's Arcas (from the Greek arktos, bear), the son of Callisto who becomes the Ursa Major constellation and gives his name to Arcadia ("bear-land"). Then when you get to the climactic scene when Bear uses the Hammer of Heaven to smash the temple of Typhon, you realize he is also Thor with Mjolnir, he's Indra destroying the serpent strongholds, he's Zeus vs Typhon, he's Heracles cleansing shrines and smashing monsters. This is again an instance where I feel like I only saw the tip of the iceberg of the layers of referential depth you included.

Yes, the parallel with Beowulf (Bear-Wolf) is totally intentional... foundational really. In fact, when they get to the longhouse, their nominal leader is actually named Famous-Spear, which of course is “Hrothgar”. The bear and the wolf are very different creatures in terms of behavior (let alone the anthropomorphization of that behavior). There are many more such “easter eggs” for the specialist in IE mythology.

One thing I like to do is to find relevant passages of myths where bizarre references are made and visualize how they might be a reference to something real. For example, in some Indian/Vedic texts Indra is helped by a giant with one hundred hands - a rather fantastical creature! In the book I make this real by the enlistment of (about) 50 allies who perform one of the critical tasks in killing the enemy. It’s a prosaic reduction, sure, but it also subtly tells the reader that these myths are partly based on real events.

8. Bear's story arc recounts the chaoskampf from the point of view of a (semi)historical warrior with motifs drawn from myth. But Wolf's story arc is also a chaoskampf of sorts, except that instead of hero vs dragon, or god vs titan, the struggle is man vs woman, masculine vs feminine, empyrean vs chthonic. He confronts the literal longhouse of the Broad-Eved Hall, and an incarnation of the sacred female in the form of the Maven. There's a lot going on in the relationship between Wolf and the Maven and in the end you get the sense that the Maven is not so much evil as...chaotic, out of control. Wolf seems to feel some tenderness for her even in death. It felt to me that in writing these sections of the book, more than any other, that there was also an undercurrent of commentary on contemporary culture. Are American men today living in the Broad-Eave Hall? How are we to deal with the Maven today?

While the Chaoskampf (with the prototypical HERO kills Serpent arc) is the main event the longhouse events are a definite reference to contemporary culture. This was also very intentional. It’s based on fact as well. Again, it’s fiction so I’m using some creative license that draws parallels with today. You see a lot of those parallels in the longhouse culture of the book, the emasculation (metaphorical AND physical) of men, the infantilization of women, the co-opting of authority with feminized discourse, etc. The Neolithic farmers were actually patriarchal, just a lot less so than our IE progenitors, so I had no qualms presenting their culture in the way I did.

When Wolf kills the Maven some readers told me they wanted it to be more brutal - to have their revenge fantasies realized. That would be gratifying but as an author you have to be careful not to overdo it. Some gratification is fine, but I wanted the Maven to be more complex and have different levels of interpretation without resorting to the tired and ultimately unsatisfying tropes of post-modernity. She IS evil and there’s no deconstructing that, which is why I wasn’t interested in going into her backstory more than a few hints. She also wears a lot of make-up and if you parse the language you’ll see what she uses, all actual forms of make-up from the period. Most were intensely toxic composed of mercury, arsenic and lead. That’s not to say we can explain away her behavior with “science” but it does add another layer (pardon the pun) to her character. She presents herself in what would be a surreal facade for that time; she gains influence and social power as a result; the means of that presentation literally drives her mad. Note that I also save some of the most gratifying revenge for the longhouse’s kin-lord. Don’t blame the scorpion (the Maven) for behaving thus, but the kin-lord should have known better and deserves what he gets. I see a definite parallel here.

We most certainly live in a longhouse today. Civilization has been institutionally feminized. It has usurped almost all aspects of elite society with smothering safetyism and the suicidal embrace of inclusivity. These have become ends unto themselves partly because the purveyors of this hypocrisy have too much skin in the game. It’s also because it’s an innate “meta-cultural” force, started in ancient Mesopotamia (Sumer) with the modern Panopticon State as it’s apotheosis: Today the longhouse, tomorrow a giant Pitesti Prison. To deal with this we need to rearm and reassert culture. Hollywood is going bankrupt at too slow a rate for us to wait. That’s why we need to re-embrace and push hard on masculine stories. We have to win the culture war first. To do that we need to make masculine stories bestsellers again, and the authors thereof need to reinvest those fortunes back into the cause.

9. The most popular article I ever wrote on Tree of Woe is called When Orcs Were Real, and it offers up a controversial theory that the ancient war between Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals is the biological-historical basis for our racial myths of ogres, goblins, trolls, titans, and so on. I was therefore very gratified that the primary antagonists in The Toll of Fortune were titans that seemed to be based on Neanderthals in an actual biological sense. At the same time, you layered in references to the Nephilim, to long hibernations during the Ice Age, to mythic powers. To what extent do you think it's possible that the Indo-Europeans might have encountered these ancient hominids? Michael Crichton certainly thought it was plausible when he wrote Eaters of the Dead.

That was a fantastic article. This touches upon an area where I use some creative liberty. The Neanderthals are thought to have died out by 28,000 BC at the latest, making their presence in my novel rather anachronous. On the other hand I asked, “what if some survived here and there? Where would that be and what would they be like?” The answer is that they’d have to stick to the high mountains and glaciers and there’d be a lot of inbreeding (with the odd kidnapping of women/children). Then I added in the idea that they might mimic the bear and learn to hibernate. Purely fictional, but hardly at the edge of science fiction. This brings in an additional analogy to ursine theme as well. Note that their chief, “Gagegh” is a play on “Gog” and “Magog”.

I think that a lot of our stories of monsters began from such folk memory, though I think it’s more likely that they emanate from Neolithic farmers encountering hunter-gatherers. Nevertheless it’s entirely possible that folk memories could be older or that the Neolithic invention of monsters simply rode the coattails of earlier hunter-gatherer folk-memories of hominid encounters.

The spoilers end here and you can safely read the rest of the interview.

10. Let's talk a little bit about the illustrations in the novel. There's 10 illustrations, each a black-and-white piece. They're actually very reminiscent of the fantasy art style I used in my own Adventurer Conqueror King System books. It's a great style with a long lineage. What I wanted to ask you about is what motivated your choice of the illustrations. Some of them are obviously to help the reader understand scenes in the book - the Broad-Eave Hall illustration and the Hammer of Heaven, for instance. But why the Venus of the Cucuteni? Why the Cernavoda Thinker or the Sphinx of Banat?

I love illustration and found many great artists for the book. The cover obviously shows the serpent but embedded in his skin are depictions of myths from different IE cultures. In his mouth you see a star. That’s Sirius, the dog-star and he’s just below Orion, the hunter. No coincidences there.

The chapter illustrations were special choices. The Venus of the Cucuteni represents the prevalence of divine female figurines in Neolithic farming cultures of eastern Europe. Gimbutas obviously covered this, but they are everywhere in the societies of ‘Old Europe’. This ‘Venus’ came from the same region as my novel and roughly the same time. Unlike the Venuses of Catalhoyuk it’s not morbidly obese or obscene looking, but rather shapely and thus fits better with the idea of the seductive powers of the serpent to sow chaos, but also that Chaos is not a purely oppressive force. The Sphinx was actually used as a setting in the book. The Cernavoda thinkers appear at the end. I don’t really know what they mean or what they meant to the Cernavoda people 5000 years ago. However there is something prophetically meditative about them, almost signaling that the European culture that would emerge over the next millennia would use the mind to do great things, after all the IE warrior wasn’t solely successful on account of his strength but also his cunning.

11. This is just the first book in a series called The Thirteen Fathers. Can you tell us a bit about the series? What's the next book and when is it coming?

Yes, this is true. In fact I sort of give away how ambitious the series will be in the name. One thing that’s confused readers is that I state on the title page that it’s “Book III”. Best to ignore that. It is the FIRST book I have written and published. I called it “Book III” to make room for sequels but it’s caused confusion. Each book will address a foundational Indo-European myth. The next book will be a direct sequel but it will explore very different themes. While this book dealt with mankind’s struggle against Chaos, the sequel deals with how the Indo-Europeans addressed the concept legitimate political authority. It will be based on the myth of Prometheus and his lesser known brother Epimetheus. I’ve actually begun writing it now! Hopefully it will be published early next year.

Hopefully so! Thus ended my time with Mr. Klopp and The Toll of Fortune. I hope this is just the beginning of your time with it. As evidence of how singular a work it is, I present to you Amazon’s rather amusing list of “similar books.” I don’t know that I have ever encountered a book that could encompass the controversial right-wing novel The Camp of Saints, the based children’s book Fables for Young Wolves, the highly lauded historical treatise The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, and the beloved science-fiction masterpiece Shadow & Claw as its comparables.

I’m grateful to Mr. Klopp for taking the time to answer my rather intense questions, and grateful to Mr. Carter for kindly introducing us.