The Necromancer: Background

“‘The Necromancer’ is subtitled ‘A Short Story by Rush.’ The title was from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, in which the Necromancer, a wizard who either summons the dead or reduces the living into specter form, is confronted by three travelers, Sam, Frodo, and Gollum. In the old tales of quests, the travelers were always restless and with a goal. So were Rush, always on tour.”—Robert Telleria, Merely Players

“A necromancer is one who practices necromancy, a type of divination involving the summoning of Operative Spirits to discern information about the future. ‘The Necromancer’ starts with heavy influence from J.R.R. Tolkien‘s literary mythology. The Necromancer was a pseudonym used by Tolkien in The Hobbit for the character Sauron. The song departs from the story of the book as Part III, ‘Return of the Prince,’ sees the return of By-Tor from Fly by Night, this time as a hero and not a villain. ‘Return of the Prince’ was also released as a single in some countries. Also in the introductory prologue to the song, the “three travelers, men of Willowdale” is a reference to the band itself, an allusion to the band’s home in the suburb of Willowdale in Toronto, Ontario. On the inside gatefold of the album, just below the lyrics to ‘The Necromancer,’ the Latin phrase Terminat hora diem; terminat auctor opus appears. This translates (loosely) to: ‘[as] The hour ends the day; the author ends his work.'”—Caress of Steel on Wikipedia

Among some of the references in the piece, “fording a river” was used by ancients in stories [a literary device] to show a decisive stage in a journey. “O’er” is an old Gaelic term. Another “bow’ reference, as in “Bastille Day,” with the travelers becoming specters and locked in dungeons. The labyrinth classically represented the quest to find the center (the start, the sprit, the center of time and space in the microcosm of a maze). Perhaps By-Tor is not evil here and battles for freedom because of his defeat in Fly By Night by the Snowdog?”—Robert Telleria, Merely Players

The strange introductory vocal in the song “was created by treating Neil’s voice with a digital delay unit and slowing the recording speed. [The song] expands on the tentative art rock experiments of Fly By Night. A whole bevy of effects are employed to heighten the sonic experience.”—Bill Banasiewicz, Rush Visions

In The Necromancer, Rush made a “selective, unspecific, and fanciful” reconstruction of medieval times. Such medievalist fantasy “flatter a middle-class sensibility. . . . The archetypal quest corresponds to the bourgeois notion of starting an enterprise or ‘following one’s dreams,’ and the successful fulfillment of the quest (after some deferral of gratification) leads directly to upward mobility or social elevation.”—
Christopher McDonald, Rush, Rock Music, and the Middle Class

Following “nostalgic popster” “Lakeside Park,” the Caress of Steel album “wings out, offering 12 and a half minutes of . . . a creepy, quite heavy, often jarring prog metal opus.”—Martin Popoff, Contents Under Pressure

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