Meet Anselm, the Teacher at the Forge

Lyra Vale's old teacher. Keeper of the Forge of Souls. The novel's quietest character and, in working terms, its most useful one.

Anselm enters the novel in the second chapter, in the Forge of Souls, and he leaves the novel briefly several times only to return whenever Lyra has run out of what she can do alone. He looks, the narrator says without irony, like a Welsh shepherd who has wandered out of the wrong century. His hair is white. His hands have been broken — once at the knuckles, once across the back — and have not quite healed. His eyes are the colour of weather just before it changes.

What he teaches

Anselm is not a great speech-maker. He teaches by showing. In the Forge of Souls he shows Lyra the three named Hollow Travelers in a basin of what looks like water and is not. He does not lecture about the order; he lets the basin do the lecturing. He nods her into the gallery of half-formed beings standing in the arches, and lets them lift their heads to measure whether her shape might fit them, one day. The teaching is the room. The room is the curriculum.

This is, in our reading, the closest the novel comes to naming what Ethereal Pages thinks teaching actually is. Not the explanation. The patient showing of the room.

The teaching is the room. The room is the curriculum. The student is the one who has been brought patiently into it.

What he carries

Very little. A single small bag. The robe he has worn for an indefensible amount of time. A piece of bell-metal in his pocket, the same colour as the Seventh Bell. He does not need much. He has been keeping the Forge of Souls for longer than the current Council can quite reconstruct.

What he is afraid of

The novel is honest about this. Anselm has been afraid that Lyra would refuse the descent. That she would, when the moment came, decide the Council's request was too much. He does not push her. He never has. He simply waits, in the Forge, with his hands behind his back, while she circles the basin and tries to find the courage that he already knows she has.

When she walks back out of the Forge in the last third of the book — carrying the named names of the three Hollow Travelers in the small careful voice she has been growing all her life — Anselm is not surprised. He has been the kind of teacher who does not get to be surprised. He has been waiting for this version of his student since she was nine.

What he is, in the lineage

He is the figure the novel wrote for every reader who has ever been taught patiently by someone older than them — in a kitchen, in a workshop, in a small careful corner of a teacher's office, in a stone gallery at the edge of the world — and has only later understood what the teaching was. Anselm does not, by the end of the book, have a dramatic moment. He has, instead, the quiet line that closes his last appearance: he places his broken hand briefly on Lyra's shoulder, and says nothing, and walks back into the Forge.

That is the kind of teaching the novel wants the reader to have known once, or, if not, to be able to recognise when they finally encounter it.