Table of Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Ten Things About Christopher Paolini

Ten Reasons Why People Hate Christopher Paolini

Riding the Dragon - The Child as Author

Eragon and Its Critics

Reviewers’ Criticisms

Are Children Subalterns?

The Good Reviews

Children and Taste

Eragon and Me

Learning from Eragon as a Child Author

Roran: The Reluctant Hero

The Magic of Anthropomorphic Animals - In the Inheritance Cycle and Beyond

Originality

Entertainment

Learning

Continuity

My Dragon, Myself

Eldest ≠ Wisest

Q: How Does a Fifteen-Year-Old Do This? - A: The Same Way a Fifty-Year-Old Does.

The Modern-Day Perceval

Ignorance, Innocence, and Purity of Heart

Family Issues

The Hero Within

It’s in His Character

The Thing About Elves Is ...

How the Inheritance Cycle Differs From Fantasy Epics of the Past

Copyright Page

Introduction

Drawing Out the Dragons

JAMES A. OWEN

When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.

—ERASMUS

That quote by Desiderus Erasmus is usually mentioned, wryly, by someone who doesn’t share Erasmus’ point of view about someone who does. I’m so far in the latter category I can’t even see the other side. I am utterly addicted to print, and am physically incapable of passing a newsstand, bookstore, or secondhand shop without giving the books on display at least a cursory glance. More often than not (which means practically every single time) I make some kind of a purchase, and for a moment that new book might as well have been under a Christmas tree for all the love I foster on it.

To a lot of people, it might seem as if my priorities are a bit skewed—but I’m really just engaging in something as old as humanity itself: I’m searching for connections to everything and everyone around me. And buying books is the best way I know to do that because books, and more precisely stories, are as important and vital and essential as food and clothes—and I’m not entirely convinced about the clothes.

Stories are what bind us together as families, and communities, and cultures. Stories are what connect us to our past, anchor us in our present, and lay the groundwork for the future. Stories are how we communicate understanding to one another both literally and through metaphor. And as one essayist in this collection noted, stories are important because none of them are new. All stories have already been told—only our point of view changes. And it is that unique point of view that makes every story at once individual and collective. Our differences make us interesting—but our similarities make us family. And that brings me to the story—and stories—of Christopher Paolini.

It was the stunning blue-visaged dragon painted by John Jude Palencar that first caught my attention. I’ve always considered myself an artist who writes rather than the other way around, so it was the design of the book jacket for Eragon that drew my eye before I cared one iota about reading the book itself. It wasn’t until the next book Eldest, with its matching red dragon, appeared that I really paid attention—and still, it wasn’t to read the books, but to take note of an interesting cultural trend: dragons were cool.

Not that dragons hadn’t always been cool—but usually they were cool to a subset of fans of a genre (fantasy) that most people considered, well, juvenile. So when a book set firmly within that genre was marketed to that exact audience (juvenile readers) to amazing and continuing success, dragons suddenly became cool to people who had never liked them before, or who had but didn’t realize it until Eragon came along. It was icing on the cake that the author of this literary fireball was himself barely old enough to drive. And suddenly, everyone in the world seemed to be reading books with dragons on the covers.

Having been one of that previous subset of readers, I already knew dragons were cool, which was one of the reasons I had written and drawn a book called Here, There Be Dragons. But it can only be chalked up to happy convergence (rather than astute planning) that my book (featuring a dragon on the cover, colored blue at the request of my publisher’s sales and marketing department) happened to be published just as the Eragon movie promotions were getting underway and every bookstore worthy of the name was assembling displays of books featuring dragons—including mine.

(The fact that Owen and Paolini sit next to each other alphabetically has resulted in a running joke among booksellers that I owe Chris dinner any time he asks, since he helped sell so many of my books. This became less of a joke and more of a potential accounting concern when my second book, The Search For The Red Dragon, appeared with a [naturally] red dragon on the cover. I would like to state for the record that there was espionage, research, and prayer involved in planning to make my next book, The Indigo King, purple so it would not match up with the gold cover of Brisingr, Chris’s third book. At the rate we’re already selling, though, I’m going to be picking up his dinner tab until he’s forty.)

My love for the cover art aside, it became a matter of professional courtesy to read the books and discover for myself just what all the hubbub was about. So I did. And amidst the thrilling tales of dragons and elves and hero’s journeys I found something else in Christopher Paolini’s books—I found myself.

A lot has been made about Paolini’s relative youth, to which I can relate. I was writing, drawing, and publishing my own comic books at the age of sixteen—and while I did not enjoy the same early and vast success nor endure the same harsh scrutiny that he has had to grapple with at such a tender age, I can empathize to a degree that many others cannot. I was the youngest publisher to ever exhibit at the San Diego Comic-Con—and I was constantly questioned, not because of my professionalism or the quality of my work, but because of my age. Had he been less persistent and not gotten the publishing deal he did, or had his books not been so commercially successful, Paolini might well have had an easier time of it. Under the glare of so much scrutiny, even praise has a certain kind of weight, because with success comes expectations, and life is difficult enough at fifteen without being world-famous to boot.

But whatever else critics might question, the achievement itself, to have written (and published) so young, is worthy of note. It requires an innate maturity to be able to convey so much in a work of fiction when one has had relatively less life experience. (It should also be noted—and is utterly appropriate—that two of the finer essays in this collection are written by authors who are as young [or even younger] now as Paolini was when he first conceived Eragon.)

The story itself is one that has been both lauded and criticized as “not new.” More than one essayist touches on this concept, that Paolini has drawn upon well-known and well-used archetypes for both character and plot. Paolini’s detractors claim that the work is therefore merely derivative, and brings nothing new to the world of fiction. But his advocates (of which I am one) maintain that he has simply done what all the great authors have done before him: retold the stories common to us all from a unique point of view. And it is a point of view that has been embraced by millions upon millions of readers around the world.

The question has been posed whether the story of Eragon is also the story of Christopher Paolini. I maintain that it might be—but the same can be said of us all, writers and readers alike. We write to express how we see things to the rest of the world, and we read to try to make sense of the world around us. Both are efforts to communicate, to make connections with the larger Story. Our dragons are metaphors, used to tie together the things we know and the things we hope to understand. Readers may find themselves drawing close to Eragon or Saphira, or perhaps Roran, and in the process discovering something about themselves. It’s been no different for any other story that’s gone before, whether it’s a tale of Perceval or Gilgamesh or even Luke Skywalker. They are all the same story. They are all our story. And the tales told in the Inheritance Cycle are our stories, too, told as they are by a storyteller who understands this, and put them into words in the way he believes they should be told.

That’s how the best stories work: They are new and familiar all at once. The book you now hold in your hands is an excellent example of this: a group of essays by writers who are doing the same thing as Christopher Paolini, and myself, and every other writer throughout history—telling stories, making connections, and trying to communicate their own unique points of view.

Ten Things About Christopher Paolini

JEREMY OWEN

When discussing Christopher Paolini and his work with, well, anyone, you quickly discover that there is no such thing as a lukewarm opinion. People run hot and cold with equal fervor, and Jeremy Owen gets right to the heart of the matter with an essay that is at once both praiseful and pointedly blunt.

Go to a library, bookstore, or better yet, any gathering of people who consider themselves writers and say two words: Christopher Paolini. Try it. It gives amazing results with very little effort on your part. The polarizing effect is instantaneous; a group of mild-mannered bookish types will transform into two ravening gangs right before your eyes. The pro-Paolini element will square off against the anti-Paolini in seconds. Make sure you’re outside the danger zone before the insults and occasional breakable objects start flying around.

You’ve probably already heard some of the pro arguments, possibly even read some in the volume you’re holding, but those aren’t the arguments I want to single out. I want to look at the opposition. You’ve heard what they have to say before, only in reference to other authors. But with the addition of Paolini to the mix the contentions take on a new, frenzied tone. I don’t know if it’s Paolini’s youth or quick ascension to lofty status that makes people dislike him, but everybody seems to have at least one point against him. I’ve listed the strongest ones below.

Ten Reasons Why People Hate Christopher Paolini

1) Youth

Christopher Paolini is young. He’s older now than when he started Eragon, but he’s still young. Most people expect sixteen-year-old boys to be babbling, hormone-riddled morons who think a pronoun is a noun that’s lost its amateur status. For the most part these derogatory thoughts about adolescent males are right. A teenage boy being able to string a coherent list of words into a recognizable sentence is noteworthy, and Christopher Paolini did that ten thousand times . . . in a row! Brilliant! Most people, especially other writers, tend to see that as an over-achievement for someone his age. I don’t think this is Christopher’s fault, but that of the observer judging him. If you think Christopher Paolini is too young, then you must be too old. Wait a while. Christopher will age with time, and you might find it easier to deal with him when he’s thirty.

2) Completion

Christopher Paolini finished a novel. Here’s a revelation that stuck in the craw of many a writer. People love saying they write for a living. It sounds distinguished, professional, praiseworthy. After the fact that they are a writer is established, it is often followed by the question, “So what did you write?” If you’re the person asking the question I hope you have quick reflexes. Like the actors that serve you dinner, many writers are biding time at their day job whilst waiting for their big break. Said break will probably never happen if they keep writing online fanfiction about Kirk and Spock in romantic situations. If you hate Christopher Paolini because he wrote a novel, it’s probably time to stop doing Internet “research” on the computer in your mom’s basement and start taking a serious stab at that outline you’ve toyed with for a decade.

3) Continuation

Christopher Paolini wrote a second novel. A person in the same situation as Christopher has thoughts like this: “I made it. My first book is published and doing well and the publisher wants my second manuscript.” If this is you, brace yourself, because here it comes. You’ll be walking around the grocery store, casually comparing prices on cans of beets, when you get it for the first time. The tap on the shoulder. “Hey buddy,” they’ll say, “remember me? From high school?” Often you do in fact remember them and the memories are not fond ones. “Saw your book,” they continue, “it’s doing real good.” I like to call the previous statement the butter-up; it’s the precursor to the real reason you hold a now-forgotten can of $1.79 whole baby beets in your hand. “Say, I had a great idea....” Flee in terror! Quick! Before the idea leaves their lips! It’s your only hope! There is no reasoning with the person before you. Stating the fact that you already have too many of your own ideas to pursue does not deter them. They mention that the hard part is already done, you just have to write the book, and they’ll share the profits with you! With as much decorum as possible, extricate yourself from the situation, saying you’ll have to go over it with your agent and get back to them. From this point on you will spend the rest of your life checking to make sure their car isn’t in the parking lot when you go shopping. If you hate Christopher Paolini because he managed to write a second book, a book that is not about the idea you flung at him as he rushed from the Piggly-Wiggly, stop. Take a minute to evaluate how good your idea really is. If you’re still satisfied that it’s a good story, do us all a favor and take the night course offered at your local community college on how to write a novel. It’s the only surefire way for everyone to win.

4) Success

Christopher Paolini wrote a bestselling novel. People that aspire to be writers will sing praises to such a person, all the while shooting little daggers with their eyes at them for accomplishing such a feat. Christopher was in the right place at the right time with the right publisher doing the right promotions with the right spin and it paid off. He has a bestselling novel. You probably don’t. If you hate Christopher Paolini because he wrote a bestseller, well, you’re pretty much stuck with the taste of bile in the back of your throat every time you think of him. I know lots of great authors who are not bestsellers. Hitting the top of the lists is a convergence of skill, publicity, and timing. Sometimes series don’t hit their stride until the fourth or fifth book. Sometimes being a bestseller is more of a pain than a blessing. If it still bothers you that he hit the right combination so young, content yourself with the knowledge that young geniuses burn out fast. (Not really, but it made you feel better for a bit, didn’t it?)

5) Hollywood

Christopher Paolini’s novel got made into a movie. This is the true lottery win of the writer, but not without its drawbacks. The novel the writer worked on with love and devotion for so long is being rewritten by someone trying to hack enough out of it so it fits within two hours of screen time. Sure, Christopher got a great paycheck and is probably getting residuals from the deal, but the movie is almost never as good as the book. It’s hard to see something you spent so much time working on reduced and reworked in such a manner when you have only extreme financial stability to show for it. If you hate Christopher Paolini because of the money he made from selling out to Hollywood, then I’m right there with you. If you happen to be Christopher Paolini’s agent and are reading this, then you can contact me through the publisher of this article. I’ve got some great ideas I think you’d be interested in.

6) Tempo

One of the things people picked out to criticize about Paolini’s writing was the pacing. The story seemed to drag, they’d say; stories should be told quickly, to give more immediate satisfaction to the reader. I think the proper formula (which I am right now extrapolating from the suggestions given to me) demands that there be blood, battle, or sex on every third page. Christopher Paolini doesn’t deliver on this. Sure, there is blood and battle, but not on every third page, and the sex is almost nonexistent! Then again, Eragon and Eldest and Brisingr are novels for young adults, so it should be blood, battle, and pining for sex on every third page. In Eldest the character of Eragon does pretty good about the pining part every time he thinks of Arya, and it started out with the blood and battle sprinkled liberally over the first chapter or so, but training? Soul searching? Roran’s responsibilities to the people of his hometown? I’ll concede that Roran does a fair amount of killing with his hammer every time he shows up, but I’ve been told Christopher needs to pick up the pace a bit with the rest. If you hate Christopher Paolini because you think his novels aren’t exciting enough, well, I can’t help you. I thought the novels were great. Try listening to classical music for a while, study a foreign language, or maybe attend a political debate to help pump up the old IQ a bit. If those things don’t help you appreciate a well-structured story that doesn’t rely on the every-third-page formula then I suggest watching old episodes of Sesame Street. It’s where I started, and I can appreciate the pacing of Paolini’s books just fine.

7) Innovation

Someone was explaining Eragon to me before I read the book and complained that it was full of unoriginal ideas. “He got this from here,” they’d say, “exactly like it was written by so-and-so.” Accusations of cliché or outright plagiarism always follow anyone who writes a bestselling novel. The editor of this issue, James Owen, was once accused by a slew of people of ripping off characters from Neil Gaiman, prompting Neil to respond by writing the foreword to a collection of James’s comic Starchild. Neil writes: “What writers do is this: we borrow, and we invent and we embroider. . . . We build upon what went before. . . . We loot and pillage and we hone and we shape. . . . We never start nor finish in a vacuum, or alone.” In other parts of the text, he explains that the characters in question, Oberon and Titania, have been used by Neil, James, Shakespeare, and others stretching back to the legends told before stories were written down. Paolini doesn’t use names we’ve read before, but the situations seem familiar because they are. Tales of Good versus Evil stretch back to the creation of Good versus Evil. The farm boy revealed as a princely figure is only slightly younger than that. You may find similarities to other stories, and be that as it may, Eragon’s world belongs to Christopher Paolini. If you think Christopher Paolini stole the ideas he writes about in Eragon and Eldest, he didn’t. He just told an old story in a new way and you’re just jealous because you couldn’t do as good a job.

8) Languages

Next we come to Paolini’s use of the elder languages. I will admit there is a bit of a flaw here. Creating a new language is a hard thing, especially when it has to sound as finessed and regal as his ancient language should. There are times when the language stumbles, sounding more like an unusable form of German than the language of ultimate truth, but let’s take a step back and look at the measuring stick we’re using. J. R. R. Tolkien was a master of ancient languages. He understood how dead languages were thought, written, and spoken. I’m sure it was no easy task to create the languages used in his Middle-earth stories, but if anyone had the knowledge to do it and make it sound real it was him. At the other extreme we have the Klingon language, proof positive that if you have a large enough group of nerds living in a fantasy world eventually they will find a way to communicate with one another. People with huge amounts of time on their hands and nothing better to do then discover to appropriate syntax and delivery of the phrase “bortaS bIr jablu’DI’ reH QaQqu’ nay’” are the type of people judging Paolini. It’s really not fair. Paolini was by himself when he came up with the ancient language. He didn’t have a lifetime of studying ancient script or innumerable nerdlings to aid him in his endeavor. If you hate Christopher Paolini because you felt he didn’t do a good job on the ancient language, I challenge you to come up with a better word than brisingr and then put it in a sentence where all the rules of grammar apply. Go on, try it, you pansy. Not so easy, is it? I predict that your continued attempts to rewrite the rules of pig latin will fail you miserably.

9) Wording

Coming close to the bottom of the list, we find that some people are put off by some of the word choices in Eragon and Eldest. I’m sure that when Christopher was writing his story he was expecting the readers to have advanced beyond the Fun with Dick and Jane books. That may not be the case. If you have ever been reading one of Paolini’s books and were shocked to be staring at a grouping of letters that defied you, I offer this: As you are reading, think about the context and usage of the large words; sometimes this will help in determining their meaning. Have a small notepad and pencil handy as you read and jot down any words that continue to confound you, giving you a chance to look them up later. Pretty soon you’ll find yourself reading at the same level as my nine-year-old daughter and the big words won’t be as much of a problem anymore. If you continue to grouse about Christopher Paolini’s word choices I recommend a particular bit of advice a second time: community college. If you did what I told you to before then you’re already there, so how hard will it be to take a second class and expand your horizons? If that doesn’t work for you, I suggest one of those word-a-day calendars.

10) Fair Folk

I’ve been asked if we really need another story about elves. I have to retort that Eragon and Eldest are not really stories about elves, they are stories about dragons and the elf-like boy who rides one. “But Eragon is so like the Lord of the Rings books,” they say, “elves and dwarves and....” At this point in the conversation it is probably a good thing to just turn around and walk away. The other person may not even notice you leaving. There is always room for something done well. If a book sits on the shelf next to the great books of the past and manages to hold its own, then it belongs.

It seems to me that the main reason people hate Christopher Paolini is because he’s managed to accomplish things they haven’t been able to do. They’re not justified in judging him, and they know it. People hate to be proven wrong, they hate to look bad or foolish, they hate to admit that some people get where they belong because of hard work, talent, and creativity. It’s hard to look at someone else’s success because it reminds them of the potential they’re too lazy to use or opportunities wasted and long gone. Christopher Paolini is where he belongs. We should be glad we have him as an example.

If you’ve gained nothing else from this list, I hope you’ve realized this: If you’re so passionate about criticizing someone’s accomplishments that you have no time to create anything of your own, you need to rethink what you’re doing. You’re wasting energy that could go toward creating something wonderful. If you do it right, someone may think up ten reasons they hate you.

Jeremy Owen has worked as a stonemason, a carpenter, an artist, a writer, an animatronics engineer, and more. He is collaborating with his brother James on several illustrated books, and is working on his first novel. He lives with his family in Silvertown, Arizona, where he currently works as the production manager at the Coppervale Studio.

Riding the Dragon

The Child as Author

TOBIAS DRUITT

Paolini’s youth is a central point of his greater story, but there are many aspect of that point beyond the generic question “He’s how old?” that are important to consider. From a unique perspective (see his bio) Dtruitt examines the similarities between the story Paolin wrote, and the story he lived, as the Eragon phenom enon caught fireand swept the world-and in the process underscores just how unique an achievment it is for a child to create, sell and survive an extraordinary story

Eragon, as most reading this know, is the story of a fifteen-year-old boy who gets a dragon’s egg by accident. When the dragon hatches, he bonds to it and becomes its “Rider.” But his problems have only just begun. He is living in a kingdom governed by the evil Galbatorix, a Rider who wiped out all the other Riders and dragons apart from the thirteen evil Riders who had joined him, their dragons, and three eggs. So when evil servants of the evil king kill Eragon’s uncle (with whom he is living because his mother mysteriously disappeared after his birth, and never named his father), Eragon specifically sets out to get revenge, though he has other motives too. The book was published internationally in 2004 but had been published at the author Christopher Paolini’s home before, in 2002. Like his hero, Paolini was fifteen when he began writing it (though he was nineteen at the time of its international publication by Knopf).

What I find interesting in the bald story of Eragon is that the book contains an obvious symbol of the process of its own creation. The plot concerns a child, a child learning something he would not otherwise know about or know how to do. Just as Eragon in the book learns about riding and looking after dragons, so Paolini learned about writing, and about publishing and self-promotion. Both of these sets of skills—dragon care and writing—are things you would not expect a child to do, let alone (alas, the prejudice against the young creeps stealthily in here) be good at. The world of Eragon is just as surprised at the boy’s maturity as the world of books was at Paolini’s achievement. No wonder, then, that there is a clear parallel between the dragon, Saphira, and the story itself. I cannot say what Paolini’s experience of writing was like, but I can say from my own experience of writing that, like Saphira, stories do have a tendency to come up with ideas of their own about where they want to go, and it is very hard to get them to change their minds. They take you on long flights, and you don’t always know where or when those flights will end.

There are other parallels between dragon-rearing and writing. Both of them are enjoyable and make you feel as if you have a special and secret identity that makes you different from other people, even your family. Most people think both sound really great. But just as most writers can tell starry-eyed dreamers about the negative side of being an author, so Paolini shows that being a Dragon Rider has a downside: Dragons are uncomfortable to ride, and your specialness attracts lots of attacks. As well, the dragon eventually grows beyond your control, as books do when they go out into the world . . . no writer can control the way a book is going to be read. Just as there are other, older writers, so there are other, older Dragon Riders for Eragon to meet. And riding a dragon, like writing, is in some respects a leveling experience: Small children can make up really brilliant stories, and a teenager like Eragon is boosted to adult status by owning a powerful dragon. As another essay in this volume shows, Eragon’s youth doesn’t stop him winning arguments with his elders, and often being right.

As for the second book, the very title says that it’s all about age. Eldest is the oldest dragon alive in the world, Glaedr. (The word eldest might also refer to Murtagh, Eragon’s older brother. They are both fathered by evil Morzan.) Glaedr and his Rider Oromis are authority figures for Eragon, and train him to be a Rider. They learn an ancient magical language (echoes of Le Guin and Tolkien) and Saphira learns combat flying. Education, education, education! Glaedr and Oromis replace Eragon’s parents as authority figures. Is this to do with Paolini himself breaking free of the parental help he stresses so heavily in the acknowledgments to Eragon? Philip Pullman says that everyone’s story begins only when they realize they’ve been born into the wrong family. This is Eragon’s story too.

The third book too shows Eragon learning and mastering various skills, from the making of his new sword to more advanced fighting and spellwork. Arguably, by this book Paolini has more comfortably settled into his role as a writer, even as he has grown older, and this book is less about experience than about what all writing should be about: telling a story, and telling it well. Even the sly cultural references he slips in show a growing ease with his storyline, a willingness to play with the boundaries of his universe.

But while all this is true and very important, the point I find interesting in the story of Eragon is the age of its author. I will now attempt to explain why.

We are, so very often, told that we are at the pinnacle of freedom. Every adult can vote, has rights, yet those rights are not completely unrestricted so as to preserve the rights of others. But this is all a rather glorified lie. We are not at the pinnacle of freedom yet. There is one last group, one final minority everywhere, that has not achieved the rights and responsibilities that normally come with freedom.

Children.

They have no political rights, and are condemned for working, just as women were fifty and a hundred years ago. (Being condemned for working goes with low wage rates, or none, as women and illegal immigrants could tell you. So could the kids who work for fast-food chains.) Through my discussion of Eragon, I will focus on one space where many children have tried to break this rather oppressive mold: authorship. There are several published child authors, most of whom write children’s fiction. I am one of these. There are hundreds or maybe thousands of other children who write and finish books. There are also many children who write and don’t finish books. Yet there always seems to be a semi-negative reaction if you tell any adult about your writing. A taken-aback response. (Here comes a whinge about my own experiences.) Some adults begin rabbitting on in an embarrassed way about how clever I must be and how great it is. I am not sure what they expect me to say my book is about, but when I say it is a retelling of Greek myth that brings back into it the original stories’ grittiness, they put on very shocked faces. Alternatively, they go into aggression mode, asking me how much of it I wrote and how much my mother did, asking me why it is under a pseudonym, etc. Yet the recurrent theme of the reactions seems to be surprise that someone my age can have written and published three books, have finished the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh and be revising them (some however I have decided are irredeemable and am simply throwing aside, or reincarnating), and have begun the eighth and ninth. Surprise, or shock?

This adult surprise and even alarm are the themes of this essay. I want to study the reactions toward child authors of children’s fiction from both adults and children, taking as my example Eragon, Eldest, and Brisingr. My interest in Paolini’s achievement is that of a reader, a child reader, but also that of a fellow writer, a fellow child writer. We will see later why it’s important that I am not only a reader, but a child reader, and not only an author, but a fellow child author.

Eragon and Its Critics

Eragon has been praised, but has also attracted some very intense criticism. Why did the book divide opinion so strongly? To try to understand people’s dislike (or, indeed, their like) of Eragon I took a look at some reviews on Amazon.com. Most people’s reviews are either one star or five. There appears to be no median. There are tons of good reviews, several bad reviews, but very few in between: nearly twenty five- and four-star reviews, and seven one- and two-star reviews, but only one three-star one. But what is more worrying is the content of the reviews. Almost all the negative ones either say it is bad because it is derivative, bad because of its style (only one, and much of it was misspelled), or bad because it is in the style a teenager would write in. One of the others was attempting to get you to burn the book (!). And the positive ones are almost all incorrectly spelled and grammatically wrong. I can understand a few reasonable typos, but they can’t ALL have happened to misspell several words. Does that mean they are not very experienced reviewers—i.e., children? And the content of the positive reviews is the sort of thing the other reviews are criticizing: a lack of depth and critical commentary, and an uneasy use of playground slang, with clichés and descriptions of the book as “cool” abounding. One five-star review just states the fact there will be four books. Most of them simply stress how great the story is, and nothing else at all. I know this isn’t a proper study, that Amazon.com reviewers are a self-selecting sample who don’t represent anything but themselves. But in the global village of Amazon.com, I still feel worried at this lack of inbetweeners, rational people who are trying to see the book’s good points and bad ones too. This lack of a median is not actually typical of Amazon.com reviews. Most frequently reviewed books attract four- and three-star reviews. Not this one. I can see that there are two different types of people reading the book, yelling at each other with fervor rather than engaging in rational debate. Why?

Reviewers’ Criticisms

The bad reviews often stress what they say is Eragon’s terrible style and derivativeness. Here is an example: I am quoting it in full, with any spelling and grammar mistakes intact, because the details are important:

Though the book starts off slightly strong the book becomes weak eventually. I actually put it down half way through. The dragon rider idea was pretty great the first time I read it . . . when it was called “Dragonlance.”

I enjoyed the dragon’s growing and coming of age. The bond between Sapphira and Eragon was attractive at first, but the book then becomes basically a journal of a LONG journey to a SHORT distance. Like a “and then they walked. and then they slept. and then they walked. and then they fought.” For a quest where everyone is supposedly looking for them, there is a remarkable lack of an antagonist after long chapter;s

This book is great for someone who is a novice writer about a subject that he adds nothing to. If you have a child who has no introduction to the realm of fantasy reading (and I don’t mean Harry Potter; not that its bad, it’s quite good, it’s just a diffrent realm of fantasy), then sure, let them read Eragon. Otherwise, i’d recommend the Dragonlance Chronicles by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. The starting book is “Dragon’s of Autumn Twilight.” And if you want some grit to your fantasy, I recommend Icewind Dale trilogy by R.A. Salvatore. starting book is “The Crystal Shard.” There’s not alot of dragon’s in the latter trilogy, though it actually adds a new dimension to the fantasy realm.

As we can see, the first point is driven home very clearly: “The dragon rider idea was pretty great the first time I read it . . . when it was called ‘Dragonlance’.” The author is actually wrong; the first time I know of that the idea of dragon riders was used was in Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey, the first of the Dragonriders of Pern books (it was published first in 1969, while the first Dragonlance book was published in 1987, according to the Library of Congress catalog). But the force of the point is still clear. Eragon is derivative of Dragonlance, which is in turn derivative of Dragonriders of Pern, which is also probably derivative of something else—and I think the something else is actually pony books. Only the first clause of the preceding sentence is the reviewer’s point; the rest is my natural extension. In fact, the reviewer praises Dragonlance to the skies, and I wonder, since he has not spotted that Dragonlance is derivative of Dragonflight, whether he is correct about Eragon’s derivativeness as well, or just trying to find an excuse to criticize it. Can it be that we tend to assume that a book by a child will be more derivative? More dependent on grownups? Is this a way of coping with the idea of a child author?

The reviewer then follows this swiftly with a point about one thing he likes about Eragon: “I enjoyed the dragon’s growing and coming of age”—the aspect which might owe the most to Paolini’s own age at the time of writing—but then launches another attack on the book, this time on its narrative. I would say that this does have some basis in fact, but all long books have lengthy sections that are just as he describes. It’s always really difficult to explain why you find these boring in one book and gripping in another (and actually boredom in general is very hard to explain anyway). But the last paragraph is the truly telling one. The first sentence is “This book is great for someone who is a novice writer about a subject that he adds nothing to.” It is obvious that the “novice writer” of this sentence is Christopher Paolini, and that by “novice” the author of the review is implying youth and inexperience combined (interesting since the reviewer has several grammatical and spelling mistakes in his review). The final sentence makes it sound as if the whole review has been written in the light of the reader’s knowledge of Paolini’s age.

Is this interpretation of the novel fair enough? Let’s imagine how it would sound if the reviewer wrote the following:

This book is great for someone who is a woman writer about a subject that she adds nothing to.

Oops. There would be protests. There would be outrage. People would ask Amazon to take the review down.

Or:

This book is great for someone who is a Black writer about a subject that he adds nothing to.

Oops again. See above for the likely response. Immediately it’s obvious that “this book is great” now sounds really patronizing. Why? Let’s try to think it through.

Are Children Subalterns?

Canadian professor of literature Perry Nodelman has said that children are “the last subalterns.”[1] Subalterns are defined by another professor, Homi Bhabha, in his article “Unsatisfied: Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism” in Text and Nation: Cross-Disciplinary Essays on Cultural and National Identities, as “oppressed, minority groups whose presence was crucial to the self-definition of the majority group.” Children are a minority group with different and fewer rights than the dominant group (adults). The term “child” is often defined in ways that confirm adult power and authority; for example, children are seen not as different from adults but as inferior to them, less competent, less clever. And yet this also means that children who step outside their role—children who write books, perhaps?—are seen as a threat. Homi Bhabha says that “subaltern social groups were also in a position to subvert the authority of those who had hegemonic power.” Maybe that’s why child authors have to be pushed back into place. Negative reviews of Eragon often make a real point of Paolini’s age. You’d almost think they were trying to discourage kids from publishing books, just as women were discouraged in the past. And it must be depressing if you are an adult who has maybe not found a publisher for your own fabulous fantasy to see Paolini walking away with a big book deal as just a teenager.

But children, apparently, have different brains from adults. It’s been suggested that the frontal lobes do not fully mature until young adulthood. To confirm this in living humans, UCLA researchers compared MRI scans of young adults, 23-30, with those of teens, 12-16. They looked for signs of myelin, which would imply more mature, efficient connections, within gray matter. The researchers concluded that “this increased myelination in the adult frontal cortex likely relates to the maturation of cognitive processing and other ‘executive’ functions.” The careful word “likely,” however, suggests the researchers had a hypothesis, not data, about the function of the frontal lobe. The researchers also found that “[p]arietal and temporal areas mediating spatial, sensory, auditory and language functions appeared largely mature in the teen brain,” but chose to place much more emphasis on differences than on these obvious similarities. A different group of researchers worked on face reading, and also found just what they were looking for: Kids’ brains are immature. “Young teens, who characteristically perform poorly on the task [of face reading], activated the amygdala, a brain center that mediates fear and other ‘gut’ reactions, more than the frontal lobe. As teens grow older, their brain activity during this task tends to shift to the frontal lobe, leading to more reasoned perceptions and improved performance.”[2] So children are different cognitively than adults. However, unsurprisingly, this information comes straight from adults. Can we trust adults to interpret the data fairly? And while maybe we can agree that there are absolutes in judgement in driving a car—the choice that avoids an accident is obviously better than the one that doesn’t—is this fair when applied to reading, and writing? In reading, younger readers might be willing to embrace more possibilities without ranking them so strictly. Who is to say that children are wrong to pick out one character to love, or to focus on the story and not on “fine” writing? Maybe it is okay for the amygdala rather than the frontal lobe to rule responses to dragon flights, imagined or real? And how is the amygdala working in adults who write for children? Is anybody testing them to see if their powers are in decline? (Thought not.)

Some people might also object that children can’t really be subalterns because they won’t always be children; one day they will be adults. To an adult, childhood seems short. But adults forget that children don’t know what it’s like to be an adult. They can’t look forward to it as if it were the end of a short-term stint in jail. They only know their own subjugation. In that sense their disadvantages seem never-ending. Plus time passes much more slowly for children than it does for adults—another big difference for readers. For children, eons go by while reading a long book like Eragon. All this means being subordinate seems endless, even if it isn’t. Besides, what other subordinate group would be willing to be at the bottom of the pecking order now on the grounds that in, say, fifteen years they would be regarded as the equals of their tyrants?

Anyway, Harvard professor James Wood recently complained that adults are too limited in their literary judgments as well: “A glance at the thousands of foolish ‘reader reviews’ on Amazon, with their complaints about ‘dislikeable characters,’ confirms a contagion of moralizing niceness. Again and again, in book clubs up and down the country, novels are denounced because some feeble reader ‘couldn’t find any characters to identify with,’ or ‘didn’t think that any of the characters grow.’”[3] Wood thinks judgments like those of the adult reviewers of Eragon are “foolish” and “feeble,” so such adults are not up to Harvard standards, perhaps? It seems adults are not a happy and harmonious group of brilliant critics who can give a strong lead to young writers. Wood’s criticism of the very rules Eragon falls foul of suggests that not all adults agree about what a good novel ought to be like.

Another argument against children really being adults (and therefore having the same rights as adults) is that children have less experience. I can reply in two ways to this. The first is that we do not universally apply this principle; if we did, the oldest people would have the most rights, and that is far from true. This principle is only used against children and is therefore unfair. The other point I’d make is that a person of eighteen has little political experience. According to these guidelines he should then not have political rights. But what happens when he becomes a young person of nineteen, still as inexperienced as he was the year before? The gatekeeping grownups are faced with the same choice and must make the same decision or else they are hypocrites. And so on. He’s twenty and inexperienced. Then he’s twenty-one . . . fifty-nine. And they can never give him any power because of his total inexperience. According to this argument, no one should have political rights. This is clearly not the case. Again we only apply this to children; hence it is useless and unfair.

Also, in the case of those who write for children, what use is experience if it actually means your mind is crowded with models that can’t work for your target audience? You are busy creating characters that “grow” and “develop” because you have been in a writing course. Meanwhile your child readers are asleep, and so is Professor James Wood. Only the adults of Amazon are listening. Are they the people you set out to write for?

The Good Reviews

But what about the good reviews? Here is one of them (again, with any spelling and grammar mistakes left intact):

Eragon is a book about a boy who finds a blue dragon egg. The egg hatches into a dragon he names Saphira. Toghether, they travel with a man named Brom, and a fierce warrior named Murtaugh, to find the secret city of the Varden. They feel that they can use Eragon’s fighting and their magic to help the Varden defeat the evil king, Galbotorix.

One of my two favorite parts of Eragon are when Eragon finds out how Brom knows all he knows about dragons and magic. Brom knew that Eragon would need to know everything about the powers he had possesion of to be able to help the Varden. Also, I really enjoyed the fighting between Eragon and the Shade. It was a difficult fight, but Eragon knew he could win. The only way to kill a Shade was to stab it in the heart.

Eragon is easily one of my favorite books, and I have read a lot of books. It’s a book you never want to put down. You never stop wanting to read the next part. It’s a great book for people who really like both adventure and fantasy books. Also, it has a lot of great fighting scenes. The battles have great discriptions, and you feel like you’re in it. It’s a long book, but that can be a great thing, because you won’t want to put Eragon down.

The first thing anyone would notice when reading the review through is the spelling. Not only are basic words like “together” misspelled, but the characters’ names as well! This is surprising, since in my experience the odder a character’s name is, the more likely you are to remember how it is spelled and how you think it sounds. And all the characters in Eragon, Eldest, and Brisingr have odd names. Then there is the unwavering focus on the story. The review tells you that the story is great, but does not analyze the style or sources of the story, or even how the story is told. The reviewer’s favorite thing about the book is part of the story, not a bit that is well described. And this reviewer doesn’t seem to have heard of Dragonlance or Dragonflight and couldn’t care less about them. Even more worrying is the misreading of the only thing the reviewer is interested in: the story. They are not (at least at first) travelling to the “secret city” of the Varden. And the Varden does not have just one secret city (though the one I think the reviewer is referring to is the most important), but many. Murtagh joins them much later, after Brom dies. And the way to kill a Shade will always be the same so “was” should be “is” (this may just be a grammar mistake, but if the author knows their grammar it is an inexcusable misreading of the text)! But the final blow to this review, the sting in the tail, is that it was written by a child. (It says “child’s review,” and in our blithe and trusting way, we are assuming it’s not fraudulent....)

Is my analysis of the review negatively biased because of this? If I had not known that it was by a child would I have read it differently? I am not sure. I am now beginning to veer close to the slightly odd position that not even a child can review a book or piece by another child without at least a tiny bit of bias against the author. Why? A great Victorian woman writer who wrote under the (male) pseudonym George Eliot once wrote a vicious attack on other women writers called ”Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.” Why was she attacking her own kind? Well, to show they weren’t her kind, of course. All subalterns tend to identify with the values of their masters, and I am no different. Part of me wants to show my maturity by ripping into this reviewer and then Paolini.

Children and Taste

So there is a division within me as a child author between the adult values I’ve learned and my reluctance to accept values that leave me in an inferior position. And there’s also a division among the Eragon reviewers on Amazon. Assuming reviewers are describing themselves truthfully, just under half of the top reviews are by children. All of the bottom reviews are by adults. But the most interesting thing is that children either review it favorably, or don’t review it at all. Or at least that appears to be the case. Are the children who dislike it (for there must be some, not all children will like it, I know some who don’t) so upset about this that they don’t review it? Could it be because a child will simply give up on a book that s/he doesn’t like? Or is it the more fearsome notion that children can’t review critically?

I would not say it was the last, or indeed the first, of those points. I am not sure about these worrying facts. For worrying they are: Eighteen adults reviewing a child’s book? What happened to adult fantasy fiction? Can it be that some of the hostile adult responses are warning kids off what has become a bit of an adults-only playground, children’s fantasy writing? Take Harry Potter. The biggest Harry Potter conference, Lumos, held in Las Vegas, actually forbids children under fourteen from attending. Most Harry Potter fansites are run by adults and for adults. So it’s not very surprising that the same is true of Eragon fansites. Is there any room for child readers, let alone child writers, in fantasy fiction anymore?

It would be a sad day for Paolini if children were shut out completely, because the Amazon reviews show one thing very clearly. Children generally like the book. What are, in fact, children’s views on the Inheritance Cycle? Do they all like it? Probably not. But if so, why aren’t they saying so? Let us try and answer the first question.

In general, as readers of any and all books, children appreciate story the most. They tend to overlook the style, at least on their first reading, and try to be swept up, and into, the story. They often don’t want the kind of stylistic flourishes that adult readers like, and give prizes to, because they can jolt you out of the story and into an awareness of reading, of what critics call texture. As a child, I don’t always want texture. I want to be carried away and to forget that I’m reading at all—mostly, anyway.

An interesting question arises about why a book’s style sometimes gets in the way of the book being absorbed and why it sometimes facilitates it. For lots of Paolini’s adult critics, his prose seems clumsy, and a longing to criticize and correct jolts them out of the story; some adults have the same experience with Harry Potter. But kids don’t mind Paolini’s use of words like tenebrous. There has to be a first time to hear big words like that. Child readers might get just as drunk on them as Paolini did. And we’re more used to meeting words we don’t understand, and don’t feel offended in the way adults seem to be.[4] When I meet a word I don’t know, I don’t think the author is trying to show he’s cleverer than me. I can look it up, or I can just ignore it, or I can guess it from the context. Or just enjoy the sound. Children probably have this experience more often than adults, unless the adults read James Joyce all day.

Anyway, what children want is to get on with the story, damnit, and never mind the prose style. This means that reading, for them—or should that be us? After all, I am a child—is about expecting things to happen. If the book promises a fight with the big bad they expect it to occur, and will be disappointed if it doesn’t have a fight with the big bad. And since he’s the big bad, they, urm, expect there to be a big fight with him. Lasting several chapters, of course, and not just three pages. In other words, if the author makes a promise, they expect him to keep it, and if he doesn’t, they become very disappointed. Paolini is very good at fulfilling his promises, and so children like his books. Some adults find the pace too slow. But this is because Paolini is thorough. He does what he says he will. Children appreciate that. So do children have different aesthetic criteria? I am not sure, and I would not like to say since I am veering close to a view that suggests “children are different and special,” which is not helpful for anyone, least of all children.

Children are also, because of the fact they bury themselves in the story, more held in suspense. So even though an adult may sit there wisely noting that at the end of every third chapter Eragon faints, children eagerly press on without noticing this, at least when they read it the first time. This also means children can sometimes second-guess the author, when very well read in the sort of book they are reading. This can be very upsetting and disturbing for child readers, and may cause them to become disillusioned with the book. As well, it means that in a series children usually have a lot of ideas about what is going to happen in the next book and if they are completely wrong, then they will often turn against the book. It’s therefore really upsetting when wiseacre adults can’t resist pointing out what’s obvious to them in a fantasy book; the adult takeover of Harry Potter fandom is a case in point.

Children’s continuations of stories in their minds are often reminiscent of fanfiction, and I am beginning to wonder whether children don’t prefer to write in an already made universe and just add to it than to make up their own. I am perfectly capable of making up my own universe, but sometimes don’t feel like it. Sometimes I want the ease and coziness of snuggling into someone else’s universe. After all, that’s pretty much a reflection of life as a child. The universe is made by previous generations—parents, teachers. I fit in as best I can.

Eragon and Me

But what, indeed, of my view on Eragon? As a child, surely my view is as important as other children’s. So what do I think?

When I first read Eragon (I was ten, and I’m fifteen now) I was sucked into the story. It seemed exciting and interesting, and I honestly wondered from moment to moment what would happen to the characters. I really liked it.

The second time I read it (still ten) I noticed more than one fault. Previous bits that had seemed incredibly exciting now seemed dreary. When I first read it I adored the battle at the end. The second time I found it boring and repetitive. Interestingly, I did not have the same experience with Eldest. When I first read it I found it boring and incomprehensible. The excitement of the first reading of the first book had been reduced to what seemed like an endless cycle of Yoda-like anecdotes.

Recently, to write this essay, I reread all of Paolini’s books. It had been a long time since I read them (save the third, which I had read fairly recently), and with an older, and perhaps much more critical eye, I reappraised them.

I was, again, sucked into the story. But unlike last time, when I had been fully immersed, it was more like sitting in a bubble, or maybe watching it on TV. You are absorbed at the time, but later you see its gaping faults. For instance, I began for the first time to notice just how often Eragon became unconscious at the end of a chapter. And how overworked the description was. I later read an essay by Ursula K. Le Guin about fantasy, “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie,” and noted with interest how much of the language she criticized crept into Eragon (though her main foe, ichor, never appeared). And while I am talking about language and description, Paolini’s style is slightly confused. He often switches from modern idiom to archaic language in the same sentence. This became jarring.

As well, my favorite parts of the book changed. As I have mentioned, when I first read it I felt that the battle at the end was exceptional; now listed among my favorite parts are the mock sword fights with Brom.

Am I being unfair and biased in my criticisms? Probably. But I think from this we can learn an important point, more about what we choose to read than about Eragon itself.

Whenever we read, we choose a particular thing to read. Often it may be the wrong thing. It turns out to be boring, or doesn’t suit our mood, or it’s total pap and we feel we’ve been suckered. But we pick it nonetheless; we have power and also responsibility. Whatever our age, we all need what I like to call, in my childish way, “stretch” reading and “relax” reading. Let us take the reading brain to be an elastic band. Difficult books stretch the band. Easier books relax it. Your mind needs both difficult and easy things. Read too many difficult books and you become worn out and unwilling to read at all. Read too many easy ones and it becomes impossible to read anything more difficult. We must learn to strike a balance, something which many of us have lost the knack of. Maybe children need a bit of guidance—but adults do too, or they wouldn’t be rushing out to buy The Da Vinci Code. Without that guidance we might all find ourselves the victims of marketing ploys, like the new Scholastic series where the games and plastic toys are already planned to accompany the purpose-written books.

Learning from Eragon as a Child Author

So what have we learned? Looking back over the text, it seems I have raised more questions than I have answered, or know how to answer. Can it be that we have learned nothing after all this questioning?

No. We have learned a lot. We have learned that adults, upon learning that a piece of work is by a child, begin to read in a different way than they normally would. They read in the same way teachers do when they mark a piece of work: analytically, critically, looking for faults. They focus less on what may be good and instead turn to what is worst. Whereas children, in what may be just as bigoted a way as adults, tend to notice only the story and nothing else. Both of these are equally silly ways to read a book. Both of them are too focused and require expanding. But how? I am not sure, though I feel sure someone else will have a plan, maybe even an answer, that I cannot spot.

But one problem has been bothering me the whole of the essay. Is Eragon the best example? Are there other, better examples of child authorship I could have used? Of course there are other child authors, that we all know, but is Paolini the one I should have chosen?

Of course, many other child authors have received similar receptions. A French child author named Flavia Bujor also wrote a children’s book called The Prophecy of the Stones or The Prophecy of the Gems (there appear to have been two publications under different titles), and it too has been called derivative and overwritten. In fact there was one reviewer on Amazon.com who directly compared it to Paolini’s work: “People have criticized books written by young authors such as Amelia Atwater-Rhodes and Christopher Paolini but let me tell you, their prose is Shakespeare compared to Ms. Bujor.” Again, the focus seems to be that though it is adorable that the child author is writing and not hitting his or her friends over the head with trucks, he or she has no skill whatsoever. Should I have, perhaps, added another example, then, for a broader, bigger picture? I do not think so, since I would only have been able to focus on one child author and his or her work, or else confuse everything by constant switches from author to author. And I have only read Paolini’s books, and of course my own (on which I have a naturally biased view, which is why I didn’t choose them).

For, at least in my opinion, “child authors” are but mere one-minute wonders that flash like a supernova across newspapers and then fade, probably just about as annoying as the celebrities who think the bedtime stories they tell their kids will make a great book. I see why people find us a pain. Stories on child authors always regard them as special, because they are children and authors, and so do not treat them in the same way as adult authors, so they behave differently. So maybe the answer to the problem that child authors face, vast opposition, is to treat them equally with adult writers. Which is actually what I want, and why I publish under a pseudonym. But the reason they aren’t treated that way now is child labor laws and education laws, which prevent children from being forced to work by their parents or adult friends. So maybe, though I at least think there could be a median, we have a straight choice between liberty and safety. Maybe child authors and readers have to be patronized to keep other children safe from exploitation. But which is better? And which should we, in all honesty, choose? But that is not my question, and though I hope it may be answered, I at least do not have that answer.

Another way to think about child authors, child readers, and child reviewers is simpler. One day they will be adults. Many great writers wrote books when they were children. Among children’s authors, Louisa May Alcott, J. K. Rowling, and Jacqueline Wilson did this. Among adult authors, Jane Austen, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, and Virginia Woolf all wrote stories, poems, and pretend newspapers as children. Inside every child author is an adult author who will one day emerge. Christopher Paolini has already emerged, and it will be interesting to see the result.

Michael Dowling, sole author of this essay, is one half of the author Tobias Druitt; the other half is his mother, Diane Purkiss. Their books are Corydon and the Island of Monsters, Corydon and the Fall of Atlantis, and Corydon and the Siege of Troy (forthcoming in the U.S.), all published by Knopf in the U.S. and by Simon and Schuster in the U.K. They retell Greek myths, but the monsters are good and the heroes cowardly. They have also been recently translated into French, by Stan Barets, and a number of other languages, including Czechoslovakian. Michael is fifteen and has started school at Abingdon. He’s been homeschooled for eighteen months, like Paolini.

Roran: The Reluctant Hero

J. FITZ GERALD MCCURDY

In heroic stories, the hero is usually easy to spot-especially when the book is named after him. But her. McCurdy explains how a secondary character, Roran, not only resembles a greater archetypal hero than the title character Eragon, but perhaps also more fully shapes the true heroic core of the Inheritance Cycle itself.

Before I began writing this article, I was curious about what critics were saying about the books in the Inheritance Cycle, so I searched the Internet to get a sense of the critical consensus. Among the thousands of results, the majority were fan driven, sharing a common “this is the best book ever written” theme. Many, particularly those posted by publishers and booksellers, seemed obviously generated to sell books. A few were written by serious reviewers; others were something else entirely, and ranged in quality from goofy to obscene. All focused solely on the obvious elements of plot and characters and either approved of or poked holes in their development. None qualified as literary criticism.

Breaking with the rigid traditional standards, the eighteenth-century German critic Johann Gottfried Herder conceived of criticism (according to René Wellek in volume II of Dictionary of the History of Idea) as “a process of empathy, of identification, of something intuitive and even subrational.” He held that “in order to understand and interpret a piece of literature [one must] put oneself in the spirit of the piece itself.”

Herder’s view revolutionized the art of literary criticism and was the basis for productive or constructive criticism as opposed to the destructive criticism of that era, which simply applied a measure or standard of comparison—a yardstick for perfection. For example, if destructive criticism were applied today and if J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings was the standard against which all fantasy was measured, Paolini’s Inheritance Cycle probably would have failed . . . along with almost every other modern fantasy book and series out there. As a result, there would be a lot fewer books published, including books that deserve attention but do not quite measure up.

Because I intend to show Roran emerging as an unwitting hero of Inheritance, I did as Herder suggested and put myself “in the spirit of the piece.” Specifically, I focused on Eldest which, in effect, is Roran’s first book, just as Eragon is Eragon’s first. I also looked at Brisingr to strengthen my “Roran for Hero” argument. I approached both stories with several questions in mind: What did Paolini set out to do? Why did he give Roran a major role in Eldest ? Was his plan sound and practical, and did he succeed in carrying it out? What effect do Roran’s segments have on Eragon? And what, if anything, does the author do to get his hero back on track in book three?

To understand Roran’s emergence as hero, it is necessary to understand the author’s intent with respect to Inheritance in general and to Eragon in particular. Paolini’s own words in an essay written for Random House provide a partial answer: “All I really wanted to do was share the epics floating around in my head with other people—writing was something I just had to master in order to make those sagas reality. . . . When I graduated from high school, I wanted to write a pure, dyed-in-the-wool hero story. So I immediately plotted out a trilogy based on my ideals of the archetypal maturation plot.”

Eragon and its subsequent success are ample proof of Paolini’s ability to plot and write a pure, well-paced hero story. This is important because he succeeded so well in book one that there was no need for Paolini to insinuate Roran into the story beyond teasing us with his presence—subtle foreshadowing that perhaps we weren’t yet done with Roran. As readers we can smell a hero even before we reach the part where fifteen-year-old Eragon grasps the mysterious blue stone. Despite the author’s inexperience, which shows in the lack of emotional depth in his characters and his often bumpy writing (after all, he was still a teenager), Paolini created a hero in the true mythic sense. While far from over, Eragon’s journey is modeled after the universal pattern of the mythological hero journey Joseph Campbell called the mono-myth . In Campbell’s words in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow men.”

Seeking revenge for the death of his uncle, Eragon ventures forth in the company of wise old Brom and Saphira, the dragon hatchling, leaving behind everything and everyone he has ever known. Along the way, he bonds with his dragon, spars with Brom until his body is black and blue, uses his magic to zap bad things, rescues an elf maid, slays the shade Durza, experiences pain, suffering, and loss, and is on the brink of embarking on the deeper, darker journey within himself.

About subsequent books in Inheritance Paolini had this to say in an interview with Kit Spring in The Observer: “I want to show what I can do. And I think even the first draft of . . . Eldest . . . is better than the last draft of Eragon.” He elaborated further to Dave Welch in a three-way interview with Philip Pullman and Tamora Pierce on www.powells.com: “My second and third book, as I see it, are opportunities to expand upon the original archetypes and try to bring a depth to the world that I haven’t seen done or in ways that I want to explore personally. . . . I chose to have Eragon mature and learn throughout the course of my story because, for one thing, it’s one of the archetypal fantasy elements.”

It’s a good plan. And yes, maturation is an archetypal element of fantasy. The challenge, though, is to show the hero growing older and becoming wiser without making him aware he is doing so. In Eldest, instead of maturing and gaining wisdom as a result of his adventures on the journey, Eragon voluntarily veers far off course; he consciously grows in maturity and wisdom among the elves. It’s a bit like having a character confront adversity and realize immediately its cumulative effect by exclaiming, “Cool! I just gained self-confidence!” What’s missing is the sense of the hero’s wonder when, by his actions in some future trial, he realizes that he’s been changed by something he can’t quite put his finger on. Separating the hero’s maturation from the journey is like reading a song without the music.

It didn’t work when Luke Skywalker went off to train with Yoda in Star Wars, and it doesn’t work in Eldest. For one thing, the process is far too long for what Eragon gets out of it, as we learn in the battle scenes at the end of the book; it fills 450 of the book’s 668 pages in my edition. For another, it upsets the rhythm and balance of the story and dilutes and weakens the entire journey, diminishing Eragon’s role. As a result, Eldest is less bold and original than Eragon, whose hero and dragon delighted us as they delighted in each other. There was an impressive simplicity in the way Paolini dealt with the notion of a teenage boy finding himself with a swiftly growing female dragon on his hands.

Enter Roran.

At first reading, it appears that the Roran segments were added to Eldest after the book was written, perhaps at the urging of an editor in order to sate readers’ appetites for action and to have Roran conveniently on hand at the end of the book, ready to set out with Eragon to save Katrina in book three. But in the interview on Powell’s, posted before Eldest was published, Paolini explained his plan: “In Book Two, I switch viewpoints to Eragon’s cousin, Roran. For a large part of the book, I’m flipping back and forth. That gave me the ability to move to a more mature character and explore some stuff I really can’t deal with with Eragon at this point.” For the most part, Paolini sticks with his plan in Brisingr , flipping back and forth between Roran and Eragon. (Curiously, once or twice he also flips to Saphira’s and Nasuada’s points of view. Because their brief musings do nothing to advance the plot, those segments are disappointing; I felt tricked when I thought I was flipping to Roran only to find my way blocked.)

Whatever his reason for inserting Roran into the story as a major character, Paolini could not have known that he was creating a hero whose amazing accomplishments would completely overshadow Eragon. If he had known, I think he would have left Roran back in Carvahall. There are no rules of fantasy that limit the number of heroes an author can include in a story. If there were, Steven Erikson’s magnificent Malazan Book of the Fallen, with its dozens of heroes, would be in serious trouble. But Erikson’s heroes don’t diminish one another, they complement each other, whereas in Eldest, each flip from Roran’s action sequences to Eragon’s passive study feels like a stumble.

While Roran is slogging through ankle-deep mud and tripping over corpses, fighting alongside the villagers against Empire soldiers and non-human Ra’zac, and while they are all weeping over their dead, crushed by the sight of ten-year-old Elmund among the casualties, the story flips to Eragon. We find ourselves adrift, literally, on a raft floating down the Az Ragni carrying Eragon, Orik, and Arya in the direction of Ellesméra, only to discover our erstwhile hero struggling to memorize the names of his seven dwarf companions as kingfishers and jackdaws flit above the water and the occasional bullfrog croaks from the ferns growing wild along the riverbank.

While Roran’s days and nights are filled with fear and dread, for Eragon time passes in a “hazy dream of warm afternoons” and suppers around a campfire under a blanket of magic Arya casts to keep the mosquitoes away. While the Ra’zac are snatching Katrina from Roran’s arms and Roran is struggling to save his beloved and himself, suffering a snapped wrist and a debilitating shoulder wound for his efforts, Eragon continues his uneventful journey to the land of the elves, riding an elven horse that won’t even let him fall off.

And while Roran is leading over 300 men, women, and children, not to mention the livestock, across the Spine on the first leg of their long, hard journey to Surda, we suddenly find ourselves in Ellesméra, where time seems to have stopped; while Eragon is theoretically spending long hours studying with Oromis, he doesn’t appear to actually be doing much of anything. In the images that remain, he mopes over Arya (who continues to reject his advances), shaves with magic, mopes over Arya, gets annoyed when the elves lavish more attention on Saphira than on him, mopes over Arya, and examines his ears as they metamorphose into points.

In Brisingr, while Roran is disobeying his commanding officer to save his men from sure slaughter, and undergoing severe punishment for insubordination at the whipping post, Eragon, acting as Nasuada’s ambassador to broker an alliance with the dwarves, is stomping impatiently about Tronjheim, behaving in a manner that would have a real ambassador turning away red-faced. If it wasn’t for Orik the dwarf, Eragon’s negotiations would have ended in disaster and resulted in a major setback for the Varden in their war against Galbatorix. (Orik manages to keep Eragon under control and, through his own efforts, emerges as king of the dwarf nations—no thanks to Eragon—and hero of these segments of the story.)

Are those the actions of a hero? What happened to the boy from book one who pitted himself and his dragon against the Urgals . . . the boy who earned the name Shadeslayer for killing Durza?

Whatever the reason, Paolini determined that it was important for Eragon to spend this time with the elves. Perhaps he meant it as a device to force Eragon to take that other journey that is part of the monomyth—the journey within that ultimately leads to self-knowledge. The hours Eragon spends concentrating on beetles in order to open his mind to all that is happening around him is reminiscent of what man aspired to in earlier myths. For example, in nineteenth-century mythology the hero is seized by the very essence of things. Leo Frobenius, in volume III of the Dictionary of the History of Ideas, argued that man “receives from the realities that surround him, a deeper knowledge, a kind of revelation of the inner order and meaning of nature. Ultimately, he is ‘seized’ by that which is divine in things, and this experience is the source of all creations—religious and mythological, artistic and social.” I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the author’s purpose in diverting Eragon from the main journey. He appears to have a sound knowledge of the elements that go into the making of earlier myths.

Still, despite the author’s intention, the segments dealing with Eragon’s training process are boring at times, mainly because, as mentioned earlier, they are too long. Besides, they place Eragon on the sidelines, effectively removing him from the active segments of the story and diminishing his character. Thankfully, Roran is there to pick up the slack. As he commences his own desperate journey, Roran becomes, arguably, much more interesting than Eragon ever was.

The Christian Science Monitor’s review noted that Roran’s sequences are the strongest in the book. The Boston Globe agreed: “The far better half of the book is the story of Eragon’s foster brother, Roran.” If action were the sole criterion for the making of a hero, Roran would be a hero by that standard alone. His story, jammed into 180 pages (less than one-third of the book), is perhaps even more intense because of its brevity compared to Eragon’s longer, less interesting sequences.

The ancient Greeks would have hailed Roran as a tame hero, one who exemplifies temperance—that cardinal virtue of moderation, self-knowledge, and self-restraint so admired by Greek society. He is a pillar of sanity under Galbatorix’s insane regime. And he always thinks things through and then acts accordingly, showing good sense as opposed to frivolity. Roran already possesses that which Eragon is searching for: self-knowledge. He, more than any other character in the first two books of Inheritance, truly knows himself.

Unlike Eragon, who has Saphira, a magic sword, and a following of admirers, Roran has nothing. He has lost his father and his farm. And although he and Katrina are deeply in love, without money or prospects he can’t ask her father Sloan for her hand. When Galbatorix’s soldiers, accompanied by the flesh-eating Ra’zac, descend on Carvahall looking for him and the Ra’zac devour one of the villagers, Roran comes out of hiding to help defend the village. In a fierce battle that leaves many villagers dead, Roran is forced to kill for the first time. When Katrina is taken and the Ra’zac threaten the inhabitants of Carvahall with death or slavery, Roran realizes that the village is lost. After carefully assessing the situation, he acts decisively and inspires the villagers to abandon Carvahall and follow him to Surda to cast their lot with the Varden in its war against the Empire. The last lines of his impassioned speech to the villagers are especially rousing:

We’ve fought the soldiers and the Ra’zac, but it means nothing if we die alone and forgotten. . . . We cannot stay here, and I won’t allow Galbatorix to obliterate everything that’s worth living for. I would rather have my eyes plucked out and my hands chopped off than see him triumph! I choose to fight! I choose to step from my grave and let my enemies bury themselves in it! I choose to leave Carvahall.

With no promises of a safe return, the villagers follow Roran, embarking on what will prove a long, arduous journey over land and sea before they finally arrive at their destination. The journey segments are well crafted. The pacing is excellent. Along the way, the hardships they face make them stronger and more determined than ever to press onward. The Boston Globe reminds us that “in the process, as Paolini ably shows, Roran is reluctantly becoming a king, hating leadership, counting every enemy he has to kill, wanting nothing more than to get back to farming—and doing the job because the job needs doing. Roran is a hero we want to meet again.”

While I agree with that assessment, it barely scratches the surface of Roran’s character. When we interpret his words, thoughts, and actions, we discover the qualities that define him and mark him for leadership. We like him because we want to see something of ourselves reflected in his character. We want to imagine that we are as courageous, as compassionate, as loyal as he. We trust him because we believe he’d sacrifice his own life to save ours. When he finally relents and assumes command of the villagers, Roran takes his responsibilities seriously and strives to be a good leader, a father or shepherd to his flock. While his duty to protect his people takes precedence over everything else, he makes time for the individual needs and concerns of every man, woman, and child under his care, always careful to deal with each person as an equal.

As Roran becomes a leader, the villagers begin to treat him as one. In a touching passage, somewhere between the coastal ports of Narda and Teirm one of the village women approaches Roran and asks him for a favor. Ever since her husband was murdered by Katrina’s father, her young son will not listen to her. She fears he has grown wild and willful and is stealing food to play dice with the sailors on their barge: “You have ever dealt generously with Mandel. If you talk with him, he will listen.” Roran tells her to put her heart at ease; he will speak with Mandel. Roran takes the boy under his wing, but instead of confronting him about stealing food and showing disrespect to his mother, he bolsters Mandel’s self-confidence by heaping responsibility on his young shoulders. Paolini does a fine job in showing us this nurturing side of Roran’s character.

In the following passage, Paolini treats us to a demonstration of Roran’s determination and powers of persuasion: As enemy sloops close in on Dragon Wing, the ship Roran and his companions stole in Teirm, Roran realizes that their only chance of avoiding capture is to cross the Boar’s Eye, a vast whirlpool between the coastal islands Nía and Bierland near Surda. He needs to know if it’s possible to cross the Eye. The captain is horrified.

Roran nodded. “I know it’s not something you want to risk, Uthar, but our options are limited. I’m no seaman, so I must rely upon your judgment: Can we cross the Eye?”

The captain hesitated. “Maybe, maybe not. You’d have t’ be stark raving mad to go nearer’n five miles of that monster.”

Pulling out his hammer, Roran banged it on the table, leaving a dent a half-inch deep. “Then I’m stark raving mad!” He held Uthar’s gaze until the sailor shifted with discomfort. . . . “We . . . dared to abandon our homes and cross the Spine. Jeod dared to imagine we could steal the Dragon Wing. What will you dare, Uthar? If we can brave the Eye and live to tell the tale, you shall be hailed as one of the greatest mariners in history. Now answer me and answer me well and true: Can this be done?”

This is one of the most powerful scenes in Eldest simply because it rings so true. We know it happened. We know that if we went on board the Dragon Wing, we would see the dent Roran’s hammer left on the chart table. In that passage alone, Paolini manages to convince us that Roran is believable. By that, I mean that he is believable in the same way that Odysseus is believable when, as Aldous Huxley recounts in his Collected Essays, he tells about seeing:

six of the best and bravest of his companions lifted, struggling, into the air, to hear their screams, the desperate repetition of his own name, and how he could only look on, helplessly, while Scylla “at the mouth of her cave devoured them, still screaming, still stretching out their hands to me in the frightful struggle,” and then he says that it was the most dreadful and lamentable sight he ever saw in all his “explorings of the passes of the sea.”

As Huxley remarks, “We believe Odysseus because Homer makes us believe.”

No essay examining Roran’s emergence from obscurity to fantasy hero would be complete without considering magic. For in the final analysis, it is magic, or rather the absence of magic, that wins the day in Eldest. In book one, Eragon wields magic for all the right reasons, such as healing and battling powerful enemies. Magic has a purpose and is treated with respect and awe. It is a power to be used wisely and sparingly. But, as Jack Mock found in his review in the online magazine Virtue, it “is quite a stumbling block for Eldest.” Because Eragon uses magic for mundane things like shaving, “the magic loses its sense of purpose and utterly cheapens the entire legend that Paolini created. The magic isn’t really there for a solid, reasonable purpose anymore. . . . It seems contrived and steals the show from otherwise convincing interactions with characters and well-imagined confrontations.”

In Brisingr, Eragon uses magic for almost every function he performs. On one occasion, he employs magic to extract three gold nuggets from the soil, which he uses to make amends for wrongs he did to others, such as repayment for meat he stole to feed Saphira before leaving Carvahall. This take-what-you-want-and-repay-by-magic is too easy. It’s the sort of wrong-thinking that Roran would never allow himself to be accused of.

Most likely, Paolini threw in Eragon’s shaving scenes to add touches of humor to the long maturation sequences. But there is nothing funny about Eragon’s use of magic in Brisingr, as the gold example clearly illustrates. I can’t help but wonder if Paolini acted imprudently in allowing Eragon’s capricious use of magic. It might come back to nick his hero on the chin. And we mustn’t forget about that wretched child back in Surda who knows only too well what can happen when Eragon misuses magic (though I found the elves far more frightening than Eragon in their use of magic to force nature to conform to their desires).

My point here is that Eragon is steeped in magic. Before he departs from Ellesméra to join the Varden at the battle in the final pages of Eldest, Oromis presents him with the belt of Beloth the Wise, which contains diamonds for reserves of power. He can also use the large ruby mounted in the pommel of his sword for the same purpose. But despite all his powers, despite his physical training with the elves and the decades of learning crammed into months, despite his fire-breathing dragon, Eragon performs poorly on the battlefield. His magic is nothing when he fights Murtagh.

Enter Roran once again.

Perhaps the most awe-inspiring aspect of Roran is that he possesses neither magic nor a fire-breathing dragon. Driven by his love for Katrina and a sense of responsibility for the villagers, he sets out on his journey armed only with a hammer. Yet through sheer determination he manages to deliver his people to Surda, only to arrive in the midst of the Battle of the Burning Plains. Undaunted, Roran assesses the situation, determines that the nasty Twins (who we suspect ran off after betraying the Varden in Eragon) pose the most serious threat, and realizes they must be eliminated. In a single paragraph, Paolini describes the most important event in the entire battle:

[Eragon and Murtagh] watched as Roran hid behind a mound of bodies. Eragon stiffened as the Twins looked toward the pile. For a moment it seemed they had spotted him, then they turned away and Roran jumped up. He swung his hammer and bashed one of the Twins in the head, cracking open his skull. The remaining Twin fell to the ground convulsing, and emitted a wordless scream until he too met his end under Roran’s hammer.

The death of the Twins is the deciding factor in the battle. The enemy falters and then flees in disarray. Once again Roran has stepped up and done a job that needed doing. And he does it all without magic. Or does he? Perhaps his magic comes from within—from that hidden core of inner strength that we hope resides in all of us to be called upon in times of need or when we struggle to do the right thing.

Who is the real hero of Eldest? By examining and comparing the roles of Eragon and Roran, this essay has attempted to show that Roran emerges, albeit reluctantly, as the hero of book two of Inheritance. Once the author decides to give him a larger role, Roran becomes crucial to the story. His extraordinary adventures provide the strongest sequences in the book and, by contrast, relegate Eragon to a lesser place. If they were deleted, Eldest would not be as satisfying a read. Despite his brief appearances in Eragon, in it Roran’s character is firmly established. He is solid, dependable, and resolute—the big brother Eragon looks up to. Paolini may not have foreseen that Roran would act in character in Eldest and through his actions rise to such heroic heights. But from Roran’s point of view, there was a job that needed doing, and he did it very well indeed. In Brisingr, his segments, more than any others in the book, advance the plot swiftly. His heroic nature remains untarnished and can’t be dulled by shorter chapters or enhanced by Eragon’s protective magic. Roran is the Everyman hero. We readily identify with him; he is a mortal, living out his life in the shadow of death and disaster, and we feel that his actions have the quality of nobility, dignity, and courage.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once remarked, “Every hero becomes a bore at last.” Let us hope that Roran doesn’t fall prey to this syndrome. He is definitely a hero we want to see more of.

J. FitzGerald McCurdy was born in Ontario, Canada, but insists she grew up in J. R. R. Tolkien’s mythical land of Gondor. She is the author of the bestselling fantasy trilogy The Serpent’s Egg. Her latest series, The Mole Wars, follows the adventures of Steele and his companions in the world of the Mole People under New York City. A retired lawyer, McCurdy has also worked as a documentary film writer. She lives in Ottawa. Visit her Web site at www.jfitzgeraldmccurdy.com.

The Magic of Anthropomorphic Animals

In the Inheritance Cycle and Beyond

NANCY YI FAN

We tell stories to relate to one another, but sometimes, what we want to communicate is better expressed trought characters that aren’t human at all. When we tell stories about animals and nonhuman creatures, we often imbue them with our own characeristics to help us relate to them, to make the story we’re telling more accessible. In the essay below, Fan explores the many aspects of this practice, and shows how literature has been wastly enriched by the use fot wise spiders, preening dragons, and talking lions.

Eragon, Eldest, and Brisingr, the first three books of the Inheritance Cycle, tell the story of the young Rider Eragon and his dragon Saphira as they go up against the forces of the evil king Galbatorix. As I read through the books, I was deeply impressed by Saphira’s human-like nature and her superpowers. She stayed in my mind long after I finished the last page. Because of Saphira, I also thought of other anthropomorphic characters like Charlotte the spider, Aslan the lion, Black Beauty, and Hazel the rabbit. My mind wandered back to Aesop’s animals, and then further back still. . . .

Anthropomorphism is a form of personification in which we assign human characteristics such as emotions, intelligence, and verbal communication skills to animals. Tales of anthropomorphic animals were first inspired by humans’ fear and awe of the unknown, perhaps when a prehistoric caveman dashed into his hut, scared shivering because of a saber-toothed tiger. Grunting and gesturing before the campfire, he used his experience and imagination to conjure the powers of animal spirits to life. Thousands of years later, the terror may be gone, but the fascination remains as fresh as ever.

Why, in our modern world, do we still like reading about anthropomorphic animals? Perhaps when many live in urban areas free of wildlife, it begins with a curiosity about animals themselves. Look in the mirror: Do you have an antler on your head? A tuft of feathers? Some smoke pouring out of your nostrils? Animals are so different from us. Yet we expect them to behave with human characteristics, giving them names like “mourning dove,” “praying mantis,” and “black widow.” The Austrian philosopher Martin Buber wrote, “An animal’s eyes have the power to speak a great language.” When the mystery around animals builds up, our desire to communicate with them leads us to create or enter a world of anthropomorphic animals.

Yet that’s only what starts us reading books like Eragon and Eldest—“explaining nature” evolved through thousands of years into using personified animals as a medium of entertainment, teaching, and tradition. We savor the originality these animals display, we laugh, learn, generation after generation. Like metal, they are good conductors; like metal, they are treasured.

Originality

A hard knot formed in his stomach as unfathomable sapphire eyes gazed back at him. For the first time he did not think of the dragon as an animal. It was something else, something . . . different. (Eragon)

Anthropomorphic animals are appealing because they offer something that doesn’t exist in the real world. Something new emerges when human and animal characteristics are combined. Mottled in the shadows of reality, these characteristics are exciting because they are tantalizingly familiar, but blink, and you find they are not quite so. From that combination, anthropomorphic animals can have a seemingly illogical juxtaposition of roles and can do almost magical things their real-world counterparts never do.

It’s puzzling how opposing characteristics can exist in a creature without seeming ridiculous. But it’s a special mark of anthropomorphic animals and is used to sculpt the most important part of those characters’ identity. The nature of personified animals as both human- and animal-like is what makes such impossibilities possible. For example, the most noticeable conflicting characteristics within Saphira are that she’s really old and young at the same time. True, her actual age is only a few months, but she’d lain curled in her egg for a century, quite aware of the elves and humans around her all those years. Because she is an anthropomorphic character, she can act out being both old and young. We know that animals rely on inherited instincts to live. Humans, on the other hand, must learn their life skills. Having the characteristics of both animals and humans, Saphira behaves authoritatively and commandingly at one moment, and immaturely at another. After all, by instinct she has many magical powers deeper than Eragon can understand. Still, she has yet to fully understand or learn to control them herself—how she turned Brom’s grave into diamond and placed a gedwëy ignasia on Elva. And though her knowledge of the dragons and judgment of men exceeds Eragon’s, it is from him that she learns language, a rudimentary skill for humans. Her rapidly switching role from teacher to charge can be seen in the scene in Eragon right after Saphira carries Eragon away from Carvahall to avoid the Ra’zac, strangers in their village:

Why do the strangers frighten you?

Murderers, she hissed.

Garrow is in danger and you kidnap me on this ridiculous journey! Are you unable to protect me? She growled deeply and snapped her jaws.

Saphira points out to Eragon the danger he does not realize, knowing instinctively that the Ra’zac are enemies. Yet when Eragon, in his ignorance, lectures back at her, she doesn’t say anything. She allows Eragon to be back in charge.

Another fascinating aspect of anthropomorphic animals is their behavior: In Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White, Charlotte the spider saves her friend Wilbur the pig by spinning words on her web. Spinning a web comes naturally to spiders, but it is a human ability to modify one’s skill to suit a new purpose; it is human competence to understand the meaning of words, and human nature to have compassion. Combining these things, spinning words on a web to save someone else, is something to wonder about; it creates a trait belonging solely to the anthropomorphic spider. Originality is an important aspect of what makes animal fantasy so compelling for readers.

Entertainment

Eragon.
“Is that all you can say?” he snapped.
Yes. (Eragon)

Ha ha! Anthropomorphic animals are also enthralling because they entertain. Laughter cures us of boredom and stress. We can’t suppress a grin when we see characters act silly, and who wouldn’t be delighted at unexpected and exaggerated actions? However, with their cleverness, their special abilities, their different point of view (and a quirk or two), anthropomorphic animals have a special way of winning our smiles.

In animal fantasy, because we accept that animals are unfamiliar, we set aside our expectations and wait patiently for every new detail. Remarks that we may pass over in human characters suddenly sound clever and different when spoken by animals. For example, Saphira answers yes when Eragon asks if his name is all she can say. A baby dragon saying it makes it amusing, but suppose a normal human were to say such a thing, then the line would lose its luster. Why? The key reason is that we always underestimate the intelligence of anthropomorphic animal characters, and we delight in being surprised and proven wrong.

Clever remarks can bring about a grin, but it’s the descriptions of the special abilities of animals that really excite us. “Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings at a single bound....” It’s Superman . . . or is it Saphira? Though we’re drawn to the abilities of animals just as we’re drawn to those of human superheroes, animals’ abilities are real—or at least more scientifically plausible. We see them. And through reading, we get to experience them. Here Eragon rides Saphira as she flies:

Even as they plummeted toward the ground, there was no fear of collision. They snapped open their wings at just the right moment, pulling out of the dive with their combined strength. Slanting toward the sky, they shot up and continued back over into a giant loop. (Eragon)

Because anthropomorphic animals have the abilities we don’t, they remain fun and exciting no matter how many times we read about them.

Another great source of entertainment comes from reading about an animal’s perspective. We have to admit, we all can be a bit little self-conscious, and want to know what others think of us. Learning the thoughts of anthropomorphic animals in fantasy is interesting, because we never get to know what animals think in real life. What do animals think of humans, and how do they think of themselves? After Eragon rides Saphira, they talk:

Once he had recovered, he exclaimed, That was incredible! How can you bear to land when you enjoy flying so much?

I must eat, she said with some amusement.

When we glimpse an animal’s point of view, we feel connected and thus interested.

It’s also entertaining when an animal possesses a quality that surprises us. When we read about an animal—a dragon, for instance—we think of traits automatically relating to dragons, such as nobility and bravery. When an anthropomorphic animal suddenly displays the opposite of what we expect, it’s hard not to giggle as if shown a secret. They make us rethink what we have taken for granted. One of my favorite humorous scenes in Eldest is when Saphira drinks mead at a dwarves’ celebration:

Even Saphira took a sip of mead, and finding that she liked it, the dwarves rolled out a whole barrel for her. Delicately lowering her mighty jaws through the cask’s open end, she drained it with three long draughts, then tilted her head toward the ceiling and belched a giant tongue of flame.

The noble dragon, who has helped win a battle, suddenly takes interest in something modern—a cask of beer. The entertainment level rises as we see exaggerated foolishness:

Eragon stood and bowed, which brought more cheers. Beside him, Saphira reared and swung a foreleg across her chest, attempting to duplicate his move. She tottered, and the dwarves, realizing their danger, scrambled away from her. They were barely in time. With a loud whoosh, Saphira fell backward, landing flat on a banquet table.

Quirks in characters make them entertaining for us. After all, we know we could not possibly display similar ridiculousness.

Learning

“Open your mind, Eragon. Open your mind and listen to the world around you, to the thoughts of every being in this glade, from the ants in the trees to the worms in the ground....” (Eldest)

When we read about anthropomorphic animals in literature, it is like being handed a present. Curiosity may compel us to start flipping the pages, but as we become immersed in the story, we gain knowledge and morals, and ways to expand our imagination and strengths. Who knew? Our gains are greater than our expectations.

Knowledge and Morals

Readers notice it instantly when the personified animal in a story displays a trait that an animal normally doesn’t have in real life. This can be a way to deepen the story’s moral context and facilitate understanding, because it lets us look at human nature from a more removed angle. We can see ourselves better that way.

In the Inheritance Cycle, Saphira is linked with Eragon, and they can converse through their thoughts, share their strength, even combine their consciousness. Indeed, they are “a soul dwelling in two bodies,” their magical link a beautiful metaphor for their friendship, and perhaps for our own friendships in our world as well.

In The Trumpet of the Swan by E. B. White, Louis the swan is born mute. He decides to go to a school and learns to understand the human language. With chalk and slate to write words, he can communicate with humans but still not with swans. His father steals a trumpet for him, and Louis leaves for the human civilization to make money to pay for the stolen instrument with his trumpet-playing. The story ends happily because Louis can produce the sounds of swans with his trumpet. To me, the moral behind this story is that if you work hard to make up for shortcomings, eventually the shortcomings bring forth talents. Real-life swans do not have trumpets with them, and they do not understand concepts such as money. By using an anthropomorphic swan instead of a human being, the author makes sure that we notice and understand the moral.

Sometimes morals are expressed by using exaggeration and symbolism among animals. A classic fairytale to illustrate this would be the story of the three little pigs. Three pig brothers each build a house: one of straw, one of wood, and one of brick. The Big Bad Wolf wants to eat them, and he huffs and puffs and blows down the first two houses, because these pig brothers were too lazy to take the time to build sturdier ones. Only the brick house remains standing. Here the Wolf’s breath is exaggerated in order to symbolize the test of time. Though humorous and entertaining, the story of the three little pigs solemnly warns us not to be lazy. The wonderful thing about personified animals in fantasy is that they need not cause you terrible anguish or torture you to tears, yet they can carry the weight of important messages just the same.

Imagination

Personified animals help expand our imagination by testing readers’ creativity as they follow the storyline. Because realistic fiction is usually confined to representing the normal rules of life, the possibilities for variation in them are limited. However, anthropomorphic animals, themselves otherworldly, offer surprises in their stories that dare us to logically analyze and draw conclusions in unfamiliar circumstances. These animals unlock doors but leave them unopened for us to explore further—showing us something new but leaving it up to us to make sense of it . . . and then even apply what we have learned to the real world. For instance, the background of the Inheritance Cycle’s storyline mainly concerns the welfare and future of the dragons, elves, dwarves, and humans. The near extinction of the dragons causes an unbalance of power and warfare. One can connect this to our world’s problems—many of our animals are becoming extinct too. Will this ultimately cause warfare in some way? By reading books like Eragon with anthropomorphic animals, we become more aware of our world.

Another book that has really enriched my imagination is The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, by Hugh Lofting. The animal doctor who can speak lots of animal languages proves a man innocent in court by translating the statements of a dog witness, and he asks a fish about the geography of the ocean floor, as well as the whereabouts of Christopher Columbus’s diaries. The animals he talks to have distinct personalities, and they are as smart as any human. It made me wonder: If we could talk to animals, could we solve lots of our everyday problems? Could we know much more about the world?

Confidence and Motivation

Reading the anthropomorphic stories also gives us confidence and motivation. Huge imaginary animals, thrilling us with their power, show us what we should aim for. Saphira is such a creature. She can make deep gorges in the earth when she lands and outdistance any animal with her speed, but she does not flaunt unnecessarily, and she doesn’t turn pompous. That is a power in itself. She bravely bears the burden of being the last female dragon, aiming to fulfill her duty and the expectations of her allies as well as guiding Eragon. Still, she makes mistakes. During her studies with Glaedr, her dragon tutor, she is so distracted by him that she carelessly abandons her studies to try to play. It results in his anger and her injury. She acknowledges her error:

You warned me about Glaedr, but I was too proud to see the truth in your words. . . . I have failed to be a good companion for you, betrayed what it means to be a dragon, and tarnished the honor of the Riders. (Eldest)

When huge, powerful animals can admit their mistakes, we feel that there is no reason why we shouldn’t.

Another supernatural character I admire is Monkey King in Journey to the West, a Chinese classic by Wu Cheng’en. Monkey King can “ride the clouds and mount the mists,” soar 18,000 li with one somersault, and change into seventy-two different forms. But he has learned all these skills through years and years of practice.

Indeed, these animals are what we hope to become. They set examples.

On the other hand (or rather, paw—or claw), small animals give us motivation. We all care for and sympathize with the weak. We want to help them. Kids are small, so we turn to the animal world and act like guardians to even smaller creatures. So when small animals in books do something unexpected, profound, and brave, we feel we can do big things too. Desperaux, a small mouse from The Tale of Desperaux by Kate DiCamillo, saves himself and a human princess from death with stories, words, and a needle. Characters like him inspire.

Mao Zedong once said, “Dare to fly through nine layers of the sky to embrace the moon; dare to dive into five seas to catch a turtle.” This is the courage and spiritual strength that these animals teach us to possess.

Anthropomorphic animals shower us with gifts. They provide us with knowledge and morals so that we can become better people. They enrich our imagination so that we can become more aware of the world and other beings. They guide us by inspiring and setting examples. We might not expect to receive so much from reading a book, but we do—and that gain is a reason why anthropomorphic animals are beloved in literature.

Continuity

As the dragon’s baleful eye fell upon him, Eragon knew that the creature was no mere apparition but a conscious being bound and sustained by magic. . . . In his mind echoed a voice of fire: Our gift so you may do what you must. (Eldest)

Because anthropomorphic animals surprise, entertain, and teach, they withstand the test of time. And the longer they last, the more they surprise, entertain, and teach. It becomes a cycle, increasing the appeal of animal fantasy with every turn. But the cycle might have collapsed if adults hadn’t liked them along with kids. Kids love reading anthropomorphic tales because they are interesting and easy to understand. Grownups recommend that children read the stories because, having read the books themselves, they know how these books easily teach morals that will be useful to their children throughout their lives. When I was small, my parents would read aloud animal stories. When I grew older, my grand-parents told me animal stories. Now I write animal stories.

We’re probably all familiar with Goldilocks and the three bears and Little Red Riding Hood. From fairytales we move on to characters like Winnie-the-Pooh and Disney characters such as Mickey Mouse. “Do animals really talk?” children might ask. Grownups know animals don’t. So why not tell the truth to children? Perhaps the real point of telling children stories of talking rodents, birds, and dragons is, somewhat paradoxically, to guide and prepare them for reality. Reading about the death of a bird or a mouse character can help kids understand and deal with a death of a family member in real life. Animal fantasy shrinks the wide world to a more acceptable, more understandable size. It shows examples of death and other truths that are compelling enough to the reader to affect them, but just distant enough that they can guide without being uncomfortably personal. Because of that, kids reading the books have courage to stretch and deal with bigger concepts that they don’t face at home or school. Personified animals play a crucial role in initiating young people to the world.

The sun and the stars have been with us since the dawn of history. Poets and writers still praise them. So it is with animals. They will never be out of fashion, because they’re going to be with us for a long, long time. And animal fantasy has no boundaries across countries and cultures, because animals are everywhere.

Our love for anthropomorphic animals runs deep in our veins. Confucius once said, “A good horse is praised for virtue, not for strength.” I think the underlying meaning of this remark is that humans ultimately want to search for humanness in other creatures. One would think that an ideal horse would be one who does what we want efficiently: plowing, or pulling a wagon. What do we define as virtue in a horse? The ability to share our values, to fortify what we stand for. We want animals to understand us—to be our friends. Even if wild horses show more strength and speed than the virtuous domestic horses, we do not call them “good horse,” because they are so distant from humans. Perhaps we feel deep inside ourselves that humans and animals are intricately linked.

We turn to stories with anthropomorphic animals to gratify our curiosity, as I have expressed in the poem below:

Animal characters parade across the pages
And out to us, raising wings and tails, together cradling
The dreams of small, sleeping children.
What are they but some sort of strange art,
Like a bronze mirror. We pick it up and look at it
Because it’s different. But in the end
We see ourselves. They seem to say—
Animals and humans, we breathe the same air,
We share the same nature. Combined,
Humanlike animals envelop us in a fine crystalline mist
Showing us our past, present, and future
through all space.

Anthropomorphic animals are like a kaleidoscope. Human characteristics and animal characteristics whirl together, amazing us with bits of originality, surprising us, assuring us with their everlasting charm. We watch, riveted, through all the colorful, unending variations—emotional horses, brave mice in armor, tea-drinking birds . . . and among them a blue dragon, swooping in the air, thoughts linked with her Rider’s. . . .

What magic.

Nancy Yi Fan is the New York Times bestselling author of Swordbird (2007). She spent the first part of her childhood in China, where she was born in 1993. She is a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and has been a straight-A student since elementary school. Birds, a lifelong passion of the author, provided the inspiration for Swordbird and her new fantasy novel Sword Quest (2008). When she isn’t writing, she performs martial arts and takes good care of her pet lovebirds, Ever-sky, Dippler, and Pandora. She currently lives in Florida with her parents.

My Dragon, Myself

KELLY MCCLYMER

The bond between dragon and Rider is an essential part of the Inheritance strory-each is made stronger by the other trhough a literal symbiosis Differing experiences, strengths, and points of view make the whole greater than the sun of its parts. But is that necessarily good? Is it possibly even dangerous? or do the benefits outweigh the risks? McClymer asks these questions and more while- examining the relationship between Saphira and Eragon-wich, more than anything else. might be about learning to trust another person (or dragon), whether you expected to or not.

Confession time: I love dragons, and have since the first time I heard of the mythical creatures who liked to kidnap princesses and test the princes who would rescue them. Only the best, bravest, smartest—smartest was always the key—could beat the evil, ravening, blazing beasts and free the princess. This appealed to me, maybe because I loved to doodle and the only recognizable thing I could doodle was a princess: billowing triangulation for a base, round head with long flowing hair, stick arms, and a pair of slippers peeping out under the skirt. Easy peasy. I must have doodled a million princesses in my time in school. Occasionally I’d try a dragon (theoretically a snake with scales and wings, right?). But my artistic talent was limited, so I always went back to princesses.

I can’t remember when I first learned about dragons, but I recall they were all vicious, cranky creatures who were only good for starting forest fires and allowing brave princes to defeat them—the embodiment of evil that could not be reasoned with, as it were. It was Kenneth Grahame’s The Reluctant Dragon that clued me in that there was a side of the story I’d been missing. Maybe a few of those princesses had not wanted to be rescued? Maybe. It was hard to imagine at first, but there were other authors who had asked the question, and other stories for me to read that gave the dragon’s side of things. I teetered toward sympathy for dragons at last. Maybe they’d just gotten a few millennia of bad press? Maybe they weren’t all evil flame and poison smoke? Evil or just misunderstood—what was the truth?

I had my answer after I heard “Puff the Magic Dragon.” My heart bled for the poor misunderstood dragon abandoned by little Jackie Paper. I knew I would never have abandoned my old friend Puff if I’d been lucky enough to have a dragon for a friend. Eagerly embracing the idea that dragons weren’t always bad at last, I devoured the works of Anne McCaffrey and other authors who portrayed dragons in a more enlightened fashion. These beasts could be friend or foe, had good and bad traits, and were never the mindlessly evil beasts of the old tales like Beowulf, where the dragon is fierce enough to give the fabled warrior a mortal wound in an epic battle but where naturally Beowulf gets top billing and the dragon gets the part of the bad guy.

In college, I studied the stories using terms like motif, metaphor, allegory, and symbolism. Early storytellers had liked the idea of the dragon as a symbol for evil (body of snake, wings, fire-breathing—all great clues to a rather nasty character, I guess). Contemporary storytellers—we curious creatures—began to explore the dragon’s point of view further. It must be trying to have everyone hate you, right? The dragon metaphor developed from one of primal destruction and pure evil to one representing great power—power not necessarily in the service of evil, but not necessarily in the service of good either. Most often the power of dragons in contemporary literature is leashed and guided by humans. Working together, human and dragon can do great good or great evil. Writers have been, and are still, transforming the classic symbol of the dragon into something more powerful and three-dimensional.

Eragon impressed me, when I first heard of it, primarily for the fact that it had been written by a teen. Having written over a dozen novels myself, I knew the commitment, talent, hard work, and luck that went into the writing of a novel—never mind the hard work and luck that goes into getting it published. I was curious about this novel by a mere teenager, especially considering my fondness for dragons. I was delighted, however, when I delved into the books and discovered Paolini had continued the trend of expanding the dragon mythos and then taken it even further.

I confess I read the story of a young boy and his exploration of the Spine with a touch of impatience. I was waiting for the dragon I knew was to come (how could Eragon become a Dragon Rider, as the book blurb promised, unless there was a dragon to be introduced?). What kind of dragon would it be? I wondered as Eragon found a blue rock. I pictured something friendly, an ally, as he tried to trade his rock for meat and the butcher refused. I wondered if the dragon would breathe fire as the trader struck the rock with his blade and created a ringing noise.

For some reason, I had been expecting a full-grown dragon. Saphira surprised me when her egg—the blue rock—finally hatched. A baby dragon? What good was that when the Ra’zac were after Eragon? But Paolini took care of my disappointment even before it had fully formed. Eragon hears the dragon’s thoughts, and she his. His discovery of an intriguing blue “stone” in the Spine results in a bond between himself and the newly hatched baby dragon—formed with a touch and represented by the dragonmark burned onto his palm—that in effect makes the boy and the dragon two halves of a powerful whole that cannot survive apart. He feeds the baby dragon, names her, hides her from the eyes of others until she is too large to be easily killed by those afraid of dragons.

Yet, despite this bond—not entirely desired or easily accepted by either boy or dragon—and despite a growing reluctance to separate from each other even when they must—as in Brisinger when, seeing Saphira for the first time after sending her away while he stayed behind in Helgrind, Eragon realizes that he “had not truly felt safe since he and she had separated”—each still retains their own strengths, weaknesses, and quirks. Neither can force the other to act; each must use reason and argument to sway the other, and they must work together to save their land from the destructive henchmen of King Galbatorix.

Paolini’s dragons are not powerful draft animals to be taught to obey the lead of a human master. They are intelligent creatures who have agreed to become interdependent with humans and elves for the sake of the world in which they all live. Old and wise almost from birth, Saphira is not friendly to the boy she has bonded to, the boy she must protect if she herself wants to continue to live. She is not unfriendly either. She is instead suspicious, jaded and weighed down by the knowledge that her species has been hunted almost to extinction. That the hunt continues to this day and that Eragon, an untried boy of fifteen, is all that stands between Saphira and death is not comforting for the dragon—as it is not for Eragon when he learns just what he has brought upon himself by finding the dragon’s egg and becoming bonded to Saphira for life. However, Paolini is careful to make it clear that boy and dragon both had a choice at the moment of bonding.

Saphira may wonder if Eragon is up for the epic battle ahead of them, but she knows that he has the potential to be a brave and wise partner, if she can keep him safe through training and treachery. She does not hesitate to reassure him of this when the elves question his ability to handle magic and he finds out they believe Saphira made a mistake in choosing a human as her Rider instead of an elf. Saphira reveals that Eragon’s discovery and her hatching had not been chance: Arya had exposed Saphira’s egg to all the elves, and Saphira did not choose any of them. Instead, she chose to hatch for a fifteen-year-old human boy who found her while hunting in the Spine and then attempted to sell, trade, and finally crack her egg with a hammer.

The Saphira introduced to readers of Eragon would be at home in battle with Beowulf. She is fierce and cynical and quick to distrust—it is not until Brom has touched her with not just his mind but his hand that she accepts that this human, the second she has met, is not simply a queer creature but a possible friend to Eragon and to herself. She literally stands between Eragon and Murtagh, growling with warning, when Eragon is injured in a battle with the Ra’zac and Murtagh offers help. There is a raw edge to her power that shows no deference to humans- though she does not devour the head of the slaver that Murtagh struck off in Eragon, she “opened her mouth slightly, as if to snap it up, then appeared to decide better of it and prowled to Eragon’s side.”

Nevertheless, her restraint indicates that if she were to enter a battle with Beowulf, she’d have a good reason for doing so, and the conflict would not be black and white. Saphira is no evil symbol, nor is she a misunderstood and persecuted creature. She is awesome power embodied, more than capable of bringing quick death to those who challenge her even a few months after her hatching. But she does not seek death for death’s sake. Even when she discovers that Murtagh is the son of the first forsworn, Morzan, she stops herself from tearing him to pieces, despite her “fangs, bared, tail raised threateningly.” Along with her wisdom comes a patience that tempers the terrible powers that she possesses. Most of the time, Saphira has the ability to tame her suspicions while she gathers evidence.

Saphira’s concern with Eragon’s youth and inexperience comes through occasionally, especially during Eragon: When Eragon says after a close call, “I’ll not forget that again,” she retorts, “You shouldn’t have forgotten at all.” But Paolini shows how her bond with Eragon grows stronger as they travel together, surviving one misfortune after another. The first time Saphira says, “I love you, little one,” occurs in Eragon directly after Eragon and Murtagh have quarreled over the beheading of the slaver, and after Eragon has struggled with his own conscience and decided firmly that “It was still wrong.” Still, Saphira doesn’t hesitate to show her own fierce nature—one that would be untempered if not for Eragon—by saying in Murtagh’s defense, “The men who buy and sell other humans deserve every misfortune that befalls them.” She confesses that if it were not for the need to bring Arya to the healers, she would track all the slavers and tear them apart. But her wisdom shows too, in this same scene, when she counsels Eragon to put aside his confusion about the actions of the past, understand that there are not always answers, and “learn what you can about Murtagh and forgive him.”

Paolini illustrates the uneasy—and potentially dangerous—alliance between boy and dragon right from the beginning, first when Eragon is knocked senseless the first time he touches the baby dragon, and next when Eragon, a young and fragile human, must ride the dragon bareback in order to flee his uncle’s killers. On that first mad flight Saphira’s rough scales rub the flesh off Eragon’s thighs until he is bloodied and almost unable to hang on until they reach safety. And yet the dragon is not all razor-sharp spines and sandpaper scales. When they are stranded high in the frigid air of the Spine, her wings shelter the exhausted Eragon from the wind and cold.

Paolini lays out the dangers to both Eragon and Saphira due to their bond in the tales Brom tells of the tragic history of the dragons and the Dragon Riders who were hunted to near extinction by the treacherous King Galbatorix. A pact between the humans, elves, and dragons that created the first bonds of alliance made the dragons’ lives forfeit if their Riders died. Though Riders did not die if their dragons did, they lived the rest of their lives among their fellow humans—who had never felt the awesome power of the dragon bond—always keenly aware that half of them was gone forever. Paolini creates a world in which the fates of dragons and their Riders are inextricably entwined, so it is not only necessary but satisfying to root for Saphira, no matter that she is cynical and deeply distrustful of humans.

There’s a part of us human readers that admires the idea of a powerful dragon so tightly bonded to a human boy despite her opinion that humans are “queer creatures.” And the deference shown to the powerful young dragon by human, dwarf, and elf alike makes Saphira a creature anyone would covet having as a protector, partner, and friend. Still, Saphira is capable of snapping up any of them in a moment of pique and swallowing them whole, and Eragon, despite the interdependence of their bond, has only so much influence over Saphira’s behavior. Brom’s careful conduct around Saphira is convincing evidence that he knows the dragon is no tame pet.

Speaking of the intertwined nature of dragon and Rider, let’s dip into the realm of metaphor to explain how this interdependence of dragon and human expands the dragon myth. Saphira, once bonded to Eragon, literally cannot live without him. She can read his thoughts, even at some distance, and he can read hers. They each sense when the other is in danger and can offer advice and—if close enough—physical support. Yet they are more than capable of independent thought and action. Paolini gives life to the proverbial saying “Two heads are better than one” with a winged, fire-breathing twist.

What Paolini has created is a two-headed metaphor for the choice that exists in all of us between using our individual power for good or using it for evil. Eragon possesses many good traits when we first meet him: curiosity and the spirit of adventure as he, a boy on the edge of manhood, explores the Spine when grown men will not; the ability to trust others, such as Brom and Garrow; an innocence that allows him to believe that life will continue on its same contented path. But he has little power in a world where he is an orphan with little to his name except an interesting blue stone he found in his exploration of the Spine—a place most villagers fear and distrust so much that a bit of that mistrust falls on Eragon just because he goes there often.

Saphira possesses a depth and breadth of knowledge and power that Eragon would never achieve alone, even once he was grown to manhood and had some experience in the ways of the world. She is also hampered, in some ways, by the byproducts of that knowledge: cynicism and the sense that the unknown contains more danger than is worth risking; suspicion of others and the inability to trust anyone but Eragon, whose thoughts she can read; a weary knowledge that disappointment lurks behind every sunrise and that those who fear the power of dragons will do anything to destroy Eragon and Saphira both.

Paolini does not divvy up all the good to Eragon and all the bad to Saphira, however. That would be too simple for the complex interdependence boy and dragon navigate. Eragon can be rash, as when he uses magic without fully understanding the risk to himself and others, and he can let his anger overcome his good judgment. Saphira’s wisdom allows her to consider more of the picture than the youthful and inexperienced Eragon can even fathom. The dragon’s ability to quickly move past the first rush of anger and determine the actions that will ultimately get them to their goal with the least cost to their lives and their souls is often responsible for their survival; her devotion to the pact between humans, elves, and dragons is absolute and unquestioned.

Both Eragon and Saphira possess strengths that can help them achieve their goals, and weaknesses that can cause them to fail. It is in working together, amplifying their strengths and buffering their weaknesses, that they are able to tap into the power they need to succeed. However, their interdependence alone does not guarantee that their goals are good ones. Galbatorix stands as a warning that the power of Rider and dragon can be turned to the side of evil. The true depths of his evil is revealed when Eragon learns that Galbatorix undermined the dragon-Rider alliance and used sorcery to gain his second dragon instead of allowing the dragon free choice in his Rider.[5]

As Eragon and Saphira travel through Alagaësia, they struggle between the primal desire to exact vengeance on those who harmed their families and the need to practice patience and work to protect all the threatened inhabitants of Alagaësia. Neither of them have reached their full power when their journey begins. Eragon is still a boy, still vulnerable to the pain of having lost his uncle Garrow to the Ra’zac, while Saphira is a newly hatched dragon who has lost much more than an uncle in Galbatorix’s deliberate destruction of the Dragon Riders and their dragons.

Both Eragon and Saphira are marked for death by Galbatorix unless they do the unthinkable and swear fealty to him—the one who killed those they considered family. Neither one of them envisions that as a viable possibility, so both know their lives are in peril until Galbatorix and his ilk are utterly defeated. Eragon still possesses a hopeful nature, much to Saphira’s disgust, which makes him struggle to protect the inhabitants of Alagaësia. Saphira’s more narrow interest in saving the last of her fellow dragons, however, echoes Eragon’s desire to do what they can to counteract Galbatorix’s evils. The question then becomes whether or not they can resist their inner urges for vengeance and blood as well as the external forces of evil that seek to destroy or recruit them. And indeed, when they learn from Oromis in Brisingr that a person’s true name changes as their nature does, it only underscores their vulnerability. Will their desires for vengeance and blood ultimately destroy them or, worse, recruit them to the side of evil? The interdependence is so absolute that they will either do this together, or the weakness of one will bring both of them down.

In their vulnerable position—bereft of family, home, the ability to fully trust others—dragon and Rider must depend upon their combined knowledge, wisdom, cunning, and honor in deciding who to trust and who to support in their quest to reach their full powers and find a way to defeat Galbatorix. This symbiosis is not without obstacles. Eragon finds that Saphira’s distrust makes him keep secrets from his friend and mentor Brom. It is painful for him when he first loses his ability to trust another implicitly, as he was able to do with his uncle, his cousin, and even Brom before Saphira’s egg hatched and her suspicious voice colored his thoughts so that he wonders more about what secrets Brom has kept from him than appreciates what Brom has already revealed. It is bitter comfort to learn, when Brom takes a fatal blow from the Ra’zac in Eragon’s defense and makes the deathbed confession that he too had been a Dragon Rider with a dragon named Saphira—and later in Brisingr when Oromis tells Eragon that Brom was his father—that he was worthy of trust. But Eragon’s hopeful nature is tempered into stronger steel by a touch of Saphira’s cynicism.

Through Saphira’s eyes, Eragon is forced to view everyone he meets through the suspicion that they could mean him harm—that they could, ultimately, betray Eragon and Saphira to Galbatorix. Through Eragon’s eyes, Saphira must become more vulnerable to those who could do her harm, or there is no hope that Eragon can grow strong enough to face Galbatorix. He needs allies to continue. Eragon knows this and Saphira concedes it as well. Brom died before training Eragon fully in magic or in the art of battle, and without training they have no hope of defeating Galbatorix and freeing Alagaësia from his tyranny. But they are caught between the need for help and the recognition that they bring trouble wherever they go, which makes them unwelcome company and a prime target for betrayal. It is only in the company of the Varden, opponents of Galbatorix, that they are relatively safe.

Paolini tests the bond between dragon and boy with a variety of characters representative of the ways evil can turn good intentions into destruction. Most representative of what can happen to Eragon and Saphira if they make the wrong choices is Murtagh. He joins them in fighting off the Ra’zac ambush that kills Brom and becomes a worthy compatriot, but he has a dark secret—he is the son of Morzan. The question for Eragon becomes this: Trust the man who fights at his side and has saved his life, yet has little desire to spare the life of any who is not his friend? Hold a man’s patrimony against him, when no man chooses his own father, or choose to judge him by his own actions? Eragon pulls toward trust and Saphira toward mistrust. But which of those instincts is most likely to lead to their destruction? As Saphira tells Eragon after Murtagh beheads the slaver, “sometimes there are no answers.” And even after their battle, when Murtagh lets Eragon and Saphira escape him, there are still no clear answers. Murtagh is no longer a man to trust. But has he turned completely evil, or can he turn back?

Always, Saphira is on the lookout for the next move that will get them both closer to their goal of capturing and defeating King Galbatorix, even as Eragon struggles to learn as much wisdom and magic as he can. For the most part, Saphira hovers above the action as Eragon struggles for the right balance of trust and cynicism, but she’s always ready to fly to the rescue when needed, and almost always in thought-communication with Eragon, guiding him with her dragon wisdom, warning him when necessary. Her cautious distance from the elves and dwarves and humans that Eragon must depend on in order to learn the skills he needs to survive serves as a reminder that her and Eragon’s combined power makes others, even allies, uneasy. Those who help Eragon may do so in part because they fear that power being used against them.

In Eldest Paolini brings Eragon and Saphira to near their full power individually. Together, yet apart, during their time with the elves, Eragon learns magic and dragon riding and Saphira grows into her full powers as a dragon. Eragon is seen as a leader, a Shadeslayer of renown. Saphira is seen as a hope for the rebirth of Alagaësia under a new, less tyrannical rule that allows dragons and Dragon Riders to resume their quest for justice and peace. Each of them separately is a powerful enemy to have. Together they have yet to fully explore the power of their interdependent strengths. I look forward to seeing what Paolini has in store for Eragon and Saphira. No doubt they will be tested alone and apart. But what new powers will they discover when they work together? Will Eragon’s feelings for Arya cause a rift with Saphira? Or is the bond between them so strong that no human-elf affection can dent it?

There is one more book in the Inheritance Cycle in which Paolini can explore this metaphorical symbiosis of good and evil, right and wrong, as Eragon and Saphira each learn to ease the other’s weaknesses and brace the other’s strengths. I expect there will be a heart-rending moment where Eragon and Saphira must face the death of one or both of them for the greater good of their world. I look forward to seeing how they hold fast to their true names and natures, save their people, and defeat Galbatorix once and for all.

I confess, I would be a Dragon Rider in Paolini’s world if given the chance. He makes it seem like the embodiment of human empowerment—ah, to have a dragon with sharp spines and strong wings to carry me far and wide. Not to mention an ancient wealth of dragon wisdom to temper my impatience and guide me toward my own, less epic, goals. So much better than being a princess and getting rescued by a prince.

Kelly McClymer has been a reader and a writer for as long as she can remember. The world of books offered so much to her growing up that she feels lucky to have given back with her own somewhat twisted imagination-fueled novels. Her list of books for young adults includes Getting to Third Date and the fantasy trilogy The Salem Witch Tryouts, Competition’s a Witch, and She’s a Witch Girl. Her latest effort, Must Love Black, out in the fall of 2008, is what she terms “goth meets gothic on the coast of Maine.”

Eldest ≠ Wisest

SUSAN VAUGHT

It’s (reflected even belief that ageequals wisdom titleEldest), but not always in the There is a wisdom thatis notalways the case as Vaught explains, there is also an experience,but instinctual wisdom than can be drawn upon by the characters in Paolini’s stories. But perhaps more importantly, Vaught notes the discernment Eragon uses in the application of his innate, youthgul wisdom-a discernment that, those around him.

Older and wiser.

Why do these words slide together like an unchangeable equation that always adds up?

Where is it written in permanent, glittering magical letters that more years of age must equal more wisdom?

Not in the dictionary, that’s for sure.

In the Oxford English Dictionary wisdom is defined as “Capacity of judging rightly in matters relating to life and conduct.”

American Heritage notes that wisdom is “The ability to discern or judge what is true, right, or lasting; insight.”

Despite the fact that age does not factor into the proper definition of the concept of wisdom, everyone in this world seems to believe that it does. So do the inhabitants of Christopher Paolini’s Alagaësia. It’s up to a young Rider named Eragon and his even younger dragon Saphira to disrupt this math and save the land of Alagaësia from the evil of King Galbatorix.

This isn’t easy, since most of the beings around them treat them like they’re nothing but ignorant children.

Despite being manipulated, disregarded, and even abused and attacked, both Eragon and Saphira demonstrate deep emotions and an instinctive understanding of the needs of the world and living creatures around them—an understanding that is often far greater than their companions’ or teachers’. It’s as if Alagaësia itself speaks to dragon and Rider, but this reality often goes unnoticed or gets mentioned only in passing as their elders continue to assume age alone makes them wiser. Some of the very decisions and actions that Eragon and Saphira’s elders dismiss or criticize as impulsive and foolish actually reflect this soul-deep wisdom and set the pair apart from everyone else in Eldest.

One of the first and most obvious instances of this innate wisdom is Eragon’s response to the Varden Council of Elders and its sneaky behavior. The Council slyly attempts to convince Eragon to swear fealty to the Varden instead of the Varden’s new chosen leader, Nasuada. Eragon immediately discerns and judges what is true in this situation: If he takes the steps urged by the Varden, he’ll make a puppet ruler out of Nasuada by implying the Council is more powerful than she is. Saphira helps him by using her own wisdom and instincts to determine that Nasuada speaks to them from her heart and that she might make a very good leader. Eragon then judges rightly with respect to his own conduct, circumventing the Council by indeed pledging his loyalty to the Varden but doing so directly to Nasuada herself. When he leaves Nasuada’s company, he’s immediately attacked by Arya, who assumes he’s done something stupid. After he explains his actions and decision, Arya is forced to admit, “Your position is not what I would wish, but better than I had hoped. I was impolite; Saphira . . . and you . . . understand more than I thought.”

Hrothgar, king of the dwarves, is the next being who places Eragon and Saphira in a difficult position with an offer that might or might not be a manipulation. Hrothgar bestows an honor upon Eragon by offering to adopt him and make him a member of the Dûrgrimst Ingeitum. No human has ever received such an offer, and Eragon realizes that the dwarf king has backed him into a corner. Accept and be subject to Hrothgar’s wishes and a binding alliance with the dwarves, or refuse and alienate the absolute ruler of Tronjheim, the city inside Farthen Dûr that shelters almost all the humans who actively resist the rule of Galbatorix.

Eragon once more shows a powerful ability to discern what is right and, in this case, what will be lasting, and he has the insight to accept the dwarf king’s gift. He worries that he might have been hasty, remembering Arya’s anger over his swearing of fealty to Nasuada; however, Nasuada recognizes the wisdom of his decision. “Now once again, all three races have a hold on you. . . . Perhaps it is best that we share your loyalty.”

With these two actions, at first believed to be impulsive but later recognized as intelligent, Eragon and Saphira navigate a treacherous political landscape. Ultimately their choices help keep the peace between humans, dwarves, and elves, and help hold together Alagaësia’s uneasy alliance against Galbatorix. Eragon and Saphira’s decisions, driven by their deep instincts, are in fact wise, though they are not the eldest in these situations and nobody sees the truth of the situations at first. Even Arya acknowledges this after some consideration, admitting, “I think you made the only viable choice.”

The next clear indication of Eragon’s intrinsic wisdom involves both visions of the future and dreams that pull him toward the tutoring of Togira Ikonoka, otherwise known as Oromis, the only other surviving Dragon Rider. After being forced to allow that Eragon’s dreams are in fact instances of prescience, Arya divulges, “Premonitions may be linked to the very nature and fabric of magic.”

Oromis later helps Eragon understand that magic arises from the energy of every living thing in Alagaësia. Thus Eragon’s ability to see the future, even in glimpses, proves that despite his youth he is inherently tied to the land which he is struggling to liberate. It is likely that this profound connection directs what at first might appear to be impulsive or rash decisions. Moreover, these dreams and visions give Eragon mature insights much like those that Saphira derives from her ancestral memories as a dragon. Eragon remains open to the subtle information he receives from his world, wisely refusing to fear it and instead letting it guide him. The energies of the land itself may be the source of Eragon’s insight and his advanced ability to discern or judge what is true, right, and lasting.

Once Eragon and Saphira journey to Ellesméra to continue their training with Oromis and his dragon, they again face dismissive attitudes. Oromis, his teacher, analyzes what he believes are Eragon and Saphira’s many mistakes, stating, “I have never met anyone such as the two of you. Every decision you make seems to have an impact far beyond what anyone could anticipate. You change the world with your whims.” He shows no recognition or understanding of the fact that Eragon’s “whims” tend to prove beneficial to their world and their cause—not to mention Saphira’s. The dragon has used her “whims” to guide Eragon unerringly through the first part of his journey, following the Ra’zac, then going to Gil’ead and the Varden. She knew it was right for Eragon to pledge himself to Nasuada and not the Varden directly. She knew it was right to go to Ellesméra and seek out Oromis himself. It’s beyond obvious that Saphira’s actions are guided by some deep source within her dragon’s heart and some deep, unassailable wisdom in her dragon’s mind that helps her to sense what is right and lasting.

As for Eragon, since he first instinctively called on magical fire to defend himself, each of his “whims” has led the fighting forces of Alagaësia closer to their goal of overthrowing Galbatorix. Yet Oromis still presumes to be wiser, because he is more experienced—because he thinks he can see the long-term outcome of the actions of dragon and Rider.

Oromis and Eragon go on to disagree over the most important tool for a person to possess. Eragon postulates that wisdom and a good heart are the most important qualities a person can possess, but Oromis insists that logic is the one most valuable skill. Eragon points out that logic can lead to conclusions that are ethically wrong. Oromis backtracks somewhat, agreeing that a virtuous nature is important, but he still believes it most important for a person to be able to think clearly.

Yet because Oromis is older, does it naturally follow that Oromis is right about this important point? Eragon initially seems inclined to think so but later remains troubled to the point that his connection to the world deepens and he has another prophetic dream. It is reasonable to assume that this symbolizes Eragon is more connected, more in tune, and perhaps closer to the truth than Oromis is. These questions have no definitive answer as yet, but Eragon’s intuitive wisdom should not be dismissed and ignored so handily.

In the case of Eragon’s sparring partner, Vanir, the overall elven better-than-you attitude extends to derisive and abusive behavior. The first time Eragon and Vanir battle, Vanir easily defeats Eragon because of his superior elven strength and speed. This victory causes Vanir to become arrogant and ultimately dismissive of the younger—and in Vanir’s mind, weaker—human. Vanir insults Eragon and then Saphira’s judgment for choosing Eragon as her Rider. Eragon’s reaction to Vanir’s disrespect for his dragon is immediate. “Eragon ground his teeth. He could stand insults to himself, but not to Saphira.”

Eragon’s next blow is almost fatal, and Vanir blocks it only at the last second. The elf learns in a hurry that the “weaker” human can be both fast and treacherous, yet Vanir still shows no respect. Even though Eragon battles on through the excruciating pain of a back injury inflicted by an evil Shade, Vanir treats Eragon like . . . well, dirt. As a less-than, a nothing. “It sickens me that such gifts are bestowed upon one so unworthy,” the elf tells Eragon after besting him in a contest of magic. “You do not even understand what magic is or how it works.” Vanir believes, as do most, that Eragon is foolish and inept.

The elf—like so many others—does not recognize Eragon’s innate wisdom or the way Eragon is connected to the land and its magic. Saphira rages back against Vanir’s insult, noting, “I wouldn’t have chosen someone to be my Rider unless they could help your race, mine, and the elves, for the three of us share an intertwined fate.”

Despite his many defeats at Vanir’s hands, and no matter the hideous pain he suffers, Eragon persists in his training with the arrogant elf. Eragon even refuses to lose his temper again with his cruel sparring partner. Both of these actions demonstrate deep wisdom—a wisdom far greater than that shown by Vanir. Vanir should know better than to question the judgment of a dragon in choosing her Rider. Also, he should be reaching deep within his own nature to assist the only known Rider fighting for the welfare of Vanir’s race, not attempting to prove him unworthy.

Saphira herself faces a similar battle, as the only other member of her race, Glaedr, repeatedly rejects her. Though Glaedr is a kind, if stern, mentor in her battle training, he does not recognize the intelligence of Saphira’s interest in him, and treats her as nothing more than a baby with a crush. Yet Saphira shows both wisdom and purpose in desiring to mate with Glaedr. She not only wishes to share her existence with the one thing she thought she would never find, another of her own kind, but also to rebuild their race. What greater benefit could there be in the struggle against Galbatorix than more eggs, and so ultimately more dragons and more Riders? Glaedr might be eldest, but it’s possible that in this decision to spurn Saphira’s advances and cut off this avenue of potential benefit, he is not necessarily the wisest.

It is the ancient dragon spirit roused during Agaetí Blödhren that shows the elves, particularly Vanir, the shallowness of their thinking about both Eragon and Saphira. A conscious magical dragon emerges during the ceremony, and once more Eragon’s instincts drive him to do the right thing. He raises his right hand, allowing the magical dragon to touch the heart of his gedwëy ignasia. This contact heals Eragon’s crippling back wound and infuses him with the physical abilities and speed of an elf as well as bringing him to maturity as a Rider in just moments. The ancient dragons, then, have passed their judgment. They have found Eragon to be worthy, and Saphira’s choice of Eragon as Rider both well-founded and, yes, wise.

We see in Eragon’s next duel with Vanir that Eragon has likely been the superior fighter all along. Now that their strength and speed are equal, Eragon is more than a match for Vanir, and ultimately breaks the elf’s arm in combat. “By the gods!” Orik the dwarf exclaims afterward. “That was the best swordsmanship I’ve ever seen....”

Eragon then has another rush of instinct, the sense of an “ominous storm . . . gathering beyond the edge of the horizon.” Saphira tells him, “What you feel is what we dragons feel and what the elves feel—the inexorable march of grim fate as the end of our age approaches.” Shortly after, Eragon moves to new heights in his training, and he and Saphira realize it is time for them to leave the land of the elves—and this time no one challenges their decision. The elves, it seems, have learned that the dragon and Rider’s wisdom should not be questioned.

The gathering battle against Galbatorix offers Eragon and Saphira yet more opportunities to demonstrate wisdom greater than most around them. In one of the most profound yet smallest examples of this, Eragon accepts Nasuada’s urging to allow the Urgal Garzhvog and his fighting forces into the ranks of the Varden. After interacting with Garzhvog, Eragon realizes that his ironclad prejudice against the creatures is misinformed, and he refuses to persist in ignorant beliefs or practices. Garzhvog and his Urgals turn out to be inordinately valuable in the battle, and this decision of Eragon’s might be amongst those that ultimately prove to be world-changing.

Another example comes while Eragon faces Murtagh on the edge of the Burning Plains. Eragon sees his cousin Roran creeping toward the very dangerous magical Twins and almost utters a spell to transport him away from danger. Murtagh urges Eragon to wait, and Eragon must evaluate whether or not Murtagh will warn the Twins and thus cause Roran harm. Murtagh gives his word not to interfere, and Eragon chooses to trust his instincts, and Murtagh leaves Roran to his fate. Seconds later, Eragon is gratified to see Roran successfully attack the Twins with his hammer. This wise choice to let Roran make his attack results in the defeat of these two magical menaces. And because the Twins are no longer able to fight, the dwarves and the Varden reclaim lost ground and rout the confused soldiers the Twins had been controlling. The physical aspect of this battle against the Empire is won, and Galbatorix’s forces retreat.

However, the greatest example of Eragon’s wisdom, and perhaps the most heart-rending, occurs in Eragon’s actual showdown with Murtagh. Despite the fact that Murtagh has betrayed Eragon and nearly battled Eragon and Saphira completely out of the sky, Eragon attempts to reach out to the older Rider. “Join me, Murtagh,” he pleads. “You could do so much for the Varden. With us, you would be praised and admired, instead of cursed, feared, and hated.” Eragon even offers to help Murtagh escape the bonds of Galbatorix and pledges his help and Arya’s in assuring Murtagh’s freedom.

This choice to reach out to Murtagh, this older Rider who considers himself smarter and stronger than Eragon, softens Murtagh’s heart. There is even a long moment in which Murtagh studies his sword and seems to be debating whether or not to accept Eragon’s offer. When Murtagh refuses, the two battle again, Eragon intent on killing Murtagh rather than allow him to return to the evil king. Eragon fails, and Murtagh plans to take Eragon and Saphira to Galbatorix—but Eragon asks Murtagh to release him instead. He tells Murtagh, “If you do this, Murtagh, you’ll be lost forever.”

The wisdom of Eragon’s statement sways the older Rider. Murtagh lowers his sword and releases Eragon. Thus, despite being physically weaker and less able to defend himself with magic, Eragon prevails in this fight, and he does it with thought, intelligence, and wisdom greater than that of the older Rider.

Murtagh takes his leave, but not before burdening Eragon with the knowledge of their shared parentage. Eragon is initially stunned, but then his innate wisdom once more rises to the surface. “Morzan may be my parent, but he is not my father. Garrow was my father. . . . I am who I am because of him.” Many people, many older and purportedly wiser people, would take many years to come to such a realization—if they ever managed to do so. Murtagh in fact is so far from understanding it that he has allowed himself to believe he is hopelessly ensnared by the evil king. Eragon, however, refuses to let his bloodline color his beliefs about himself, his intentions, or his abilities.

After his showdown with Murtagh, Eragon enjoys his reunion with Roran and comes to understand the burden of horror and misery placed on his cousin by the capture of Roran’s true love Katrina. Eragon intuitively understands that this situation must be resolved before Roran can reach his destiny, whatever that might be. He uses magic to show Roran that Katrina still lives, then agrees that he will go with Roran to Dras-Leona to rescue Katrina, and ultimately to kill the Ra’zac and avenge their father Garrow.

In Brisingr, there are those who decry this decision and insist that Eragon and Saphira are being immature and impulsive, tending to Roran’s heart and the life of one girl before the needs of the Varden, but these naysayers are ultimately forced to understand their folly when this trip turns out to be yet another key stop on the path to defeating Galbatorix. The Ra’zac are dead, slain by Eragon’s bold mission, and Galbatorix has lost some of his most valuable weapons. Moreover, the Varden has gained Roran, a valuable warrior and commander who will do his part to turn to the tide in the battle against the twisted emperor.

Eragon and Saphira’s wisdom is what Alagaësia needs, especially with the ultimate loss of Oromis and Glaedr in the third installment of the series. The land itself has decided that love and loyalty must be honored, even at great cost. Yet those who surround dragon and Rider remain slow to recognize this, and to respect Eragon and Saphira’s decisions.

Perhaps in the fourth tale in the Inheritance Cycle, Eragon and Shapira will finally enjoy the full measure of the respect they deserve. The second tale, however, makes one thing abundantly clear: eldest does not always equal wisest.

Susan Vaught is the author of Trigger, which was called “a powerful cautionary tale” by Publishers Weekly in a starred review, and Stormwitch, winner of the Carl Brandon Society Kindred Award. Both were named Best Books for Young Adults by the American Library Association. Her most recent release, Big Fat Manifesto, is already garnering critical acclaim. She is a practicing neuropsychologist and lives with her family and dozens of pets in rural Tennessee.

Q: How Does a Fifteen-Year-Old Do This?

A: The Same Way a Fifty-Year-Old Does.

CAROL PLUM-UCCI

This essay by Plum-Ucci is less a commentary on Paolini’s young age than it is a mediation on how it si we writers do what we do. I have often commented that everyone has interesting insights, odd observations, and unusual connections occur to them-writers just make a point of writing them down, and then waiting until the proper occasion to string them together. Plum-Ucci shares some of her own insights into this concept, and offers some succinct conclusions about Paolini’s own processes

When novelists have the opportunity to meet their readers, the most popular question they’re asked is, “How do you come up with your story ideas?” Readers’ eyes loom, full of wonder. Some anticipate a blow-by-blow description of a process, similar to what they might hear from a bridge builder. Others would love to hear what borders on magical: “I was sitting at my terminal and suddenly became overwhelmed by the sounds of mighty, rushing water! The hero, the setting, this powerful plot drove me into another world, and I rarely came back out of until the final page was written!”

The real answer inevitably seems tame, like perhaps something is missing. Christopher Paolini has taken some stabs at answering, such as this one he posted for Teenreads.com: “It took me a month to hammer out the main details of what was now the Inheritance trilogy. Then I sat down, put my tremulous pen to paper, and finally started book one: Eragon. I worked sporadically at first, but as I became more and more engaged with my project, I spent as much time as I could writing.”

The answer interests us—but perhaps because it came from Paolini himself. If he’s like a thousand other authors out there, he finds that the questioners say, “Oh!” politely, but often continue to stare.

Lots of authors take Paolini’s stance, trying to answer the question with as much sanity as they can impose on the process of novel writing. However, we’re aware that when our answers resemble the description one might give of completing an extra-long math homework assignment, something indeed seems missing.

Strangely, there are fascinating explanations for the writing process—but normally the writers don’t know much about them. Busy novelists are up to their gizzard in imagery, settings, story-weaving, and reader response. We should think of them like sea captains, who might understand a lot about their boat, but not necessarily a lot about the sea creatures roaming the depths beneath them.

The magical concept of capturing a story is so stupefying that I really had to study it myself five years ago. In doing so, I found myself in the world of psychology, specifically psychoanalysis, the study of dreams and how the dream center interacts with our imagination even when we are awake. A walk through information pertaining to imagination can shed some light on how Paolini has created the Inheritance Cycle.

We can all agree that the Inheritance Cycle is driven by a very powerful imagination. And specifically in the case of Paolini, the complex question of conjuring story components is buttressed to the question of, “How does someone do this at the age of fifteen?”

The second question is slightly easier to approach than the first, if one is willing to accept a bit of a surprise. Unbeknownst to many, a critical key to story writing is not sweating bullets like a student taking the SAT or plotting calculations like an accountant balancing columns of numbers. In fact, the opposite is true in chronicling tales: The best passages are written when we are most able to relax. Some psychologists suggest that writing comes from a part of ourselves they call the “Inner Child”: the part that likes to color, paint, play. It is only when the “play” thoughts become taxed by “work” thoughts that the imagination falters and creativity is disrupted.

Personally, I never suffered from writer’s block until after my first book, The Body of Christopher Creed, won numerous awards and I was suddenly inundated with contracts. The connotations of “work” associated with “contracts” wreaked havoc on my “play station.” Telltale of a well-functioning “Inner Child” are Paolini’s words further along in the Teenreads.com interview: “Eragon flowed out of me at a tremendous pace; I never had writer’s block. Part of my speed was due to the fact that I had no idea what, technically, constituted good writing, and therefore, I did not edit myself during this process.”

Granted, he ran into challenges later in editing (which uses brain function that more closely resembles that required for the SAT), but in laying the groundwork, in painting his fantastic world and breathing the breath of life into characters—the boy was simply having some fun.

You might say, “We all have imagination, and that doesn’t explain how dragons and boys and wizards and caves and Urgals come together so engagingly for a fifteen-year-old.”

Having never been published myself until I was forty, I have often said, “I learned nothing of the art of writing until the age of twenty-one when I was able to put school behind me.” Teachers are well intentioned and encouraging, but so many hours in school are spent on work one is not interested in, waiting for others to complete their tasks, operating in circumstances where free choice is nominal, and warding off social scrapes. One arrives home from school quite mentally taxed, yet often facing another hour or two of homework. According to John Taylor Gatto, author of Dumbing Us Down, the sensitive, artistic student could border on intellectual burnout by the age of fifteen or sixteen.

In this sense, homeschooling could be a benefit to some future artists, and I believe it explains a lot in Paolini’s case. I could write a hundred essays on this subject, but for the purpose of this one, let’s suffice it to say that specialists often comment on how the imagination of children is far more dynamic than that of their adult counterparts. A five-year-old can imagine for hours at a time, but as the impositions of school, then work, then marriage and family build, imagination dims. Essentially, the imagination of a fifteen-year-old, properly cultivated and preserved, is far less banged up, damaged, and cluttered than the imagination of his elder counterparts in publishing. Paolini has that edge in this sense.

Let’s leave that for a moment and move on to what happens to him while writing. Imagination does not shut down when one is sleeping. The founding fathers of dream analysis suggested a hundred years ago that literature pulls from the dream center to acquire its organic materials—characters, settings, ideas for plots, symbols. This doesn’t imply that writers work in a sleepy trance. If the phone rings, we’ll answer it.

But think of the dream center as a closet with many interesting things on the shelves. When we sleep, the light in the closet is bright; when we’re awake, it grows dim—except for those who are involved in creative processes such as writing, painting, or daydreaming. The artist’s conscious mind works with his subconscious mind to create.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud theorized that everyone has a “subconscious,” that part of our mind that acts like this dark closet full of images, actions, and emotions. As we dream, Freud said, these closet images drop off their hangers and dance around in the air, causing us to see, feel, and respond to an amazing parade of people, things, and plots.

This imagery can signify things in our waking life. For example, last night I dreamed I was holding a beautiful little lizard who was annoyed by being held and turned to bite me several times. The bites didn’t hurt, but I felt sorry for the little thing and finally let it go. It sprouted wings, flew out my window, and grew to the size of a dragon I recognized as Eragon’s Saphira. I knew the dream had to do with my nervousness about writing an essay for publication when, generally speaking, I only publish novels these days. Letting go of Saphira symbolized “letting go” of my anxiety. If I did so, what I had to say would actually grow into something far more worthwhile than if I were uptight about writing the essay.

Thank you, Dr. Freud.

Karl Jung, initially a student of Freud’s, coined the term “collective unconscious,” implying that what lies on the shelves of our dream closet proves somewhat common among all human beings, of all races, cultures, and eras. For example, psychologists agree that a circle usually symbolizes unity in a dream. Hence a dream about being given a beautiful ring might reflect how the dreamer is coming into a time of peace with herself or her family.

For the images, impulses, and life forms that are common to us all in dreams, Jung used the term archetypes. These include numerous universal symbols like the circle, plus impulses, emotions, and plots that people have fixated on universally, throughout history. Jung was also among the first to suggest that the same archetypes that serve in dreams also serve in literature. Hence, a ring that causes strife—such as the featured element in Lord of the Rings—might represent unity gone bad in story as well as dreams. As Tolkien wrote the trilogy bearing the scars of World War II, the ring, with all its malignant power, could represent what he sensed as a serious threat to world order.

It’s generally the people we remember best from our dreams, and since the days of Aristotle people have named the character as the most important element of the great story. Some popular archetypes and their meanings in both dreams and literature include the following, with examples from Paolini and friends:

The Child

In dreams, this is the innocent part of ourselves. A happy child in a dream may reflect a carefree feeling about some aspect of our lives. A sad child or lost child may represent a feeling of being overwhelmed with responsibility. In literature, the Child often appears either as an innocent or in a carefree state, but with problems approaching. Frequently the Child is about to embark on a journey that will take him through a coming-of-age process. This Child often doubles with another archetype, the Hero. Eragon is a Child Hero.

The Prophet or Wise Elder

In dreams, this is the wise part of us that perhaps wishes to influence or comfort the less certain parts of ourselves. In literature, this (generally) aged person can lead the Child Hero to wisdom. He is a key player in countless stories through history, but since we’re discussing the Inheritance Cycle, let’s acknowledge Obi-Wan Kenobi of Star Wars and Gandalf of Lord of the Rings, both of whom compare strikingly to Brom of Eragon.

The Lover

In dreams, this archetype is someone whose face or aura we are drawn to romantically, and often represents the romantic part of ourselves that seeks completion. It is both a wish and projection. The Lover allows both dreamers and artists to exercise the side of themselves opposite their gender. As Virginia Woolf stated in A Room of One’s Own, all great artists should be “androgynous in mind,” and every day artists draw up excellent characters of the opposite sex, projecting from their own psyche. Princess Leia of Star Wars, Arwen in Lord of the Rings, and Arya of the Inheritance Cycle are projected similarly from male writers.

The Shadow

In the Shadow, the darker more repressed aspects of ourselves find an outlet. The Shadow contains all the feelings we would not like to admit possessing when we are awake. People who dream of monsters and wake up screaming are often thought to be facing an emotion or situation that is too painful to face while waking; that emotion or situation is said to be kept in their Shadow. In literature, the Shadow generally produces our antagonists. Shadow archetypes usually thwart the Hero on his journey toward greatness and are responsible for a great deal of the story’s tension. Projections of the Shadow include Darth Vader, Sauron, and Galbatorix.

The Savage

The Savage is the manifestation in dreams of our instinctive or primal side, and can have either negative or positive connotations. The Savage can appear as anything, from a small, rat-faced creature to a voodoo priest imparting words of wisdom. In literature, the Savage sometimes shows up to help out the protagonist when conventional wisdom has failed him. Yoda in Star Wars is an example of a positive Savage. Negative Savages include the Inheritance Cycle’s Urgals, and Lord of the Rings’s Orcs.

The Parent

Regardless of whether our relationship with our parents is peaceful or tense, we will dream the Parent archetype as noble and upstanding. The dream Parent often symbolizes a sense of comfort and security that conjoins with the wisdom of the Prophet. Dreams of Parents being injured or being violent symbolize a perceived threat to our security. In literature, if the Parent is unknown, obliterated, or in danger, it often propels the coming-of-age journey. Luke’s Uncle Owen in Star Wars Episode IV and Eragon’s Uncle Garrow in Eragon both play this role. Both met violent deaths via the foot soldiers of corrupt governments, and a desire for justice triggers both Child Heroes’ departures for journeys with their Prophets.

Flip the genders of certain archetypes and you have mildly different implications, and of course both literature and dreams are surrounded by a host of support players who fit these and other archetypes. In Lord of the Rings Gollum could also be interpreted as an infusion of the Savage. Many versions of the Savage appear in the Inheritance Cycle, most notably the Urgals and the Ra’zac. In Star Wars, R2-D2 represents the Child archetype insofar as his computer noises and jumps and whinnies reflect innocence.

This scenario, where the Child Hero embarks on a coming-of-age journey, may not seem to fit Lord of the Rings, as Frodo Baggins is an adult at the start of his journey. But ultimately it may. Sometimes archetypes can be symbolized by a group rather than an individual, in which case the “Hobbit nation” would assume the archetype of the Child. This is implied by their tiny stature and their undisciplined, adorable, and yet indulgent natures. And while Frodo Baggins may remain fully Hobbit at the end, his death may represent a transcendence akin to coming of age.

I have left Paolini’s dragon for last, because Paolini has included some intriguing twists that seem to defy definition. Amidst the archetypes found in the dream center or collective unconscious are many symbols—so many that psychoanalysts have devised uncounted “dream dictionaries” to shed light on these symbols. But in nearly all, one will find the symbol of the “reptile” or “lizard.”

In psychoanalyst Eric Ackroyd’s A Dictionary of Dream Symbols , the appearance of a “lizard” in a dream “may represent something in your unconscious that you don’t wish to take notice of.” And dreams recorded with slithering lizards do often inspire the dreamer to feel either a sense of fear or revulsion. In much of literature, the dragon has been an antagonist, an instrument of the Shadow.

Eragon’s Saphira is a unique twist on the typical literary dragon in that (1) she is a protagonist and an instrument of the Child Hero, (2) she is intelligent more than primal, and (3) she is decidedly female. Ackroyd has a definitive entry for “dragon,” which is lengthy, but one definition in particular relates to Saphira: “The dragon may represent the devouring aspect of (your relationship with) your mother. ‘Slaying the dragon’ may therefore mean putting an end to whatever attachment to your mother is detrimental to the process of finding your own psychic individuality.”

Slaying the dragon, then, might imply a very comfortable and healthy relationship between the author/creator and his mother (literal or symbolic). The fact that Eragon scrapes the skin off his legs the first time he rides his dragon had me wondering if a Mother figure close to Paolini was at times abrasive and fire-breathing. But Saphira is also both loyal and beloved, and unless Saphira is fueled by something that breaks with the conventional symbols of dreams analysis, she symbolizes a closeness, mutual respect, and friendship with parental figures.

But let’s examine whether Saphira has potentially transcended the usual connotations. She almost seems like a vortex of archetypes falling into one another: she’s not quite the Lover, but her intimacy with Eragon (for example, in their exchanging thoughts without words) is Lover-esque. She’s not quite the Mother, but as Eragon never had a mother, Saphira is put somewhat naturally into a proxy position. And finally, the two are not only best friends, but cross-gender best friends. Having a cross-gender best friend is not the norm in real life, but it is a huge fantasy among average people, representing what we sense would be a perfect balance of character traits, male and female.

Saphira is also, according to many, the most intriguing character in the novel and one of the key ingredients to its success. I’m back to wondering about the impact of homeschooling in the creation of this novel, this time as applies to Saphira, because I’m not certain that this type of character could have arisen from a mind that placed institution (school) at its center of affection as opposed to home (where a parent is usually the nucleus).

Part of the reason Saphira is such an intriguing character may have to do with Paolini’s age. He is in a unique position compared to other authors who write the coming-of-age tale: He is writing the coming-of-age tale while, in fact, coming of age. And it’s possible that such unique immediacy infused his dragon as a very dynamic vehicle for the Child Hero’s journey. Ackroyd also describes the winged dragon as symbolizing “some kind of transcendence, some passing from a ‘lower’ to a ‘higher’ level of personal maturity.”

Through all of this, we can see that Paolini is doing something quite different from the accountant reconciling columns of numbers. He and the accountant are reaching into entirely different parts of the brain for their work. The accountant is reaching primarily into the information processor, but Paolini is reaching often into his dream center. During the creation process, characters and settings and even plot details began to materialize much like they do in dreams, but because the author is awake, he can make some choices, do a bit of molding, erase, and go back if something isn’t working.

For example, Paolini does say that he gave a lot of thought to whether Saphira should be intelligent or primal. But the circumstances of her initial appearance, or the fact that she has blue scales instead of green, or the fact that she was injured in her wings and not her foot in Eragon—these manifestations might be as mysterious to him as the images tossed forth in dreams are to us.

In interviews, Paolini emphasizes that success is largely attributable to good editing, discipline, and conscientious presentation. None of these things have much to do with the subconscious, and his statement is correct. However, in both graduate school and the many workshops I have led, I have seen writers exercise these disciplines—sometimes for decades—without producing a salable manuscript like Paolini did. Hence I would like to make one more point about how he met with success.

Let’s go back to the dream closet of Freud and Jung and the various things that lie on the shelves. When Jung coined the term “collective unconscious,” from which archetypes emerge, he gave us a very important concept for understanding how and why certain writings like Paolini’s are successful.

Here is the concept, simplistically put: The collective unconscious implies that my closet looks very much like yours, and Christopher Paolini’s looks like ours. Paolini is able to grab us and keep our attention because the images that drop off his hangers and dance for him have the same effect on him as they do on us.

Writers who are successful have managed to find the items in their collective unconscious that are (1) very intriguing to them—such that they have enough fun writing that they bring the novel to completion—and (2) equally intriguing to the reader.

I am talking here about reader interest. Did Paolini have long talks with himself about what would interest his prospective reader? I doubt it. And doing so doesn’t matter. One can hit as a matter of luck, at least at first. Paolini must have created a world that we would want to be in, or we would not have stayed there. Certainly entire books like this one would not be created about his tales.

I believe in this writer-reader relationship concept wholly, and I can best describe it through my own life. One of the greatest days in my writing career happened early on in my twenties, when I finally admitted to myself I was not Albert Einstein, I was just your average Josephine. It could have become a very sad moment, looking back on myself as an average student, who never broke a thousand on her SATs or attracted a teacher’s attention outside of the writing arena. It was actually an exciting revelation. Why? Because it meant that what interested me would probably interest other average people—average readers, of which there are thousands—and if I found a way to write about things that were most intriguing to me, I would probably be writing about things that were intriguing to many. A career was born, one far different than Einstein’s—but if Einstein had tried to write a popular novel, his audience being a limited number of erudite scientists, the results might have been horrendous. I can look into the minds of others and anticipate what will sell, not because I’m some sort of genius but because I’m so wonderfully average.

Granted, I write in the teenage mainstream, and Paolini has entered the realm of sci-fi/fantasy. It could be that readers therein are given to higher IQs than my readership—perhaps—but I would not carry the burden of genius too far in trying to understand this young man’s abilities. Paolini went ahead with what was most intriguing to him and, in the process, had enough instincts to keep what would be most interesting to his readers and shy away from what would not.

There’s nothing flowery or tricky about much of writing. It’s not so much in the words; it’s in the imagery, and in the ability to create a writer-reader relationship—which is very similar to a boy-girl relationship except that, in the former, the parties are caught in a weird time warp. If a girl rings a boy’s cell phone, he picks up and answers after a second. But when the writer writes, the reader doesn’t pick up the pages for months or years. Yet the response and the relationship are very real; just ask publishers, who bank fortunes by having faith in this concept.

I emphasize this relationship because I have seen its importance often overlooked in writing classes, whether at the junior high, high school, college, or graduate level. It annoys me to no end, and Paolini, having never suffered the woes of learning writing via mega-institution, seems to have come out ahead. Professors are paid to read papers; they have to read. Perhaps that is why so many forget that readers do not have to read anything that they don’t feel like reading. Hence the writer-reader relationship is a critical part of understanding the art of writing.

I learned this as a young journalist who enjoyed feature writing for newspapers. My paycheck was at stake: If I didn’t catch the audience and keep them, I wouldn’t have an audience . . . and eventually, I wouldn’t have a job either.

Paolini had a lot of time to play, to entertain himself thoroughly, to paint a world that appealed to him in almost every way. Beyond that, he employed a gut instinct about what captivates, what bores, what works, what aborts. The proof of his success is that what he had to say, readers chose to hear, to the tune of millions of copies.

We’re still hearing him. So is Hollywood. If he can hold up under the weight of contracts and obligations on his “play station,” we’ll be hearing him for a long time.

Carol Plum-Ucci has authored many young adult novels published primarily by Harcourt. The Body of Christopher Creed and What Happened to Lani Garver are studied in high schools nationwide, as both were named Best Books for Young Adults by the American Library Association’s young adult division, YALSA. The Body of Christopher Creed and The Night My Sister Went Missing were finalists in the Edgar Allan Poe Awards, and The Body of Christopher Creed was named a Michael L. Printz Honor Book by

YALSA.

Plum-Ucci lives in southern New Jersey, and all her novel settings pay homage to the South Jersey barrier islands and the Pine Barrens, which have housed her family for fourteen generations. She has a bachelor’s degree from Purdue University and a master of arts from Rutgers, and she attributes her greatest training as a writer to working as an editor on her college newspaper, the Purdue Exponent. Her sequel to Streams of Babel, called Fire Will Fall, is slated for Spring 2010, and she recently finished a sequel to The Body of Christopher Creed, to be released Fall 2010.

The Modern-Day Perceval

JOSHUA PANTALLERESCO

People are fond of noting the heroic archetypes strewn throughout the Inheritance Cycle, but outside of some broader pop culture references and a few necessary references to Joseph Campbell, no one has really examined Eragon’s cultural and mythical genealogy until now. Pantalleresco shoxs us how Paolini drew upon a classic arhcetype (one that was around long before Luke Skywalker) to give Eragon traits and characteristics that would made him familiar, noble, and relatable to reades in modern times. The parallels are striking, as is the realization that the kind of character embodied by Eragon and his predecessor Perceval tryly is timeless.

A hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles.

—CHRISTOPHER REEVE

Heroes are the foundation of epic fantasy. I’ve enjoyed heroic tales ever since I picked up my first comic book at the age of eight. There was something larger than life about someone making a difference that stuck with me. It influenced me to read my first fantasy novel. Fantasy and comics aren’t that different at heart: Both feature great evils bent on destroying all the heroes hold dear, whether it’s something personal like their family or something larger such as their hometown or even the whole world. What fascinates me to this day is how each hero responds to crisis.

There are different kinds of heroes. Some are like Superman or King Arthur and possess all the tools to become a great hero—they have the skills, the knowledge, and the inherent conscience to know right from wrong. Then there are the heroes like Perceval, who have to learn what the right thing is, and are heroic because of their courage and despite their limitations.

Perceval is my favorite kind of hero. He’s one of the earliest characters in literature that starts out like you or me. He struggles with the finer details of good and evil and, like us, doesn’t know all the answers. Many characters after him have had similarly humble beginnings. Take, for example, Peter Parker. Peter is a science kid from Queens who is bitten by a radioactive spider, giving him fantastic powers. Destiny calls out Peter with the death of his uncle and drives him to become Spider-Man. Another example is Bilbo Baggins of The Hobbit. Bilbo is just another hobbit in the Shire when Gandalf enlists his aid to recover gold from a dragon and he’s thrust into action.

This archetype appears over and over in fantasy and is used for many reasons. For one thing, it’s easier to sympathize with a character that doesn’t know and can’t do everything. While everyone recognizes that Superman and King Arthur are good, heroic characters, they are very hard to relate to. Most of us are not born destined to become a great king or be faster than a speeding bullet. The appeal of this type of character is that they represent the best of who and what we might be and may someday become. They do the right thing for no other reason than because it’s the right thing.

Perceval archetype heroes connect with the audience. They don’t have the luxury of understanding everything around them and, like us, make mistakes and cause problems, though with the best of intentions. But they also connect with us because, like us, when the book starts they have no clue what’s going on. Each turn of the page finds the character facing larger-than-life obstacles in a world he or she barely understands. And those obstacles intensify as the story progresses. The hero’s journey to some extent reflects our own journey through life, often fraught as it is with mystery, wonder, and terror. Christopher Paolini has recreated this kind of hero for the young adult audience and made it his own. But more than that, Paolini has made Eragon’s story into a modern-day Perceval tale. The parallels between the two characters are striking.

Ignorance, Innocence, and Purity of Heart

Perceval is one of the legendary Knights of the Round Table who first appears in Chrétien de Troyes’s unfinished Arthurian romance, Le Conte du Graal, and also appears in other stories, including Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur. His story begins with his mother doing her best to keep Perceval as ignorant of the rest of the world as possible. Her motive is to prevent Perceval from becoming a knight and sharing the same fate as his father and younger siblings, but her intentions are upset when Perceval is impressed by some knights he comes across in the forest and sets out to become a knight himself.

Eragon is the central character in Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance Cycle, currently consisting of the books Eragon, Eldest, and Brisingr. Eragon’s mother brings him to the town of Carvahall to be raised by his uncle, in ignorance of who he is and where he came from. This begins to change when he finds a “mysterious stone” in the Spine while hunting that turns out to be a dragon egg. Once the dragon hatches, Eragon finds himself caring for the hatchling and becoming her friend and guardian. He has no clue where the egg came from, but desires to learn as much as he can about dragons and, in time, Dragon Riders.

The biggest parallel between the two characters is that both of them are sheltered. Neither is aware of the customs and rules of the world outside their home. This limits both characters as they are then also unaware of the consequences of their actions. They have the best of intentions, which cause great disasters without their knowing it. However, this sheltering has also allowed both characters to remain innocent and develop a rare purity of heart. Where a lot of us would second-guess ourselves, Eragon or Perceval do not. Whatever actions or choices each character makes, he puts his whole heart into it. They possess no doubt or hesitation. Their innocence of the world gives them freedom few of us enjoy.

The biggest example of Perceval causing harm through good intentions is his meeting with the Holy Grail’s injured guardian, the Fisher King. During his quest to become a knight, Perceval meets the Fisher King in his castle. Sheer accident coupled with his pureness of heart allows Perceval to see the Grail when he meets the King. With the Grail present, the right question would have cured the king of his wound. The question is right on the tip of Perceval’s tongue, but he doesn’t ask it because he is told by another knight that it’s impolite to ask too many questions. Because Perceval doesn’t want to appear rude, the king remains afflicted.

To his credit, once Perceval becomes aware of his folly he vows to set things right. You could say this mistake shapes the whole course of Perceval’s life. Instead of seeking out glories and engaging in crusades once he succeeds in becoming a knight, Perceval seeks the Holy Grail to make amends for what he has done. Many stories, including Le Morte D’Arthur, deal with Perceval’s quest to do just that.

Eragon’s biggest blunder to date involves his “brother” Roran. Eragon chose to keep knowledge of his newly hatched dragon to himself, not telling anyone what had happened or what he was doing. Had Eragon told his uncle about the egg, he might have prevented his uncle’s death at the hands of the Shade Durza and King Galbatorix’s minions.

Galbatorix’s men don’t stop with the death of Eragon’s uncle, of course. They also target Roran. For the rest of the series Roran is pursued by these forces for the simple reason that he is related to Eragon. Eventually Roran loses home, fortune, and love due to Eragon’s choice. To survive, Roran is forced to take matters into his own hands. He leads the whole town out of the village and takes them on a journey across some of the world’s most dangerous terrain to make it to safety. The townspeople and Roran are forced to do things they would have previously considered unthinkable, robbing and killing just so they can move undetected. Roran questions who and what he’s becoming, and he blames Eragon for making him have to live like this.

Like Perceval before him, Eragon means no ill, but his actions do more harm than good. In spite of the damage the two men do, I find this fault of theirs endearing. Eragon and Perceval make mistakes in their pursuit of doing the right thing, and I don’t know of a single person who hasn’t done the same at one point or another. It’s very easy to relate to them both.

This flaw is also the source of both characters’ most redeeming quality. Perceval and Eragon accept the consequences of their actions and try to make amends. Once he learns what he did to the Fisher King through his inaction, Perceval dedicates himself to correcting his error; Eragon makes a similar pledge to aid Roran in saving Katrina (and does so in Brisingr). Even though it will not change what each has done, Eragon and Perceval do their best to rectify their mistakes from that point on.

The greatest compensation for their ignorance is the innocence that comes along with it, which allows both of them to glimpse things that others far wiser and better equipped fail to find. The Holy Grail, something many others spent their whole lives searching for without success, appeared right before Perceval while he was still very young. In the Inheritance Cycle, dragon eggs only hatch for the Rider the dragon chooses. Many others crave to be chosen, yet none of them are because they lack the pureness of heart Eragon possesses. Perceval and Eragon succeed because of, not in spite of, their innocence. While neither of them has the tools and knowledge that others before them had, what they do have is an innate desire to do the right thing. Without this trait, Perceval never would have found the Grail, and Eragon never would have been chosen by Saphira, and it is the catalyst for both characters to rise above the obstacles that have prevented others from achieving their goals.

Family Issues

Another major connection between these characters is the theme of family. Family issues are the heart and soul of both characters’ stories. Eragon and Perceval’s biggest questions and challenges come from family, both known and unknown. Both characters struggle to know who they are and where they come from, and cause unintentional consequences to their families as a result.

Perceval causes great harm to his family in several instances. When he expresses his desire to become a knight to his mother, she becomes very sick almost on the spot. Perceval is so caught up in becoming a knight that he misses his mother’s plight completely, oblivious to the fact that he is the cause of her illness. Even though he vows to come back, he never sees his mother again after he leaves the farm. And it is only after he leaves the castle of the Fisher King that he learns the Fisher King is his uncle. Perceval’s biggest wrongdoings are committed against his family.

Eragon also brings harm to his family. Keeping Saphira a secret costs Eragon’s uncle his life and changes Roran’s, but unlike Perceval, Eragon’s most serious challenge comes directly from his family. Murtagh first aids Eragon right after Eragon’s teacher Brom dies. Companions through circumstances, their relationship grows into a mutual respect and friendship. Murtagh is eventually revealed as the son of the Dragon Rider Morzan, but in spite of where he comes from, Murtagh is one of Eragon’s staunchest allies and friends. However, through King Galbatorix’s machinations, Murtagh becomes a Dragon Rider in the king’s thrall. It is during their first encounter as enemies that Eragon learns that he is Murtaugh’s younger brother.

Paolini is taking De Troyes’s theme of family and pushing it one step further, complicating the issue of lineage in Perceval’s story by presenting Eragon’s family as villains instead of heroes. This is the biggest difference between the characters—yet there can be no doubt that this difference is merely a variation on the same theme.

The shared theme of family does not end there: Eragon and Perceval’s fathers play major roles in the characters’ lives, but without being a true parental influence. No matter what story of Perceval you read, he is always the son of a noble knight. Though Perceval never knows him personally, his father’s reputation as a brave and courageous knight shapes Perceval’s whole world and not only through his desire to become a knight as well. His mother never would have isolated Perceval if it weren’t for his father, and this isolation plays a key role in Perceval’s development.

Eragon’s father was Brom the Storyteller, who was really Brom the Dragon Rider. After killing Morzan and stealing Saphira’s egg from Galbatorix, Brom faked his death and moved to Carvahall to be close to Eragon. Brom never revealed himself as Eragon’s father for fear that Galbatorix would discover who he was and what his connection was to Eragon. Instead, he chose to interact with Eragon as a teacher and later a friend. If Brom hadn’t decided to come to Carvahall, Eragon never would have found Saphira’s egg, confronted the Ra’zac, and become the dragon rider he is today.

If it weren’t for either character’s father being who he is, neither of them would have been raised in isolation. Who knows who these characters would have become had circumstances been a little different?

The Hero Within

One result of Perceval and Eragon’s lack of knowledge about their world, their families, or their histories is that they have no clue about their identities. The biggest example of this is that neither of them knows their true name. In Medieval culture, nobility was often raised with two names, one given to them as a child and another they received when they came of age. In Le Conte Du Graal, Perceval has no real idea what his true name is; for almost half the story he doesn’t have any name, and only gets his true name when he names himself “Perceval” later on. (Continuances of Le Conte Du Graal after De Troyes’ death reference Perceval having the name of Parlufeit when he was younger.)

It has been strongly hinted that Eragon has more than one name, yet at this point “Eragon” is the only name he knows. In the Inheritance series everything and everyone has a true name in the Ancient Language. Once learned, this true name can give you great power over yourself, or in Murtagh’s case allow someone else to enslave you. One of the things I’m most anxiously awaiting from the next book in the series is whether or not Eragon discovers his true name. Will the power unleashed by knowing his true name allow him to master himself, or will he be consumed by it?

A large part of both Perceval and Eragon’s stories involves not only who they are but also who they want to become. Once he sees the knights in the forest, Perceval wants nothing more than to be one himself. Armed with nothing but this strong desire, he storms into King Arthur’s castle and demands to be knighted. It isn’t until Perceval meets Gornemant that he even begins to understand what that entails. Trying to follow the example Gornemant teaches forces Perceval’s perspective to change. He starts to question his actions and make decisions based on what a knight is supposed to do, and we see Perceval change and grow as a person with each adventure he goes on and each choice he makes.

Unlike Perceval’s, Eragon’s story is unfinished, and while Eragon knows who he wants to be, and has been taught the basics he needs to get there thanks to Brom, Murtagh, and Oromis, he hasn’t become that person yet. Brisingr forces Eragon to confront some challenging moral dilemmas, in particular how to deal with Sloan when he finds him alone and helpless while rescuing Katrina. Eragon makes a very difficult decision in allowing Sloan to live. How Eragon deals with Sloan—condemning him to live the rest of his days with the elves, yet also giving Sloan a chance to change who he is—is in my eyes a very mature, just, and very heroic decision. Perceval himself would have approved. And book four of Inheritance will hopefully allow Eragon to continue changing into who he wants to become. I, for one, can’t wait to see how it happens.

Identity is, after all, the heart of the story of the hero, whose journey is about discovering who he or she wishes to become and getting there one step at a time. Perceval, through his adventures, becomes one of the best Knights of the Round Table. Even though Perceval never succeeds in finding the Grail again on his own, I can’t help but think of him as a hero. He becomes someone who does the right thing, or he tries to. He has courage, is willing to fight for the oppressed, and never quits seeking the Grail his whole life. He started out just like us, but becomes someone we can look up to.

As for Eragon, it remains to be seen if he’ll survive to become the kind of Dragon Rider he wants to be. The odds are against him and seem to grow more daunting with each page. We, as readers, want him to succeed. Eragon stands his ground and fights for what he believes in, and he perseveres in the face of overwhelming odds, even if he doesn’t yet understand everything about himself or his situation. To me the heart of a hero is just that, persevering no matter what. By that definition Eragon already has the heart of a hero. Whether he will endure to the end like Perceval is what remains to be seen.

Joshua Pantalleresco discovered his love of writing at the age of thirteen and has never stopped. He has published the book I Am . . ., a collection of poetry, and has written, designed, and edited the student magazine Northern Flight. He currently writes about comics for Septagon Studios and is hard at work on his first novel. He lives in Calgary, Alberta.

It’s in His Character

JEREMY OWEN

How much of an author can be found inside his or her books? Are the characters and settings in a story merely metaphors for events in an author’s life? And is that even possible with an author as young as Paolini? These are some of the questions posed by Jeremy Owen as he compares the differing ways that people interpret books. Some look for a deeper understanding of the author. But as Owen notes, it may be more beneficial-and practical-to realize that the questions we ask as we read may reveal less about the author and more about ourselves.

“How long have you been looking for your father?”

Harlan Ellison asked the question. He’d just read my brother’s graphic novel Starchild: Awakenings. He didn’t ask about a particular part of the story. There were no questions about plot or direction. There were no questions about interpretation or comparison with similar stories done by other writers. There were no inferences about influences or James’s line of study. In the place of all these possible questions, the type of questions that are usually asked, there was just one: “How long have you been looking for your father?”

The question changed the way I think about everything I read.

Our mother divorced our father when James was about six years old. James hadn’t been actively looking for our father—our life was a good one despite or because of his absence—but there was a sense of something missing that showed up in the way my brother structured his story even if he wasn’t aware of it. When a word is laid down on the page by a writer, any writer, that word gives us a clue to what that writer thinks is important.

It’s always interesting to see the interpretation of human interaction, emotion, and conflict through the writer’s eyes. Whatever the author finds important invariably works its way into the personalities of the characters, giving us a broader view of the writer’s perceptions than is laid down explicitly on the page. Older writers learn to mask some of this, allowing the plot and characters to drive the story. It is far easier to see what I am talking about when you look at the work of a young writer.

By young, I mean young in the craft. New writers don’t often have the skill to round out a character and mask the traits the writer subconsciously portrays. Balanced characters are hard to form. It takes time to create a complex personality that is neither black nor white but constantly shifting shades of gray. If a piece of work lacks complexity and the writer also has a prejudice toward a certain character, the words written about that character can be very revealing about the writer. The more quirks and traits you add, the harder it is to come to any solid conclusion about the views of the man behind the pen.

Christopher Paolini is a bestselling author, but he is not an old writer. Inheritance is Paolini’s first major work, so you’d expect it to be easy to look at one of his characters and say, “That’s him. This personality is definitely Paolini.” I have two points to make about this line of reasoning. First, Christopher may be a young author, but his characters are not simple or one-dimensional. I doubt looking at any one character would reveal more than Paolini’s general attitude. Second, you’re not Harlan Ellison. Harlan is probably smarter than all of us put together. So if you plan to interpret the actions and emotions of the characters in Inheritance for anything other than mental exercise, you’re probably wasting your time. If you actually are Harlan Ellison, feel free to interpret away.

My goal is not to give any perception-altering insight into Christopher Paolini’s personal life, but to uncover some general attitudes he presents through his characters.

I won’t be making any assumptions based on the races in the Inheritance Cycle. It is interesting to note that Paolini makes his elves into a race of long-lived deep thinkers who shun religious belief, and that he shows a humanizing view of the wild Urgals in the final chapters of Eldest, but by and large the races of the Inheritance Cycle run the regular gamut of emotions, beliefs, actions, and trials that we regular humans do. It’s not until we start looking at the individual characters that we find anything we can really dig into. I’d like to start by examining some of the minor roles in the story, looking at the villains first, and then end with the characters I think are most significant.

Sloan doesn’t become a villain until the book Eldest, though he does nothing to endear himself to us with his harsh treatment of Eragon and his opposition to Roran’s intended engagement to Katrina. Sloan has been bitter and fearful for years, overprotective of his daughter after the death of his wife in the Spine, but he is still respected as an important member of the community. That trust puts him in a position where the flaws in his judgment allow him to betray the villagers of Carvahall during a siege of the village by the Ra’zac and the soldiers of the Empire. He kills one of his fellow villagers, and takes his unwilling daughter with him as he allies himself with the Ra’zac. Sloan is heavy-handed with his daughter, rude to the village in general, and kills one of those he should have been protecting, but it is clear that one of the major forces behind his decision is a misguided effort to protect his daughter. Sloan’s actions prove more of a detriment to Katrina than a help, and though he only realizes this too late, he does realize it. Sloan is blinded and tortured when the Ra’zac turn on him. When Eragon frees Sloan, it is clear that despite the ordeal Sloan’s thinking has not changed. Knowing Sloan will never cease searching for his daughter, fearing what will happen to both Katrina and Roran when he finds them, Eragon uses the ancient language and Sloan’s true name to separate Sloan from his daughter forever and compels him to travel north to live among the elves. We are left waiting to see if there is any redemption for Sloan as the story continues. We may even hope there is, because Paolini has helped us empathize with this supposedly evil character.

Murtagh is in the strange position of being an unwilling villain. Again, Paolini helps us empathize. Murtagh has no choice.

He does what he is doing because of the knowledge he has of his father’s evil deeds and the compulsion of his vows in the Ancient Language. Murtagh is an almost heroic character, finding small ways to avoid the path he is forced to tread even as a greater force drives him to do what he otherwise wouldn’t. His desire to hide his shame is overcome by his desire to do what is right. I’m waiting to see if his need to do right proves to be his downfall or his ultimate salvation.

When we are first introduced to Durza, it seems he is the embodiment of evil. Crimson hair and maroon eyes set him apart from humanity in appearance the same way his unearthly power sets him above so many in magical ability. He kills mercilessly, driving the Urgals under his command to commit deeds of base animalism only exceeded in their baseness by the violent actions of Durza himself. He is portrayed as a person so devoid of pity that he deserves to die. But in the final battle between Durza and Eragon, Paolini again surprises us with the depth of his characters. During the mental struggle of the fight, the barriers between the minds of Durza and Eragon are breached. Eragon is subjected to flashes of the path Durza followed to become what he is. Eragon experiences Durza as a child, his mother combing his hair; Durza’s family being shunned for his father’s sin; Durza weeping over his parents’ graves; Durza being rescued and nurtured by, and in return nurturing, Haeg the sorcerer; Durza calling upon spirits to avenge Haeg’s murder only to be overwhelmed by the power of the entities he has summoned. Mere pages before Durza’s death, Paolini paints him as someone to sorrow for, not someone to abhor.

With the exception of the Twins, the villains of Inheritance are all victims of circumstance. Galbatorix went mad and took power only after the death of his dragon. The Urgals only fight and kill under Durza’s coercion or to provide for and protect their families. Sloan only betrays Carvahall to protect Katrina. Murtagh only pledges allegiance to Galbatorix under duress, and keeps his oath only because the Ancient Language will not let him break it. Durza is only what he is because the spirits that overpowered him are evil. The Ra’zac are monstrous, but they are the last of their kind, and they allied themselves to Galbatorix in an effort to create a legacy to be remembered by. Paolini looks past these vile actions to see the flawed circumstance of the people who initiated them. He shows us clearly where the characters went wrong, and in a way lessens their responsibility for their actions. Paolini doesn’t absolve the perpetrators, but he does suggest that evil is not absolute. We can question the reasons for someone’s actions, but we must also ask ourselves if we would have done any differently in their position. Galbatorix’s circumstances have not yet been fully exposed, and I look forward to seeing the final villain uncovered. Are there similar lines of force driving Galbatorix to give in to his darker urges?

The villains of Inheritance could be heroes, but for a twist of fate. The same is true of the heroes. They are imperfect, loved by some and despised by others. Their flaws and inexperience often cause problems despite their good intentions.

Brom is one of the least flawed of Paolini’s heroes. He is patient, waiting years as he watches over Eragon, never letting on to his true intentions. His only shortcoming is his inability to end the tasks he starts. He almost ends the reign of the evil Dragon Riders. He almost completes the training of Eragon. He almost succeeds in his quest to reestablish the Dragon Riders among those free of Galbatorix’s rule. Brom is perfect, or would be if time or situation ever allowed him to fully succeed. It is in Brom that Paolini explores the fatalistic notion of incomplete victory, showing that no matter how well a job is done, it is never truly a success unless it is finished.

Paolini also suggests that just because a person is a hero does not mean he will always stay one. In the first book of the Inheritance Cycle, Murtagh is one of Eragon’s most trusted companions. After Brom’s death, it is Murtagh who becomes Eragon’s training companion and sparring partner. Murtagh saves Eragon’s life on several occasions, traveling with him (sometimes unwillingly) until the great battle at Tronjheim. It is in Tronjheim that Murtagh disappears and is presumed killed, and in a way he is killed, for the Murtagh that returns at the end of Eldest is not Eragon’s friend and ally but the sworn servant of Galbatorix. Murtagh has spent his life running and hiding from the repercussions of being a fallen Dragon Rider’s son only to become one of the fallen himself. Paolini gives us empathy for the villains of the story, but he also does not elevate the heroes to a lofty standard where there is no possibility of falling.

Let’s look at the example of Roran. Roran is my favorite character in the story, mainly because he is not blessed with extraordinary talents and gifts like his cousin Eragon. Roran is thrust into untenable situations where he has to react, lead, and make life-and-death decisions whether he wants to or not. Dealing with the death of his father and loss of the family farm was hard enough. Believing those losses were the fault of a trusted family member, in this case Eragon, makes them harder still. Through it all Roran steels himself with the knowledge that Katrina loves him, and if he can only set the situation right, reclaim his life, and put himself back into a position of responsibility, then he will be able to move on. But his connection with Eragon upsets his plans once again. Soldiers come looking for him because of his cousin and lay siege to the town. Roran is faced with a choice: leave his family home and the woman he loves, or stay and protect what is left of all he cares for. In making his decision, he is forced to set aside tradition and even become a killer in defense of his future wife and the village. Roran is blamed for the death of several villagers killed by the soldiers, and though he defends the village and is considered its leader, there are those who will not let him forget the lives that were lost, nor the price of reckoning that is still to come. Paolini sets Roran up as a savior and hero but makes sure the reader knows that there are those who hate him for it.

Eragon may well represent the other side of Roran’s coin. Like Roran, Eragon is put in positions where he can only react. He didn’t choose to be the recipient of Saphira’s egg—though as a child of one of the Dragon Riders, he may not truly have had a choice. Eragon did choose to keep the egg and the dragon, however. It is here we see the major difference between Roran and Eragon: Where Roran seems to be universally cursed for his well-intentioned choices, Eragon receives blessings and curses in equal measure. Eragon is blessed with Saphira, though it leads to the death of his adoptive father and the destruction of the family home. He is forced to flee, but is blessed again in that he is accompanied by Brom, who becomes his protector and teacher. Ambushed by Urgals, Eragon finds his connection to the Ancient Language, and through the language and his connection to Saphira, Eragon is able to advance far beyond his former capabilities. He is running and hiding to avoid detection and capture by Galbatorix’s forces, but he is at the same time finding a new level of freedom thanks to his burgeoning skills as a Dragon Rider. Brom is killed but Murtagh takes his place. Eragon finds the Varden and becomes a proven hero in his defense of Tronjheim, slaying the shade Durza, only to receive a crippling wound from Durza’s final blow. Eragon persists in his training despite the progressing pain from his injury and is rewarded by finding out there is still a living Dragon Rider, Oromis, to train him—but not as well as he might due to an injury that took away Oromis’ capability to fully use magic and the Ancient Language. Eragon is scorned by those he trains with because of his human heritage, only to have his weakness and injury taken away during the Blood-Oath Celebration of the Elves. For every few trials Eragon must face, there is a reward—though the rewards may not always be worth the price.

Like Roran, Eragon is not held blameless for the mistakes he makes. The prime example of this is his blessing of the child Elva. His attempt to shield her from harm turns her into a shield from harm because of his ignorance of the Ancient Language. The mistake is something that appalls the elves and earned Eragon a serious tongue-lashing from the witch Angela, adding to his already guilty conscience. When the attempt to free Elva from the curse goes awry Eragon is again absolved of part of his responsibility, this time by Elva herself, and held blameless by others because he at least made the attempt to free her. Here is another point where Eragon and Roran diverge. While Roran is held to the consequences of all his actions, Eragon, often because of his position of Dragon Rider, is given a reprieve when he explains how he means to set things right. Eragon’s life is by no means easy, but the constant influx of help and forgiveness from unexpected sources, not to mention the support and understanding of Saphira, greatly eases the burden he has to bear. Roran is compelled forward by will alone. Roran is held responsible despite his circumstances; Eragon is always lucking into second chances.

I know there are people who read a book and feel they know the author. I don’t think that’s really possible without talking directly to the writer, like Harlan did with James. My brother and the character in Starchild that Harlan compared him to did share some similarities, but that other character still wasn’t James. No matter how well a character is constructed, it still pales when compared to a real person. No matter what insight a character may give to its creator, or what similar qualities it possesses, it is still never fully representative of the person. You can read the words someone writes, but it is not the same as knowing them.

I think a better way to approach the understanding of a person through the characters of Inheritance is to do this: Find the character that you identify with the most and see what that says about you. There are characters in Eragon that I like, but it wasn’t until Roran started going through hell in Eldest that I became a convert to Paolini. I feel a kinship with Roran that is deep and real to me. I’d like to think I would respond the same way in similar situations, while at the same time I’m glad that he’s the one acting out the harsh reality instead. The way a character touches you is a far better truth to learn than what of the author’s personality that character represents. Knowing a character, feeling for that character, can be very revealing to the person reading (though if you find yourself bonding with Sloan, Durza, or the Ra’zac you might want to seek professional help).

I’ve never met Christopher Paolini. I don’t know him, but I do know this: Paolini has created characters that are strong, complex, and loved by millions of people; he has a great talent for making believable characters. I know I identify with some of his creations, and I know I’ll read more of Inheritance as the story continues.

If I ever get the chance to ask Christopher whether or not any of his characters are based on him or anyone he knows, I probably will. If I don’t, just knowing Paolini’s characters is good enough for me.

Jeremy Owen has worked as a stonemason, a carpenter, an artist, a writer, an animatronics engineer, and more. He is collaborating with his brother James on several illustrated books, and is working on his first novel. He lives with his family in Silvertown, Arizona, where he currently works as the production manager at the Coppervale Studio.

The Thing About Elves Is ...

GAIL SIDONIE SOBAT

Writing abour elves is a two-edged sword: On the one hand, elves ar such an entrenched part of fantasy literature that it’s practically a requirement to include them in one way or another. But on the other hand, elves have been used so frequently (and often, poorly) that they’ve become a stereotype. Sobat eloquently outlines Paolini’s use of elves in the Inheritance Cylcle while interweaving a history of elves in fiction and mythology. Her conclusion is that Paolini skims the edge of the sword-benefiting from our collective concept of elves while painting a vesion of them that is darkly, and uniquely, his own.

Well, they’re a slippery lot. Hard to pin down. The wee folk. The little people. Fairies. Or is that faeries? Or brownies? Or pixies? Pan or Puck? Sylphs or dryads or nymphs? Goblins or hobgoblins or gremlins or gnomes? Leprechauns or imps or sprites?

Enough to set the mind reeling!

So to begin at the beginning, sort of: according to the Oxford English Dictionary, elf is an Old English word (sometimes spelled ylf/ielf/aelf/alf) which denotes “a class of supernatural beings, believed to be of dwarfish form, and to possess magical powers, which they exercised either to the help or the hurt of mankind. Now a mere synonym of fairy. Sometimes distinguished from fairies a) as a subject species; b) as more malignant.”

But how did these creatures of the stuffy Oxford morph into the vibrant Arya and Islanzadí and Oromis and those other elves who people (er . . . elfize?) Paolini’s Inheritance Cycle? Well, like so many other creatures of mythology—or to use Tolkien’s phrase, faery—elves have an intricate and fascinating history.

But let’s just get the fairy thing out of the way now, then, shall we? There is no denying that fairies are elves are fairies. The grand master J. R. R. Tolkien himself cites the term “fairy” as “a relatively modern word, hardly used until the Tudor period” derived from the French fae or fée and with English derivatives ranging from fey to fay to faerie, to fayre, to fairy to faery and etc. But the word has fallen into disfavor—except largely for prepubescent girls who fawn all over things fairy—due to certain associations. You know the ones. Fairy equals effeminate equals catamite equals gay. Fairies are gay. Which is often true in the old sense of the word gay, meaning “full of or disposed to joy and mirth; light-hearted, exuberantly cheerful, sportive, merry” (as the OED defines it). But more usual these days is that fairies are gay per the slang first introduced in the United States circa 1924.

No wonder modern-day fantasists much prefer the less connotative “elves.” But you will understand when I slip into the world of faery and interchangeably use fairy or elf that I intend nothing derogatory or stereotypical or homophobic.

Diane Purkiss, who like Tolkien and presumably Paolini despises the “little wingy thingies” of later sanitized fairy lore, traces elves to their dark and downright dangerous roots in the ancient worlds of Egypt, Mesopotamia (that’s modern-day Iraq and part of Iran, to you), Greece, and Rome. In her book At the Bottom of the Garden: A Dark History of Fairies, Hobgoblins and Other Troublesome Things, she finds not-so-distant elvish cousins in the demons of the dead, child-snatching bogeys and chimney-sprites, gorgons like Medusa with her snaky locks, Siren chanteuses who lure mariners to their deaths, Gello the child-hungry and devouring murderess, Lilith and her frightsome ilk. Purkiss concludes from her study of the ancients that from the start, elves “[came] from the outside,” that they “were either once people or are like people who have become trapped,” that they are linked “with the dead, and some are the dead,” but above all, can be deadly.

This rendering of elves seems very far removed from the noble and fastidious, not to mention vegetarian, elves of Paolini’s universe. And yet. The elves of Islanzadí are removed from other inhabitants of Alagaësia, living as they do in Ellesméra, perhaps a thinly veiled reference to the real-world Ellesmere Island. Living in Canada as I do, I know that Ellesmere Island is very far to the north in the inhospitable yet beautiful Canadian territory of Nunavut, certainly “outside” unless one is Inuit and well adapted to the conditions of northern life. Further, Paolini’s elves are also people-like and trapped by the dire circumstances of Galbatorix’s master plan, his increasing powers, and the demise of the Riders and dragons. There are hints throughout both novels that the elven powers are diminished—Islanzadí herself evaluates her leadership in a whisper, “I am diminished” (Eldest). Birthrates are middling to poor; thus instead of a thriving and growing culture, elves are reduced in numbers and choose to sequester themselves away in Du Weldenvarden, with but one crippled master and a maimed dragon left of their former glory.

Yes, but elves associated with the dead? And worse yet, deadly?

Purkiss is not alone in casting elves in the shadows of death. Folklorist Micha F. Lindemans shares her opinion in the Encyclopedia Mythica: Alves of old-Norse folklore were “the spirits of the dead who live[d] close together in hills and mountains,” ancestors of the local farmers who offered the earth-sprites sacrifices in return for favors. Similarly, elves of Teutonic and Norse traditions

were originally the spirits of the dead who brought fertility. Later they became supernatural beings, shaped as humans, who are either very beautiful (elves of light) or extremely ugly (dark/black elves). They were worshipped in trees, mountains and waterfalls. The Danish elves are beautiful creatures, but they have hollow backs. The Celtic elves are the size of humans. . . . In stories from the 8th and 9th century [British Isles] there are many references to elves, or fairies as they are called there.

And whether light or dark, white or black, beautiful or ugly, elf or fairy, these creatures were to be respected and feared.

Dwelling on the margins or at thresholds and crossroads—ever perilous places for pilgrims or wanderers—elves are gatekeepers between the realm of living and dead, the seasons, the end of a year and new beginnings. To meander mindlessly into their midst whether in folktale or more recent fictions is to invite trouble, even death. Betty Ballantine says in her foreword to Faeries that the world of faery is a place “of dark enchantments, of captivating beauty, of enormous ugliness, of callous superficiality, of humour, mischief, joy and inspiration, of terror, laughter, love and tragedy. . . . it is a world to enter with extreme caution, for of all things that faeries resent the most it is curious humans blundering about their private domains like so many ill-mannered tourists.”

If in doubt, consider Arya’s lesson to Eragon just prior to their meeting up with the elves of Du Weldenvarden. Wary of his likelihood to offend or embarrass, she coaches, “because elves live for so many years, we consider courtesy to be the highest social virtue. . . . If you make a mistake the elves will think you did it on purpose. And only harm will come if they discover that it was born of ignorance” (Eldest). Arya next instructs him on the appropriate forms of address and formal gestures for greeting (which remind me of the Vulcan “Live long and prosper” and simultaneous hand salute, but more on Vulcan-elven similarities a little later). All of this presumably to save Eragon from losing face—perhaps both figuratively and quite literally—when introduced to her elven kin.

Du Weldenvarden is the “private domain” of the elves, a sea of trees that spans the “entire length of Alagaësia,” a place both “mysterious and enticing, as well as dangerous,” and Eragon recognizes the forest as “step[ping] into fairyland,” “a perilous place for mortals . . . riddled with strange magic and stranger creatures” (Eldest). Nasuada confirms it as a supernatural realm, claiming the elves “placed wards around the forest that prevent any thought, item, or being from entering it through arcane means,” while the witch Angela counsels Eragon to “be careful in Du Weldenvarden.” In so painting this picture for us, Paolini is drawing on traditions of the Archetypal Forest, that dark and shadowy otherworld so compelling and frightening to the human imagination. One need only recall the fairytales of one’s youth, set deep in the woods where dwell the stuff of nightmares: trolls or dragons, talking wolves or bears, ogres or witches or the trees themselves that will consume the hapless traveler. In Jung’s terms, the forest is the site of the unconscious, that dark unknowable part of the human psyche where rules of logic are abandoned, where creativity and magic spring to life—a place to visit, an important place to journey and be tested, but the initiate (whether Eragon, you, or I) must beware the trap of enchantment. To stay in the forest—to remain unconscious—is a kind of death. To spring forth from it, a kind of rebirth.

Small wonder then that elves and fairies and all manner of other fantastical beings and beasties dwell in this mystical otherworld, apart from mere mortal men. We have always been afraid of the dark and the deep woods. (Well, at least I’m not afraid to admit it!) And writers from the earliest medieval poets to composer Stephen Sondheim have deftly played upon our fears, recognizing the attraction and repulsion of journeying “into the wood.” For there live the elves who, even in the epic poem Beowulf that marks the beginning of English literature, are the “misbegotten” descendents of Cain and cousins to the “cruel spirit” Grendel, the supernatural foe that the hero Beowulf must defeat. Such a sinister birthright!

But then so is Eragon’s. Eragon, who as Rider and through his connection with Saphira, is becoming an elf, or at the very least, elfish. Eragon, who, arguably elf-possessed by Rhunön, fashions Brisngr at her ancient forge and tempers the blade with elven charm and spell. Eragon. Brother of Murtagh, who in Eldest, has become vile slave of Galbatorix, claiming that he and Eragon are “the same . . . mirror images of each other.” Like resembles like. Or at the very least has the capacity to perpetuate like. And as so many others know, from Luke Skywalker to Victor Frankenstein to Dr. Jekyll to Ged in Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, once you have a shadow-self or alter-ego or Doppelgänger (double walker) hanging about, whether you are human or scientist or wizard or semi-elf, there’s bound to be trouble with your double. And it’s usually of the sinister variety.

But back to the woods and the rich, if roguish, heritage of elves.

It’s in the medieval forest where Thomas the Rhymer is abducted by the temptress Faerie Queen whose rosy lips he kisses underneath the Elderberry, a tree noted for its faery world connections. The lady in the “grass-green silk” skirt beckons the smitten Thomas along the “bonny road, / which winds about the fernie brae” and into a seven-year enchantment. Legend tells that he returned after his Elfland sojourn with the powers of longevity, poetry, prophecy, and magic: nice gifts from his green elf lover. One may wonder if Paolini’s Arya bears any resemblance to this faery seductress, for surely Eragon is equally smitten and led along a bonny path to Ellesméra, and, it turns out, ends up not a bad rhymester (E-rapper?), an apt heir to Thomas. Witness the poem Eragon writes “after the style of the elves” for the celebration of Agaetí Blödhren.

In Sherwood Forest we encounter trickster Robin Hood, closely linked with mischievous Robin Goodfellow, also the Green Knight of the Sir Gawain tale, all relatives of the Green Man. Loosely, the Green Man is any eldritch sort (whether the Jolly Ho Ho Ho Green Giant or Peter Pan or Puck), dressed in green or leaves or bark, or all of the above, associated with the forest and the green world and therefore a symbol of the “wildness, and . . . passionate energy of nature,” its beauties and perils (as John Matthews says in The Green Man). Although perhaps better known for their naughty escapades with the Sheriff of Nottingham, Robin, Maid Marian, and his rogue comrades are akin to the spirits of the woodland: the King of the Wood, the Queen of the May, and their wood-sprite retinue. While popular film and later traditions painted them as merry and good-hearted and handy with arrows, they spring from the same outlaw and magical source as do elves. In fact, Robin’s derring-do and audacity, his thrill-seeking and dangerous escapades, are in keeping with his elvish nature as Green Man. (Echoes of Robin and Marian as bold bandits who “rob from the rich to give to the poor” reverberate in Eragon’s daring dragon-egg thieves Arya, Fäolin, and Glenwing.)

In fact, Robin’s very namesake is Robin Goodfellow—whom we’ll meet again in Shakespeare’s Puck—another Green Man elven prankster of wood and grove who teaches, Matthews notes, “by paradox and trickery, forcing [humans] to take paths into unknown territory.” And Goodfellow is close cousin to the Green Knight, that very same green guy who strides into Arthur’s court, “full fierce he was to sight,” demanding a blow-by-blow hatchet match. The only knight emboldened to meet the challenge is Gawain and he promptly beheads the Green Knight, obviously a creature of faery, for in the very next gruesomely delicious scene, his decapitated head demands that Gawain journey to the Green Chapel—coincidentally (you guessed it) in a deep, dark forest “fearsome and wild”—within a year to receive a retaliatory blow. Of course, what follows is a testing period for Gawain and beyond the scope of this essay, but suffice it to say that the Green Knight, like the Green Man, “offers his life-blood for the sake of the people, in return for their own courage and self-sacrifice” (says Matthews). In this, he is not unlike Oromis, who sacrificed his magical powers and able body (as did Glaedr, his dragon) and in Eldest takes on the task of tutoring Eragon, presumably in return for the young hero’s impending courage and self-sacrifice.

Finally, throughout the forests around Camelot, King Arthur and his knights embark on many a magical quest, replete with elvish adventures and faery seductions and perilous otherworldly quests. Merlin dwells in these primal woods (as in twentieth-century tales do pointy-eared Yoda, Wise Old Man figure in Luke Skywalker’s training, and Ogion the Silent, to whom Ged is apprentice), just as Oromis dwells in Du Weldenvarden. Like Oromis (Yoda and Ogion), Merlin’s wildwood roaming allows him to learn “the speech of animals and [hone] his prophetic powers” as Terry Windling puts it in the introduction to The Green Man. And it is no coincidence that the young hero in these tales—whether ancient folklore or current-day fantasy—must stay for a time in the woods to learn from the elf or wizard master how to listen, to observe, to gain the boon of patience, fight with a sword (or light saber or wizard’s staff), and then emerge and rejoin the rest of the world in the hope of its betterment or rescue. For even though a very important part of any hero’s training is the onset of self-knowledge, to stay in the woods is to lose oneself—sometimes to madness, sometimes to death. Get out or go loony or croak. It’s that simple.

All of these magical, sometimes tricksy fellows and dames with fairy glamour about them are allied with the green natural world and have more up their sleeves than those who confront or train with them might guess. They are not sweet and wingéd beings, dressed in tulle and trilling fair songs in mortal ears. Paolini has rightly sensed and communicated the dangers inherent in consorting with elves. Brom warns Eragon that elves, male or female, are fierce sword- and magic-wielders, and can “tear [him] apart with ease” (Eragon). When Eragon first tries to probe Arya’s consciousness, she drives “an icy dagger into his mind” and “ruthlessly crush[es] his defenses” until he reassures her he is an ally (Eragon). In their sword-to-sword combat, even soon after her recovery, Arya clearly bests Eragon. As a result, he quickly learns to appropriately respect and fear her (a fine feminist flourish by our young author, methinks), taking to heart the wise words of witchy Angela: “Just because elves do not display their emotions doesn’t mean they aren’t subject to rage and passion like the rest of us mortals. What can make them so deadly, though, is how they conceal it, sometimes for years” (Eldest).

And speaking of deadly, how about that Elva? She of the dragon mark placed haplessly by Eragon, she of the terrible knowing smile, body of a four-year-old, voice of a forty-year-old. She of the dreadful appetite and appetites. She who can read the “primal fears” of others, especially Nasuada, and feel the unbearable pain of all beings. Elva, as her name suggests, is ensorcelled, a creature of fairy—old wives might call her a changeling. She bemoans the wyrd given her by Eragon: “the magic in my blood drives me to protect people from pain . . . no matter the injury to myself or whether I want to help or not. . . . Use me as you would an assassin—in hiding, in the dark, and without mercy” (Eldest). It seems she, like her elven cousins, bears the mark of Cain. Even after Eragon casts the counter-spell on Elva in Brisingr, his attempt to counteract the original devastating enchantment. And we shudder to think what might befall if the morally ambivalent child-elf falls into the wrong hands. . . .

Yet how to reconcile these dark creations and characters of Paolini with their bright and shining counterparts in his novels? In Eragon we’re told that elves are called the “Fair Folk” because, as Brom explains, “they are more graceful than any of the other races.” When Eragon first encounters Lifaen, Edurna, Celdin, and Narí in Du Weldenvarden, he is struck at once by their laughter and jouissance: “They joined hands and danced in a circle around [Arya] like children, singing merrily as they spun through the grass. . . . It was a wondrous sound, like flutes and harps trilling with delight at their own music” (Eldest). In fact, Paolini—whether knowingly or unknowingly—is describing the duality of elves that came into play around the time of Will Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Prior to Shakespeare’s romantic comedy (and some would argue Spenser’s Faerie Queene), elves were, as we’ve seen, more closely allied with the demonic and diabolical. Danger. Elves ahead. Enter at your own risk. But with the likes of theatrical Puck, Titania, Oberon, and their glittering attendants, elves became faeries became the creatures of stardust and moonbeams, twinkling lights and dances in rings. Clap your hands if you believe. Trickery and caprice still lingered in the background, but the profile of elves and fairies would never be the same.

Though Shakespeare’s Oberon bears some slight vestige of his former fearfulness (moodiness and possessiveness) as Lord of the Underworld and “Anglo Saxon King of the Fairies,” Titania, the once foreboding consort to Oberon, has been distilled to an ultra-feminine nymph. Gone is any dark resonance of Morgan le Fay[6] to whom Titania was folkloric sister; gone are any associations of death. Likewise, Shakespeare’s Puck is reduced to a troublesome, meddlesome Cupid figure. Even his tricks on humans seem trite in comparison to his forefather, Robin Goodfellow, who would have sooner lured and entrapped than aided and abetted lovers lost in the faery wood. In short, Shakespeare turns elves into fairies, diminutive, pretty creatures prone to playfulness but never really bent on any harm. The stately beings of Irish and Welsh folktales, the formidable harbingers of danger or guardians of the dead, shrink in stature and power. Purkiss asserts that “the sweet fairies of the Dream are indeed the remote ancestors of every wholly benign fairy, right down to the pink-clad Sugar Plum fairies in tights. In taking the sting of death out of fairies, Shakespeare robs them of their complexity.”

And the cuteness continues through the centuries, at first seeping into, then flooding the narratives of later writers[7] including those of the Enlightenment, the Romantics, and the Victorians. Two notable exceptions to the sweet and airy sort are Mozart’s Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute, a formidable fairy femme who shrieks her rage, “Hell’s vengeance boils in my heart” in the famous aria,[8] and Goethe’s “Erlkönig” (translated as Erl-King or Elf-King) which tells the horrific tale of a feverish young lad claiming the King of Elves wants to abduct him and finally dying in his father’s arms. These two Germanic pieces have in them obvious remnants of the earlier traditions of elves, also true of John Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” which tells a similar abduction tale of a knight by a “full beautiful . . . faery’s child.” But this nymph has more in common with Morgan le Fay or Homer’s Sirens[9] than Shakespeare’s Titania, for she takes the knight to an “elfin grot” where he slumbers deeply and learns from the specters in his nightmares—pale knights, kings, and warriors—that the beautiful lady without mercy has enthralled him. He awakens to continue presumably ever after, “alone and palely loitering,” his life essence drained by the merciless elf-lady. We shall shortly see how Arya is likewise a “belle dame sans merci” to Eragon. . . .

Another English writer who balks at saccharine fairy-lore, Christina Rossetti, recaptures the wickedness of elves. In Rossetti’s poem “Goblin Market,” Laura succumbs to the enticements of the goblins and offers a lock of her gold hair (uh-oh!) in exchange for their fairy fruit which she instantly devours in a (ahem!) shockingly sexual way: “she sucked and sucked and sucked the more / Fruits which that unknown orchard bore, / She sucked until her lips were sore.” Apparently, once is never enough. For afterward, Laura lives a tormented existence. She pines and dwindles away, longing to see the elf-men again, but seemingly unable to do so, yearning to “taste” once more their forbidden fruits. Only the intervention of her sister, Lizzie, spares Laura from a fate similar to that of the young knight in Keats’s poem.

Arguably, two pieces best illustrate Purkiss’s idea of “the split between a fairyland seen as ideal and a terrible reality that underlies it”: Robert Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” and J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. In the former, the knight Roland, son of Arthur, must voyage to the realm of fairy where his sister is prisoner in the castle of the king of Elfland. His brothers before him have attempted the rescue and been beguiled by the fairies, having seen only the glamour and beauty of the magical inveiglers. But Roland alone sees the reverse image of Elfland: “without illusion . . . fairyland is revealed as a charnel-house, grey and grim, with the fairies as the grinning dead,” a place “haunted by dead people, by nameless fears” (as Purkiss describes it). In Peter Pan we meet Tinkerbell, the diminutive and pretty fairy (with a healthy sprinkling of temper and jealousy) and, by contrast, the brash Peter Pan, whose very name suggests his connection with Pan/Puck and all things elvish.[10] As Puer Eternis or eternal boy, Peter lives in Neverland with the other Lost Boys,[11] a definite nod to the under/other worlds of faery. Here one may play at pirates and raids; one may fly and dally and have great adventures. But the truth of Neverland is that it is a kind of trap. To remain forever a child is to remain forever in the forest is to not grow up is to be swallowed by the ticking crocodile, so to speak. Initially, such a state may appear attractive, but frankly, in the end it sucks to be abducted by fairies.

So between these two extremes—the pretty and the perilous—are the elves of Tolkien and Paolini. Tolkien fashioned his elves not only from Anglo Saxon, Norse, and Teutonic sources, but also from the Irish elves or sidhe (pronounced “shee” and the root of banshee, a she-bitch screamer whose cries brought death to the hearer), stately creatures of faery who lived under mounds or faery hills, “the most handsome and delightful company, the fairest of form, the most distinguished in their equipment and apparel, and their skill in music and playing, the most gifted in mind and temperament that ever came to Ireland” (notes George Constable in The Enchanted World).[12] Compare Tolkien’s elves: “They were tall, fair of skin and grey eyed, though their locks were dark, save in the golden house of Findrod; and their voices had more melodies than any mortal voice that now is heard,” and Paolini’s: tall and graceful as dancers, “more fair and noble than any human Eragon had seen, albeit in a rarefied, exotic manner” (Eldest). There is no doubt that both Bilbo Baggins and his author are huge fans of elves, the most “superlatively gifted race to ever walk Middle-earth” (according to Master of Middle-Earth author Paul Kocher). And there is little doubt that Christopher Paolini based his own pointy-eared folk in large part on Tolkien’s.

First there’s that smell of pine trees that Bilbo associates with elves, creatures “he loved though he seldom met them; but he was a little frightened of them too” (The Hobbit). Similarly, when Eragon rescues Arya from the Gil’ead dungeon and again when she later confronts him about his sworn allegiance to Nasuada, “a bit of fear” chills him, and the young Rider notices that the elf smells “like crushed pine needles” (Eldest).

Secondly, Paolini’s elves share many qualities with “The People of the Stars”: loquaciousness, a dislike of dwarves, a love of trees (especially the Menoa Tree so like the mallorn-tree), a propensity for singing. Tolkienian elves bear a “keen original sympathy for other living beings. In order to speak with ents, elves taught them the ‘great gift’ of language” (says Kocher), just as Paolini’s taught the ancient language “to the other races, who used it for making and doing powerful things” (Eragon).

Then there is the great journey of Paolini’s elves, “a proud race . . . strong in magic,” from Alalëa to Alagaësia until settling in Du Weldenvarden to create an aesthetically beautiful Eden, working at art, smithing handsome weapons, and representing the “ideal in [their] appearance” (Eragon; Eldest). These beings mirror Tolkien’s “People of the Great Journey” who sailed across the sea to Valinor and there “lived for ages, and grew fairer and wiser and more learned, and invented their magic and their cunning craft in the making of beautiful and marvelous things.” Lorien, for Frodo and company, is to Kocher “a land of peace and healing” just as Du Weldenvarden is the site of Eragon’s contemplative meditations, where his body is remade whole and arguably more elven.

Further similarities abound in particular elf characterizations. The Lady Galadriel—like Arya, Oromis, and others—is able to read “the inmost thoughts of each of her guests”; she knows the mind of the Dark Lord but can bar his intrusions into her own. How closely she resembles Arya! As well, Legolas, like Oromis (who hopes Eragon will learn to emulate him), “can always see farther than anybody else, and can hear the very stones.” And Legolas and his friends, like Arya and her kin, “enjoy an endurance that never tires . . . a lightness of body” with “senses . . . keener, bodies more perfectly composed, than ours, as befits immortals.” We’ll revisit Arya’s body momentarily—if only to irk Eragon! Finally, we learn from Elrond’s refusal to take the Ring into his possession that Tolkien’s elves are susceptible to darker powers, to the possibility of evil. In Eragon we meet Vanir, whose competitiveness and disdain for Eragon, if not malicious, borders on nasty.[13] Who knows what the future novels may reveal about the blacker hearts of various elfish traitors, as yet unknown or disguised?

And now a few words about sex.

Okay, J. R. R. Tolkien never said it out loud in either The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings. But certain scholars (not to mention bloggers and fans) have surmised that Tolkien’s elves did it.[14]

However, I find it interesting, and probably hormonally apropos, that a fifteen- now twenty-one-year-old writer infuses his novels with more than a few hints of—with apologies to Marvin Gaye—“let’s get it on.” From his first glimpse in person of Arya, “Eragon’s blood burned. . . . Something awoke in him—something he had never felt before. It was like an obsession, except stronger, almost a fevered madness” (Eragon). The poor lad, from the start, is lost. When he tries to heal Arya’s terrible wounds, Eragon cannot help but notice “her lovely lady lumps” (as will.i.am might say). And it seems their wyrd is to be together: He has a ring, she has a tattoo with a yawë; they both have pointy ears; both read minds, make magic, like dragons.

One might think our lad Christopher was watching the episode “Amok Time” of Star Trek wherein Spock endures the Pon Farr, or Vulcan mating ritual, that pricks his pointy ears to passion. Eragon’s similar seduction begins with a Siren-like “susurration” at his ear:

Like a thread of smoke . . . the voice rose in strength until the forest sighed with a teasing, twisting melody that leaped and fell with wild abandon. . . . The air itself seemed to shimmer with the fabric of tempestuous music. The fey strains sent jolts of elation and fear down Eragon’s spine; they clouded his senses. . . . Seduced by the haunting notes, he jumped to his feet, ready to dash through the forest until he found the source of the voices, ready to dance among the trees and moss, anything so that he could join the elves’ revels (Eldest).

Which hints at the age-old adage, “Blow in my ear and I’ll follow you anywhere.” But Arya is a killjoy. “Crossing her long legs” in Eldest, she explains that Dagshelgr is a fertility rite, a saturnalia practiced throughout Du Weldenvarden. In short, the birds, the bees, the animals, the elves are doin’ it! Maddeningly, she and her companions must do their duty and resist. The result for poor Eragon (and also Saphira and the others) is nothing short of sexual frustration. At dawn, everything in the forest is budding and blooming, except our young teenaged hero.

For alas, Arya is holding out. Playing hard to get. All for the good of Alagaësia, mind you. Alien and beautiful, exotic and other, she is the older woman, an elf princess, beyond Eragon’s reach. He does what any lovesick suitor might: tells her she is beautiful, draws her portrait, brings her flowers, professes his love. All to no avail. She is inaccessible and closed to him. Arya is cruel: la belle dame sans merci. And Eragon wants her all the more, as is ever the way with errant knights bewitched by faery temptresses. We witness further flirtation and frustration in Brisingr : at one point the lovely Arya places a hand on Eragon’s knee; at another she shares with him an intimate story about Fäolin, former elven love; Rider and she-elf tend to each other’s battle wounds with an intimacy that borders on sexual healing (apologies once again, Marvin Gaye); and near the third novel’s conclusion, grief moves Arya to fling herself into Eragon’s arms. Her presence—so near and yet so far—is enough to drive our heart-sore hero to distraction, his breast tormented with “a torrent of hurt so deep and wild” (Brisingr) that one can only be reminded, “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”[15]

One wonders what will become of this cool elf princess and the Rider who feels and looks like a “princeling” and wants a whole lotta love. Their names bear such resemblance to two others who became lovers: Arwen and Aragorn of Tolkien’s tale. Will Arya, like Arwen, somehow choose to become mortal? Or will Eragon fully transform to elf and become a prince worthy of la belle dame? Will their wyrds join as their yawës imply?

The answers may prove as capricious and beautiful and dangerous as the elves.

Gail Sidonie Sobat really loves elves, dragons, and all things faery—she almost wishes her ears were pointy! She is the author of the award-winning YA fantasy series Ingamald, A Winter’s Tale, and A Glass Darkly. She completed a master’s degree in English at the University of Alberta in children’s literature, specializing in fantasy. Gail’s work has been published in academic and literary journals, anthologies, and has been broadcast on radio and performed on stage. Her newest work, Gravity Journal, is a realistic novel about a young girl who struggles with cutting and an eating disorder. Visit Gail’s Web site at www.gailsidoniesobat.com.

How the Inheritance Cycle Differs From Fantasy Epics of the Past

IAN IRVINE

There are no new stories, Irvine notes in his essay-but the way that stories are told is also greatly affected by everything that came before. Oral storytelling gave way to the written word, and so on. With each change of methodto theater, and cinema, and even video gamesstorytellers have changed the way that they tell their tales. Irvine deftly demonstrates how the differences are not so much in the stories themselves, but in how the perceptions of the storytellers shape those old stories to present them in new ways.

Late in the twentieth century the world definitively entered the third age of storytelling, and this is changing the way some new authors tell stories, and how young audiences view them. Paolini’s Inheritance Cycle reflects this transition.

The first age, oral storytelling, began with tales told around the campfires of hunters and gatherers. It was only after printing became cheap enough that books were widely available and compulsory education ensured most people were literate that the world transitioned to the second age, written storytelling. Written storytelling must have existed since the invention of writing around 5,000 years ago, but only took over as the predominant form when mass-produced books became affordable in the Industrial Revolution. And not everyone was happy about it. Even in Greek and Roman times people complained that writing tales down was ruining the craft of storytelling.

I had the opposite problem. When I first read Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey I didn’t enjoy them much, for the oral storytelling style felt awkward and unfamiliar to me—though I had devoured books from an early age, I had seldom heard tales told. However, I loved The Aeneid, which Virgil had written to be read. Now there is as much angst about the recent move toward digital and visual media that’s making the printed book redundant.[16]

Alas, I’ve never fully entered the third age where, over the past half-century, the written word has been replaced by the visual media (movies, TV, games, and Internet) as the principal form of storytelling. We didn’t have a TV at home when I was growing up (and how bitterly I resented that), and I rarely saw movies, so I never developed the sophisticated appreciation of these media that the youth of today take for granted.

So how has storytelling changed, and how has it stayed the same?

Critics of the Inheritance Cycle make much of the fact that Eragon was written when Paolini was in his teens, and that it is derivative of the Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonflight series, and other fantasy epics. There seems little doubt that Paolini has been heavily influenced by these sources, but what’s wrong with that? J. R. R. Tolkien, George Lucas, and McCaffrey, and every other modern fantasy writer, were also influenced by writers and tales they admired. Indeed, Paolini acknowledges his debt along with his aspirations: “In my writing, I strive for a lyrical beauty somewhere between Tolkien at his best and Seamus Heaney’s [winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature] translation of Beowulf.”

A noble aim for any writer, and particularly for a teenager, though traditionally the apprentice has begun by imitating the other great works and only found his true style after mastering the craft.

Philip Pullman acknowledges his sources at the end of his His Dark Materials series—“I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read. My principle in researching for a novel is, ‘Read like a butterfly, write like a bee,’ and if this story contains any honey, it is entirely because of the quality of the nectar I found in the work of better writers.”

Besides, there is nothing new in literature: Everything we read is a reworking of what has gone before, back to the very first written works of literature, if not the dawn of human storytelling. The basic plots were first discussed by Aristotle in his Poetics twenty-three centuries ago. He believed there were only two, tragedy and comedy (though he did introduce subdivisions).

Much has been made about fantasy coming out of nowhere to become a mainstream genre in the past few decades. In fact, fantasy is surely the oldest literary genre of all, and until the eighteenth century, when the novel appeared, most narrative fiction had a fantasy element, including the oldest known stories.

The Epic of Gilgamesh, first written down more than four thousand years ago though based on older oral sources, is one of the earliest works of literature and has influenced many later works, not least Homer’s Odyssey. The echoes of Gilgamesh are evident in many epic fantasies of today, including Eragon.

Briefly, the God-King Gilgamesh is outfitted with specially forged weapons and armor and sets out for epic adventures in strange lands . . .

I must travel a road I have never travelled,

. . . where he has to fight fantastical beings such as the monstrous demon, Humbaba, the cave-dwelling guardian of the cedar forest, who has brought evil upon the land:

And Humbaba, his roaring is the Great Flood,
His mouth is fire
His breath is death!

It seems that Gilgamesh can never defeat such a powerful and supernatural foe but, after a gigantic struggle, the monster is brought down:

Gilgamesh struck the neck of Humbaba
Enkidu, his friend, struck Humbaba twice also.
At the third blow Humbaba fell . . .
For two leagues the cedars resounded.

This plot, the oldest in all literature, may also be the most common. There are few civilizations, ages, or cultures which do not have versions of the hero slaying the monster, from The Odyssey’s Perseus versus Medusa and Theseus venturing into the Labyrinth to kill the Minotaur, to Beowulf, St. George and the Dragon, Jack and the Beanstalk, the Australian Aboriginal tale of the great devil-dingo, most of the James Bond films, and Jaws and Alien. It is the classic hero’s journey of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a book which profoundly influenced Lucas in the creation of Star Wars. As Campbell describes it:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernational wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons upon his fellow man.

Later, using another common theme from myth and fantastic literature, Gilgamesh crosses the Waters of Death into the Underworld in search of immortality (in a scene reminiscent of Harry and Dumbledore’s crossing of the black underground lake in search of a Horcrux in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince), though Gilgamesh is doomed to failure because of his own human frailties and follies, and because death is the fate of all humans, which it is impossible to fight:

The common man, the noble man,
Once they have reached the end of life,
All are gathered in as one.

But not for a long time in some cases. In Eragon, when Angela reads the dragon bones in Teirm, the infinity symbol comes up, suggesting that Eragon will have an extraordinarily long life. We later learn that this comes from being bonded with a dragon, and the healing in Eldest that gives him elf-like qualities. But of course that doesn’t mean that he can’t be killed.

The doomed hero motif also occurs over and over again in the history of myth and fantasy, from the story of King Oedipus, to Kullervo in the Finnish national epic the Kalevala, to Count Dracula and Michael Moorcock’s stories of the albino Elric of Melniboné.

Moorcock, also a notable critic of the fantasy genre, distinguishes fantasy fiction from myth, legend, and folktale “by its definite authorship and because it does not genuinely purport to be a true account of historical or religious events,” which is fair enough, though considered from the viewpoint of pure storytelling there is little difference between one and the other. And certainly, many readers of the great imaginative modern works such as the Lord of the Rings consider fantasy to be a mythology for the modern age. As it happens, one of Tolkien’s initial aims was to create a mythology for the English-speaking peoples.

A more relevant distinction is the purported intent of the work, or those who created it. The primary intent of modern fantasy is storytelling, while myths, legends, and folktales have a number of additional purposes, including explaining the world or the universe, the maintenance of a culture, and the justification and support of a ruler or realm. Virgil’s Aeneid, which is based on Aeneas, a Trojan from The Iliad, and roughly follows the second half of The Odyssey, tells the story of the founding of Rome and legitimizes the realm as being descended from gods and heroes.

Only after the invention of the printing press could written stories begin to surpass oral tales for mass entertainment, and fantasy in the form of the chivalric romance (“romance” here means containing supernatural or fantastic elements), such as Amadis of Gaul (1508) and its dozens of sequels and hundreds of imitators, was both popular and influential. These tales generally portrayed a handsome and noble hero out to rescue a beautiful, virtuous damsel-in-distress, and were full of the stock items of modern fantasy such as magicians and sorceresses, magic and magical devices, monsters, evil spirits, madness, exile, and wonders of all description. Miguel de Cervantes wrote Don Quixote as a parody of the worst examples of the genre, the Don having been driven mad by the books of chivalry he’d read.

Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590), partly intended to celebrate the Tudor dynasty and glorify Queen Elizabeth the First, who is portrayed as Gloriana, the Faerie Queen, was strongly influenced by Arthurian legend, Virgil’s Aeneid, and other earlier epics, and contains many fantasy elements including monsters, magical creatures, and wicked wizards.[17]

With the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century, realism triumphed over fantasy, but only temporarily. The origins of modern fantasy can be clearly seen in the Gothic novels of Horace Walpole (The Castle of Otranto, 1764), Ann Radcliffe (The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794), Charles Maturin (Melmoth the Wanderer, 1820, which also has an anti-Catholic theme), and others, and many of these novels remain in print to this day. Gothic romances were commonly set in a partly ruined and labyrinthine castle inhabited by a mad or villainous lord or monk, who pursues the heroine through it until she is finally rescued. The setting is dank, gloomy, and oppressive, full of lunatics, demons, ghosts and other undead, ancestral curses, and violence, cruelty, and torture, e.g.:

The maniac marked the destruction of the spot where she thought she stood by one desperate bound, accompanied by a wild shriek, and then calmly gazed on her infants as they rolled over the scorching fragments, and sunk into the abyss of fire below. ‘There they go, -one-two-three-all!’ and her voice sunk into low mutterings, and her convulsions into faint, cold shudderings, like the sobbings of a spent storm. . . . (Melmoth the Wanderer)

Unlike modern fantasy, Gothic novels were always set in a (admittedly corrupt) version of our world, and were the most-read form of fiction in this era. It is no coincidence that their popularity coincided with the vast social upheaval of the Industrial Revolution, the population shift to urban squalor and the “dark, satanic mills” of the industrial workplace. Perhaps they provided an escape from the turmoil of everyday life in the same way as the recent boom in fantasy and SF TV series (e.g., Lost, Heroes, Battlestar Galactica) which sometimes invert the stereotypes of good and evil for the chronically anxious or completely tuned-out post-September 11 generation. Around a quarter of the pilot shows picked up for TV series by the U.S. networks in 2008 are either SF or fantasy, or heavily influenced by these genres, which represents a dramatic break with the past. But I digress.

Gothic fiction was profoundly influential on many of the great European writers of the nineteenth century, from Wordsworth to Goethe, to Poe and the French Romantics. Jane Austen wrote Northanger Abbey to poke fun at the genre, and clearly had read a lot of it. Gothic fiction also led to Frankenstein, Dracula, and Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), one of the most influential works of fiction of all time, which ultimately inspired the horror films of the mid-to-late twentieth century, the vampire novels of Anne Rice, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the explosion of vampire fantasy fiction in the past decade and a half.

In the stability of the Victorian era the appeal of fantasy waned, and realistic fiction reigned supreme while fantasy was largely restricted to children’s stories and the penny dreadfuls. Modern fantasy fiction began in this interval with George MacDonald’s Phantastes (1858), a psychological novel set in a dream landscape, and William Morris’s The Wood Beyond the World (1894), arguably the world’s first true fantasy novel in that it is set in a kind of medieval but invented world. The anthologist Lin Carter has proposed that Morris was the inventor of the modern fantasy novel.[18] Though written in an archaic style which is difficult to read—

Walter leapt up and put his arm about her, and looked whitherward she pointed, and at first saw nought . . . . and then at last he saw that it was the Evil Thing which had met him when he first came into that land; and now it stood upright, and he could see that it was clad in a coat of yellow samite—

Morris’s three fantasy novels were immensely influential (notably to C. S. Lewis), and pseudo-medieval invented worlds remain the most common settings of fantasy to this day, in the works of Tolkien and Lewis, as well as in current popular fantasists such as George R. R. Martin, Tad Williams, Robin Hobb, Lois McMaster Bujold, and Paolini.

From the turn of the twentieth century the prolific Irish writer, Lord Dunsany, wrote dozens of fantasy stories and several novels, and was a powerful influence on many later fantasists, including H. P. Lovecraft, Jack Vance, Ursula K. Le Guin, David Eddings, and Tolkien.

Tolkien’s other influences included Nordic myth—his dwarf names Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, Thorin, Fili, and Kili, among others, come from The Deluding of Gylfi in Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, as does Gandalf ’s name—and Beowulf, notably the dragon Beowulf fights as an old man:

The burning one who hunts out barrows,
The slick-skinned dragon, threatening the night sky
With streamers of fire.

The Hobbit’s brooding, malicious dragon, Smaug, jealously guarding a stolen treasure hoard in its cave and every so often sweeping out to bring fire and ruin on the surrounding lands, was clearly inspired by the barrow-dwelling dragon in Beowulf.

Tolkien created an unprecedentedly detailed and internally consistent world for the stories he set in Middle-earth, and many of the other popular fantasists of recent times have done the same, sometimes in prodigious and meticulous detail (e.g., the intricate political landscape in Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire). In Williams’s monumental Memory, Sorrow and Thorn, every race and species has its own characteristic mode of speech and Williams never falters in his portrayal of it.

It has been argued[19] that modern fantasy “is a literature for a discontented city population” or an audience “which wished to turn its back on a scientific and technological world,” and I believe this to be partly true. I recall a man in the audience at a talk I was giving, when asked why he read fantasy rather than SF, replying, “I’m not interested in the future.”

And little wonder—in a post-September 11 world where the State intrudes ever more deeply into our private lives to further the War on Terror, and the nightly news brings every atrocity in the world into our living rooms in voyeuristic high definition, and our complex lives seem increasingly out of our control—that readers should want to escape into a world of fantasy where the dividing line between right and wrong is (generally) clear, and ordinary people can do extraordinary deeds and make a difference.

But I think most people read fantasy because, while some other genres have become increasingly literary, fantasy largely remains focused on storytelling—that is, on pure entertainment.

The phenomenal rise of the modern fantasy genre dates to the mid-1960s, when the Lord of the Rings, first published a decade earlier, became an enduring bestseller and, along with the works of other writers such as Le Guin’s Wizard of Earthsea and Robert E. Howard’s Conan series, created a great hunger for multivolume epic fantasy stories which could not be satisfied by the available literature. A decade later, Terry Brooks’s The Sword of Shannara (itself highly derivative of Tolkien’s work) became an instant bestseller and the form of modern popular fantasy was fully established. Fantasy is arguably the broadest of all genres but, for the adult market at least, few writers have achieved great and enduring public popularity writing outside the pseudo-medieval setting and the now clichéd struggle of good versus evil.

The Inheritance Cycle, clearly, falls in the middle of this great tradition of epic fantasy. Unfortunately, any critical overview of the series is hampered because the fourth volume, as yet unnamed, will not be published for some time. Since the resolution of the Inheritance Cycle is unknown, it is not possible to fully appreciate the story canvas the author has created.

Thus far, there is little that can be considered original in Eragon or Eldest, and I find no fault with that. The characters, setting, and plot of the Inheritance Cycle would have been familiar to audiences three thousand years ago, for the books deal with universal themes. Where Inheritance does differ from the fantasy epics of recent decades, it is in the style and logic of Paolini’s storytelling, which in my view owes as much to movies and fantasy gaming as to fantasy literature.

I think the Inheritance Cycle is strongly influenced by fantasy gaming, especially in fight scenes. For example, when Eragon strikes down twelve attacking Urgals at once after leaving Teirm, and again when he escapes from prison in Gil’ead and rescues Arya, it reads like the moves of a mêlée in a fantasy game rather than a “realistic” fantasy fight scene, as the previously mentioned authors would have written it.

And in Eldest, when Eragon is given a variety of magical gifts by the Varden before going off to fight Galbatorix’s army, the story is reminiscent of an adventurer being equipped to venture into a monster-infested game dungeon.

The gaming influence is particularly evident when Eragon is defeated in the battle with Murtagh at the end of Eldest. He doesn’t fight to the end of his physical and mental abilities, but rather he has only so much energy, like gaming’s “hit points,” and once it is all used up he falls.

The last reserves of power stored in Za’roc’s ruby and the belt of Beloth the Wise were only enough to maintain his exertions for another minute. . . .

In Brisingr, when Eragon and Murtagh fight in mid-air on Saphira and Thorn, and Murtagh’s blow stabs into Eragon so hard that the sword tip is embedded in his hip bone, the pain is described as insignificant and the injury portrayed as superficial—“The pain shocked Eragon like a splash of frigid water”—though in a real battle it would be a serious injury. This again is a gaming image, where injury occurs without significant suffering or consequences, where characters can be healed over and over, and even healing magic is trivial: “Eragon squirmed in the saddle as the elves’ magic took effect and his hip began to tingle and itch as if covered in flea bites.”

When Eragon is healed by the dragons in the Agaetí Blödhren and gains the powers and qualities of an elf, it is hauntingly reminiscent of characters I’ve known in times past undergoing rejuvenation or transformation in Dungeons and Dragons and other fantasy games:

The dragon bent his neck and, with his snout, touched the heart of Eragon’s gedwëy ignasia. A spark jumped between them, and Eragon went rigid as incandescent heat poured through his body, consuming his insides. His vision flashed red and black, and the scar on his back burned as if branded. . . .

Many critics have noted the similarities between the plots of Star Wars and Eragon—a farm boy is brought up by relatives, having no knowledge of who his parents were; his guardians are killed by the Empire and the boy sets off on a journey of discovery with a wise and mysterious counselor; etc.—but I believe the influence goes deeper than that. I believe that Paolini’s storytelling style is also influenced by the way stories like Star Wars are told.

Certainly Eragon follows closely the classical three-act narrative structure of the original Star Wars film (1977) and similar block-buster movies, with the first third of the book (roughly up to his arrival at Teirm) being the setup, his travel and adventures up to the revelation that Murtagh is the son of Morzan being the second act, and the remainder of the book being the climax and resolution.

Parts of the story are told in a cinematic fashion too. As I’ve noted above, the authors of the great fantasy epics of recent decades go to enormous lengths to make their invented worlds internally consistent and the actions of their characters plausible. Heroes may perform marvels but they don’t do things that are, in that world, impossible; traveler’s journeys take a realistic amount of time, according to the nature of the terrain to be crossed; magic, where used, is never a convenience to get people out of trouble, but springs from the history, race, and training of the wielder, and is always limited. Fight scenes are informed by a thorough understanding of the limitations of the weapons used, and of human capabilities. Where a character must perform a seemingly impossible feat, the author is careful to show, in advance, how the character comes by the ability to do so, so that the internal logic of the novel’s fictive world is always maintained. Once the impossible becomes achievable, the fictive dream state—the feeling of being carried away into another world that readers so crave—will be broken, and many readers will lose faith in the story.

In fantasy movies, for instance the Matrix series or Star Wars, some characters perform impossible or highly implausible deeds as a matter of commonplace, though this is more tolerable because the audience does not have to imagine the story—all they have to do is look at it on the screen. Even in movies, though, there has to be a degree of plausibility, which the director breaks at his peril.

The sight of Anakin Skywalker leaping over the side of an air car in Attack of the Clones, and falling thousands of feet through the sky traffic to intercept an enemy, quite destroyed the credibility of the movie for me. How could I identify with, and emote about, characters who can seemingly do anything?

Paolini does not make this mistake; Eragon displays sufficient pain, confusion, and genuine human frailty that the reader does identify with and care about his fate. But it has to be said that he doesn’t struggle much: Typically Eragon encounters a small initial difficulty, but easily overcomes it, and afterward mastery comes quickly. This is frustrating to many readers who have grown up with written storytelling for readers identify with the protagonist’s difficulties and failures, and long for him to succeed. If he doesn’t struggle much, it’s hard to care deeply about his goals, or his fate.

In the battle with the Urgal in Yazuac, Eragon uses magic for the first time when

The energy inside him burned at an unbearable level. He had to release it, or it would consume him. A word suddenly leapt unbidden to his lips. He shot, yelling “Brisingr!”

His arrow, enchanted with fire by the word of power, kills his enemy. Eragon had heard Brom say “Brisingr,” previously but thought it was a swear word, and has no good reason for using it here. He did not know the word was magic, nor how to use magic—it simply came to him when he needed it and worked perfectly. Predestination or coincidence? Either are uncomfortable bedfellows in storytelling.

Again, in Teirm, when Eragon wants to listen in on Brom and Jeod’s conversation, some words of power Brom had once mentioned give Eragon perfect hearing the first time he tries them. And when Brom needs help to read the shipping records, he teaches Eragon to read in a week. After one week, he can read complex documents written in a variety of hands! These easy successes, which might be perfectly acceptable in a fast-paced movie, weakened the story logic of Eragon for me, undermined the fictive dream, and diminished the story—I still enjoyed it, but I might have enjoyed it so much more.

In Brisingr, Eragon and Arya are confronted by a patrol of fifteen soldiers and kill them all in a few minutes at no cost to themselves save that Eragon smashes his hand so badly the cartilage is showing through his mangled skin. His only reaction is to think, Blast, as though he’d stubbed a toe.

In the final battle with Durza in Eragon, the Shade strikes Eragon across the back, the sword blow cutting into him so deeply that, even after the best efforts of the healers, Eragon is left with a huge, ropy, and disfiguring scar from his right shoulder to his left hip. In reality, such a deep gash would have severed his spine and almost cut him in half, yet he overcomes the pain, and, “He lunged forward . . . And stabbed Durza through the heart.”

Such clearly impossible feats are commonplace in the fantasies, myths, and romances of earlier ages—Don Quixote tells of Felixmarte, a warrior in a chivalric romance he’d read, who “with a single backstroke he cleft five giants asunder as if they had been made of bean cods”—and in sword and sorcery tales, but not in the great epic fantasies of the past few decades. I don’t, however, think that Paolini is harking back to earlier tales; rather, he is employing gaming and cinematic techniques for a predominantly young audience who, having grown up seeing the majority of their stories on a screen rather than on the printed page, are more comfortable with this manner of storytelling.

The fantasy writers I enjoy most are those like Martin, Tolkien, and Bujold, whose invented worlds are internally consistent and whose characters’ actions are always plausible, within the boundaries of that created world. But then, as well as being firmly in the camp of written rather than visual storytelling, no doubt I’m a curmudgeonly old reactionary. I hope so. And besides, as well as being a writer, I’ve been a scientist all my professional life and therefore yearn for logic, order, and most of all, consistency in my fantasy fare.

It is, of course, perfectly acceptable for Paolini to tell the Inheritance Cycle in a more visual, movie-influenced manner—literary critics may sneer, but there are no rules in storytelling. All that matters is that the audience be captivated by the tale, as clearly much of Paolini’s audience has been, and good luck to him.

Ian Irvine is a marine scientist who decided he wanted to write stories and now has over a million books in print.

Ian has written twenty-four novels, including three bestselling fantasy series, The View from the Mirror, The Well of Echoes and Song of the Tears, and three eco-thrillers about catastrophic climate change, the Human Rites trilogy. His fantasy novels have been published in many countries and languages. He has also written ten novels for children and young adults, including fantasy and comic fantasy.

He lives with his family in the mountains of northern NSW, Australia. Ian’s web site is www.ian-irvine.com, and he can be contacted at ianirvine@ozemail.com.au.

1
See his essay “The Other: Orientalism, Colonialism, and Children’s Literature” in Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 17.

2
You can read more about these studies at http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/teenage-brain-a-work-in-progress.shtml.

3
See his article at http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10060 http://koreanish.wordpress.com/2008/01/26/grow-and-develop-james-woods-on-characters-in-fiction/.

4
For example, in one review at http://www.geocities.com/fantasticreviews/eragon_paolini.htm: “You could accuse Paolini of getting the word ‘tenebrous’ out of his thesaurus.” (Generally this reviewer likes Paolini.)

5
Murtagh, however, does seem to have been chosen by his dragon, Thorn. He tells Eragon in Eldest, “And after Thorn hatched for me, Galbatorix forced both of us to swear loyalty to him in the Ancient Language.” Perhaps there is hope for Murtagh yet; perhaps Thorn was as wise as Saphira and found a way to avoid committing to Galbatorix as Saphira found a way to avoid committing herself fully to the Varden.

6
King Arthur’s sister-lover and nasty, nasty elf-sorceress! She seduces her own brother, King Arty!

7
. . . and movie makers. Lest anyone doubt the legacy of the benign, lovely faery in later fantasy, think no further than the beautiful Liv Tyler (Arwen) and Orlando Bloom (Legolas) of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings. Consider Julia Roberts as Tinkerbell in Stephen Spielberg’s Hook, or the original animated Tink, fashioned deliberately by Disney artists after Marilyn Monroe. Okay, so one might argue that Will Ferrell hardly counts as pretty in Jon Favreau’s Elf, but still he’s arguably cute. And harmless.

8
“Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen” from The Magic Flute.

9
Homer’s Sirens were those sweet-throated babes whose songs were seemingly irresistible to sailors, with few exceptions: Only Orpheus and Odysseus/ Ulysses managed to escape their lethal lullaby lures.

10
In Geraldine McCaughrean’s Peter Pan in Scarlet, we encounter an even darker version of Barrie’s original elf.

11
Not unlike Kiefer Sutherland as leader of another gang of Lost Boys in the 1987 movie by the same name, featuring not elves but their blood-sucking vamp cousins.

12
W. B. Yeats was especially enamored of these faeries, apparently a true believer in their existence, and Purkiss suggests, decidedly keen to cast them as “essential to Irish life.” He, like Keats, preferred the “faery” spelling that Tolkien also favored. For Yeats, faeries were fraught with difficult ambivalence. They were at once a mixture of loveliness and malice yet also a source of inspiration and national identity—in other words, poetry and death (which many students and my boyfriend would argue aren’t very far apart!). His “The Stolen Child” is an abduction poem in the tradition of “The Erlkönig” and “The Song of Wandering Aengus” hearkens back to Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.”

13
And since goblin and imp are often used synonymously with elf and fairy, the truly evil Tolkien faerie folk are his goblin/orcs, upon which Paolini modelled his brutish Urgals/Kulls.

14
In his essay “Laws and Customs of the Eldar,” Tolkien admits to chaste unions between his “Good People.”

15
Puck’s famous elfish pronouncement in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

16
See, e.g., Robert Coover’s article “The End of Books” in the New York Times.

17
The beautiful lady, Duessa (in reality an ugly witch), is the personification of what was for Edmund Spenser one of the greatest evils of his time, the Roman Catholic Church. It isn’t hard to see Pullman’s Mrs. Coulter in her:

The Witch approching gan him fayrely greet,
And with reproch of carelesnes unkynd,
Upbrayd, for leaving her in place unmeet,
With fowle words tempring faire, soure gall with hony sweet.

18
He does so in his introduction to the 1971 edition of William Morris’s The Water of the Wondrous Isles.

19
E.g., in David Pringle’s introduction to Modern Fantasy: The Hundred Best Novels .

THIS PUBLICATION HAS NOT BEEN PREPARED, APPROVED, OR LICENSED BY ANY ENTITY THAT CREATED OR PRODUCED THE WELL-KNOWN BOOKS ERAGON, ELDEST, OR BRISINGR, OR THE INHERITANCE CYCLE.

“Ten Things About Christopher Paolini” and “It’s in His Character” Copyright © 2008 by Jeremy Owen

“Riding the Dragon” Copyright © 2008 by Michael Dowling

“Roran: The Reluctant Hero” Copyright © 2008 by J. FitzGerald McCurdy

“The Magic of Anthropomorphic Animals” Copyright © 2008 by Nancy Yi Fan

“My Dragon, Myself” Copyright © 2008 by Kelly McClymer

“Eldest ≠ Wisest” Copyright © 2008 by Susan Vaught

“Q: How Does a Fifteen-Year-Old Do This?” Copyright © 2008 by Carol Plum-Ucci

“The Modern-Day Perceval” Copyright © 2008 by Joshua Pantalleresco

“The Thing About Elves Is ...” Copyright © 2008 by Gail Sidonie Sobat

“How the Inheritance Cycle Differs From Fantasy Epics of the Past” Copyright © 2008 by Ian Irvine

Additional Materials Copyright © 2008 by James A. Owen

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

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