David Eddings - The Rivan Codex

The Rivan codex

By David Eddings

Ancient Texts of The Belgariad and The Malloreon

When David Eddings sketched a strange map one morning before work, he took the

first step in an extraordinary imaginative journey that would last for years

and result in a majestic saga of Gods, Kings, and Sorcerers--one loved by

millions of readers the world over. Now David and Leigh Eddings take us on a

fascinating behind-the-scenes tour of the extensive background materials they

compiled before beginning the masterpiece of epic fantasy unforgettably set

down in The Belgariad and The Malloreon and their two companion volumes,

Belgarath the Sorcerer and Polgara the Sorceress.

Our tour stretches from the wealthy Empire of Tolnedra to the remote Isle of

the Winds, from the mysterious mountains of Ulgoland to the forbidding reaches

of darkest Mallorea. We will visit the time before Time when two opposing

Destinies began the cataclysmic struggle for supremacy that would involve Gods

and men alike, crack a world asunder, and threaten to unravel the fabric of

the universe itself. We will see the origin of the Orb of Aldur and glimpse

the final act upon the Sardion Stone.

Along the way, we will stop to greet old friends: Belgarath, the Old Wolf,

disciple of the god Aldur; Polgara, his enigmatic daughter; brave Belgarion,

the Rivan King; and his beautiful Queen, Ce'Nedra. Old enemies will be

waiting, too: the maimed god Torak, evil incarnate; Zandramas, fearsome Child

of the Dark; and the tragically corrupted traitor, Belzedar.

Rare volumes will be opened to your eyes. Sacred holy books in which you may

read the secrets of the Gods themselves and of their prophets. Scholarly

histories of the rise and fall of empires from the Imperial Library at Tol

Honeth. The profound mysteries of the Malloreon Gospels.

Brimming with the adventure, romance, and excitement readers have come to

expect from David and Leigh Eddings--including invaluable advice for aspiring

writers on how and how not to create their own fantasy worlds--The Rivan Codex

will enrich your understanding of all that has gone before . . . and whet your

appetite for all that is yet to come.

THE BELGARIAD

Book One: Pawn of Prophecy

Book Two: Queen of Sorcery

Book Three: Magician's Gambit

Book Four: Castle of Wizardry

Book Five: Enchanters'End Game

THE MALLOREON

Book One: Guardians of the West

Book Two: Kings of the Murgos

Book Three: Demon Lord of Karanda

Book Four: Sorceress of Darshiva

Book Five: The Seeress of Kell

THE ELENIUM

Book One: The Diamond Throne

Book Two: The Ruby Knight

Book Three: The Sapphire Rose

THE TAMULI

Book One: Domes of Fire

Book Two: The Shining Ones

Book Three: The H~ City

High Hunt

The Losers

By David and Leigh Eddings

The Prequel to the Belgariad: Belgarath the Sorcerer

The Companion Novel to Belgarath the Sorcerer: Polgara the Sorceress

DAVID & LEIGH EDDINGS,

The RIVAM

codex

ANCIENT TEXTS OF THE BELgARIAD

AND THE MALLOREON

ILLUSTRATED BY

GEOFFTAYLOR

HarperCoflinsSblishers

Voyager

An Imprint of HarpeiCollinsPublishers

77-85 Fulham Palace Road,

Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

The voyager World Wide Web site address is

http: / /wwwharpereoRins.co.uk/voyager

Published by Voyager 1998

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Copyright David and Leigh Eddings 1998

The Authors assert the moral right to

be identified as the authors of this work

A catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 00 224677 5

0 00 224702 X (Deluxe edition)

Set in Palatino

Printed and bound in Australia by

Griffin Press Pty Ltd, South Australia

A division of PMP Communications

reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,

in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,

photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior

permission of the publishers.

For Malcolm, lane, loy~ Geoff and all the staff at HarperCollins.

It's always a genuine pleasure to work with you.

With all our thanks.

DAVID & LEIGH

CONTENTS

introduction

Preface: The Personal History of Belgarath the Sorcerer

PART I: THE HOLY BOOKS

The Book of Alorn

The Book of Torak

Testament of the Snake People

Hymn to Chaldan

The Lament of Mara

The Proverbs of Nedra

The Sermon of Aldur

The Book of Ulgo

PART II: THE HISTORIES

General Background and Geography

The Empire of Tolnedra

Appendix on Maragor

The Alorn Kingdoms

The Isle of the Winds

Cherek

Drasnia

Algaria (Including an appendix on the Vale of Aldur)

Sendaria

Arendia

Ulgoland

Nyissa

The Angarak Kingdoms

Gar og Nadrak

Mishrak ac Thull

Cthol Murgos

PART Iii: THE BATTLE OF VO MIMBRE

Book Seven: The Battle Before Vo Mimbre

Afterword by Master jeebers

Intermission

IV: PRELIMINARY STUDIES TO THE MALLOREON

A Cursory History of the Angarak Kingdoms

V: THE MALLOREAN GOSPELS

The Book of Ages

The Book of Fates

The Book of Tasks

The Book of Generations

The Book of Visions

VI: A SUMMARY OF CURRENT EVENTS

From the Journal of Anheg of Cherek

Afterward

389

INTRODUCTION

My decision to publish this volume. was made in part because

of a goodly number of flattering letters I've received over the past

several years. Some of these letters have come from students at

various

levels, and to make matters worse, I've also received letters from

teachers who inform me that they're actually encouraging this sort

of thing. Aren't they aware that they're supposed to wait until I'm

safely in the ground before they do this?

The students, naturally, ask questions. The teachers hint around

the edges of an invitation to stop by and address the class. I'm very

flattered, as I mentioned, but I don't write - or grade - term papers

any more, and I don't travel. To put it idiomatically, 'I ain't going no

place; I been where I'm going.'

Then there are those other letters, the ones which rather bashfully

confide an intention to 'try writing fantasy myself' I don't worry too

much about those correspondents. They'll get over that notion rather

quickly once they discover what's involved. I'm sure that most of

them will eventually decide to take up something simpler - brain

surgery or rocket science, perhaps.

I'd more or less decided to just file those letters and keep my

mouth shut. A prolonged silence might be the best way to encourage

a passing fancy to do just that - pass.

Then I recalled a conversation I had with Lester del Rey on one

occasion. When I'd first submitted my proposal for the Belgariad, I'd

expected the usual leisurely reaction-time, but Lester responded

with what I felt to be unseemly haste. He wanted to see this thing

now, but I wasn't ready to let him see it - now. I was in revision of

what I thought would be Book I, and since I was still doing honest

work in those days, my time was somewhat curtailed. I wanted

to keep him interested, however, so I sent him my 'Preliminary

Studies' instead - 'So that you'll have the necessary background

material.' Lester later told me that while he was reading those

studies, he kept telling himself, 'There's no way we can publish this

stuff,' but then he admitted, 'but I kept reading.' We were fairly far

along in the Belgariad when he made this confession, and he went

on to say, 'Maybe when we've got the whole story finished, we

might want to think about releasing those studies.'

Eventually, the two ideas clicked together. I had people out there

asking questions, and I had the answers readily at hand since nobody

in his right mind takes on a multi-book project without some fairly

extensive preparation. My Preliminary Studies were right there

taking up space, I'd just finished a five-book contract, and I had

nothing else currently on the fire. All this thing needed was a brief

introduction and some footnotes, and we were off to press. Just in

passing I should advise you that my definition of 'brief' and yours

might differ just a bit. It takes me a hundred pages just to clear my

throat. Had you noticed that? I thought you might have.)

Please bear in mind the fact that these studies are almost twenty

years old, and there are going to be gaps. There are places where

some great leaps occurred, frequently flowing out of the point of my

pen during that actual writing, and I wasn't keeping a diary to

report these bursts of inspired creativity. I'll candidly admit that

probably no more than half of these 'strokes of genius' actually

worked. Some of them would have been disastrous. Fortunately, my

collaborator was there to catch those blunders. Trial and error enters

into any form of invention, I suppose. This book may help others to

avoid some of the missteps we made along the way, and it may give

the student of our genre some insights into the creative process

something on the order of 'connect wire A to wire B. Warning! Do

not connect wire A to wire C, because that will cause the whole thing

to blow up in your face.'

Now that I've explained what I'm up to here, let's get the lecture

out of the way. (Did you really think I'd let you get away without

one?)

After I graduated from the US Army in 1956, one of my veteran's

benefits was the now famous GI Bill. My government had decided

to pay me to go to graduate school. I worked for a year to save up

enough for some incidentals (food, clothing, and shelter) and then

enrolled in the graduate school of the University of Washington in

Seattle. (A good day in Seattle is a day when it isn't raining up.) My

area of concentration was supposed to be modern American fiction

(Hemingway, Faulkner, and Steinbeck), but I had those Ph.D exams

lurking out in the future, so I knew that I'd better spend some time

with Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton as well. Once I'd mastered

Middle English, I fell in love with Chaucer and somewhat by

extension with Sir Thomas Malory.

INTRODUCTION

Since what is called 'Epic Fantasy' in the contemporary world

descends in an almost direct line from medieval romance, my

studies

of Chaucer and Malory gave me a running head start in the field.

'Medieval Romance' had a long and honorable history, stretching

from about the eleventh century to the sixteenth, when Don Quixote

finally put it to sleep. It was a genre that spoke of the dark ages in

glowing terms, elevating a number of truly barbaric people to near

sainthood. The group that is of most interest to the English-speaking

world, of course, is King Arthur and his knights of the Round

Table. There may or may not have been a real King Arthur, but that's

beside the point. We should never permit historical reality to get in

the way of a good story~ should we?

Since the issue's come up, though, let's take a look at someone

who was historically verifiable and who had a great deal of impact

on the fledgling genre in its earliest of days. The lady in question

was the infamous Eleanor of Aquitaine.

Eleanor was related tofive (count 'em) different kings (or

pseudokings) during the twelfth century. Her father was the Duke of

Aquitaine (now known as Gascony) and, since he controlled more

land than the King of France, he routinely signed official documents

as 'the King of Aquitaine'. In 1137, Louis of France arranged a

marriage between his son, Prince Louis and 'princess' Eleanor.

Eleanor wasn't a good wife, since she had what's politely known as

a 'roving eye'. Evidently, it was more than her eye that roved.

Her husband, who soon became Louis Vii of France, was a pious

man, and his wandering wife not only failed to produce an heir to

his throne, but also became notorious as an adulteress. He finally

managed to have their marriage annulled in 1152, and two months

later Eleanor married Henry Plantagenet, Duke of Normandy, who

incidentally also happened to be King Henry II of England. Eleanor,

as it turned out, was not barren, and she bore Henry several sons.

Aside from that, Henry and Eleanor didn't really get along together,

so he took the easy way out and locked her up to keep her out of his

hair. After he died, Eleanor stirred up trouble between her sons,

Richard the Lionhearted and John the Incompetent, both of whom

became kings of England. They also locked Mother away to keep her

out of mischief.

Thus, Eleanor spent a lot of her time locked up. Embroidery

didn't thrill her too much, so she read books. Books were very

expensive in the twelfth century because they had to be copied by

hand, but Eleanor didn't care. She had money, if not freedom, so she

could afford to pay assorted indigents with literary pretensions to

write the kind of books she liked. Given Eleanor's background

it's understandable that she liked books about kings, knights in

shining armor, pretty young fellows who played the lute and sang of

love with throbbing emotion, and fair damsels cruelly imprisoned in

towers. Her literary tastes gave rise to troubadour poetry, the courtly

love tradition, and whole libraries of interminable French romances

that concentrated heavily on 'The Matter of Britain' (King Arthur et

al) and 'The Matter of France' (Charlemagne and Co.).

Now we jump forward three hundred years to the Wars of

the Roses. There was a certain knight named Sir Thomas Malory

(probably from Warwickshire) who sided with the Lancastrians.

When the Yorkist faction gained the ascendancy~ Sir Thomas was

clapped into prison. He was not, strictly speaking, a political

prisoner, however. He was in prison because he belonged there, since it

appears that he was a career criminal more than a political partisan.

There may have been some politics involved in the various charges

leveled against him, of course, but the preponderance of evidence

suggests that he was a sort of medieval jesse james, leading a gang

of outlaws on a rampage through southern England. He was

imprisoned for sedition, murder, the attempted murder of the Duke of

Buckingham, cattle-rustling, horse theft, the looting of monasteries,

jail-breaking and not infrequently of rape. Sir Thomas seems to have

been a very bad boy.

He was still a nobleman, however, and a sometime member of

parliament, so he was able to persuade his jailors to let him visit a

nearby library (under guard, of course). Sir Thomas was quite proud

of his facility in the French language, and he whiled away the hours

of his incarceration translating the endless French romances dealing

with (what else?) King Arthur. The end result was the work we now

know as Le Morte darthur.

A technological break-through along about then ensured a wide

distribution of Malory's work. William Caxton had a printing press,

and he evidently grew tired of grinding out religious pamphlets,

so, sensing a potential market, he took Malory's manuscript and

edited it in preparation for a printing run. I think we underestimate

Caxton's contribution to Le Morte darthur. If we can believe most

scholars, Malory's original manuscript was pretty much a

hodgepodge of disconnected tales, and Caxton organized them into a

coherent whole, giving us a story with a beginning, a middle, and an

end.

Now we jump forward another four hundred years. Queen

Victoria ascended the British throne at the age of seventeen. Queen

INTRODUCTION

Victoria had opinions. Queen Victoria didn't approve of 'naughty

stuff'. Queen Victoria had a resident poet, Alfred Lord Tennyson,

and he cleaned up Malory for his queen to produce a work he

called Idylls of the King. Idylls of the King is a fairly typical Victorian

bowdlerization that accepted the prevailing attitude of the time

that Le Morte darthur was little more than 'bold bawdry and open

manslaughter'. It glossed over such picky little details as the fact

that Guinevere was an adulteress, that King Arthur did have an

incestuous affair with his half-sister, Morgan le Fay, and other

improprieties.

Another hundred years slip by and we come to Papa Tolkien, who

was probably even prissier than Queen Victoria. Have you ever

noticed that there aren't any girl Hobbits? There are matronly lady

Hobbits and female Hobbit puppies, but no girls. The Victorians

maintained the public fiction that females don't exist below the

neck.

Contemporary fantasists all bow politely to Lord Tennyson and

Papa Tolkien, then step around them to go back to the original texts

for inspiration - and there are a lot of those texts. We have King

Arthur and his gang in English; we've got Siegfried and Brunhild in

German; Charlemagne and Roland in French; El Cid in Spanish;

Sigurd the Volsung in Icelandic; and assorted 'myghtiest Knights

on lyfe' in a half-dozen other cultures. Without shame, we pillage

medieval romance for all we're worth.

Operating by trial and error mostly, we've evolved a tacitly

agreed upon list of the elements that make for a good fantasy. The

first decision the aspiring fantasist must make is theological. King

Arthur and Charlemagne were Christians. Siegfried and Sigurd the

Volsung were pagans. My personal view is that pagans write better

stories. When a writer is having fun, it shows, and pagans have

more fun than Christians. Let's scrape Horace's Dulche et utile off

the plate before we even start the banquet. We're writing for fun,

not to provide moral instruction. I had much more fun with the

Belgariad/Malloreon than you did, because I know where all the

jokes are.

All right, then, for item number one, I chose paganism. (Note that

Papa Tolkien, a devout Anglo-Catholic, took the same route.)

Item number two on our interim list is the Quest'. If you don't

have a quest, you don't have a story. The quest gives you an excuse

to dash around and meet new people. Otherwise, you stay home

and grow turnips or something.

Item number three is 'The Magic Thingamajig' - The Holy Grail,

the Ring of Power, the Magic Sword, the Sacred Book, or (surprise,

surprise) THE JEWEL. Everybody knows where I came down on

that one. The Magic Thingamajig is usually, though not always, the

object of the quest.

Item four is 'Our Hero' - Sir Galahad, Sir Gawaine, Sir Launcelot,

or Sir Perceval. Galahad is saintly; Gawaine is loyal; Launcelot is the

heavyweight champion of the world; and Perceval is dumb - at least

right at first. I went with Perceval, because he's more fun- A dumb

hero is the perfect hero, because he hasn't the faintest idea of what's

going on, and in explaining things to him, the writer explains them

to his reader. Don't get excited. I'm not putting Garion down. He's

innocent more than stupid, in the same way Perceval was. Actually,

he's fairly clever, but he's a country boy, so he hasn't been exposed

to very much of the world. His Aunt Pol wanted him to ~be that way,

and Polgara has ways to get what she wants.

Item number five is the resident 'Wizard' - Merlin, usually, or

Gandalf - mighty~ powerful, and mysterious. I scratched that one

right away and went with Belgarath instead, and I think it was the

right choice. I've got a seedy old tramp with bad habits - who just

incidentally can rip the tops off mountains if he wants to. I chose to

counter him with his daughter, Polgara, who doesn't really approve

of him. That sorcerer/ sorceress (and father/daughter) pairing broke

some new ground, I think.

Item six is our heroine - usually a wispy blonde girl who spends

most of her time mooning around in a tower. I chose not to go that

route, obviously. Ce'Nedra is a spoiled brat, there's no question

about that, but she is a little tiger when the chips are down. She

turned out even better than I expected.

Item seven is a villain with diabolical connections. I invented

Torak, and he served our purpose rather well. I even managed to

give him a fairly believable motivation. "Iton helped on that one.

Torak isn't exactly Lucifer, but he comes close. As usual, he has a

number of evil underlings to do his dirty-work for him.

(Stay with me. We're almost done.) Item eight is the obligatory

group of 'companions', that supporting cast of assorted muscular

types from various cultures who handle most of the killing and

mayhem until the hero grows up to the point where he can do his

own violence on the bad guys.

Item nine is the group of ladies who are attached to the bully-boys

in item eight. Each of these ladies also needs to be well-defined, with

idiosyncrasies and passions of her own.

And finally we come to item ten. Those are the kings, queens,

emperors, courtiers, bureaucrats, et al who are the governments Of

the kingdoms of the world.

OK. End of list. If you've got those ten items, you're on your way

toward a contemporary fantasy. (You're also on your way to a cast of

thousands.)

All right then, now for a test: 'Write an epic fantasy in no less than

three and no more than twelve volumes. Then sell it to a publisher.

You have twenty years.' (Don't send it to me. I don't have a printing

press, and I do not read in the field. It's a way to avoid contamination.)

STOP!! Do not uncover your typewriter, uncap your pen, or plug

in your computer just yet. A certain amount of preparation might

help. It's a good idea to learn how to drive an automobile before you

hop into the family car and take off for Los Angeles, and it's

probably an equally good idea to browse through a couple of medical

texts before you saw off the top of Uncle Charlie's head in

preparation for brain surgery.

Let me stress one thing at the outset. This is the way we did it. This

is not the only way to do it. Our way worked out fairly well, but

others, done differently, have worked just as well. If you don't like

our way, we won't be offended.

Now, of necessity, we get into a bit of biography. This

introduction is designed to provide enough biographical detail to answer

students' questions and to provide a description of our

preparations. I hope it satisfies you, because it's all you're going to get.

My

private life is just that - private - and it's going to stay that way. You

don't really need to know what I had for breakfast.

I was born in Washington (the state, not the city) in 1931. (Go

ahead. Start counting. Depressing, huh?) I graduated from high

school in 1949, worked for a year, and then enrolled in a junior

college, majoring in speech, drama, and English. I tore that junior

college up. I won a state-wide oratorical contest and played the male

lead in most of the drama presentations. Then I applied for and

received a scholarship at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and

Reed turned out to be quite a bit more difficult. The college required

a thesis for graduation, so I wrote a novel (what else?). Then I was

drafted. The army sent me to Germany instead of Korea - where

people were still shooting at each other. I'd studied German, so I got

along fairly well, and when I wasn't playing soldier with my jeep

and my submachine gun, I made the obligatory pilgrimages to Paris,

London. Vienna, Naples, Rome, Florence, and Berlin (before the

wall). It was all very educational, and I even got paid for being in

Europe.

Then I came back to the States and was discharged. I had that GI

Bill, so I went to the University of Washington for four years of

graduate study. I've already told you about that, so I won't dwell on

it. During my college years I worked part-time in grocery stores, a

perfect job for a student, since the hours can be adjusted to fit in with

the class schedule. Then I went to work for Boeing, building rocket

ships. (I was a buyer, not an engineer.) I helped, in a small way, to

put a man on the moon. I married a young lady whose history was

even more interesting than mine. I was a little miffed when I

discovered that her security clearance was higher than mine. I thought

'Top Secret' was the top of the line, but I was wrong. She'd also been

to places I hadn't even heard of, since she'd been in the Air Force,

while I'd been a ground-pounder. I soon discovered that she was a

world-class cook, a highly skilled fisherwoman, and after an

argument about whether or not that was really a deer lying behind that

log a hundred yards away late one snowy afternoon - she

demonstrated that she was a dead shot with a deer rifle by shooting poor

old Bambi right between the eyes.

I taught college for several years, and then one year the

administrators all got a pay raise and the teaching faculty didn't. I told

them

what they could do with their job, and my wife and I moved to

Denver, where I (we) wrote High Hunt in our spare time while I

worked in a grocery store and my wife worked as a motel maid. We

sold High Hunt to Putnam, and I was now a published author. We

moved to Spokane, and I turned to grocery stores again to keep us

eating regularly.

I was convinced that I was a 'serious novelist', and I labored long

and hard over several unpublished (and unpublishable) novels that

moped around the edges of mawkish contemporary tragedy. In the

mid 1970s I was grinding out 'Hunsecker's Ascent', a story about

mountain-climbing which was a piece of tripe so bad that it even

bored me. (No, you can't see it. I burned it.) Then one morning

before I went off to my day-job, I was so bored that I started

doodling. My doodles produced a map of a place that never was

(and is probably a geological impossibility). Then, feeling the call of

duty, I put it away and went back to the tripe table.

Some years later I was in a bookstore going in the general

direction of the 'serious fiction'. I passed the science-fiction rack

and spotted

one of the volumes of 7he Lord of the Rings. I muttered, 'Is this old

turkey still floating around?' Then I picked it up and noticed that it

was in its seventy-eighth printing!!! That got my immediate attention,

and I went back home and dug out the aforementioned doodle. It

seemed to have some possibilities. Then, methodical as always, I

ticked off the above-listed necessities for a good medieval romance.

I'd taken those courses in Middle English authors in graduate school,

so I had a fair grip on the genre.

I realized that since I'd created this world, I was going to have to

populate it, and that meant that I'd have to create the assorted

iologies' as well before I could even begin to put together an outline.

The Rivan Codex was the result. I reasoned that each culture had to

have a different class-structure, a different mythology, a different

theology, different costumes, different, forms of address, different

national character, and even different coinage and slightly different

weights and measures. I might never come right out and use them in

the books, but they had to be there. 'The Belgariad Preliminaries'

took me most of 1978 and part of 1979. (I was still doing honest work

those days, so my time was limited.)

One of the major problems when you're dealing with wizards is

the 'Superman Syndrome'. You've got this fellow who's faster than a

speeding bullet and all that stuff. He can uproot mountains and stop

the sun. Bullets bounce off him, and he can read your mind. Who's

going to climb into the ring with this terror? I suppose I could have

gone with incantations and spells, but to make that sort of thing

believable you've got to invent at least part of the incantation,

and sooner or later some nut is going to take you seriously, and,

absolutely convinced that he can fly if he says the magic words, he'll

jump off a building somewhere. Or, if he believes that the sacrifice of

a virgin will make him Lord of the Universe, and some Girl-Scout

knocks on his door - ??? I think it was a sense of social responsibility

that steered me away from the 'hocus-pocus' routine.

Anyway, this was about the time when the ESP fakers were

announcing that they could bend keys (or crowbars, for all I know)

with the power of their minds. Bingo' The Will and the Word was

born. And it also eliminated the Superman problem. The notion that

doing things with your mind exhausts you as much as doing them

with your back was my easiest way out. You might be able to pick up

a mountain with your mind, but you won't be able to walk after you

do it, I can guarantee that. It worked out quite well, and it made

some interesting contributions to the story. We added the

prohibition against 'unmaking things' later, and we had a workable form

of magic with some nasty consequences attached if you broke the

rules.

Now we had a story. Next came the question of how to tell it. My

selection of Sir Perceval (Sir Dumb, if you prefer) sort of ruled out

'High Style'. I can write in'High Style'if necessary (see Mandorallen

with his 'thee's, thou's and foreasmuches), but Garion would have

probably swallowed his tongue if he'd tried it. Moreover, magic,

while not a commonplace, is present in our imaginary world, so I

wanted to avoid all that 'Gee whiz! Would you look at that!' sort

of reaction. I wanted language that was fairly colloquial (with a

few cultural variations) to make the whole thing accessible to

contemporary readers, but with just enough antique usages to give it a

medieval flavor.

Among the literary theories I'd encountered in graduate school

was Jung's notion of archetypal myth. The application of this theory

usually involves a scholar laboring mightily to find correspondences

David Eddings - The Rivan Codex

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: