The Belgariad - David Eddings - 1982

Rolando, 7 months ago

Oh man, guilty pleasure. I don’t know if I’d call this a “masterpiece of world-crafting”, it’s basically just “what if medieval Europe sat next to the Roman Empire which sat next to the Native American plains, etc.” Also, it’s “problematic” in various ways. And yet I’ve owned the series for most of my life and still read it through every couple of years, usually in the same frame of mind where I think about turning on a TV or eating some fast food.

Eddings was one of the earlier Tolkien-lite practitioners. He was smart enough to take it seriously and play it straight, and there’s a reason why the Hero’s Journey is so timeless. If his characters are all two-dimensional tropes, there is honesty in the camraderie they share. In fact, the best parts of the series are when everyone’s on the road, chatting and joking and planning: the crafty old man, the mysterious woman, the honest tradesman, the spoiled girl, the big man, the rogue, and you, you are with them, and you can imagine yourself there, not alone, possibly under threat but doing something important and surrounded by friends.

Arotrios, 7 months ago

Glad you like! It remains one of those series that defined my childhood.

I agree his characters start as two dimensional tropes. That being said, as the novels progress he does a fairly good job (for a fantasy writer) in bringing forth their backstories, catharsis, and evolution. Belgarath, for instance, is definitely not Gandalf the more you get to know him. Polgara's relationship with Durnik (and Durnik's relationship with Garion) are also exceptionally well rendered. In fact, it's how Eddings' describes Garion's evolution from boy to man, and how the morally ambiguous characters around him encourage that evolutionary catharsis that really gives the series more depth than most fantasy fare.

It's notable that in Eddings' later series, this dynamic was completely missing, and his books suffered greatly for it in my opinion.

As to world building, what impresses me about Eddings is his detail in describing the cultures he creates, and his capacity to make them come alive when seen through the eyes of a farmboy. Unlike Tolkien, the cultures are not defined as black or white, but in varying shades of grey, and unlike a lot of the other fantasy out at the time, it wasn't just a rehash of LOTR. While I fully agree that what "world building" has become in current times vastly overshadows Eddings' work in terms of scope, at the time, his use of low fantasy to render his world gave it remarkable vibrancy and a life that I didn't really find in other writers of the time. For instance, I can tell you they rode dragons in Pern, but that's about it, whereas I can literally hear the god Mara sobbing in the empty ruins for the slaughtered Maragor from when I first read the Belgariad as a tween.

Rolando, 7 months ago

Sure, it’s possible we just got different things out of the series. Personally, I wasn’t impressed so much by his descriptions of the cultures, as I was by the large networks of people involved. I suspect when he wrote his background notes, he spent at least half his time writing up all the secondary people, their characteristics, and their relationships with others. At their best, the novels have the feel of a vacation trip to a family reunion under stormy weather.