It was a real pleasure to have join me for this “2x2” livestream—where two authors each ask each other two questions. Sally’s writing occupies a fascinating place between folklore, magical realism, and beautifully human stories. I had a lot of fun unpacking how all those things fit together in her works, and frankly, in my own.

And thank you to everyone who joined live in the middle of the day, either on lunch break or slacking at the workplace. Respect. Apologies, as always, to Australia for doing this at an inaccessible time, but that’s what this post is for!

Show Notes:

Considering where my writing and Sally’s overlap, it should be no surprise that we talked a lot about the the supernatural in stories, plus setting, place-rootedness, and even a little bit about enchantment.

We also talked about:

• The 2x2 Interview returns from the dead!

• “Folklore logic” and the power of the unexplainable

• Flannery O’Connor being stern

• Sasquatch stories from straight-laced neighbors

• A boy, a forest path, a shield, and no plot whatsoever

• Persistent settings and why Ferris Island works

• “Terroir,” exile, and writing from somewhere you no longer live

Alright folks: take it to the comments:

1. What’s a story that made the world feel stranger and more alive after you finished it?

2. Which matters more in a story: a compelling person, or a compelling place?

3. What have you read lately that trusted mystery instead of explaining everything?

Links & Further Reading

You can read Sally’s works over at Talebones, and read her spiritually non-fiction work at The Wildroot Parables. She is also the the author of the novellas Ivy & Ixos and Imp—plus two collections, The Shell and The Orchard Hounds.

Sally also works as a highly-recommended editor. Learn more about how to work with her by visiting her site, here.

—

Meanwhile, if you want to watch me grapple with themes of place and exile in my own serialized novella, check out The Samyuzot below.

—

Thanks, as always, for watching!

Hopefully that’s the mark of a concept that matters, and one you will find useful as a writer and illuminating as a reader.

If you don't already read Dunmore Dispatch, let this conversation be your on-ramp. Ian found the term “narrative distance” before I did; I learned it from him, and it transformed my writing. Thanks for joining, Ian.

Thanks also to all of you who joined live, especially those who asked questions and made us laugh. You know who you are.

Show notes and rough chapter-timestamps are below the links.

Links & Further Reading

More on narrative distance:

• Eric’s explainer on narrative distance which maps the concept with more examples.

  • This probably explains it better than what we did on-stream.

• Ian’s essay on the value of variable zoom

  • This is how you start to use and change narrative distance within a story.

  • This is also about changing “focal length,” to borrow a term from the stream.

• [Actually, Tolkien’s Prose is Crisp] from Ian. The post that started this whole thing.

Our fiction — see it in action:

• [For Want to Save Harbor] — Eric’s story, Ian’s pick;

  • close and far distance used deliberately throughout, every shift intentional

• [How Not to Kill an Archprior] — Ian’s story, Eric’s pick

  • opens at a remove, zooms in for the fights, zooms back out for the jokes. Comedy requires distance, heart requires proximity.

Show Notes:

We talked about The Lions of Al-Rassan, Tigana, The Saxon Tales, Hunger Games, The Stormlight Archives, Wheel of Time, and probably more… ⚠️ Mild spoilers possible for all ⚠️

Here’s what we talked about with approximate timestamps.

• 0:00 — Why we’re here: Ian’s Tolkien Reading Day note, a lively comment section, and deciding to have a conversation in public.

• 7:00 — Defining narrative distance

• 11:00 — What narrative distance is not: not POV, not tense, not voice — related to all three and reducible to none of them

• 14:00 — How we (i.e. Ian) discovered this

• 16:00 — Present tense and the ceiling it sets

• 20:00 — Variable zoom: why you already do this naturally when you tell stories out loud (but is more rare in fiction these days)

• 30:00 — Examples.

• 45:00 — Q&A STARTS HERE: When to use close vs. far; the TVization of fiction; prose’s secret superpower over every other medium

• 50:00 — Favorite authors for narrative distance? It’s Kay. For us both.

• 57:00 — How to actually get better at this.

• 60:00+ — Ian hates vegetables.

Take it to the comments. We want to know:

1. Where have you felt a book’s narrative distance fighting its story—a fixed close distance that made the epic feel small, or vice versa?

2. Do you think of prose as a camera? Has that been useful or limiting?

3. If you’ve experimented with zooming—intentionally writing a scene at far distance that you’d normally dramatize—how did it go?

‘Come!’ said Gandalf. ‘We are needed. There is much that you can yet do.’

Then suddenly Denethor laughed. He stood up tall and proud again, and stepping swiftly back to the table he lifted from it the pillow on which his head had lain. Then coming to the doorway he drew aside the covering, and lo! He had between his hands a palantír. And as he held it up, it seemed to those that looked on that the globe began to glow with an inner flame, so that the lean face of the Lord was lit as with a red fire, and it seemed cut out of hard stone, sharp with black shadows, noble, proud, and terrible. His eyes glittered.

—The Return of the King. The Pyre of Denethor.

Imagine, if you would, that you have a long and dark battle ahead of you.

It shouldn’t be hard to imagine. We all carry our own heavy burdens; we have our own battles.

But imagine this particular battle has already begun. You’re in it already, and the fight is likely to get worse.

You know you must fight this battle. You know the Enemy you face. You know that defeat will mean the erosion and eventual destruction of everything you hold dear.

You have a role to play in this fight, a specific battle-station suited to—and arising from—your particular gifts and strengths. Every day you must take up that station again, and come to the fight anew.

It is a hard battle. And long. The Enemy is great and merciless. He fights savagely.

You have allies and friends, and many others working beside you in their own roles, with their gifts and strengths.

Now imagine that you also have one particular asset at your ready disposal: a magical artifact, which can bring you knowledge that is otherwise inaccessible. With this magic in your hands, you can turn your gaze anywhere in the world. You can see things you would never see with your own eyes. You can hear things your ears would never otherwise hear.

This knowledge can teach you about the Enemy. It can show the tactics of this evil power. Such magic could be of service to you.

There’s only one problem…

You cannot truly control this artifact. You can influence it. You can choose to pick it up and put it down. You can decide what to do with whatever you learn. But you cannot always control what you see and hear, for there is another Power at work within it—a Power greater than you and beyond your full understanding.

And while you can always control what you do with your emotions, you won’t be able to control what emotions arise within you while you gaze into this great artefact.

This artefact is useful, arcane, and perilous.

I’m talking, of course, about your smartphone.

There are obvious parallels, of course, between the devices in our pockets and the palantír of Denethor in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.1

Denethor is one of Tolkien’s most masterfully crafted characters. Though he is perhaps overshadowed as a villain by the likes of Saruman, Gollum, and Sauron, Denethor remains in my mind as the most interesting of the antagonists in The Lord of the Rings.

He enters the narrative first as only a name, arrives on page in The Return of the King as the Lord of Minas Tirith, intimidating, proud, and effective. But by the end, Lord Denethor walks freely into his own tomb, destroys the symbols of his own office, sets himself aflame and dies cursing all those who would fight on in hope.

There are more than a few reasons for Denethor’s despair, but one thing had an influence greater than all the rest: the palantír, the magical Seeing-Stone which he tried to use for the sake of his battle.

Ultimately, however, everything he saw “fed the despair of his heart until it overthrew his mind.”2

“I couldn’t fall asleep until after one a.m.,” said my beloved, bleary-eyed wife one recent morning. We’d gone to bed at a reasonable hour and I—probable sleep-apneic that I am—promptly slipped into unconsciousness. But not Mrs. Falden.

Her mind had been stuck on things, she told me. Not racing, exactly, but just moving from bad thing to bad thing. She’d seen some friends earlier that evening, but some of them were unburdening with her about their recent problems. Normal friend stuff, but heavy friend-stuff.

And of course, our family has had its own hardships lately. Our own battles, if you will.

“So my mind was just on all of that, feeling that stress a bit. Then since I was feeling crappy and I couldn’t sleep,” here Mrs. Falden gave a wry smile, “I decided to make all of that worse by opening Instagram and staring into my phone for a while.”

We should extend pity and compassion to Denethor. He was not a monster at first. Like his son Boromir, he tends to be remembered for his downfall and death rather than his earlier deeds.

But we should remember that Denethor guided Gondor through a precipitous crisis for years before we see him on-page.

When we first hear of him in The Fellowship of the Ring, at the Council of Elrond, it is entirely in the context of this desperate, existential threat.

Boromir says of the war, which his father directs:

‘[Few people] know of our deeds, and therefore guess little at their [own] peril, if we should fail at last.

‘Believe not that in the land of Gondor the blood of Númenor is spent, nor all its pride and dignity forgotten. By our valour the wild folk of the East are still restrained, and the terror of the Morgul kept at bay; and thus alone are peace and freedom maintained in the lands behind us, bulwark of the West. [...]

The Nameless Enemy has arisen again. Smoke rises once more from Orodruin that we call Mount Doom. The power of the Black Land grows and we are hard beset. [...]3

Here we have the parameters of Denethor’s battle. The entire fate of the free peoples of Middle Earth rests on his ability to lead Gondor in defense against overwhelming odds.

We should also remember that Denethor and his people are almost entirely alone during this crisis. As Boromir explained:

‘But still we fight on, and those who shelter behind us give us praise, if ever they hear our name: much praise but little help. Only from Rohan now will any men ride to us when we call.’4

Only from Rohan, says Boromir, but of course even as he says this Rohan is falling under the sway of Saruman’s betrayal. Gondor stands alone.

The war against Evil defines Denethor. How can it not? He gazes out his tower and sees his homeland and the land of Shadow just beyond it. Sauron’s realm dominates the landscape. He can watch as the clouds gather on the horizon and never dissipate. He can see the physical advance of the sleepless enemy.

Consequently, Denethor is willing to do anything—anything—in that fight.

And one day a small Elven riverboat floats down the Anduin to Denethor’s doorstep. Within lies his son, dead.

There is the great personal loss, of course, but even more: Boromir was Gondor’s best hope for victory, and they placed their trust in his strength. With his death, Gondor’s solitude is now made manifest in its Lord’s own grief.

Denethor turned then to the palantír and tried to find there a shortcut to wisdom, knowledge, and power. He tried to use it for the defense of his realm.

As Gandalf explains, post mortem Denethoris:

‘In the days of his wisdom Denethor would not presume to use it to challenge Sauron, knowing the limits of his own strength. But his wisdom failed; and I fear that as the peril of his realm grew he looked in the Stone and was deceived: far too often, I guess, since Boromir departed. He was too great to be subdued to the will of the Dark Power, he saw nonetheless only those things which that Power permitted him to see.’5

We are all familiar with this sort of story, because we’ve lived it in small ways. More and more of us, more and more often, each day since the summer of 2007 when the first iPhone hit the shelves.

Here’s how it plays out.

We’re not feeling great. There’s something on our mind. Something’s worrying us. So at the very first threat of silence we reach for our phones. We choose distraction instead of mental discomfort and we don’t even realize we’re doing it.

It could be at a red light, or waiting in line, or at your desk while you wait for your computer to boot up, or even during commercials that are interrupting your the larger, brighter screen you were already watching in emotionless silence.

There’s rarely intention when we do this. There’s no real purpose. Maybe we have something specific we want—maybe—but it’s never urgent. We might check an inbox or a notification feed or our texts. We’re not looking for anything in particular except a stimulus we can respond to.

But we do it anyway.

I know I do it. Far too often. No judgement here.

But I want to hone in on that particular instance with my dear wife again, since I think it reveals something about how we face (or refuse to face) evils that are right in front of us.

Somewhere deep in the night, since my wife couldn’t sleep, our bedroom was bathed in blue light as she looked for some piece of joy and distraction. Maybe there would be pics of our nieces and nephews. (We live far from them, and miss them dearly). Maybe a college friend had sent something funny. (They live all over the place, so social media is how we keep up.) Maybe the algorithm will just give some random thing to laugh at, to break the melancholy.

In this particular instance, the Power that lurked in the heart of the Seeing-Device was intent on bending the eyes of all who watched onto one particular set of news stories. They were all about this guy named Jeffrey Epstein. Maybe you’ve heard of him.

“And it wasn’t just news stories or something,” my wife told me as we prepared breakfast the next morning. “It was pictures. I don’t know how they even got past the safety filters. Like one second I’m watching a reel about how to deal with your toddler arguing with you and then the next second I’m looking at abusers preying upon children while some floating head screams at me about how angry we should be.”

As we made breakfast, we spoke about how we both hate social media because… well, do I need to spell it out? It’s awful.

But at the same time we like social media because it helps us know what’s going on. It’s not as if we want to be blind to the really awful things that are happening. We do want to be informed. But the rollercoaster of it all…

At best we come away not feeling worse.

“I want to know what’s going on,” she said, “so I can prepare myself and my family for dealing with whatever this world is gonna throw at us, and I want to be able to find and listen to people I trust who can help us with particular things… but now I just feel shook up and awful and like nothing will ever be okay.

“And,” she added, “I feel like there’s no actual control over what I see. Delete the apps and feel blind and cut off from the world, or allow raw sewage to pump into my brain.”

“It’s like Denethor,” I said.

“... What do you mean by that?”

Denethor has a battle to fight. He has an Enemy to resist. He has work to do, people to help, things to organize. He can look out the window of his tower and see the Anduin over which the enemy is crossing. He watches the battle below.

Like I said before: the battle against Evil defines him. In raw terms, his decades-long war against Mordor probably means he does more, on the whole, than many of the heroes of The Lord of the Rings.

But when his son Faramir falls to a Black Dart and is brought before him, wounded, what does he do?

He turns inward. He goes up to his tower and locks the door, and the room is lit only by the fell light of the palantír.

As his own knight, Beregond, later tells Gandalf and Pippin:

‘It was in the very hour that Faramir was brought to the Tower that many of us saw a strange light in the topmost chamber,’ said Beregond. ‘But we have seen that light before, and it has long been rumoured in the City that the Lord would at times wrestle in thought with his Enemy.’6

In these moments, Denethor is wrestling with Sauron, and he is learning helpful things. Even Gandalf says later that “[the] knowledge which he obtained was, doubtless, often of service to him.”

The palantír does indeed give him knowledge, and lets him see things he could not see on his own. He knows of the enemy fleet coming from the south. He know of Aragorn long before he otherwise would, and he has some sense of Rohan’s peril long before messagers arrive about Saruman’s betrayal. The palantír gives him foresight, of a kind, and an ability to plump the depths of mysteries otherwise locked to mortal Men.

Denethor is not wrong about the palantír’s power. But it is a false wisdom.

Because Denethor is not the stone’s master.

Made in the long-ago ages of Middle-Earth, the seven palantíri were eventually employed in the ruling and defense of the kingdoms of the Dúnedain. It is in this precise purpose that Denethor uses his. But even in the ‘Days of Old’, the stones were subject to the master stone at Osgiliath.

With those kingdoms of the Dúnedain receding against decay the might of Mordor, many of the stones fell under the power of Sauron. Thus, when other minds gazed into the palantíri, they were ensnared by the greater mind of the Nameless Enemy.

First, of course, was Saruman, but Denethor was soon to follow. As he explained the Seeing-Stones to young Pippin, Gandalf explained their allure and their danger.

‘Easy it is now to guess how quickly the roving eye of Saruman was trapped and held; and how ever since he has been persuaded from afar, and daunted when persuasion would not serve. The biter bit, the hawk under the eagle’s foot, the spider in a steel web! How long, I wonder, has he been constrained to come often to his glass for inspection and instruction… And how it draws one to itself! Have I not felt it? Even now my heart desires… to look across the wide seas of water and of time to Tirion the Fair, and perceive the unimaginable hand and mind of Feanor at their work, while both the White Tree and the golden were in flower!’ He sighed and fell silent.7

The temptation is towards pleasure, towards connection with good things that one cannot reach, towards equipping oneself to fight on the side of good.

But all these things can ensnare, for a greater Power is at work, and now the stones answer to Sauron.

In much the same way, we cannot control the digital world we in which we participate, especially with regard to social media.

We simply cannot control it. We think we can. But there are stronger minds at work behind the glow.

Technocrats. Megacorporations. Algorithms. Artificial Minds which humans do not even understand. We understand the inputs and outputs, some of us do, at least, as concepts if not as code… but we don’t understand these ‘intelligences’ that turn the gears of our digitized lives.

The great kings controlled the palantíri, but that did not save them.

In the same way the algorithms were made by brilliantly effective engineers who excelled at creating massive companies and in revolutionizing our entire way of being.

That does not make the algorithms good for us.

Denethor’s is not the strongest mind. Sauron’s is. Sauron decides what Denethor sees. Sauron can bend Denethor to his will.

When we peruse social media to find something to settle our emotions— ‘to look across the wide seas of water… while both the White Tree and the golden were in flower!’ —the same thing happens. We turn our gaze to far things, only to have deeper minds turn our eyes where they will.

It sounds nice to gaze into a glowing glass which can allow us to commune with one another, to share thoughts directly from soul to soul across space and time. But by gazing into it, we give some of our mind over to whatever is on the other side.

In Denethor’s case, we should note what does not happen as a result of his Doom-gazing.

Denethor does not decide that Sauron is good, and decide to join him (though Saruman does that, in his own way). Denethor does not conclude that Gondor is evil or not worth saving.

Denethor does not forget who he is, nor his station, nor his duties. He is not fooled. He knows much as a result—it’s not ignorance that dooms him. Nor is he even lied to—what Sauron shows him is factually true.

Denethor is not stupefied or robbed of his reason. There’s no trace, no possession, no overpowering of his identity.

But in spite of all of this, Denethor does give up. He loses hope.

Nothing shows this more clearly than a quick comparison between Denethor and his counterpart, King Théoden.

When Théoden is freed from the spells of Wormtongue, he comes out into the light of day and asks Gandalf, “What is to be done?”

And Gandalf replies “Much.” Théoden then sets out to reclaim his kingdom and save his people from Saruman’s treachery.

In contrast, when Denethor hears the same thing from Gandalf, he curses him:

Then passing through the door [of the tomb, Gandalf] took Faramir from the deadly house and laid him on the bier on which he had been brought, and which had now been set in the porch. Denethor followed him, and stood trembling, looking with longing on the face of his son. And for a moment, while all were silent and still, watching the Lord in his throes, he wavered.

‘Come!’ said Gandalf. ‘We are needed. There is much that you can yet do.’

Then suddenly Denethor laughed… and lo! He had between his hands a palantír. And as he held it up, it seemed to those that looked on that the globe began to glow with an inner flame [...]

‘Pride and despair!’ he cried. ‘[...] thy hope is but ignorance. Go then and labour in healing! Go forth and fight! Vanity. For a little space you may triumph on the field, for a day. But against the Power that now arises there is no victory… The West has failed. It is a time for all to depart who would not be slaves.’8

Despite all the things the palantír did not do, it did enough to make Denethor despair in his battle. Knowing everything about everything did nothing to help him actually prevail.

The stone gave its wielders the illusion of knowledge, of wisdom, of security, of community, of presence… But in reality—it ensnares them in dark rooms, alone, glued to the images given by powerful malice.

To return for a moment to my wife’s sleepless night where she was bombarded with images from the Epstein files…

What do we gain from moments like that?

Are we now suddenly more against human trafficking than we were before? Are we now suddenly more capable of resisting that evil? Is there something my wife and I, alone in our room at midnight can actually do to fight this? Are we now more likely to help those who need our help—as in our help, specifically, she and I, within the reach of our arms, in our lives?

No.

But we are more angry now. More unsettled. Less stable. Less in control of our emotions. More worried. More desirous of watching more and more so that we can know what’s going on.

Knowing about everything everywhere doesn’t actually help us fight evil.

Instead, an overwhelming deluge of information paralyzes us. Everything is bad. There’s so much evil. What can you do against such reckless hate? Evil powers are rising! They are here and here and there too. Keep looking. Keep looking.

It becomes—rapidly—a vicious cycle: It is a constant voice of alarm (Everything is awful!) combined with a paralyzing effect that prevents us from making anything better.

‘It is a time for all to depart who would not be slaves.’

‘Such counsels will make the Enemy’s victory certain indeed,’ said Gandalf.

‘Hope on then!’ laughed Denethor.9

We have to put down the palantír. Ideally, we should cast it into the Sea.

Eschewing the palantír is not eschewing the fight! It’s actually about facing the fight.

Turning off the doom-machine does not mean turning a blind eye to evil. That’s a lie—a lie that Sauron probably told Denethor: keep looking in the stone and you’ll be able to beat me. Pay no attention to the monsters ravaging your towns outside your window.

If we are to fight evil at Osgiliath, or in the Pelennor Fields, or in our homes, or in our families, or in our communities, then we must cover the stones, leave our dark tower rooms, and look at what is in front of us.

Then, we must act from a place of hope.

If we don’t, we’ll end up like the Lord of Minas Tirith. We’ll be overcome by the rising tides of despair, do nothing about it, and then curse our own inability to fight.

Then Denethor leaped upon the table, and standing there wreathed in fire and smoke he took up the staff of his stewardship that lay at his feet and broke it on his knee. Casting the pieces into the blaze he bowed and laid himself on the table, clasping the palantír with both hands upon his breast. [...]

Gandalf in grief and horror turned his face away and closed the door. For a while he stood in thought, silent upon the threshold, while those outside heard the greedy roaring of the fire within. And then Denethor gave a great cry, and afterwards spoke no more, nor was ever again seen by mortal men.10

Théoden’s question—what is to be done?—is the right one.

Not “what is happening everywhere, to everyone, always?” but “what is to be done, now, here, by me?”

The answer to that question is not likely found on social media. It won’t be found by staring the blue glass and letting technocrats play with your mind.

The answer won’t be found in the palantír. It can only be found by looking up from it.

Whatever battle you’re facing—whether its personal or familial or a larger fight for a better world for your friends, neighbors, and children—that battle is real. You are not alone.

Your role in that battle is real. It is particular to you. You may have allies and friends and you should call to them for aid, but only you can take up your duties.

You cannot fight that battle from a dark room, alone, with a glowing glass in your hands.

Cover the stone. Go outside. Fight.

Thanks for reading. If you like what you’ve read here and want me to keep making stuff like this, you can help me by liking, commenting, or sharing this post.

. . .

⚒️ Want to Read More? 👇

. . .

Subscribe now

The year is flying by here at the Forge, and I’m deep in the midst of a few long-term projects. It’s far past time that I gave my Forgemasters their slated Lorework (i.e. my behind-the-scenes story unpacking for paid subscribers), but while I’m at it I wanted to give a general update for free subscribers as well and point you to some things that are worth your time.

Here’s what’s been happening around Falden’s Forge.

New Stories 📜

I walked into 2026 with one plan: to write more stories. I’m not nearly to my totally achievable goal of writing six-thousand-and-eight-one stories, but the two I’ve put out this year so far are ones of which I am quite proud.

• Gautin’s Errand tells the story of a crippled young boy striving for a fatherly affection that may or may not be worth striving for at all. But one day his father thrusts Gautin into absolute peril, and he becomes the one person who can save his whole family from doom. Read Gautin’s story here.

• The Bull and the Boar is also about family, and dangers in the forest. But there the similarities end; this one has quite a different … flavor. Here, a hungry huntsman returns to civilization in hopes of filling his stomach and solving a small mystery. In the process, he just might get a chance to start again. Will Finsen get what he desires, or only what he’s already chosen? Read the whole drama, here.

I’ll also be going behind-the-scenes on Gautin’s Errand later in this email, below the paywall, exclusively for my Forgemasters.

I’ve got some great stuff coming down the pipeline, but for just about all of it, I’d rather it be a series of happy surprises when they come. Stay tuned.

Livestreams 📽️

I don’t really intend for livestreams, videos, or podcasts, to become a regular feature in this space, but it turns out that when my fellow creators ask me to show up and talk about something I like, I tend to say yes. Who’da thunk?

Here are two such instances from the last few weeks:

• First, I had the distinct pleasure of hosting Scoot to talk about A Canticle for Leibowitz, a post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel about preserving knowledge when all knowledge is lost, and preserving hope when it seems there’s none to be had. It was a fun (and at times heavy) conversation about a classic (and at times heavy) book.

• More recently, I joined Scoot again, but this time over at Ann Kimrough’s Tell Me a Mystery. We talked shop, specifically about the particular format of serialization that I tried out with The Samyuzot that might offer our fellow Substack writers more options for long-form narratives without sacrificing engagement. This is in-the-weeds writerly stuff. If that interests the fellow writers in the audience, check it out here.

What I’m Reading 🍄

Now I also want to share a few things I’ve enjoyed reading over the last few weeks which I think you Forge-readers might also enjoy. , In no particular order:

• Stuart D. Brooks had a lovely meditation on the Power of Beauty in Tolkien’s Works, which not only helps unpack the role of physical presence and visual beauty in the Lord of the Rings, it also features quite the spectrum of Tolkien-inspired art.

• Ben A. Clarke has a great piece about Sanderson’s Stormlight Archives, and why it doesn’t feel quite like fantasy. Ben articulates a lot of what I’ve thought about Stormlight without ever putting it down to page (he’s also read much deeper into the series than I have). The “Radiant as superhero” is an important point, and it does much to help contextualize Sanderson as “sci-fantasy.” Crucially, the piece is not a take-down or a invection against the series, nor against it’s author; I appreciate Ben’s even-handedness even as I appreciate his critiques. I’ll be chewing on this for a while as I consider what Sanderson’s triumphs mean for the wider genre…

• Longtime friend-of-the-forge Ian Dunmore is in the midst of “Mycology March,” an exploration of a particular worldbuilding niche: mushrooms. From poisons to psychedelics, this series is teaching me everything I didn’t know I wanted to know about fungus—with Ian’s usual dose of snark and levity, of course.

Now, onto the part of the show where my paid subscribers help me decide what story I write next, and then a behind-the-scenes look at Gautin’s Errand.

Vote For What’s Next

Every month, Forgemasters get to vote on what story I write next.

Here’s how it works: I share three story hooks. You vote for your favorite. I write the winner. The other hooks stay in rotation until they lose three times, in which case I’ll retire them. Polls stay open until I start writing (at least 1 week).

Want to suggest a story prompt? Have something else from Cethanwald you want to see? Leave a comment, reply to this email, or send me a direct message in the app.

Here are this month’s Story Hooks:

Since last time we had two “last chance” prompts, and you lot chose the third, that means we have three brand new hooks.

Read more

I originally wrote this exclusively for my Forgemasters, but I’ve made it free for everyone.

Thanks for being here. I hope you enjoy. —Eric.

Finsen was hungry. He, better than most, knew what hunger was. No one could survive for years alone in the wilds without knowing hunger the way most people knew their family. Finsen knew how to go without. How to procure nourishment from the hostile lands when his muscles were weak and his head spun on his shoulders. He knew how to fight through it.

But he was hungry.

And here was the answer to his hunger: the massive carcass of an orrox splayed out under an oak tree. The bull was twice longer horn-to-tail than Finsen was standing up. Its bulk was thicker than the trunk of any tree—save perhaps the holiest and most ancient oaks. And this feast was only freshly dead. Steam emanated through the tawny, tufty hair. It had a puncture wound at its side, wider than a spear-shaft but clean-cut. The beast had died swiftly. A good kill. A good kill indeed.

But not Finsen’s kill.

He had come here moments ago, back to this spot where he had once kept a tiny lodge, and found the bull lying here, it’s killer nowhere to be found.

Yet, despite the gurgling stomach, this feast was not paramount in Finsen’s mind. Nor was the mystery of its death. Instead, he was transfixed by the carving in the bark of the oak. It was a span above the dead orrox, in rough lines made with little skill. Four words: Father Finsie Come Home.

Only two people in all of Borsylla’s great wood had ever used that pet-name. And only one of them called him father. He thought of the girl who had no doubt carved this. It was profane to damage a tree without cause like that. Mother Forest gave her bounty of herself to her children, but this seemed… hasty. He thought of what it could mean.

While he pondered this, his eyes went over the carcass again, and the insanity of it washed over him and stole away his thoughts. Orroxen were valuable assets and were jealously guarded. Slaughtering one was a village affair, since it would feed every family for a time. They were carefully apportioned. To kill an orrox—especially one that was not your own—that was to call down the wrath of Mother Wood and Father River, not to mention outlawry from the whole of Borseylean societies. Kings or no kings, the laws of the Forest guarded all Borsyleans like iron upon branch. So how did the orrox come this deep into the wood? And who else could have been here to kill it? And where had they gone?

And why here? This was Finsen’s former trapping-ground. He had lived in this area for a long time, but his old hut had long ago rotted away. Now he had wandered back—driven by hunger—to see if snaring this area would produce. He hoped to see squirrels or rabbit scat. A two-hundred-fifty-stone stock carcass was the last thing he had expected.

He wanted to eat—only the laws of Borsylla held him back. Someone would surely come looking. It would become known.

Or, thought Finsen, he could go to town and report the missing beast. Yes. It had been a while, but the news of the orrox would be welcome even if it meant a premature butchery. He would surely be fed. Yes.

✹ ✹ ✹

Sâleth was hanging her wet laundry on a rope strung between two birch trees at the edge of the Motherwood. She spread her soaking smock across the middle of the line and then turned back towards her home. She stopped short when she saw Finsen across the yard, waiting for her.

A still minute passed without a word or twitch from the woman, only a chill stare from her amber eyes, until, mind made up, she walked forward and into the house as if the man simply was not there. She entered her home. Finsen followed.

The woman was already back at the wash-basin. She did not interrupt her work to greet her uninvited guest, so he began the conversation.

“Hello, Sâleth,” Finsen said with a smile.

“Why are you here?” she asked.

“You look well.”

“And you look like Borvane’s own spawn. I see the gray is finally touching your beard.”

His smile faded. He was unsure what kind of reception he would receive, but it was unlike Sâleth to curse by naming the boar-god. Still, Finsen hoped he could make headway here. He had turned many of this woman’s moods around. Like game in the heart of the forest, she might be skittish or aggressive, but she would fall to his skills or his charm as she had before. “It was a hard winter.”

She looked at him then. But then she turned her attention back to her laundry, turning the dolly in the basin which also served as the house’s bath.

“This place is in good condition, as always,” he said.

“Thank you.” No barb this time. “But why are you here, Finsen?”

“I—”

“Don’t say that you came to see me. I know it isn’t true.”

“I didn’t walk into this house by accident, Sâla, now did I?”

“I’m surprised you remember where it is.”

“How could I ever forget our home?”

“Our home,” she repeated, as if unused to saying that exact combination of words. Finsen sensed a fight brewing, and changed topic.

“I found an orrox.”

“Rich man, you.”

“No, I mean that I found a carcass of one. Still fresh. Not a day’s walk from here. I came looking to see whose it was.”

“Did it have a brand?” Sâleth asked, putting down the dolly and rolling down her sleeves.

“If it did, it was on the underside, and one man can’t move a dead orrox, and it’s not as if I was about to butcher—.”

“—butcher it yourself, yes, of course.” The mistress of the house looked out the window, thinking. Her animosity was forgotten in the mild crisis of the lost orrox. “I don’t know of anyone who’s missing one. How odd. Are you sure its from Bilwich?”

“There are no other settlements anywhere near where I’ve been. The thing didn’t look like it had been loose long. It was well-tended. Old Merren’s farm is closest to the spot, so I went there first but he wasn’t home.”

“Oh. Merren’s been dead for nigh on two years now.”

Finsen blinked. “It can’t have been that long since…”

“It’s been much longer than that.” Now Sâleth’s golden gaze was fixed on Finsen’s face like an arrow in soft turf. He tried to speak, but could not think of what to say. Evidently, Sâleth could. “What is wrong with you, coming back here as if nothing’s happened? Appearing at my door and saying hello like it was just yesterday we were breaking bread together?”

“I…well, I know I haven’t been around much—.”

“At all.”

“But we parted well, did we not? I don’t remember there being an argument or shouting like there once was. I thought we were better, you and I?”

“Better, you and I? I suppose you’re right, Finsen. We are better now that you don’t bother coming around at all.”

“That’s not—.”

“And you’re right that we didn’t fight last time you left, but only because I didn’t try to stop you leaving, as I always did before. You getting gone was what I wanted! So: you’re correct, we didn’t fight.”

The man clicked his tongue and looked around everywhere except at those amber eyes. He saw the cookery that had lasted a generation already. He saw the ‘roxskin pelts hanging by the window. The intricately-carved tree-icon on the mantle that had once belonged to his mother. He had given it to Sâleth not long after they had met.

“I still hold affection for you, Sâla. I thought, after all the good times, you might still hold some for me. I know I haven’t been here, but I was a good husband, when I was here.”

“You were never my husband. Although I suppose—” at this, Finsen’s heart allowed itself a bit of hope— “you did make me incapable of ever having a true husband. That must count for something. For what else can a ruined woman expect but to dwell here on the far edge of a river-town? And what greater hope for a life-mate can she have except by waiting for the redemption of her impatient lover?”

“You could have stayed with me. We could have had a life together.”

“Alone in the woods is no place to give birth.”

“It’s been twelve years and we’re still having this argument. Why not let it rest?”

“Nineteen. It’s been nineteen years.”

“Camisua is not nineteen. She can’t be.”

“Oh, so you do remember your daughter’s name!”

Finsen ignored this. “Is she here?”

“No.”

The man turned away and made heavy strides towards the bedroom door, the only other room in the house. With one eye lingering over his shoulder, he knocked. “Camisua? Cammie, it’s your father.” He lifted the latch, peered inside. It was dark within, so he opened the door further. It was mostly familiar. A few chests, a distaff of orrox-hair and a spindle by the fireplace. One bed with rough-carved pine posts.

“Do both my girls share one bed now? Surely your station hasn’t fallen so far that you must huddle together in the winter.”

“Quite the opposite,” Sâleth said. “My station has improved much in recent years.”

“Then where is Camisua’s bed?”

“At her house, I would think.”

Finsen spun to look at his daughter’s mother. He knew that his question would only make him look foolish, but he could not think of what else to say: “She has removed? Why? Could you not keep our daughter under our—?”

“—Married women tend to remove from their mother’s houses, yes.”

“Married women.” Finsen repeated the words, and still they took a few moments to penetrate his ears. Eventually he blinked. “Who is he?”

“You do not know him.”

“Why hide his name? Is he someone I hate?”

“What offense could you possibly have against any man, you who so rarely venture into society? Is there any man you know well enough to hate? No. I am not hiding him for his sake or for yours, but rather for my daughter’s.”

“She thinks I would disapprove, then? That I would be angry with her choice?”

“Camisua fears her own anger, not yours!” Though she augured a rage of her daughter, that same emotion was now clear in Sâleth’s face and tone. “My daughter came to me weeping on her wedding day—weeping, Finsen!—not because her father was absent, not because there was any defect or fear over the bridegroom. She wept because she knew that if you so much as showed your barbarous face that morning then the bitterness in her heart would overflow into an outburst and ruin the peace of the gathering. On that day, Camisua was like the image of Mother Forest herself. She claimed none but Holy Feaburn as her father, and claimed with open arms the heart of her husband. She was happy. She is happy. But the wound of your abandonment lay too strongly upon her. She told me she could not bear your presence on that day, nor ever again.

“And so I promised her,” Sâleth had to catch her throat and blink away tears. “I promised that I would never tell you where she lives, nor the name of her husband, nor her family. Go and ask it of the neighbors—if any of them would divulge it to a stranger like you.”

Sâleth’s voice quieted, leaving the estranged couple in a heavy silence. Slowly, the two of them became aware of the birdsong outside, and the chattering of squirrels. A woodpecker made his presence known in the trees.

“If Camisua hates me so, why did she ask me to come home?”

“What?” Sâleth asked in disbelief.

“That’s right, Sâla. I think you’re lying to me. She came all the way out to Pine-House—you remember it, of course, it’s the house that you were too good for. Well, Cammie came all the way out there and carved me a message in a tree-trunk. Why would she do that if the thought of my arrival troubles her so deeply?”

Now the woman deflated. All her rage left her at once, and in its place was nothing but the exhausted contempt of a woman who had borne far too much—for far too long—for lack of competent help. “Is that why you are here, Finsen? Is that all? If so, you are a bigger fool than I ever imagined. She went and carved that message years ago. Four years ago. In autumn, so that you would maybe return for the cold winter. I remember, because I was the one here to comfort her when the leaves stopped falling, then when the snow fell after it, and when it thawed into spring and the flowers came and left and still the girl’s father never so much as came for supper. I gave up hope for you long ago. But it took my daughter quite a bit longer to grow up.”

Then Sâleth gave a bemused sniff.

“Sometimes I wonder,” she said, “if perahps you’d found some other woman out there in the forest. Someone willing to live the life you want. No, don’t tell me! I would pity her, if so. But whatever you’ve found out there, whether a woman or better game or the holiest of trees or even the Borvane himself… whatever it is that keeps you out there, I hope you like it, for you will not ever spend another night under my roof. The Motherwood heard that vow of mine. I meant it then. I mean it now.”

She finished.

Finsen could offer no protest. He stood in stupefied recognition of things he should have known long ago. One sound came from him; a grumbling from his stomach.

The mistress’s eyes darted to her pantry. But then she turned away from her unwanted guest. She went wash-basin again, rolled up her sleeves, and took up the dolly stick. The sound of Finsen’s hunger was subsumed into the sloshing of the laundry. She decided to keep her eyes only on the washing, to say nothing more and ignore the useless man. She found it was not hard to do. When her task demanded she leave the basin and turn around, Finsen was gone.

✹ ✹ ✹

Finsen tramped his numbing feet over the trails back to the carcass of the impaled orrox. Sâleth’s words bounced in his head, and he tried to stamp them away with each heavy stride. Never in his life did he feel so unmoored. Decades now he had lived in solitude, without only temporary stints in among his people. Now, for the first time, he was aware of things he lacked. As he walked, more and more he sensed a rising fear that the arrow of his life had missed its mark.

He needed to eat. That was all. He was hungry. Hunger brought stormy moods. And Sâleth was always unpredictable. He put her out of his mind, and instead thought of the massive bull, and how he could begin to carve it up.

Should he start at the rear-foot, as if it were a hare, and skin it, and then quarter the meat?

No matter—his imagination rushed onward—he could have massive flanks of red meat tonight. The rest could rot. There could be no time for preservation. He would take what he could, today, now, without delay, and he would cook it and eat it and whatever was still there tomorrow—Borvane take the wolves who would make it messy—he would process it then.

He needed food. Tonight.

The air was getting colder. Unseasonably so. A dampness on the breeze. Like a storm a few hours away during the chill after-weeks of winter. The sun was disappearing.

A fire then, too, when he returned home. A fire to roast meat. The orrox’s meat. Yes.

As he came near the carcass glade he could already taste the meat and feel its juices running down his beard. He slapped the branches of the last pine-shrub away and walked into the clearing.

There he met his god.

✹ ✹ ✹

A standing orrox has a head as high as a man’s, and a peaked shoulder-crest that looms even higher; the smallest of these gentle beasts is three times as wide in the shoulders as its ‘roxherd. But even the largest orrox is puny beside the looming hulk of Borvane, the boar-god.

Glimpsed now in the glade by unsuspecting mortal eyes, the god’s haunches rise higher than the hunter’s crown; its shoulders brush the branches of high boughs; its head spans a breadth wider than a river rowing-boat. And the mountainous boar is gorging itself on the remains of the unclaimed orrox spread beneath the oak that bears Finsen’s name. The sound of its snorting and chewing is enough to make any man vomit, and the glade’s newcomer would do exactly that if there was anything in his stomach.

He dry-heaves instead.

The beast swings its face to regard the interloper with one great eye. The eye is larger than the man’s face and it is dark, dark, dark—a pool of starless night in a thin ring of yellow sclera. It looks almost human. The resemblance gives no comfort to the hunter.

Mother Borsylla’s floor trembles as the god turns fully to regard whatever mortal fool has left the safety of the River to venture wantonly into Borvane’s realm.

There are tusks above and before its snout, longer and straighter and sharper than those of natural boars. The comparison itself is nonsense, like seeing a drop of spittle and naming it after the River-Father. This god’s face is dripping with blood. The gore on the tusks seems to glow.

Light has faded. The carcass-clearing is shrouded in early twilight; all things are in blues and grays and blacks. Except the tusks. Those bright red tusks.

How is it so cold?

The boar’s steps reverberate through the soil. Finsen cannot remember sitting down, but he is, and the trembling comes up through his tailbone and rattles his spine. His breath plumes in front of his face. The grasses wilt. Finsen sees two eyes. Four tusks. A mound of swineflesh and a mouth that belongs to another world and there is nothing in his whole mind except the looming presence of the orrox-eater.

The god roars. It does not shriek like a pig. It does not whine or snort like the swine of the field. It roars and the trees shake in fear.

A part of the hunter’s mind wants him to run. To flee as far from this vision as possible, to retreat back to the world he knew before the veil between mortal and immortal was torn away. But a voice wells up from his guts and even before his mind parses its words he knows that he will obey. There is no force in it, but it is deep and he desires what it desires for him and his souls trusts in it. It tells him to stay. He stays.

The god holds its gaze on the hungry mortal. It recognizes him; knows his tracks; remembers his every kill and ponders where every bone is buried under the Forest eaves. The boar was there, always; watching, always; dwelling, waiting, luring, always. Finsen feels that voice again and understands that he is recognized. He is known for what he is and not for what he thinks himself to be. He understands.

And the man who once thought himself the greatest of Mother Borsylla’s children—for who else can claim to have lived with such radical trust in the bounty of the Forest—now realizes that he was never her son, for the Motherwood cleaves to Father River and together they nurture their people in the dance of the seasons, but deeper and ever farther into trees come older Woods and other Powers. Here there are no herds of docile orroxen. This is the realm of the scavengers. The brutes. The Boar.

Rise.

And Finsen stands. He walks through a mist of boar-breath, the only heat in the world. He steps up to the gutted orrox. The monstrous boar is beside him, peering down at the kill.

Take.

Finsen kneels and places his hands into the steaming entrails. His fingers maneuver around the intestines and he feels the soft lungs exhale as his arms go deeper, searching. His beard is mingling with the hide-hair now as he plunges both limbs up to the shoulder into the carcass. He finds the giant heart and by some spell the whole organ comes free without force and by the time he takes three more breaths he is sitting on his heels holding the red mass under the light of the stars. Its weight tests his arms.

Eat.

The heart is tender in his teeth. Its warmth soaks his beard. His face flushes. The meat crumbles on his tongue and his lips drip with the excess. The boar stoops and puts its jowls into the orrox’s ribcage.

They eat.

Thanks for reading. If you want to help me write more stuff like this, simply like, comment, or share this piece.

This book has been living rent-free in my head since I finished it, and getting to talk it through with someone who appreciates it so deeply was exactly what I needed.

And thank you to everyone who tuned in live. The turnout honestly surprised me, and it was a pleasure seeing so many familiar names show up for a long, nerdy, spoiler-heavy discussion of a very strange, very demanding novel.

Show Notes:

This conversation is full-spoiler and assumes you’ve either read A Canticle for Leibowitz or you don’t care about spoilers.

We talked about:

• Why this book is a Rorschach test: is it hopeful or nihilistic?

• Brother Francis, anonymous sacrifice, and continuity across centuries

  • 💀 skulls and wooden statues

• Hope is a choice. Hope is also a gift.

  • 🔥This book looks evil in the eye.

• Suffering, euthanasia, and moral shortcuts.

  • ⚕️“We can eliminate human pain by eliminating humans!”

• Who the heck is Rachel? Is she a Marian apparition?

• Thon Taddeo and the modern(ist) mindset

• Why Dune sucks

We didn’t do a great job of interacting with chat during the stream, so I’d love to keep the conversation going here.

Did Canticle strike you as ultimately hopeful, or ultimately tragic?
And what image or moment from the book has stuck with you the most?

Feel free to comment, restack, or share this with someone who’s read the book and needs to talk about it with another human being like I did.

Further Reading:

You should read A Canticle for Leibowitz. But if not, read these instead.

From Scoot, some timely ruminations on virtues, and an exciting sci-fi serial, Before the Maps are Final. If you like Canticle, this stuff is up your alley:

The Peasant Times-Dispatch

Introducing Season 4: Peasant Virtues

+JMJ+ Thank you for reading another issue of The Peasant Times-Dispatch, where we explore the life of faith from the perspective of a peasant—we aren’t experts, we aren’t theologians, we are just tryi…

Read more

5 months ago · 8 likes · 3 comments · Scoot

Gibberish

Before The Maps Are Final - Index

New To Gibberish? Check out this Navigation Page…

Read more

4 months ago · Scoot

And from myself, a reflection on King Théoden and his own experience with hope, which I mentioned on the livestream 👇

I originally wrote this exclusively for my Forgemasters, but given my effort this calendar year to write and share more of my fiction, I’ve made it free for everyone.

Thanks for being here. I hope you enjoy. —Eric.

Gautin stepped out from the treeline and waited in the silence. The sun was rising somewhere beyond the clouds, but there was little light. The late-autumn fog filled the air; sky and earth were one world, damp and closed-in.

The boy stepped forward until he was shrouded in the mists. Never in his eleven years had his legs walked so far as they had last night.

They are coming for us, his father had said.

The cold ground, nearly frozen, pressed against the skin of his bare feet. His left foot was already numb from the chill of the passing night, but not his right. That foot felt the cold as a comfort; the chill helped the swelling and worked against the ever-present pain in this half-mangled limb.

He looked down and, in the tiny glimmers of that hidden dawn, saw his accursed leg. Malformed since birth. It bowed out beside him. It would not bend the way it should, and the bulging thing below the ankle hardly looked like its supposed twin. Both leg and foot always gave him a constant ache, but the pain was extraordinary now. Gautin expected to see blood or bruising or some blemish that could betray the searing hurt. He wanted to see something grisly there. He wanted to see protruding bone or seeping fluid between his toes. It would only be just. If only there were some horrid sight—more than mere ugliness—that could bear witness to the world the agony of his life.

Instead it was only a bowed leg and lump-foot. Puffy, bony, and misshapen all at once. Just ugly. A wretched scar with no battle to tell of.

The boy sniffed, brought his gaze back to the world. He saw shadows of trees behind him. Endless fog ahead.

There was nothing to do but wait for light.

His hands moved under his outer garment and removed a flat package wrapped in linen. Besides his tunic, cloak, and underclothes, this was the only thing Gautin had with him. He thought he knew what was within, but he unwrapped it anyway.

Under the linen he found a massive red wax seal, a crisscross of twine, a stack of folded parchments. You must safeguard these letters and deliver them to Naufke, his father had said. Into his hands only, and to no one else. It is more important than you can understand, my son.

My son.

When else had Gautin ever heard those words?

He replayed the moment in his head, savoring it as the dawn made its reluctant appearance. In the bone-cold mists, those words were a warming hearth. Eventually the light ceased its growth. The morning was no less obscure than the hours that preceded it. The sun would be no help.

They are coming for us.

No one can save us, except perhaps Naufke.

Better that you should die…

Gautin put foot in front of misshaped foot. He set off further into the woods, further from home.

✹ ✹ ✹

It was a particular preoccupation of Lord Arling Kolvensing that his home be known far and wide as a place of jovial leisure and manly pursuits. The estate was neither large nor remarkably wealthy within the standards of its realm. Nonetheless, for the kingdom’s baronial classes, there was no better table at which to sup, no ale-bowls more full, and no gatherings more enjoyable than those to be found under the roofs of Kolvenfeld.

Much of the credit for the hall’s reputation naturally belonged to Arling’s wife, Hilfa, but Kolvenfeld was much more than a banquet-hall. Outside the hall’s doors lay a great, rectangular yard with single- and double-storied outbuildings on every side. Some, like the kitchen and smokehouse, were mundane enough. Most of Kolvenfeld’s main estate, however, was dedicated to the pastimes of the martial lords—and their sons.

There was an entire shed for the lord’s hunting gear, and a two-storied armory overflowing with spears, shields, helmets, and all the panoply of war. So great were the number of horses in the stable that the building’s hayloft was the size of a granary. Then there was the guest house, the steward’s house, the smithy, the gameskeepers’ hut, and the brew-house with its many drinking-benches. All of this was in addition to Kolvenfeld’s many tenant homes, farms, barns, store-rooms, and pastures. Nearly thirty people dwelt on the estate itself, with another two-hundred souls in its immediate orbit.

Lord Arling himself was boisterous, gregarious, and headstrong; he was vigorous in his eating, loud in his jests, swift in war and in the hunt. Other men liked him. And why should they not? He remembered their names and their lineages and he never refused to share an ale-bowl. He laughed easily and made others laugh at themselves. He had won glory in war. Men flocked to him.

Lord Arling Kolvensing even had the trust of King Thelcor. Not an easy thing to earn, that.

The domestic culture at Kolvenfeld was an extension of the lord himself: manful, stalwart, hearty.

One of the newest buildings at Kolvenfeld was the women’s house. Built for childbirth and the nursing of babes, it lay on the far side of the main hall, away from all these others. This was no exile; Lady Hilfa had chosen the spot herself.

Hilfa did love her husband, of course. Arling loved her in return.

She gave him five sons.

He loved four of them.

✹ ✹ ✹

Gautin heard the horsemen before he saw them.

Something twinged in his chest; his heart was already beating faster than he thought possible, as if it was about to burst. Would he now be discovered? His latent fear swelled into pure terror.

The poor boy was tumbling through branch and brush like a startled cub. Stealth was impossible with his leg; endurance was impossible with his lungs. With every step he lurched, swung his lame foot through the duff, and limped onward. He laid hands on whatever tree-trunk he could reach for support.

Voices echoed through those trees, their source undetectable in the fog. Gautin stopped to listen. He could only hear his own panting. His hands went to his knees. He looked behind him at his trail: broken branches, dark gouges in the woodland litter where his limb was always dragging. If his pursuers were behind him, he was already caught.

But the voices—the horses—seemed to be up ahead in the fog.

They were growing louder.

Where could he hide? He looked around at the ground, spun his head, and collapsed.

✹ ✹ ✹

All four sons of Arling Kolvensing, save the youngest who was a babe, rushed from the doors of their father’s hall. They pounded across the planks of the upper gallery which wrapped around the whole building, to the stairway, and then down the steps into the courtyard.

It was a familiar sight at Kolvenfeld. The young masters storming to the armory and the stables meant that Lord Arling was in a hunting mood; his sons ran before him to prepare his way.

Equally familiar, but far less regarded, was the sight of little Gautin Arlingson utterly failing to keep up with his brothers. As the other three were already emerging from the armory with bows and spears, the limp-legged Gautin was still shambling down the stairs from the hall.

“Slouchin’ Gautin!” laughed his brothers when they saw him. “You can’t catch us, and you can’t catch a hare!”

Berglif, a year younger than the cripple yet half-a-head taller, stuck his tongue out and wagged his head. “Keep the porridge warm for us when we return, sister!”

Gautin tried all the harder to catch up. His leg swung clumsily below him. Halfway across the courtyard the boy had to stop and catch his breath.

In no time at all his brothers were emerging from the stable, leading the horses which had been saddled with an alacrity Gautin could not countenance.

“Oh, look: Slouchin’ wants to come too!” announced Orlend Arlingson, the eldest. “Of course you can come, little sister. Just saddle Nokil and follow us!” This got a laugh from the others. Nokil was Father’s warhorse, twice the size of these garrons that Arling and his sons took on their hunting expeditions.

Then a new voice boomed out over the courtyard: “Leave Nokil out of this! You know better than to bring him into the mountains.” Lord Arling Kolvensing descended the stairs of the gallery. His heavy strides made deep impressions in the soft grasses.

Orlend said something to his father which earned another laugh, but Gautin did not hear it. His whole person, heart and mind and body, was bent towards the looming figure who was now passing over him like a thundercloud. The sun briefly disappeared behind the towering man—

—there was a whisper from somewhere near the ground—

—and then Arling went by. He asked his eldest: “Have you packed all the quivers this time?”

“Yes, Father.”

“And the hard-cakes?”

“Yes, Father.”

“Good, though I hope we’ll have meat by dusk. We can go up to the old stone hut at Skellering. Hillibrent tells me there’s plenty of grouse this year. Now, what of the horses?” The chatter went on.

This was man’s work, and Gautin was only fit for loom work and cookery. Lady Hilfa encouraged it, even; she worried over her three wild sons, but for Gautin her eyes she had only sympathy and affection. They spent much time together in the hall—when it was quiet—or over in the women’s house. When a fifth son was born this past summer, disappointment was plain on Hilfa’s face when the midwives announced the baby’s sex. With no daughter, the Lady doted on her diminutive son.

By the time Arling rode off his estate with three beaming sons, the courtyard was empty. Where Gautin had gone, and when, no one even thought to wonder. Not even the servants knew where the child had limped off to, although one of them did later find the lord’s war-saddle disturbed from its resting place in the stable, lying in the dust beside some of Nokil’s tack.

✹ ✹ ✹

He startled, as if awakening from a falling-dream; his heart jumped from a pained stillness to a rapid thumping. Voices. There had been voices.

Where?

He picked his face out of the leaves and dirt. He strained to see what he could from his low vantage.

Something was moving from right to left, twenty spans away at least—it was so hard to discern through the fog and branches.

A horse. Then the tiniest glint of light high above it revealed a rider’s helmet. He was not alone. Two more horsemen came next, looking more like ghosts than men.

Gautin stayed exactly where he was.

This must be the Sil road, he thought. He must have come farther east than he expected. Surely, these men had come from Kolvenfeld.

The boy could scarcely breathe. There was a rustling near his hip: his own hand, trembling in the forest litter.

A few words passed between the riders, too far to hear. Then another voice, this one angry, louder—the boy in the woods could almost recognize it. There was an exchange, then the angry voice grew louder. The words were unclear but the insulting intent was not. Then that voice cried out in surprise and cut off.

There was laughter from the horsemen. A quiet rebuke.

Had that voice been… ?

The fog thinned, and more figures came into view. He counted four, all on foot, the tallest first, then each one shorter than the last, until the last one… only a child.

Father. Brothers.

They were each bound at the wrists, and tied in a line one after the other, and a tether extended from Lord Arling’s neck into the mists ahead of him.

Then came a shorter steed. Gautin recognized their own mule, even in the fog. Much worse, he recognized the figure of the woman atop it. The bundle in his mother’s arms could be nothing else save his littlest brother.

Gautin blinked away the tears. A prayer escaped his lips.

The cavalcade was beginning to fade into the mists again when some unseen captor tugged at Arling’s leash and the proud man fell face-first out of Gautin’s sight. His sons clambered close behind in an effort to not step on their father. They were soon all tangled and stuck.

Gautin heard the jangling of chains. And laughter.

✹ ✹ ✹

A crashing sound of pots and pans made everyone in the hall jump. Every head turned.

There, suddenly the target of attention for the whole Kolvensing family and two dozen of their drunken guests, was little Gautin.

He had been carrying a broad basket of fleeces and furs to accompany the extra bench-beds his father had requested so as to sleep the whole party here in the hall. But with Gautin’s off-kilter gait, the whole basket had been lurching to one side with each of his shambling steps.

That is how he bumped the andiron at the edge of the central hearth.

The spit jostled and wobbled, the cauldron swung back and forth, the weight of it pulled the spit free from the andiron’s fitting, and the whole long bar—loaded with a dozen measures or more the night’s cooking—fell down into the hearth.

The clatter was deafening. The cauldron spilled and the soup hissed into the fire, sending smoke and steam up to the oak rafters, incense of burning pork and evaporating stews. As one end of the spit landed, the rest angled awkwardly and pushed the other andiron over and out of the hearth entirely. A lady leaped off her paramour’s lap and the man tumbled back over the bench to avoid the hot metal. The roast landed in the fire. An explosion of sparks. Ash blew out from below, dusting all the bread that was warming on the hearthstones.

When the gasps and shrieks died away and it was clear there was no risk of a hall-fire, all eyes went to the petrified little boy with the hamper in his hands.

“Have you no wits?!” roared Lord Arling from his seat. “If I did not know your face, boy, I would think I had invited Stumrain of Sil into my hall! A cripple is bad enough, but an idiot too?”

There was absolute silence in the hall, save the fire consuming the roast and the sizzling of the soup upon the logs. The guests might have been confused, but those who lived in this region knew Stumrain, the young, bow-legged, idiot youth who spent every day shambling about the town, yelling wordless moans at passersby, weeping and shouting in his witlessness.

“Worry not, friends!” Lady Hilfa announced with a pained smile. “We have plenty of vittles already prepared in the cook-house. Virik! Bring out the second cauldron, and get the girls to bring the bread.”

“And more ale!” shouted one of the men.

“And more ale, yes!” Hilfa’s composure was returning. “Now Kiljan, strike up that tune again.”

The party resumed. The servants began to work at the hearth to repair the damage. No one paid the crying boy near the hearth any more mind. Except, of course, his brothers.

“Ha-ha!” Orlend sneered right in Gautin’s face as the other three gathered around him. “Slouchin’ Stumrain! You should leave, little sister, before you make more ruin for Father!”

Gautin dropped his basket on the floor and brought a hand to his eyes. He squeezed his face, trying to keep his tears in.

“Ha! You even have a squint like Stumrain, don’t you? Slouchin’ Gautin. Squintin’ stupid Stumrain.”

Even as the words left the eldest’s mouth, Munand and Berglif had turned the tease into a song.

✹ ✹ ✹

“Hold there, Carter!”

At the soldier’s words, the farmer reined in his oxen and brought his haycart to a halt. The three riders were coming up the road the other way from Sil. Over their hauberks they wore tabards of green and red, denoting their place in King Thelcor’s household.

The farmer felt a keen desire to be anywhere but here, on this road.

The men inquired after his business, and he told them about hay and wagoning and the market-day at Sil. They asked him what he knew about the goings-on at Kolvenfeld. The farmer had heard little; some people at market had spoken about it, but no one there understood anything of what had happened.

“Arling Kolvensing has been declared a high traitor,” said one of the king’s men. Now the farmer truly wanted to be elsewhere. Everyone knew what happened to those who fell under Thelcor’s suspicions. The soldier, for his part, seemed to relish the man’s now-troubled mind.

“And what about him?” the soldier nodded to the boy who was fidgeting in the back of the haycart. He was young, perhaps eight or nine, completely filthy, dressed in a cloak and tunic far too thin for the weather. He was barefoot, and one of his legs was misshapen, with a clubbed foot beneath. The boy rocked back and forth in the hay, but did not regard the men at all.

“Oh, ehm, he climbed in while I was leaving town.”

“He just hopped in on his own?”

“Well…” the carter cleared his throat. “So, with him, well—.”

“You there! Boy!” the rider brought his horse alongside the rear of the cart. He had to shout again before the crippled young man turned his head. When he did, he was squinting hard out of one eye, and the rest of his face held a strange expression as if he was not quite looking at the man, but past him. “Yes, you! What are you doing on the road? Where are you going?”

The boy did not say anything. He merely held his gaze at—or near, or beyond—the soldier.

“Answer me!”

The sound that came from the squinting face was wordless and unsettling. It seemed to belong to an animal more than to a man.

Then the soldier laughed. Turning to the carter he said, “I’ve heard of this lad. Why didn’t you tell us you had the Idiot of Sil?”

The rider reached down and smacked the boy on the side of the head, then chuckled again at the goose-noise this abuse produced. He mimicked the boy—“Wonk, hyonk!”—and looked to his friends.

The other two were laughing too. They dismounted, came around to the back of the cart, and began to torment this rare exhibition before them. They prodded its bony leg, flicked its ears, and took turns trying to effect louder and more raucous sounds from the thing.

The farmer sat statue-still, wishing again to be whisked away.

Eventually the men remembered their duties. Or maybe they simply got bored. One of them flicked two copper algrens into the haycart. “Your bread for the day, beggar-goose.”

Then they left.

The oxen began to walk, the cart axle began to creak, and the driver began to shake from the after-fear.

The boy, however, was only relieved. The prodding and mocking he did not mind. Only one thing concerned him: the letters he had stashed in the hay.

✹ ✹ ✹

The horsemen came pounding into Kolvenfeld without any warning. Virik the steward was near the gateway to the road, and the first horse knocked him clear to the ground.

Six riders. Twelve. Twenty. All dressed for war. Thundering and spreading through the courtyard.

Some of the women were crying out. Chaos reigned where moments ago there had only been a quiet, domestic morning at the end of autumn.

Gautin looked up from where he sat in the shade, uselessly scraping a rake in the dirt for lack of better amusement. But now a hoof stomped his scrawling into a puff of dust.

“You there!” snapped the green-and-red-clad man from his steed. The sun glinted off the top of a spear, high overhead. “Where is your lord? Where is Arling?”

In abject fear, the boy swallowed, and found he could not. He bobbed his head like a chicken to get his throat to work.

“Whore-son servants,” the man grumbled. “Useless.” And he rode away to continue the search.

Men were everywhere now. Riders wheeled about, going from corner to corner of the yard, steeds stamping. Many had dismounted and were charging through the doors of both hall and outbuildings. There was no bloodshed. Not yet.

Gautin stood up. He looked at his rake and its twig tines. He thought of the horseman’s spear. He wished he had his own.

Mother was almost certainly in the hall. His brothers were all in the far field. There was no one here to help.

Gautin’s grip tightened on the handle.

He limped off towards the armory.

✹ ✹ ✹

Try as they might, the royal soldiers could find no evidence of Arling’s treachery. Every room was turned out. Every floorboard pulled up. Every servant questioned, some more forcefully than others. The walls of the storehouses were so thoroughly torn apart that the whole building began to sway. The men put it to the torch.

Evidence or no, King Thelcor’s men did not wait to bring their quarry all the way back to Saxo Keep before starting their work on Arling’s flesh. They were tasked with bringing in quite a few things, after all, and the traitor’s person was only one of them.

Arling held out. No amount of ingenuity could force him into submission.

So they proceeded against his flesh and blood via another route; they began their work anew, this time upon his eldest son.

It was only a matter of minutes—a few blows to the face, a twisted arm, the dramatic revelation of a hot iron—before Orlend Arlingson’s tongue flowed freely at the will of his family’s captors.

Which was how the king’s enforcers learned of a particular mistake. They were tasked with capturing all of Arling’s sons, and they had been told of four. Four they had. But this babe here, he was the fifth.

“Why had Lord Kolvensing not told his liege of this newest child?” the men asked themselves. “Is Thelcor not generous with his vassals? That alone confirms this man’s guilt.”

A description of this missing son was soon provided to them from the whimpering Orlend.

A certain few of the soldiers admitted that they had seen this boy—not the idiot they thought they had met, but Arling’s last remaining free kin. After the appropriately bloody lashing, these three were among those who were sent back out again onto the roads to find the damnable child.

Their captain went with them.

✹ ✹ ✹

Gautin made it to the armory without anyone giving him more than a moment’s glance. He went up the steps, opened the door, and entered the dark portal. There was more shouting in the courtyard below. Gautin closed the door behind him.

He took several steps into the room.

A great shadow moved at the edge of his vision. Gautin twisted on his good leg. The boy swung his rake as hard as he could—

—Arling the Warchief caught the handle in a fist. His other hand held his sword.

“Gautin!” he gasped. He wrenched the rake from his son’s grasp and threw it to the ground. He cast a glance over his shoulder, back toward the door. Then he whispered: “Are your brothers with you?”

Gautin shook his head.

“Bolt the door. Quickly now.”

Gautin did. When he turned back, his father was gone.

His absence only lasted a moment. Arling dropped down from the loft, like lightning from a raincloud, eschewing the ladder and landing with thunder. The noble chieftain stood up on steady feet. He beckoned his crippled son to the bench near a high window at the back of the room.

As he limped over to his father, Gautin thought that the man seemed transformed. This was not the gregarious drinker at the center of every hall-party. This man was taut as a bowstring, hard as a shield-boss, sharp as an arrowhead. For the first time in his young life, Gautin was catching a glimpse of the chieftain who had led hard men into blood.

Arling lifted his son and sat him roughly on the bench.

“Gautin. You must do something for me, for your mother, and for all of us,” Arling’s breathed into his son’s face. “This is a sudden burden that you must bear. Why the Words have chosen you as the only person to help us in this distress, I will never understand, but you are all I have now.”

There was shouting outside in the courtyard. Arling turned over his shoulder to look at the door again. Another shout, very close now. The man turned back.

“Listen: this is what you are to do. You know Haslofeld, don’t you? The place of your mother’s kin and your uncle, Naufke Thinilson? Good.” Arling produced a flat, linen-wrapped package and put it on Gautin’s lap. “You must safeguard these letters and deliver them to Naufke. Into his hands only, and to no one else. It is more important than you can understand, my son. They are coming for us, the king’s men. We Kolvensings face our doom. No one can save us, except perhaps Naufke, if he receives these.

“I will soon face the king’s ire and the burning racks. I will resist, but Thelcor’s wrath will not be sated. Once they are done with me, they will come for you as well, and for your mother, and all our kinsmen. Even the little babe, Gautin.

“You must understand: better that you should die than these letters go undelivered. You must not fail!”

The door from the gallery slammed against the bolt. “Arling Kolvensing!” came the shout from beyond. “Open in the name of the king! Surrender yourself!”

“Out this window now,” said Arling, lifting his son to the opening near the ceiling. “Drop over the gallery-railing to the yard below. Go straight to the woods. Speak to no one. Do not be seen.”

✹ ✹ ✹

They found the old carter first.

“I knew nothing of the boy!” cried the farmer through bloodied lips. His teeth lay on the road. “I left him back there, at the trappers’ hut. Back that way!”

“It’s nearly dark,” noted the captain. “Why did you hurry onward? Why not stay back with the other travelers?”

“Sign of a guilty conscience,” supplied one of the other men.

“You think you can outrun us, peasant?” the captain demanded.

“No! No!” the farmer sputtered. “I would only rather be home than to pass the night in a drafty hut with villains and beggars.”

His protests fell on uncaring ears. Most of the searchers left him and his oxen, but a few stayed behind. The farmer never did make it home.

Those kings-men who were more concerned with their mission continued back up the road towards Sil, looking for the travel-shelter the doomed carter had spoken of.

The sun set.

An orange glow appeared in the darkness, flickering at the edge of a wood. The trappers’ hut. The hole-plagued fur that served for a door could not contain the light of the hearth within, not its warmth. The soldiers descended upon the shelter and crowded in the doorway. They looked inside: four walls of stone packed with moss, a mound of moldering thatch for a roof, a smoky hearth, and three figures hunched in the smoke-filled den.

Two were adults of indeterminate sex and age, for they were only piles of rags and filth, and both were sleeping on benches. The third was also a vagrant, equally wretched, but awake to the world. When the fur-door opened he turned to the newcomers. His eyes were milk-white with cataracts; his unseeing stare wandered over the soldiers but brought him nothing except his private world of darkness.

“Is that you again, boy?” rasped the old josser.

“We are not boys, but we are looking for one. Tell me what you know of him. Where did he go?”

“Oh, I…” the man hesitated. “I’m not sure.”

“You speak to a captain of the royal household. Loosen your tongue in the name of the king, sightless one, or I will cut it out.”

“I cannot see anything, sir. I know not where he went.”

“But you knew he was a boy.”

“The man who left him here. That’s what he told me. He didn’t stay, m’lord. The boy, I mean. He stirred the fire, then left. He didn’t say a thing.”

The captain stooped to the fire. There among the burning embers he saw a burning lump of tinder, tossed in not long ago. There were scraps of linen, a stack of black and flaking papers, and, oozing out of the whole bundle, bubbling globules of red wax.

“Do you have any bread?” the blind man asked. “I’ve two coppers here. I can pay.”

The captain ignored him, and watched the black papers as they crumpled to nothing in the ember depths where Gautin had stuck them.

✹ ✹ ✹

Three hours since the royal horsemen had galloped into Kolvenfeld, and darkness had descended upon the woods.

Gautin could smell the smoke from the home which burned behind him.

He knew where he had to go, but only vaguely. He knew how to travel there, but knew his foot would not allow it. He knew there were men searching for him, but knew he would never be able to outrun or outfight them.

He tried to keep walking, but his feet stumbled in the dark—not that they were ever steady in the daylight. So, little Gautin crawled to the nearest tree. Finding it hollow, he curled up inside and tried to sleep.

He wept instead.

✹ ✹ ✹

The moment he heard about the arrest of his sister and her husband, Lord Naufke Thinilson summoned a dozen of his closest followers to his home. These being dark and uncertain times, and with the tidings from Kolvenfeld spreading like disease through all the baronies of Estval, no fewer than sixty men had answered his call. Each arrived armed for war. More were sure to come. Haslofeld was so packed with warrior-guests that Naufke was already sending his bondsmen to sleep in the stable-loft; the cowshed might be next.

On this, the third night since Arling’s capture, most of these men were crowded around the edges of Naufke’s hall; they watched from the shadows at the latest newcomer: a mangy, glassy-eyed, barefoot cripple-boy who had wandered onto the estate around midnight and who now sat staring at the hearth-coals alone. They awaited the return of the lord of the house. He was not long in coming.

When Naufke did reenter his hall, he carried a quill and small clay ink-pot, along with a tight stack of cleaned birch-bark for writing. The lord strode across the rushes to sit on the hearthstone facing his young kinsman. He acknowledged no one in the hall except Gautin, whom he now addressed:

“Are you certain this letter is destroyed? If it was so important, why didn’t you hide it somewhere? Perhaps if there was some hope of recovering them, then perhaps—.”

“Husband,” the mistress of the house interrupted Naufke. “This should wait until morning. Let the boy warm up, find him some shoes, get some food into him. I’m sure you’re tired, Gautin. Rest. Then we can deal with whatever this is… How does that sound?”

The boy shook his head.

Naufke sighed. Shaking his head, he opened the ink-pot, dipped the quill, and placed the bark on his knee. “What is it, then, my boy?”

Gautin sat up straight and took a deep inbreath...

Then he spoke:

“‘For the man to whom I trust my family in what may become our most dire hour.’”

His voice was calm and direct, and it carried through the hall. It had a reedy timbre, but he sounded nothing like a child. He continued:

“‘I must offer my correspondence to you without any names for reasons you will soon understand, but at each turn I will make my meaning clear to your mind, even if to no one else’s. Today is the sixteenth day of Sumine. Since our chance meeting outside Lienburg yesterweek—’”

“Stop!” Naufke threw up a hand. “Everybody out. Wake those in the loft. Get them out! Do it now!”” The collected men began to take their leave. Naufke shouted for them to hurry. Even his wife was banished from his hall.

When they were alone, Naufke gripped Gautin’s arm. “Why should I trust this message? Your father swore an oath of silence to me about that meeting. And now he is under the knife for treason! Do you understand, boy? I could die. My family could die. If he told you of that meeting, what else did he say? Who else knows of it?!”

“He told me nothing, sir. I know not if he kept counsel with anyone else. I am not in my father’s confidence. I know of it only from the letters.”

“Letters? There was more than one?”

“Six letters. This is only the start of the first.”

“What did they say? What were they about?”

“I…” Gautin sniffed. “I am not sure. They did not make sense to me. So I simply learned every word of them. I assume they will make sense to you.”

Naufke’s jaw dropped open. Then he leaned back and surveyed the room with widened eyes. “You simply learned every word…”

“‘Since our chance meeting outside Lienburg yesterweek,’” Gautin continued, “‘I have had no rest. Your words were truth. A hard and bitter truth which has burned both my heart and conscience. I pledge to you that I shall now work towards the goal you spoke of then. I shall not share my plans with you until you receive this letter. The man we spoke of trusts you not, but he trusts me now. Discovery is too great a risk. The work is too fragile. I will do it all with my own hands. What follows is a list of evidences where you may have the means to argue before our peers. I shall add to it as I undertake this work.’

Gautin interrupted his recitation: “None of that makes sense to me. And everything after this is merely a list. But my father said that if you received this letter, you could save my family.”

Naufke’s face was pale as fresh-washed fleece. He had not copied a single word. His implements dropped from his lap, and the stack of bark clattered against the hearth and then to the floor. The lord stood up, paced one way, threw his hands through his hair, paced back.

“Can you save my family, Uncle?”

Naufke bent and cupped the child’s face in tender hands. “How many letters did you say you learned, Gautin?”

“Six.”

“And how long was each?”

“The first was forty-one lines on one side. The second letter was four pages, with twenty or twenty-one lines per page, but he wrote on the backs as well, plus a postscript. The third lett—.”

“Scribes!” Naufke shouted. He broke away and ran to the hall’s door. “We need clerks and writers!”

Minutes later, Gautin found himself at the center of a table-ring with seven men, each with quills, bark, parchment, or wax-tablets, diligently awaiting his next words. Naufke bade him to speak, so Gautin spoke.

He recited every word of every message.

The letters were full of cryptic instructions: “Go to the tree where we buried the dead after the Battle of Crehan for Brolingson’s seals. Ask the abbot of Grimalbans for the ‘pearl of the Coridon.’ The fifth chancellor’s ledger is with your longest tenant. Under the north corner of the women’s house on my estate there is a stone, buried testimonies beneath that our subject thought destroyed.”

On and on the lists went. At the end of each item, Naufke would point to the next scribe so that Gautin would not be slowed down. Round and round the clues flew. The recitation rolled on like a spring-swollen river.

Several times the writers had to ask Gautin to repeat something and he would say it again, verbatim, exactly as before, without needing to ask which item was unclear. Then he would take up the litany again.

By the time Gautin finished the last item on the last list of the last letter, there was a new dawn.

“Do you know what you’ve just done, Gautin?”

“No,” said the bleary-eyed boy.

“One thing is certain: your father is a traitor of the highest order. No—” he corrected himself when he saw the fear on Gautin’s face. “Let me explain. It is a relief. Shortly after your father was appointed vicar-chancellor, we met unexpectedly on the road—the meeting the letter spoke of. I took the chance and begged him to work to subvert the king’s tyranny. He refused. In strong words. I thought our kinship died that day. I thought it a great shame, for I always loved him even in his faults. I feared Arling might turn me over to Thelcor’s torturers for my thoughts…

“But now we see the truth. Your father has been working to undermine Thelcor—and quite diligently. If I understand your father’s meaning in these lists, every word of those letters is a path to another tool to win over our fellow lords.

“I will dispatch men. Your father mentioned missing seals stolen for Thelcor’s forgeries, funds that he has extorted, orders in the king’s name. Thelcor has committed so many crimes, Gautin. So much evil. But so many have not seen it first-hand. They have only rumors. But now your father has given us proof of all! I will send out messengers to every landholder I know. Your father is well-liked, you know, and the lords are restless enough already…”

He trailed off when he saw that Gautin’s eyes were closing and he was slumping in his stool. Naufke lifted his nephew into his arms, carried the boy into the family’s private chamber, and laid Gautin into the lord’s own bed. The child was asleep before his uncle could pull the furs over him.

He awoke in the afternoon. His aunt was there at his bedside with bread and hearty stew. He ate, and even sipped deeply of the ale-bowl she offered for his fortification. Once he had changed his clothes and donned one shoe for his good foot, he went to find his uncle.

Outside the hall, Haslofeld’s small courtyard was bustling with activity. Horsemen were coming and going, helmets on and shields bouncing on their backs. Strong men were loading carts and pack-mules. In the middle of it all was Lord Naufke, wearing mail and sword-belt. His followers were packed around him, but they parted before the bow-legged boy like wheat in the wind.

“Here he is,” Naufke bent to embrace Gautin in two arms. “Are you feeling better?”

“What is happening, Uncle?”

Naufke stood and sighed. To Gautin’s relief, the man did not kneel or crouch down. “We’re collecting your father’s hoards. They are already having the intended effect: my messengers are returning with notes of support. The lords of Estval are rallying to our cause. And so we are preparing to march on Saxo Keep, where, your father has written us, the king is starving his own nephew. Perhaps that youth will make a better king than Thelcor.”

“Cursed be the name!” interjected one of Naufke’s men.

“Curse Thelcor the Wicked!” Naufke echoed. “He shall not be king much longer, if we have our way!”

There was a sudden commotion by the gates, and everyone turned to watch a tired-looking warband riding into Haslofeld.

“Ah, yes,” Naufke chuckled. “I sent out more than messengers…”

“There’s blood on their clothes,” Gautin said. “Blood on the horses.”

“I should hope so. That means they found their prey. Thanks to you, Gautin, the banners of rebellion are being raised all over Estval. Today was just the first skirmish...”

But Gautin wasn’t listening any more. The riders who had come in were filtering through the gates and he saw between helmeted heads a patch of long, raven hair and a bundled babe wrapped in its mother’s arms. Beside the woman was her husband, Arling.

His nose was broken, his jaw was swollen, his whole face was purple. But his eyes were alert. He scanned Haslofeld’s yard like a hawk, searching with a grimace. Then he saw Gautin. Arling smiled and pointed to him with a cry.

“My son! There’s my son!”

All at once, mother, brothers, and father looked at Gautin Arlingson with joy on their faces.

He ran to them.

Thank you all for supporting my work. I hope you enjoyed this month’s story. If you did like it, please don’t hesitate to share it with others. Tell them what they’re missing, eh?

Share

This post is both a personal reset and a practical update. As 2026 begins, I want to be clear about what this newsletter is for, what I’m prioritizing, and what’s going to change as a result.

For my Forgemasters in particular: consider this post as January’s usual Lorework. Rather than a behind-the-scenes look at a single story, I want to step back and talk to you directly about the larger project that you are generously supporting, and where I intend to take it next.

We’ll still have this month’s story-hook poll down below, where paid subscribers can vote for an upcoming story…

… but first, a little heart-to-heart.

At various times throughout my “writing journey,” I’ve found myself getting… impatient.

This is one of those times.

I’ve learned that I need to pay attention when that impatience shows up. It’s usually not a sign that I’ve been lazy or that I’m falling behind (though it feels that way). In the past, it’s always meant that I’ve been putting off something of value, and it’s time for me to take the next important step.

That impatience has led to good things.

I started this newsletter in a fit of pique (if I’m serious about this writing thing then I’d better try to find an audience, dangnabbit), and later I launched The Samyuzot because I wanted something longer form than just short stories. There are plenty of other examples where my attitude towards myself and my writing has changed for the better because of a relentless thought:

“Are you serious with this? Does it actually matter to you? Do you actually want to write?!”

For a while now, I’ve been telling myself that I haven’t been writing because I’ve been busy. And that’s true, up to a point. I’ve been busy doing some damn important and necessary things.

(As I typed those exact words Mrs. Falden told me that Junior has a fever and would I please go get a bowl in case he vomits? Us Falden men always vomit whenever we spike a fever. Isn’t that such a fun and quirky familial trait?! Oh, and did I mention we were all sick just after Christmas? Sneezing’s Greetings and Happy Spew Year to us!)

So this isn’t an apology, and it isn’t self-pity.

Instead, I’m trying to say that my impatience tends to cut through my fog. It’s an internal signal that tells me to move. It forces me to look in the mirror and make decisions.

I’m having one of those impatient moments right now.

For a long time (for as long as I’ve wanted to write, in fact), I’ve had a handful of large, epic-scale stories in my mind. Specific people (like Haelend of Eithelion) that I want to write about.

I haven’t really written these stories, however, because I’ve been scared. I’m scared that I’m not a good enough writer yet. I’m scared that they won’t be as good as what’s in my head. I’m scared that my audience will evaporate if I write too much fiction on this platform.

But I’ve been getting more and more impatient to tell those stories.

As 2025 fades into the rearview, my impatience is starting to win out against my fears.

I want more fiction here at the Forge. I want to make more serials. I want you to meet all the peoples (and peoples) of Cethanwald, and I want you to join me as the Fourth Age of that world collapses and expands into its Fifth.

Also: I want as much of my fiction as possible going to print this year.

I want to break out of the ‘someday’ mentality for my bigger stories and start building them. Here. Now.

And so…

My plan for 2026 is to focus directly on creating fiction, and writing precisely the kinds of stories I want to write.

I didn’t come here to chat about genre, though I love doing that. I came here to tell you stories. So that’s what I’ll be doing.

I will send you these stories as often as I can. I don’t know exactly how often that will be.

If that’s not your cup of tea, I understand. No hard feelings. You can hop off this train right here.

It’s likely that I will continue writing bits here and there about history and fantasy, but I’m going to shift away from that as a goal. Instead, I’ll write that non-fiction stuff only when (if) particular topics set my brain a’buzzing.

In the absence of a particular bolt of inspiration for a rapid-fire non-fiction piece, I’ll be writing stories. Stories of kings and vagabonds, warriors and wizards, and all the ordinary folk who make a world worth knowing.

But for those of you who do want to stick around, I am honored to have you.

I have ideas for no less than four new serials. Not all of them will see the light of day, but gosh-darn-it I want to take a swing at every single one of them. And that’s not including the long, long list of short story ideas I have—ideas that aren’t just options, but ideas where I’ll be mad at myself if I don’t write them.

Which means I’m going to keep being mad at myself (i.e. “impatient”) until you guys get a whole lot of narrative goodness.

So, what’s the Forge gonna look like these days?

I’ll get back to the Forgemasters Posts (like this Lorework), and I’ll still have exclusive stories for you paid subs, but to be completely honest, I don’t know if I’ll continue the paywalled stuff beyond Summer 2026 (when most of my paid subscribers are set to renew). If there are going to be changes, I will communicate that to all of you way ahead of time.

Speaking of: I have some catching up to do.

• Soon as I can, I’ll be releasing Gautin’s Errand, from November’s Lorework Poll.

• Soon after, I’ll be releasing whatever story you all choose down below.

• And I haven’t forgotten about The Siege of Salbat, from September’s Lorework.

• So as not to lock everything behind a paywall, I plan to make at least some of those stories free for everyone.

Will the stories be weekly after that? Likely not. I’ll continue my once-monthly Forgemaster story (paywalled, after January), and try to write at least one more free story each month. The free, non-fiction posts (history, reviews, fantasy analysis, etc) will be sporadic.

The fact is, I’ve often stopped writing stories because I know I’m not going to be able to finish in time for a Tuesday post, so I pivot on Friday or Saturday to write a non-fiction post (which are generally easier). But the middle of the week is my most stressful time, so I can’t always return to the half-done story until Friday, at which point I feel like I may not finish in time… and the cycle continues.

If I’m going to write half of what I want to write between now and when I die, then I have to be okay with occasionally sending nothing out on a given Tuesday. The hamster-wheel production has to give way to the long-term goals.

I’ll send out stories when I have them. Which should be a whole lot more often in 2026.

Now, with all that out of the way, let’s get to the normal paid-post Lorework poll.

Vote For What’s Next

Every month, Forgemasters get to vote on an upcoming story.

Here’s how it works: I share three story hooks. You vote for your favorite. I write the winner. The other hooks stay in rotation until they lose three times, in which case I’ll retire them. Polls stay open until I start writing (at least 1 week).

Note: I believe you have to be logged in on the app or on the web to vote.

Want to suggest a story prompt? Have something else from Cethanwald you want to see? Leave a comment, reply to this email, or send me a direct message in the app.

Here are this month’s Story Hooks:

1. A fisherman gets an unexpected haul [Last Chance]

2. Aftermath of a battle on a frozen lake

3. A hunter finds his name carved in a tree [New]

Thanks for voting!

Thanks again for your ongoing support of my work here at Falden’s Forge. You can support me even further by liking, commenting, or sharing this post.

Share

Things have been quiet here at Falden’s Forge for a while as I deal with some major changes on the personal front (mostly good) and their subsequent disruptions for my writing (not so good). Things will pick up again in January, but I still wanted to do a year-end wrap-up in the meantime.

It’s been a huge year for this publication. There are more than twice as many of you reading now than there were at this time last year, which is unbelievable to me. Meanwhile, Falden’s Forge itself has grown from a fledgling, “let’s see if this works” project to a growing, living, body of work.

Some pieces found a much wider audience than I expected, but even those that barely made a ripple still mattered deeply to me. Two years ago I still wasn’t even sharing any of my work, but I now I have plenty of folks—like you, dear reader—who have joined to read my stories and to explore history and fantasy with me. That’s what means the most.

Thank you for reading.

Now, as we close our the year, I want to do share with you some posts which I think are the best of what I put our on the Forge this past year. So let’s go.

The Best of Falden’s Forge 2025

The fun part of doing this is that there’s absolutely no single definition for “best”. Is it by reads? By engagement? By my own personal opinions?

Yes. All of those things.

But let’s start with simple popularity.

Most Popular Story

My most popular story, by most metrics, was from the middle of the year, a “hunter/hunted” story set—like all my fiction—in the world of Cethanwald.

This was a really fun one to write. It’s tense, and has a few overlapping themes, but I genuinely didn’t know if anyone would like it. I experimented, as I have before, with parallel story arcs; I like to follow one character across two different intertwined timelines: one in the character’s past, another in the future.

It got a warm response, for which I’m grateful.

Most Popular Non-Fiction Post

Outside of my fiction, I’ve had a few posts that have help introduce my work to a wider audience. Chances are, most of you found me through those history/fantasy commentaries (welcome, welcome!).

Of these, my most popular post was my springtime reflection on the climactic scenes of Lord of the Rings, and the often-overlooked failure of Frodo Baggins.

From the piece:

Good doesn’t win by being physically stronger. It doesn’t win by force of arms. It doesn’t win by conquest or raw, worldly power.

It doesn’t even win by making itself clear to us—as so often doing the right thing appears to be stupid, unpragmatic, useless, or unjust. At least at first.

And yet the only way for Good to flourish is for each of us to choose it anyway. Small people. In small moments. Choosing good.

Read more below.

Now, for some other categories.

Which Post Was Most Fun to Write?

I wrote a number of different “series” in 2025, and all of them were memorable for me. There was a deep and meaningful sort of “fun” that I experienced as I wrote and finished my first long-form serial, The Samyuzot, but I want save some of that reflection for later. Instead, I want to share a different series that I co-wrote with (whom I also roped onto Substack this year, which I viewed as a major win for us all).

In April—immediately on the heels of that Frodo piece—Ian and I wrote a three-part series about the role of magic within fantasy stories.

• First we put together a “defense” of so-called hard magic systems

• Then we did the opposite, and went hard into why “soft” magic systems are better

• Then we unpacked them both and talked about the greater implications of the whole thing, and wound up cutting to the heart of fantasy’s purpose and mechanics.

It was fun because I got to work with a friend; it was fun because I’m a nerd about that stuff (which you all knew already); but mostly it was fun because this is the kind of crap Ian and I never shut up about.

If you ever get the chance to just hyperfixate on some niche topic to an audience that’s actually interested, I’d recommend it.

Here’s the start of that series. There’s another “pseudo-intro post” that I wrote last year too, but you can probably skip it if you want to get to the meat of what Ian and I did together:

That series was a blast to write, and it was fascinating to go from “why stories should or shouldn’t explain magic” and then slowly descend into “why magic should explain the stories.”

Which Story Was Most Fun to Write?

Of my stories, however, I wanted to share another one I had fun writing: Stoneheart. It’s not very often that I write from a specific character’s perspective, but when I do I tend to enjoy it. Once you get into a character’s mindset and start to find their voice, the words can really start to fly onto the page. There’s still all sorts of work to hone it and get a good story out of it, but still: this one was fun.

I initially wrote this as a perk for my paid subs, the Forgemasters, but since I’m linking it here I’ll make it free for a few weeks.

The One I’m Proud Of

If I had to point to one thing that defines Falden’s Forge in 2025, it would be The Samyuzot.

Now I’m cheating a little, since I started that project in 2024 and actually cited it as “what I’m proud of” at the end of last year too. But this is my newsletter and I can do what I want.

The Samyuzot is my first completed long-form fiction project in public, and it had all the creative and emotional risks that implies. Nine stories, each one self-contained, with a larger arc that lands home at the end. I’m still a little amazed that I actually did it.

So I’m proud of it first because it exists.

But more than that, I’m proud of the kind of story it turned out to be. What began, years ago, as a side character in a much larger, unrealized story gradually demanded the center of the stage. The titular “samyuzot” refused to stay away and his story carried a thematic weight for me even I did not understand until I was well and truly done with writing that story.

By the time I reached the finale, it was clear that I had circling questions I hadn’t fully articulated for myself, and it required some soul-searching. And, in the midst of figuring that out, I needed to scrap thousands of words and entire story concepts before the finale started to come together.

In short, I’m proud of this story for the sheer amount of craft it demanded from me, and I’m proud of what it’s become.

Without a doubt my favorite part of it is the finale, but that doesn’t make sense to link here, so I’ll give you the table of contents:

Final Thoughts

There’s a lot more I want to share here, especially my explorations into what kings actually did all day and why castles are a thing. I also happily put the fear of god into people by comparing cavalry to American football (“The Tush Push, Cavalry Charges, and the Chaos of Combat”).

And on the strictly fantasy side, I reflected on classics someone should have told me about sooner, and the worst book I’ll ever love.

But time is short.

Before I sign off, I want to say this plainly: thank you for reading.

Whether you’ve been here since the early days or found Falden’s Forge somewhere along the way this year, your attention is not something I take lightly. Writing takes place in solitude, but it doesn’t mean anything until someone else shows up on the other side of the page. You did. Repeatedly.

As I said, things will pick up again in January. There are more stories to tell, more irons for my proverbial forge-fire. I’m looking forward to what comes next, and I’m glad you’re here for it.

Until then, thank you for reading.

Then, I want to share a bit more about the origins for my other recurring character, Maldurian the Delver.

Read more

Ranulf let his horse carry him through the orchards and gardens outside Clarendon. The mare knew to follow the others; she dutifully stayed near the carriage.

The rider paid little attention to the rest of the entourage. His eyes watched the line where the dirt of the road met the grasses; he watched, disinterested, as the roadside went past wattle fences, or village homes, or stone-piled walls that marked the boundaries of this field or that farm.

At one point he watched as a red squirrel gnawed on a moldering apple near the roadside. The fruit was rotted nearly to black. It oozed. The squirrel was undeterred. The lead riders paid the little creature no heed. The abbot’s carriage rumbled past it. Only when Ranulf, at the end of the group, came near and his horse’s hoof clopped down just beside the apple, did the squirrel jump away.

From atop a rock wall, the rodent watched Ranulf and his mount with black eyes and twitching ears. A globule of rotting fruit hung from its teeth. Ranulf snapped his fingers at the creature, and it leapt away in a blur of red fur.

✹ ✹ ✹

Read more

Recently, my wife and I were at our kitchen table, chatting with a mutual friend over drinks, when that friend asked whether I, “as someone who reads a lot,” would recommend The Lord of the Rings.

Before I could say anything, my wife burst out in laughter. “I’m sorry, it seems you’ve never met this man. This is my husband, Eric.”

With the barely-contained enthusiasm of a leashed terrier who just saw a squirrel, I began to explain that yes, believe it or not, I would recommend the books. I don’t necessarily recommend them to everyone, but I love them, here’s why, et cetera et cetera.

Then our friend asked whether she ought to read The Hobbit first. My short answer was “No.” My longer answer was “only if you want to, and here’s what to expect if you do.”

Then I said, “then again, my memory of it is a bit hazy. I haven’t picked up The Hobbit in… oh, I don’t know. Maybe fifteen years?”

So, folks, I read The Hobbit.

First, there was a surprise a piece of Falden Lore which I myself had forgotten:

And then, as I read the actual book, there was another surprise: just how soft and inconsistent Tolkien’s worldbuilding was. That’s not an insult, nor is it, for anyone deeply familiar with Tolkien’s legendarium, particularly surprising.

But still, the worldbuilding of The Hobbit, or lack thereof, is worth evaluating, because it speaks volumes about how we conceive of Tolkien’s work, other “worlds,” and the artform of fantasy narrative more broadly.

What’s So Weird About The Hobbit?

The strangest thing about this book is how out of step the setting feels with Tolkien’s later opus, The Lord of the Rings.

I’m not talking about tone, here. LotR feels at home beside Arthuriana, but The Hobbit is a children’s tale; LotR is epic while The Hobbit is episodic; while LotR is brooding and deep, The Hobbit is instead whimsical and rooted in the “oh-deary-me” perspective of our homebody burglar, Bilbo Baggins.

But that tonal difference is clear to anyone remotely familiar with these works. That’s not what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about Middle-Earth itself, and the role that setting plays in the narrative.

So, I’d like to unpack a few of the ways that the setting of The Hobbit contrasts with that of The Lord of the Rings, and then draw from that contrasts some vital lessons. These contrasts are not bad. What follows are not complaints. Rather, I’m going to poke at the oddities and see what pops out.

Is it … England?

For starters, the line between our world and Middle-Earth is much blurrier in The Hobbit.

It is well documented that Tolkien sought to create a legendarium which he “could dedicate simply to: to England; to [his] country.”1 But in The Hobbit, that connection is made far more explicit. Right on page 2 he explains:

I suppose hobbits need some description nowadays, since they have become rare and shy of the Big People, as they call us. They are (or were) a little people [... They have a magic] which helps them to disappear quietly and quickly when large stupid folk like you and me come blundering along.

This is, of course, a framing device, not dissimilar to ‘once upon a time.’ But the narrator continually makes references to himself, and to us the readers, mentioning “our time,” and “these days” throughout the story.

Tolkien even suggests, in Chapter 6, that Bilbo was the progenitor of the modern phrase “out of the frying pan and into the fire.”

These connections are not remotely unique for fantasy written in (or before) Tolkien’s day, but they still seem odd given that Middle-Earth has become, for us, the archetypal example of a fully-removed, secondary world, high fantasy setting.

Trolls, Giants, Shapeshifters

Chapter 2 is one of The Hobbit’s most famous sequences, with three trolls turning to stone by the light of the sun. However, despite a callback in The Fellowship of the Ring when Frodo and his friends come across “Bilbo’s trolls,” no other troll in those later books ever turns to stone.

It simply stops being a thing.

Likewise with the massive giants in the Misty Mountains. As Thorin’s company passes through those mountains in The Hobbit, the giants are a significant preoccupation. Even on the other side of those mountains, Beorn mentions that “the giants have been restless.” But in The Fellowship, despite treading many of the same routes, giants simply don’t come up.

And speaking of Beorn, there are no other shapeshifters like him in The Lord of the Rings. Is he unique? Are there others? Who knows? (In fairness, there are other transformations and mutations in some of Tolkien’s other work.)

In one final difference around magic: Gandalf is repeatedly described as wielding a “wand,” rather than a staff. He still has his iconic walking stick, but it is a wand that comes out to help him with his magic. A small difference, but odd, since it conjures the image of an occult magician more than an ecclesial sage.

The Elves Are Different

When we meet the Elves, they are practically unrecognizable from the wise and solemn creatures of The Lord of the Rings. Instead, Bilbo comes to Rivendell and the place is a merry, mischievous party. The elves are positively impish. They make fun of the dwarves and they make fun of Bilbo for being fat.

As Bilbo, Gandalf, and the dwarves enter Rivendell, Tolkien constantly uses the language of humor. The elves’ songs are “ridiculous,” and “pretty fair nonsense,” and if you, dear reader, had pointed this out to them “they would only laugh all the more.”

It’s maybe not a huge difference, but could you imagine Elrond and his people singing a song that goes like this?

O! tril-lil-lil-lil-lolly
the valley is jolly
ha! ha!

… because they do!

Rivendell itself has almost no description, compared to what we later see in The Lord of the Rings. So much so that I had forgotten it was in The Hobbit at all.

Now bear with me while I offer a few more differences.

The Goblins

In another odd real-world connection, Tolkien insinuates that it was goblins that invented high-explosive artillery.

Hammers, axes, swords, daggers, pickaxes, tongs, and also instruments of torture, they [the goblins] make very well. [...] It is not unlikely that they invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once, for wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them…2

There’s hints here of Tolkien’s anti-industrialness, but also a melancholy look at his experiences in the First World War. The machines of war, he says in a children’s story, could not possibly be made by mankind, but rather by monsters.

In another difference with the characterization of non-humans in The Lord of the Rings, the goblins of The Hobbit are avid singers. Two or three times the goblins break out in song about their vicious intent, something that might seem out of place in the more serious epic that followed.

Notable Absences

That leads me to a few notable absences in The Hobbit. Unless I’m mistaken, the word “orc” never blesses the page. [I was mistaken. The word ‘orc’ appears one time, but one time only]3. The goblins are merely that: goblins, akin to any impish creature of folklore. Likewise with the name of the Elven-King of Mirkwood. He is, always, simply the “the elven-king.” No, Thranduil here, no. Who’s that? And there’s only the one elven king, apparently.

Plus, I already mentioned the general lack of setting for Rivendell, a vitally important place in the future books. And there is no mention of any of the larger realms to the south: no Rohan or Gondor or Mordor.

Is Any of This a Problem?

Let me be crystal clear: absolutely none of these differences are actual problems. None of this is “wrong.” None of it undermines the story of The Hobbit, nor do these inconsistencies diminish from the later books.

So why am I talking about it?

Because we fans of Tolkien have created a false idea about Middle-Earth and Tolkien’s legendarium. We treat it as a complete whole, and we laud Tolkien’s meticulous efforts to craft a deep world that feels unbelievably real.

People hold up Tolkien as the worldbuilder par excellence.

Granted, he is. But it’s important for us to recognize his worldbuilding alongside the fact that he made these stories up as he went along.

The Hobbit was first spoken, ad libidum, to his children as a bedtime story. His son, Christopher, recounted in the forward to The Hobbit’s 50th anniversary edition that his father would stand by the fire and tell them and re-tell them the adventure of one Bilbo Baggins.

[My brother] remembered that I (then between four and five years old) was greatly concerned with petty consistency as the story unfolded, and that on one occasion I interrupted: “Last time you said Bilbo’s front door was blue, and you said Thorin had a golden tassel on his hood, but you’ve just said that Bilbo’s front door was green, and Thorin’s hood was silver”; at which point my father muttered “Damn the boy,” and then “strode across the room” to his desk to make a note.

After publishing The Hobbit, Tolkien began working for years on what would posthumously become The Silmarillion, but he put it aside in December 1937, bowing to demand for “a new story about Hobbits.”

In a 1955 letter to W.H. Auden, sent a year after LotR’s initial publication, Tolkien writes about the process of creation and discovery:

I had no conscious notion of what the Necromancer stood for (except ever-recurrent evil) in The Hobbit, nor of his connexion with the Ring. But if you wanted to go on from the end of The Hobbit I think the ring would be your inevitable choice as the link. If then you wanted a large tale, the Ring would at once acquire a capital letter; and the Dark Lord would immediately appear. As he did, unasked, on the hearth at Bag End as soon as I came to that point. So the essential Quest started at once. But I met a lot of things on the way that astonished me. Tom Bombadil I knew already; but I had never been to Bree. Strider sitting in the corner at the inn was a shock, and I had no more idea who he was than had Frodo. The Mines of Moria had been a mere name; and of Lothlórien no word had reached my mortal ears till I came there. Far away I knew there were the Horse-lords on the confines of an ancient Kingdom of Men, but Fangorn Forest was an unforeseen adventure. I had never heard of the House of Eorl nor of the Stewards of Gondor. Most disquieting of all, Saruman had never been revealed to me, and I was as mystified as Frodo at Gandalf’s failure to appear on September 22.4

And he goes on a great length for more and more of the story. So much of the Lord of the Rings was unplanned.

Tolkien then spent a solid decade editing the epic. He wrote a few years before its publication:

It was begun in 1936, and every part has been written many times. Hardly a word in its 600,000 or more has been unconsidered. And the placing, size, style, and contribution to the whole of all the features, incidents, and chapters has been laboriously pondered. I do not say this in recommendation. It is, I feel, only too likely that I am deluded, lost in a web of vain imaginings of not much value to others…5

Tolkien even went back to later editions of The Hobbit to make Gollum more menacing and to fix continuity errors about the One Ring—now that the author had a sense of it—as well as to remove a moment of certain Elves becoming real-world Gnomes. (I guess that explains the “tril-lil-lil-lil-lolly-ing”.)

Worldbuilding That Matters

Tolkien’s mastery of the Art of worldbuilding—and it is an Art—does not actually flow from the years he spent studying ancient texts or his philologist CV. Instead, it flows from his desire to tell a good story. Everything, from the existence of the One Ring to the color of Bilbo’s door, is purely for the sake of the narrative.

The elves are mischievous and the goblins sing in The Hobbit because it is a children’s story. Later on the goblins become Orcs and Uruk-hai and the elves become solemn and melancholy because it is an epochal adventure. I know I said above that the difference isn’t about “tone,” but it is worth noting how the worldbuilding—the setting itself—bends to preserve a narrative tone.

None of the inconsistencies between The Hobbit and The Fellowship matter to the stories. They only matter if we treat Middle-Earth like a static object to be catalogued rather than a setting for a cycle of stories.

But the fan-made-wiki-style of setting is a poor way to craft a narrative. That catalog and the “canon” of a fiction world can be helpful for protecting the integrity of a story. But they are only useful insofar as they accomplish that.

Worldbuilding is the not-so-secret ingredient for fantasy narrative. As and I wrote in our Magic Systems series, “fantasy takes its strength from the ways that it differs from reality. The way that a fantasy narrative takes exception from reality ultimately forms the backbone of that narrative.”

Fantasy writers (and fans) make a mistake, however, when they think that those exceptions—the fantastical world—compose the thing itself. The setting is not the story, and without the story, the setting is nothing. The Lord of the Rings is not Middle-Earth, and without The Lord of the Rings (or Tolkien’s story more broadly) Middle-Earth is nothing.

That’s my big takeaway from The Hobbit. Worldbuilding must always be subservient to narrative, especially in fantasy, where it matters so much.

Don’t just take my word for it, either. Here’s “king of worldbuilding” Brandon Sanderson teaching his writing class (slightly paraphrased for clarity, skip to the 6-minute mark):

Sci-fi/fantasy has this weird disconnect... the setting is both the thing that defines us and is at the same time the least important part of our stories. [...] Generally, if you have a story with excellent worldbuilding but with bad characters or bad story [i.e. plot] you are going to have a worse story than one that has excellent character and story but weak worldbuilding. Of the three things that I talk about that make up our stories—our setting, our plot, and our characters—your time is best spent learning how to make engaging and interesting characters, followed by learning how to tell a really good plot, and in third place, your ability to have a really great setting.

And if you don’t like hearing from Sanderson, then go back and think about how Tolkien crafted Middle-Earth through sheer narrative discovery.

If it’s good enough for Tolkien, then it’s good enough for me.

Thanks for reading. If you want to help me write more stuff like this, consider becoming a Forgemaster by taking out a paid subscription. I offer my Forgemasters exclusive short stories, behind-the-scenes posts, and a direct voice in my creative process. Join below 👇

You can also support me by simply liking, commenting, or sharing this post. It legitimately helps support my work.

Share

Just want to keep reading? You can see the rest of my writing on this page.

Read more

“It takes time to find the natural stories that would have been told within the world you’ve created…

But in the end, the result is something richer, something, even, that transcends time and place...”

is the host of The Second Story, a YouTube channel devoted to the craft of storytelling, and the author of The Blue Prince, a new, serialized fantasy novel about a young heir on the run and the unlikely beggar who aids him.

I recently had the chance to pick Hilary’s brain on the art of storytelling—why fantasy captured her imagination from the start, how she challenges formulaic approaches to writing, and what she’s building now both on YouTube and on Substack.

Here’s our conversation.

I hope you enjoy.

Let’s start with a simple question, but one I never tire of asking my fellow authors: why fantasy?

When I was a little girl I read voraciously. I read everything, it didn’t matter the genre. I remember reading the Boxcar Children, Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, a book about children who hid an allied fighter pilot in their barn in the occupied Netherlands (The Winged Watchman), Undset, Poe, Melville, Alcott, historical novels set in France or ancient England, and so on. Anything I could get my hands on. Mysteries, war stories, adventures, historical novels, at the end of the day I loved stories. I rarely even considered genre distinctions.

As I started to explore writing, I would repeatedly come across this pesky piece of “advice”: “No, tiny ten-year-old Hilary, you may not write a story in which the diamond necklace is stolen from the train by goblins, because that’s not realistic.”

Never mind my arguments that it shouldn’t matter if goblins were the ones robbing the train, provided the way in which they did so made sense. No, goblins in a story was itself not realistic. This would often be followed up with, “if you want to write that sort of thing, write fantasy.” This was meant as a warning, I think. The assumption being I’d never want to stoop to such levels.

But what I heard was that fantasy didn’t concern itself with stuffy, regimental realism. So, thought tiny ten-year-old me, that was clearly what I really wanted to write. Thereafter I found that I could write anything I wanted, and if I simply called it “fantasy” no one would bother me about realism.

Which is all a long-winded way of saying that I like the fact that in fantasy I can make my own rules. If I make the world from the ground up, no one can yell about this piece of technology being unrealistic, or this interaction between two countries being historically inaccurate. I had space to explore themes and ideas within a world of my own design, which could serve as a backdrop for the ideas in precisely the way I wanted. I don’t know how many excellent stories with fascinating ideas that I’ve seen dismissed as unrealistic. And such a dismissal tends to carry “intellectual” weight. If a story isn’t realistic, it’s not smart or relevant or important. Fantasy sidesteps all such nonsense and allows storytelling to proceed unhindered.

Ah yes, I think every writer of fantasy has felt that stigma. How dare we stoop to imagine things while we imagine the stories we read on the page! There’s also an argument—ever present, unending—over whether fantasy has anything meritorious or even truly distinct about it. Many discard it as shallow, as you noted.

How do you respond to those critics? Do you care?

It’s hard not to care, but not caring is an important skill to cultivate for any writer who wants to put their work out into the world. We live in a world that’s post-Tolkien, and few people – even very serious, stuffy people – can completely deny the cultural impact Tolkien had on Western Civilization… while writing about dragons and elves and goblins and orcs. Any fool who insists that fantasy has nothing meritorious about it is out of his mind. Anyone with reason can see how impactful the great, old fantasy stories were. Too, if you go back to the Middle Ages, you can see that fantastic elements were an ordinary aspect of almost all stories. Whether it’s just to tell the story or to serve as symbolism for some other idea, fantasy provides the storyteller with a different array of colors with which to paint any idea he wants to relate.

Also, an argument could be made that all fiction is fantasy, to some degree. It’s all made up in the fantasy-world of the author’s mind. It’s just that some authors prefer that world to more closely resemble this one.

The question of a lack of distinction is probably a separate issue. Fantasy has fallen prey to rigid formulism that unfortunately lends a sense of same-ness to the genre. I think the formulas and the common tropes of fantasy have become a kind of runaway train. Fantasy writers would do well to hop off and remind themselves that the core of fantasy is that they can write whatever they want, whatever they want. Whether that’s a story with dragons and orcs, or a story with knights whose swords are actually sentient cellphones, anything is possible and there are no rules.

Let’s talk about formulas. Over on your YouTube channel, The Second Story, you’ve made a robust case against formulaic storytelling. Certainly, no serious storyteller will advocate for boring or predictable narratives; on the other hand, there are certain archetypal stories, and narratives which seem to resonate down the ages despite oft-repeated similarities.

Why do you think formulaic storytelling is so treacherous for storytellers? What’s so problematic about it? And where is the line between derivative slop and “standing on the shoulders of giants”?

I absolutely agree that certain archetypal patterns are easily found in stories throughout history. But I think what’s important to remember with that is that these patterns simply occurred, they were not pursued. A thousand disconnected people can tell a thousand different stories over the course of a thousand years and you’ll absolutely find patterns emerging. This speaks more to the nature of the human mind and our pursuit of truth and beauty through storytelling, a pursuit that transcends time.

The fact is that things like The Hero’s Journey were intended as analyses meant to observe this fascinating similarity in our human stories. One of the biggest issues with the concept of archetypes and patterns in storytelling is that they tend to dismiss the impact a given culture has upon its own body of storytelling. This speaks to the larger problem with formulas (or formulae): they are the aesthetics of the thing, rather than the thing itself. You can dress up a story to look, talk, and act just like the Nibelungenlied, but it will never possess the depth of history, civilization, and culture that is necessarily contained in the organically grown narrative work of a given civilization at a given point in time. Just like painting a house facade to look like brick does not provide the stability of good brickwork.

Nevertheless, storytelling is, in very large part, a kind of constant borrowing and building. Stories naturally borrow from other stories and build upon them. However, I don’t think any storyteller can build upon something he’s borrowed unless he genuinely understands it as the original tellers and hearers would have understood it.

This is evidenced in cases like George R.R. Martin getting annoyed that Tolkien never told us Aragorn’s tax policy. A tale such as the one that Tolkien was borrowing from and then building upon was not concerned with matters such as tax policies, that was not present in the spirit of the texts he was reading, nor in the one he wrote.

Yet Martin read it outside that spirit and so could not be said to have understood it. He read and understood only the surface of the story, the aesthetics. Therefore any attempt he made to borrow and then build felt like rote imitation and subversion.

Relying on the formulas – even very, very good and beautiful formulas – prevents a writer from digging deeper than aesthetics. If the writer follows the formula to make his main character a certain sort and also give him an older tutor character, for instance, because that follows the formula, that doesn’t just prevent him from discovering some other story that might have emerged organically outside the confines of the formula, it also prevents the writer from understanding and studying the nature and essence of his own world. If you dig into the culture you’ve created, the world you’ve built, you might find different kinds of main characters or different approaches that don’t use the tutor archetype, or even the hero’s journey.

If you fixate on archetypes to build characters, you might lose the nuance and complexity of an organically built character who is more consistent with the fictional civilization of your story. It takes time to find the natural stories that would have been told within the world you’ve created. It takes time to find those characters and understand how they see the world. But in the end, the result is something richer, something, even, that transcends time and place and slots naturally into the ancient tradition of stories and their tellers.

To go back to realism for a moment: I’m a big believer in the art of worldbuilding, at least in the sense that I think fantasy derives its power from the fantastical—from its secondary world, which Tolkien labels Faerie. I love the sub-art of worldbuilding because that world naturally gives way to fascinating stories. In such cases, hopefully, the stories which result feel creatively organic, rather than crafted from bits of other stories. Like you say, it takes digging in. It takes time.

How else do you think storytellers can best avoid derivative creativity?

I know a lot of teachers and industry professionals advise writers to read everything in “their target genre” and to really pay close attention to trends, but I think the opposite is better. I think writers should absolutely read, but they should only read what they’re interested in. These seeds will tend to make their way into the fertile earth of their imagination, and that’s a good thing. A fantasy writer who loves reading noir and Agatha Christie might write something quite fun without even realizing what he’s doing. If a writer loves fantasy and loves to read it and also wants to write it, that’s wonderful.

But I still think it’s really important to remember two things above all: one, even if you’re imitating (which is natural and normal) it’s crucially important to understand the spirit of the work, not just the surface.

And two, when you sit down to write your own story, make sure each decision you make is your own. Don’t add a tutor just because you think you have to, and don’t remove a perfectly good tutor character just because you think it’s terribly overdone.

In your review of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, you explained your rather unusual upbringing, with your father creating a domestic world saturated with the medieval. Candles, hallways of medieval art, Gregorian chant, and incense…and of course that all goes much deeper than just aesthetics.

How does that environment impact your creativity today? Does it show up in your worldbuilding? Beyond mere aesthetics, do you find the medieval mind appearing in your stories?

I’ve always envied those scholars who had the academic certification to back up their given title “Medievalist”. I was raised outside of the world, while still being aware of the world, occupying a kind of glass bridge between the unique and rich environment my father created and the one that was meanwhile evolving into the modern world of those times. Imagine: you’re watching the towers come down while sitting with your back against a shelf of two-hundred-year-old tomes, white incense smoke animating the sunlight, Gregorian chant coming through the speakers. The event felt as if it was both happening and not happening. Like it was happening in a different time, but not in the past or the future, just a different time.

I’ve always returned to that habit in myself, as a person and as a writer: I sit in the medieval-esque world, surrounded by a wealth of knowledge and beauty, and from within this I can observe the modern world from a uniquely apart vantage point.

I have been drawn to writing old stories, certainly, if only because I feel a certain kinship with them and their characters. The mindset and the essence of my upbringing helps me, I think, conceive of worlds that aren’t this one. But I’ve also found, when writing modern stories set in this world, that approaching them with a more medieval mind has many of its own interesting advantages. I don’t know if that necessarily shines through my work, but it makes the process very enjoyable for me.

If you had to recommend one piece of fiction to help an uninitiated reader dive head-first into the medieval period, would it be The Name of the Rose or something else?

It would be either The Name of the Rose or Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin. Although one is western and the other is Russian. The Name of the Rose digs into the intellectual landscape of the time, but Laurus actually manages to capture the medieval spirit in a way I’ve never seen in a modern novel. If you read essays written by Vodolazkin it is quite evident that he (one of those lucky Medievalists™!) has a keen grasp on what the medieval world would have been like to a medieval person, how they would have perceived the world around them, their neighbors, their stories, even themselves. And that really shines through in his beautiful book.

(Aaaaaand, I have just ordered Laurus.)

You’re in the midst of serializing your novel, The Blue Prince, about a young prince who is on the run from assassins, and who teams up with a cunning—but secretive—beggar. Tell us a bit more about the book. What’s it about, in your own words?

The young prince, driven from the security of the Palace by a devastating attack, finds himself alone in the great, wide world and has no choice but to trust the secretive beggar. The beggar, struggling against hopelessness and despair, doesn’t know if he’s strong enough to return the prince safely to his royal father, but is driven by some mysterious motivation to see the mission through to the end. Their journey will be long and full of danger and hardship, but along the way both of them will learn more about each other, themselves, and the world around them.

In addition to the young prince and the beggar, there’s a second major storyline that I haven’t yet introduced, which will become more central after the end of Part One. That one will introduce a widower strategist who is carefully maneuvering his House into a position of power. His path will eventually cross with that of the blue prince. And then (if I do my job well) things should get pretty interesting…

What was the inspiration for the novel? What was the initial idea, and what made you decide to write this book now?

I can’t quite tell you the very first initial idea because that was the ending of the book. The conclusion popped into my head and I decided to see how I would write a story that would arrive at that conclusion.

But as for inspiration, my answer is probably too long, but I’ll try to summarize. When I created Láokoth and gave it its House System I was intrigued by how the people of that country would define righteousness. What makes a man from Láokoth a good man? What makes a king or a prince or a Housemaster good and noble? In what way would an individual person pursue goodness and virtue within that civilization? In matters such as family and nation and individual, how would a person from Láokoth determine what the right choice was? I wanted to present characters from all different parts of this world with choices that would force them to reveal this. In the end, I wanted the conclusion to be the summary of all these choices, to be, in a sense, the essence of Láokoth.

What do you hope readers take away from it?

I really just hope that anyone who reads it enjoys the journey. It’s a long journey and we still have many people to meet, but I hope they’re all memorable and I hope the story stays with the readers for a little while.

Earlier, you mentioned reading outside your genre in order to foster a creativity that goes beyond conventions. Are there works outside of the fantasy space that you can point to as major influences on your imagination in general, or on The Blue Prince specifically?

History! I read history more than I read anything else. As far back as I can get. I read so much European history in high school – and it’s still my first love – but these days I’ve been exploring other histories, particularly Slavic and Chinese. Especially the latter, as there is so much of it. The Records of the Grand Historian includes many volumes and reads like the most thrilling historical fiction. I own two volumes of the Han Dynasty records, which are immensely addictive, and I have my eye on the rest. (Korea also has this, but I haven’t been able to find any of it translated…) A couple years ago I discovered The Histories of Laonikos Chalkokondyles, who is sometimes called the Eastern Herodotus. I was curious to read what he wrote about Vlad Dracul, particularly after he tricked his way out of the Turkish court. The story of Vlad and his brother Radu directly inspired another book I’m writing in the same world as The Blue Prince. Old histories like this are a wonderful source of inspiration especially for fantasy writers.

The old records about ancient Chinese spycraft are also fascinating and full of wonderful historical accounts. Quite a few of these records have been translated and collected in a book called The Tao of Spycraft. I really like that book especially when trying to plan my way through my own intrigue and politics. We modern people can’t help but think about these things from a modern perspective. One of the great things about practical texts from the past – such as how to go about selecting men to be spies – is that they help you to get out of your modern mind and temporarily occupy the perspective of another time.

I also love old books of mythology and own several volumes of The Mythology of All Races, which is a wonderful resource for worldbuilding ideas. For instance, in the volume on Slavic mythology I learned that there was a special procedure a family had to carry out when they moved house to ensure that they didn’t end up with two sets of household gods (disastrous).

I also enjoy reading anything that digs into the psychology of the characters. Few authors do that as well as Dostoevsky, of course.

When I start to feel like my imagination is in a rut, I turn to Borges. His short stories are full of such an openness of mind and openness of world. One gets the impression that he didn’t really believe in rules. And yet was still committed to structure and telling a comprehensible story. It feels like opening the windows in my mind and letting in fresh air. After a story or two, I can go back to my own work reinvigorated.

Far be it from Eric Falden to do anything but praise the impulse to drink deeply from the well of history…

Thanks for joining us this week, Hilary. It was great having you.

is the creator and host of The Second Story, over on YouTube. You can also see her essays and fiction over at HilaryLayne.com.

You can read Hilary’s book starting here 👉 The Blue Prince

If you want to help me create more like this, consider becoming a Forgemaster by taking out a paid subscription. I offer my Forgemasters exclusive short stories, behind-the-scenes posts, and a direct voice in my creative process. Join below 👇

You can also support me by simply liking, commenting, or sharing this post. It legitimately helps support my work.

Share

Apologies to you all, but this month's paid story will be delayed.

The Falden house is in a bit of chaos. Currently, Mrs. Falden is on bedrest following a (planned, non-emergency, and successful) medical procedure, and Junior is home sick with a cold (after also being sick with something worse last week). I’m doing my best to care for them both while keeping them apart to prevent the missus getting sick.

On top of all that, I am starting a brand new full-time job this week, which is very good news overall, but unfortunate timing. The fact that "new job" barely feels like it's in the top 3 of "Most Important Things This Week" tells you something of the present overwhelm.

We have the support we need, thanks to family, friends, and neighbors who are pitching in with childcare, meals, and other odds and ends; we are incredibly blessed to have such people in our life. Nonetheless, I haven't had a spare moment, and I can't afford to skimp on sleep for the sake of writing. Something had to give.

Fortunately, this month has five Tuesdays rather than the usual four. I was already planning on taking that fifth Saturday (Sept 30) as a week off from posting. I'm moving that "week off" to right now. My "post chaos weekly break" is now a "mid-chaos fail-safe." Such are the hazards of being a one-man-operation.

You'll still get your Forgemaster Story this month, either on the 23rd or on the 30th (whichever needs allow).

The other Tuesday will have a free post, as usual.

By the way: the winner of this month's poll was "a Silent Moment in a Bitter Siege." I'm quite excited for it. The idea is burning in my mind.

Until then, consider the following:

I recently read somewhere that if a musical composer creates two pieces of music that are extremely similar, then all he’s doing is copying himself. It appears stale and repetitive. But if he creates three pieces of music along that same theme, it becomes an exploration of an idea, a cycle of creativity which is always on the cusp of becoming something else.

That how I feel about the following three stories. Though the events of each are unconnected, and I wrote them all over the course of a year, all three stories consist of intertwining two alternating timelines, back and forth between past and present events.

It’s not quite the “Memento of Substack Serialization” that was calling for a few weeks ago, but it’s something.

• A Malign Endurance, about a young apprentice who tests the limits of magic.

• Lessons From His Father, about a hunter trying to honor his late father’s legacy.

• and For Want of Safe Harbor, about a fisherman faced with impossible choices amid evil times.

I know a lot you paid supporters might have read all three of those, but perhaps not. In any case, that theme of asynchronous storytelling is on my creative mind these days…

What about you? Have you ever explored a theme three times over? What do you think of reptition across different stories?

Reply to this email or, if you’re on desktop or in the app, drop a comment. Thanks!

✹ ✹ ✹

Thank you all for your continued support of Falden's Forge. I remain hugely grateful to each and every one of you.

Until next time,

Eric

Then, I’ll be unpacking “Morning at the Outpost,” a story of an old veteran passing the time in hostile territory.

Vote For What’s Next

Every month, Forgemasters get to vote on what story I write next.

Here’s how it works: I share three story hooks. You vote for your favorite; I write the winner for later this month. The other hooks stay in rotation until they lose three times, in which case I’ll retire them. Polls stay open until I start writing (at least 1 week).

Here are this month’s Story Hooks:

1. A journey into a cursed valley

2. A silent moment in a bitter siege

3. A guard tries to do his duty

Read more

I last read Eye of the World when I was fifteen. I remembered quite a lot of that story and I knew what to expect. Now, nearly twenty years later, what did I think?

The story is heavily derivative, the plot is predictable and formulaic, the prose is nothing to write home about, and the whole book could probably be 300 pages shorter.

And you know what else?

I had an absolute blast reading this book.

When I cracked open that same, mass-market paperback copy I had a teen, I fully expected it to disappoint; I knew its flaws, and every single one of those flaws was there. I did not expect to still end up loving every minute I spent reading this book.

This… perplexes me.

I know some of you reading cannot stand this book or this series. I know for others its a staple of their personal canon. But whether you love or hate this book or its series, I think I’ll agree with a lot of what you say.

Despite launching a massively successful (and just plain massive) series, it functions mostly as a stand-alone novel. The hooks are there for the sequel and subsequent series, but the end of this “Book 1” is about as much of a neat resolution as the series sees until the end of the whole marathon.

In one sense, I want to treat it as the singular novel that it is; at the same time, it’s impossible to separate it from the larger Wheel of Time series. Likewise with its place in the fantasy genre: I want to just treat this book and series as their own thing, but my judgement about them is inextricably linked to Robert Jordan’s place within that genre.

So what’s going on here? That’s what I aim to explore.

Surely, It’s Just Nostalgia?

For many fans, The Wheel of Time was their introduction to the fantasy genre. They fell in love with this artform because of and through these books. If this were a young reader’s first exposure to fantasy books, you could do a lot worse. Eye has a classic “hero’s journey” type of story and (in a vacuum) the world is vibrant and immersive. It’s reasonable for many fans to have formed an unbreakable attachment to Jordan’s epic.

I’m not here to tell anyone they’re wrong. Because they’re not wrong. This book is worth loving.

But I am not one of those fans. I was reading fantasy from a young age, though I also didn’t love fantasy until I was an adult. (Well, sort of. I did love fantasy, but didn’t know I loved fantasy. It’s a whole thing.)

Basically: I’m not personally invested in defending Eye of the World. I didn’t love it because it made me “feel like a kid again,” or because it “took me back” to some formative memory.

This was not a nostalgia read. This was a read where I asked “35 years after it was published does Eye of the World hold up?”

And it does not hold up. But it also totally does hold up.

The People In the Room

Eye of the World somehow manages to be both a timeless classic and also very rooted in its own time. To understand it, then, we have to look at its place within the wider story of the fantasy genre.

We can actually trace Eye’s origins directly back to 1970s American publishers and their effort to copy-paste Tolkienian knock-offs into a highly commercialized content product. Tracing that line is not a matter of tracing culture or influence; we have names.

In the 1970’s, the chief editor of Ballantine Books, Judy-Lynn Del Rey, brought in her husband and fellow editor, Lester, to help manage Ballantine’s line of fantasy literature. Ballantine was already benefitting from the breakout success of The Lord of the Rings, which took the United States by storm in the prior decade. The Del Reys sought to mimic that series’s commercial success. Ultimately, it was their commercial vision which spawned the fantasy genre as a genre in the way we understand it today. But note that this “vision” was not a creative vision. It was entirely business-driven, completely commercial.

For more on this, I’d like to direct you to and her excellent YouTube channel The Second Story, especially Layne’s deep-dive into the Del Reys and the so-called “Golden Age of Fantasy”. I highly recommend you give that video its due time, since I believe the story she lays out is essential for understanding the fantasy genre. And it has immense ramifications for how we understand The Wheel of Time.

Lester and Judy-Lynn founded Del Rey Books in 1977 on the back of publishing Terry Brooks’s fantasy epic, The Sword of Shannara. Shannara is, in the entirely correct words of Hilary Layne, “a Tolkien rip-off.” But that was the point. The key to Lester Del Rey’s success was his tyrannical adherence to a narrow formula: young male leads, secondary worlds, magical mentors, triumphs over obvious forms of evil, always getting the girl, and a host of other ancillary tropes like dwarves, elves, dark forests, talking trees, and mystical swords.

The goal was not artistic merit or cultural staying power. The goal was cash.

In that, the Del Rey’s succeeded. Shannara was a massive commercial success, and in the years following, other publishers scrambled to replicate it. Among them was Tor Books, a fantasy imprint founded in 1980 by Tom Doherty.

When Doherty founded Tor, he brought with him his most trusted sci-fi/fantasy editor, Harriet McDougal. That decision would prove critical to Tor’s success, as it was McDougal who would meet, recruit, edit, and ultimately marry Robert Jordan.1

Jordan began writing The Wheel of Time in a period that was saturated with derivative, cardboard cut-outs of Tolkienian fantasy, and his publisher was highly incentivised to crank out more and more of it.

This is not to say that Jordan didn’t have any artistic vision or that Eye was created as a cynical cash grab; rather, industry behavior all but guaranteed that no fantasy book would get published if it wasn’t cast in the same old mold.

Looking back at the development of the fantasy genre qua genre, we can trace a fairly straight line from Lester Del Rey’s formulaic commercialism to the publication of Eye of the World in 1990.

The Formula and Innovation

Let me tell you: you can really see the surface-level formulas all over Eye of the World. It’s derivative. It’s formulaic. So much of it is predictable. Much of the plot seems arbitrarily designed to send our heroes into very specific—and very trope-laden—scenarios.

Shall we count a few of the ways? The plot reads like a Mad Lib of fantasy tropes.

Rand al’Thor is a typical farmer from Idyllic Village, but Nazgûl Myrdraal begin to stalk him and his friends. Then, Orcs Trollocs attack. Luckily, Rand’s father gave him a Sword of Mysterious Lineage just before the attack, and also he might not actually be his father. There’s also a magic-wielding mentor character (Moiraine) who is there to take Rand and his friends to safety in Rivendell Tar Valon. There, they’ll be safe from Sauron’s the Dark One’s influence, as he seeks to bring shadow over the world from his base in Mount Doom Shayol Ghul, which is in Mordor the Mountains of Dhoom.

Moiraine’s companion is a grizzled ranger from the North, who is the lost heir to a lost kingdom, and his name is Aragorn Lan. Also, all of Rand’s friends come, including his crush, Egwene, because it turns out she could become the most powerful magic-wielder ever. The only one better than her might be Nynaeve, another village character who also comes with them. There is also a bard with them, because this is apparently Dungeons & Dragons. He has a Dark Past with Political Implications.

Did we mention the world is awaiting the rebirth of a Prophesied Chosen One? Don’t worry about it, Rand, I’m sure it won’t be anyone you know.

At various points, there’s a shadow monster called a balrog Mashadar, a Very Obviously Cursed artefact that works a lot like the One Ring, Tinkers (who are literally just Tinkers with a dash of radical pacifism), mention of a mask-wearing warlike desert people called the Fremen Aiel, a princess who thinks Rand is just oh so handsome and is exactly his age, a long-lived tree-loving creature called an Ent Ogier who thinks humans are oh so hasty2, and eventually an actual, literal Ent for good measure. By the end of the story, the fellowship must go through the Mines of Moria The Ways en route to Mordor the Blight, where we get a final showdown between our protagonists and the powers of evil.

Every single notable character in this book could be a protagonist of their own story. That could be a good thing; but I mean it less in the “everyone feels real and has their own story they are living” way and more in the “every one of the main character’s friends just happens to get super-powers or be born with cool abilities” way.

The resulting story feels, at times, downright arbitrary. The Trollocs that attack and follow the party of protagonists away from their Idyllic Village drive them in such a way that the only way to escape them is to go into a place that is uniquely cursed by a barely-contained, world-ending shadow monster. That place just happens to be on their way to safety. Once everyone is separated, one of the protagonists ends up getting help from the one person who lives on a giant blank area of the map, and that one person can talk to wolves, and by the way “so can you, my boy! Better buckle up!”

Playing It Straight

But here’s the thing: Eye of the World plays all these cliches and tropes completely straight. The characters are not “genre savvy.” They don’t know they’re in a story. None of this is cliche to them. There is no lampshading. There are no looks to camera. There are no moments of ironic bathos.

It is simply… genuine.

Characterization is not Jordan’s strong-suit, but these characters aren’t cardboard cut-outs, either. They are unique. They have personality. They are sympathetic and understandable.

As a result, I enjoyed the adventure. I felt the characters’ tension in not wanting to trust—but having to trust—their guide Moiraine. Their foibles feel mostly real. Their relationships made me smile as I read about them. I wanted them to succeed. I wanted evil to lose. And I wanted to see more and more of this world.

What’s more: Jordan leans into some of the arbitrary nature of the story. The world is one that is “woven” by the Wheel of Time itself, with every life and every event like its own thread, with every person woven into the tapestry of time, often by forces far beyond their control. The three main characters—Rand, Perrin, and Mat—come to understand that they are “ta’veren,” unique threads in the pattern around which other threads must move and weave. Their lives are swept up in a “Weaving of the Web,” and capital-letter philosophical concept within the story’s world. It’s an in-world philosophical justification for all the unlikely coincidences that, at times, move the story forward.

It works well enough. Instead of brushing aside the tropey happenings as a way to cover-up the story’s gaps, it turns those cliches into foundational pillars which buttress the story’s believability.

As plot devices go, it’s a pretty good way to make believable the unbelievable.

Innovations & Transitions

One should also bear in mind that Eye feels more derivative for us than it would have for a fantasy reader in 1990. Just as “magical high school” is now a well-trodden trope, we ought to remember that it was new and inventive when Ursula K. Le Guin published A Wizard of Earthsea. It features a young wizard who must come of age while learning magic at The School of Wizardry. Tired trope, right? But it was published back in 1968—a decade before the Del Rey’s founded their formula-driven business model. It was an innovative work at that time, intentionally crafted to be subversive (in a good way).

We have the benefit of hindsight; things which looked new in 1990 could look tired to us, so we ought to remember that Jordan made some genuine innovations with his work.

To name only a few:

• The Wheel of Time takes immense inspiration from Asian cultures and Eastern philosophical schools, something unique for its time.

• In that world, only women can wield magic safely

• For a dash of psychological horror, men who wield magic will go insane and kill tons of people.

• Subsequently, the Magical Mentor Character is not an old wizard like Gandalf, but a beautiful woman of indeterminate age.

• Furthermore, the Aes Sedai (the magic channelers) are not universally respected or trusted, with some people treating them with utter reverence and respect, and others even forming pseudo-religious military orders with the goal of wiping them out. Our protagonists, for their part, would simply rather avoid them.

• The world did not include fey creatures like elves, or other stock fantasy populations like Dwarves, Dragons, or anything besides humans, a few bespoke shadowspawn, and the very rare Ogier.

Jordan clearly had a vision for something far more unique than the formulaic fantasy-by-numbers of his immediate predecessors, and Eye is the beginning of that vision. There are even direct foreshadowings of specific plot points from deep within the series, such as the prophetic visions of a minor character, Min.

I didn’t think about this too much while I was actually reading, but on further reflection, Eye of the World stands in between the formulaic era of the 1970s and 80s and the “slide towards grimdark” era of the early millennium.

Eye of the World is firmly rooted in the formulas of the Del Rey Era; the tone of the stories remains similar in the next two books, The Great Hunt and The Dragon Reborn, but begins to diverge beginning in book four, The Shadow Rising. Unsurprisingly, opinions about the series tend to hinge upon that transition, with some saying the first three books are barely worth reading because the story really picks up with book four, with others saying they loved the first three and then lost interest.

Furthermore, Jordan’s innovations become more central in the later books. The list of ‘innovations’ above is fairly superficial, but by the time when Jordan was publishing book eight, The Path of Daggers, the series had expanded significantly and those innovations were far more central. Not coincidentally, the series had sold over 10 million copies. This was in 1998.

Looking deeper, we can see Jordan tried (at times clumsily) to integrate matriarchal power structures into his world; he also had a much greater diversity of human cultures and characters than most fantasy up to that point, with dozens of unique countries and cultures (some of which feel shallow in retrospect), and none of which are a straight rip-off of 13th century Europe; the series’s magic system is also one of the first—if not the first—mainstream “hard” magic systems, with hard magic practically being a requirement for fantasy books today. (Read here to learn more about what that means).

Lastly, Jordan was innovative with the sheer scale of his epic. The whole series is a whopping 4.3 million words long. The audio books take a combined nineteen days to listen through. Meanwhile, the books have overlapping narratives across a huge world, at times jumping back and forth in time and in history, with storylines diverging and converging over long arcs, oftentimes with massive payoff for those readers willing to invest. That sense of scale has come to dominate epic fantasy today.

Many of the things we take for granted with the fantasy genre today had their root—or received their staying power—because of Jordan’s Wheel of Time.

And that legacy bleeds backwards into the first installment: Eye of the World, which then looks all the more formulaic thanks to its own sequels’ innovations.

And Now For Something Completely Ironic

I’m about to extend this review into a bit of a topical cul-de-sac simply so that I can talk about how (and why) these books are insanely long. I am also going to ignore the irony of making my post unnecessarily long in order to tackle this.

Jordan’s series uses a strict, third-person limited narrative voice, which I like to call the “RPG Video Game Camera.” Every chapter has a single point-of-view (POV) character through whom we, the audience, experience the story. Much like a role-playing video game. For most of Eye, that character is Rand al’Thor, the protagonist. But for ten of the book’s fifty-two chapters, we get the points-of-view for some of his fellow Adventuring Villagers.

Jordan gives us a narration which is tailored to each chapter’s point of view. We get some of that character’s internal monologue, we get retellings of their thought processes, and things are described in a manner consistent with the POV character’s thoughts, feelings, and understanding. The narrator is never any character exactly. The narrator remains distinct, but quite subjective.

It is also extremely fixed.

The narrative voice shackles Jordan to a particular narrative distance, and we never get much in the way of summary. Each chapter begins in medias res, rooted in a particular moment. That moment might be days or weeks since the last chapter, and there might be some past-perfect-tense summary to bring us up to speed, but for the most part events happen on-page in a predictable pace. Especially in the middle, the story loses its urgency.

That is also why, for many readers, the events in the middle of this book seem to blur together. Maybe its a quirk of my own edition, but I even found a story beat duplicated, with exact sentences happening twice inside 50 pages.

That lack of urgency and blurring effect could be remedied with a zooming out of the narrative distance, but you can’t change the distance once you’ve committed to the RPG Video Game Camera. Thus, POV characters have to overhear important plot things that they don’t understand, they have to hear people mutter characterizing dialogue under their breath, and they all mostly have to stay together so that the plot can happen in sight of the audience.

As I’ve said in previous posts, Jordan’s choice to adopt this third-person-limited, subjective narration is one reason why these books are so long. And why the series is fourteen books.

And Wheel of Time’s success is one reason why the “RPG Video Game Camera,” then became the default for epic fantasy, much to my chagrin.

A Litmus Test?

Chances are, whatever opinion you do hold about Eye of the World, it’s valid. It’s good, bad, original, unoriginal, derivative, influential, memorable, forgettable, gripping, plodding, and enjoyable. You could put almost any word in that list and make a decent argument for it.

It would be wrong to call this book “divisive,” but opinions about it vary so wildly that it becomes a cipher.

It looks a bit different to everyone who sees it.

That’s why I think it could prove a very helpful barometer: what you think about this book will say a lot about what you think about fantasy in general. That might be true of any fantasy book, but I think Eye is unqiuely useful in this regard.

• There are few books that so unilaterally sit between the formulas of the 1970-80s and the darker, reactionary books of the 1990s and new millennium.

• There are few books that contain so many of the “classic” tropes and also pave the way for significant genre evolution

• There aren’t many books that have sold 100 million copies, like The Wheel of Time has in total, that can then serve as a touchstone for such a wide audience.

So then; what does Eric Falden think of this book?

I don’t know how to wrap it all up.

Like I said, I found it derivative to the point of laughability. But I felt like I was laughing with the book, not at it. Its predictability helped my enjoyment, rather than hindered it. Very unusual for me.

All its flaws are readily apparent… but none of those things prevented me from enjoying every minute I spent with this book.

I’ve never read a perfect story, and I’ve certainly never written one.

I think it’s okay to love something flawed. In fact, I really hope we all love flawed things in spite of those flaws.

So I say this with love: Eye of the World is the worst book I’ve ever loved. And I do love it.

Thanks for reading. If you want to help me write more stuff like this, consider becoming a Forgemaster by taking out a paid subscription. I offer my Forgemasters exclusive short stories, behind-the-scenes posts, and a direct voice in my creative process. Join below 👇

You can also support me by simply liking, commenting, or sharing this post. It legitimately helps support my work.

Share

Here is that story.

Read more

This week, I’m continuing my series comparing “fantasy” castles to their actual historical counterparts. The goal is to explore the absolute treasury of storytelling possibilities that castles provide merely by existing, a treasury which is mostly left unspent within fictional narratives.

In the first part, we looked at the precise purpose of castles, as distinct from other fortifications: to defend large swathes of territory by denying any potential enemy freedom of movement.

As I explained, the vast majority of warfare in the Middle Ages did not actually happen on a pitched battlefield between armies arrayed in magnificent formations; instead, most warfare consisted of small-scale fights between mobile forces (generally knights and cavalry) or else it was the slow, grinding process of besieging, degrading, and capturing castles.

It’s that latter kind of warfare I’d like to look at more closely today. To that end, I want to trace out the general shape of a medieval siege.

As we’ll see, attacking a castle is no easy feat. But as we’ll also see, sieges generally progress in a manner that is almost completely absent from media today.

If you have examples of sieges “done well” within a narrative, I’d love to hear about them. I’d love counter-examples for when I move through fantasy sieges. Reply to this email or let me know in the comments.

Why Besiege?

As we saw in Part 1, each castle presents an invader with an uncomfortable decision. Facing a garrison in a castle, the invading army has three basic options:

1. Ignore it, advancing further into enemy territory, likely to have the castle’s garrison harry their lines of supply (and your scouting, and their foraging, and their reinforcements, and their messengers, and…)

2. Besiege it: stop their advance and take the castle

3. Invest it: Leave a (necessarily large) contingent of troops here besieging the castle, in the hopes that they will keep the defenders contained, but without the intention of truly taking the castle.

Castles were created to make option #1 (ignore it) unfeasible. At the same time, however, every castle is also designed to make options #2 and #3 immensely costly. Again, that’s the entire point.

Nonetheless, if an attacker is determined to try and conquer enemy territory, he must pay that cost. He must take the castles and control them in order to control the territory.

So: what does it take?

Initial Investment

Barring the presence of overwhelming force or the rare chance of a rapid assault, an attacker must surround the enemy if he is to have any chance of seizing the castle. It takes quite a long time to capture a defended position. Knowing this, the attacker will want to ensure the defenders cannot be reinforced, they cannot resupply, and that they cannot communicate with the outside world. That third one—communication—may in fact be the most vital.

To that end, the first stage of taking a castle is investment, which in military terms refers to the process of surrounding the enemy fortification; this has nothing to do with finances and actual costs (though an investment of an enemy holding requires quite the investment, har har).

Nota bene: Sometimes the terms “investment” and “siege” are used interchangeably; while that’s normally harmless, it’s not quite right. A siege is the (slow) process of capturing a fortified place. An investment is the act of surrounding that fortified place. A siege almost always includes investment, and investment is usually the foundational aspect of a siege. But they are distinct. Sometimes you hear about sieges that lasted years or even decades, and in every case the attackers had an incomplete investment!

Surrounding and blockading an enemy is no easy thing. The defenders may sally forth from the castle at any moment, day or night, and their allies on the outside will constantly try to break the blockade. The attackers will need to fortify their own position to limit the effectiveness of a surprise counterattack.

Meanwhile, going anywhere near the enemy castle will subject the attacking troops to enemy missile fire. Thus, the encirclement will need to have a significantly larger radius than the castle itself. In a world where the fastest form of communication is “man on horse,” that distance means the defenders will be able to coordinate and communicate far faster than the attackers.

That missile fire also means that the area immediately surrounding a castle might become a “no man’s land,” which neither adversary controls. But a sally out of the castle could move far across that area and attack any point on the attacker’s siege line. Everyone, on every part of the siege line, must be capable of repelling an attack from the defending garrison.

The investment might take several forms. The attackers could create several fortified camps with some troops always ready to intercept enemies going to/from the castle. This requires visibility and coordination, but does not require extensive fortifications or stretched lines. They could also create a contravallation (literally a “wall-against” or “counter-wall”). These field fortifications like ditches or palisades could stop, slow, or funnel enemy sallies. These may not even have to fully encircle the castle to be effective.

There was, however, a more common reality, present among less disciplined and unprofessional armies: the attackers would simply pitch camp in a broad ring around an enemy fortress. That ring might have gaps, or it might not. These camps might be relatively unfortified, depending on things like command structure, experience, discipline, morale, and a commander’s ability to get men to do a bunch of hard, back-breaking work. In such instances, the besiegers simply rely on numbers and arms to repel any counter-attack. It doesn’t always work out.

History is littered with sieges which were broken because the attackers did not fortify their own camps. Suffice it to say: soldiers are not automatons, they do not magically know what the best thing to do, they do not magically do the best thing even if they do know, and all the same caveats go for their commanders.

A Numbers Game

I’ve gone on long enough about encirclement, but I must make one final point. This should already be clear, but it’s worth stating explicitly: Because there is need for investment, it takes significantly more manpower to attack a castle than it does to defend it.

These numbers tend to be very lopsided indeed. Here are a few figures from major sieges around which we have reliable data.

There’s a bias here for English history, which I don’t have the time to fix by looking farther afield from English-language sources. There’s also a bias here towards sieges where the attackers eventually won, because that means territory changed hands, and that means those sieges are more likely to be recorded and remembered. Nonetheless. Note that in these cases the attackers had at least ten times the number of men, and that a castle could hold out for months even with a few dozen determined defenders. That’s how lopsided it could be.

All those men need to be transported, fed, paid, and kept in line. That lopsided calculus will dictate almost everything that follows, so remember it.

Ticking Timers

From the moment that a besieger makes a successful investment of an enemy position, the siege becomes a battle of wills. It is the will of attackers to maintain the siege, against the will of the defenders to resist indefinitely.

Both of these wills will be tested by several unavoidable stressors.

For the defenders, they have a limited supply of food, which they cannot replace. From the moment of investment, a timer starts ticking until the day everyone inside begins to starve. For this reason, civilian populations are often expelled from a fortification as soon as it becomes clear that an enemy host is on the way. No serious commander will tolerate people who are a drain on his resources unless they are militarily beneficial.1

Disease may not be an immediate factor, but once starvation does become a concern, disease will become a huge problem among the malnourished defenders.

The defenders also have a limited supply of manpower. They will not be able to reinforce their position. Every lost combatant is irreplaceable.

In short, a defender will strive to hold out indefinitely, but it is impossible to hold out forever. From the moment of investment, the defenders are in a losing position.

The attackers, meanwhile, have their own stressors. They may be able to resupply and reinforce themselves, but that requires constant work and organization. Because attacking a castle requires an order of magnitude more men, that also requires an order of magnitude more food. The surrounding countryside is likely to run out of food very quickly, and the attackers will need to go further and further afield for resupply (which means pillaging) or they must rely on well-prepared and well-defended lines of supply.

Camp conditions are likely to deteriorate quite rapidly. The castle is a home. It has things like roofs and kitchens and latrines. The camp outside? Not so much. For a besieger, you are living, at best, in a tent or commandeered village. You’re crapping in a trench with 1,000 of your closest friends. You’re cooking over an open fire, weather permitting. When you’re not bored, you’re doing manual labor or risking your life in combat. And that situation will continue for months, sometimes through winter. Siege camps tend to be muddy, smelly, disease-ridden places, far beyond the “regular” wretchedness of other warcamps, since these you don’t get to leave and march onwards in a few days.

So, while the defenders in the castle have a ticking clock for starvation, the attackers have that same clock, plus a higher initial likelihood of disease. If morale drops, the attacking soldiers can fade away into the countryside or desert back home. (The defenders can’t desert, they have nowhere to go.)

Lastly, the attackers need to worry about relief forces. Pitched battles in the Middle Ages usually resulted from exactly this: an invader tried to seize territory by capturing objectives (cities and castles), and a defending army came to stop them or to break a siege. In these cases, the attacker might lift the siege (or leave a small detachment behind) in order to face the relief army, so as not to worry about the relief army coordinating with the garrison, who might try to sally out simultaneously.

Overall, a siege was a miserable experience for both the defenders and the attackers. It was a prolonged exercise in seeing who gave up first. And we haven’t even talked about combat yet.

Negotiations

Because sieges were so dreadful, and because everyone understood the dynamics of both attacking and defending, there were usually several successive rounds of negotiations between the attackers and defenders.

It’s worth noting at this point that across medieval Europe, sieges usually did not result in the classic “fight to the death.” Those merciless conflicts did occur in this period, but to my knowledge they almost always happened across religious lines—and even then, not universally. While in the ancient world, a successful siege generally resulted the brutal sack of a city, the taking of a castle usually resulted in the surviving defenders going free with their lives and often enough with their arms.

Why?

It goes back to that lopsided numbers game, the various ticking timers, and people’s general desire to not die.

Even if the defenders are loyal servants of their lords, they don’t want to die a pointless death. Even if the attackers are certain of victory, they don’t want to spend lives storming a castle that’s about to surrender.

Hence, frequent parleys and moments of negotiation.

The first round of negotiation usually began as soon as investment was completed. The attackers might threaten and say “This is your only chance. Surrender now or we fight to the death,” but this was usually an empty threat, for reasons we’ll see. The defenders probably can’t surrender at this point because they’ve sworn oaths to defend this place in the name of their lord or king. Honor and loyalty mattered, because honor, loyalty, and interpersonal relationships translated to political power.

But it was also reasonable to hold out, even against overwhelming numbers. The defenders had the duty to defend the castle, but their lord had a duty to come and relieve them. They only had to withstand the assault until that time arrived. No castle could withstand a truly indefinite assault, but theoretically, no castle had to.

Preparing for Assault

Assuming there was no immediate agreement of surrender, the attackers had to find a way to progress the siege. They had to attack.

I’m going to get more detailed in the next section on the assaults themselves, but for now I just want to point out that any assault would require planning, counter-planning, and a whole lot of work for the men on the ground. So there was always a period of preparation before the moment of any actual assault against the walls.

If the castles had ditches, those would need to be filled. If the ditches had stakes, those had to be cut away. If the defenders shot bolts and arrows at the defenders, the attackers had to construct fortifications in no-mans-land so they could safely approach the walls. The defenders might sally out to destory those forifications, etc. etc.

There was also the necessary construction of siege engines like ladders, mines, towers, bridges for moats, fascines to fill ditches, plus catapults (and their variants). Attackers usually did not create such things ahead of arriving at the objective. Such things slow down the march, plus you need to see the castle before you know exactly what you need, and you’re going to be sitting outside the walls for a while anyway…

The only siege engines an attacker might bring are the complicated things like catapults or cannons.

One common misconception is that stone-throwing engines like the catapult were designed to break down the enemy’s walls. Though that could happen these engines mostly served to suppress and degrade the enemy counter-measures. Defenders might build wooden hoardings (like below) to fire on enemies closer to the wall, but those hoardings could be destroyed by heavy projectiles.

Though many stone-throwers could not destroy the walls in anything like a reasonable timeframe, they could degrade the cover from which enemy archers shot, or collapse tower roofs, or send dead carcasses over the walls to encourage disease, or simply work as long-range anti-personnel weapons.

A key reason for defenders to sally out and attack the siege camps was to destroy their engines. The moment an attacker begins building a giant wall-climbing machine, the defenders will be able to see it and find a way to destroy it. Doing so could set a siege timeline back weeks or months.

All of this “preparation” made up the bulk of a siege’s time. It was a daily grind of work, and dangerous work at that. Not to mention, all the while, relief forces may be on the way, disease is setting in, the garrison’s allies are trying to sneak messages or supplies in. Those clocks are ticking.

There is, of course, the option of not assaulting, but instead starving out the defenders. It’s simple. It’s effective. It takes a long time. Time an invader may not have. Winter is much harsher on men in camp than men in a castle, and that’s not even considering relief forces. Plus, it’s hard to maintain morale and force integrity when your 1,000 soldiers are sittting around in the mud doing nothing.

Most sieges proceeded from mere investment into bloody assault.

Assaults

Then came the actual fighting. There were three basic options for an attacker.

1. Escalade: go over the walls

2. Breach: go through the walls

3. Subterfuge: pull a little sneaky sneak.

Escalade was the simplest, the fastest, and the deadliest method. It’s simple: move men over the no-mans-land and up onto the walls to try to kill the men defending the castle.

The defenders are likely to see any form of escalade coming, both in the days leading up to it and in the moments preceding the attack itself. These assaults tend to be incredibly bloody, and casualties tend to be lopsided in favor of the defenders. But remember! The lopsided math means that the attackers can absorb those losses in a way that the defenders cannot.

Ropes and ladders could be constructed quickly, but are also easy to repel. Large siege engines, like a siege tower with an offensive drawbridge, would be a better way to attack, but they are slow to make, slow to deploy, and vulnerable to counter-attack. They must be large enough to deliver a lot of men, small enough to move, and must be sent in with a huge escort of troops so that the defenders don’t sally out and destroy it during the assault. They must also be resistant to fire despite being made of wood. The defenders will see the tower coming and they will prepare countermeasures, and you won’t see those countermeasures until they are deployed. Good luck!

If you can’t go over, go through. Breaches could be achieved by rams, mines, or projectiles. Wooden walls were pretty common for early castles (and in wood-rich regions like Eastern Europe), and naturally they were easier to breach. But easier does not mean easy.

For stone walls, all of these breaching methods were slow and painstaking processes. A ram (or a group of men with picks) requires prolonged access to the base of the castle wall. Mines require intense engineering efforts beyond the means of most medieval armies. And projectiles generally could not breach stone walls until the later medieval period.

Quick notes on that: the counter-weight trebuchet2 did not appear in Europe until the 13th century, and designs capable of breaching a wall did not really show up until the 14th. By the 15th century, we started to see the use of cannons. So by the time we get to the truly wall-breaking trebuchets, we’re already in the waning days of castle design.

A shot from a large counter-weight trebuchet could peel away huge chunks of masonry, but it could also take up to an hour to reload. Meanwhile, the defenders would repair as best they could during that time. Thus, even the most advanced medieval “artillery” might require days or weeks to create a breach.

And of course, it is still not easy to assault a breach in the walls. All that stone doesn’t go away.

This rock pile (from Mark Ahsmann, via Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 3.0) is not meaningfully different from what a castle wall looks like when it’s “breached.” Would you want to run up that—while people shoot at you—in order to have a knife fight with a group of angry men at the top?

Unless you breach the wall by surprise (as with a mine), then the defenders will see it coming and might prepare additional defenses behind the breach.

The intense difficulty of assaulting a castle by escalade or breach meant that every attacker's preferred option was subterfuge.

Bribe a guard. Sneak up a latrine spout. Sneak attack with a single ladder in the dead of night while it’s raining. Find some way to get men inside the walls without all the bloodshed. Once inside, try to capture a gatehouse and drop the drawbridge so your men could pour in. That’s what a lot of attackers tried to do. These tactics were incredibly risky for those involved, and they rarely succeeded. But the payoff could be immense: immediate, total victory.

Of course, castles are designed to not have gaps in their defences, and a well-disciplined force would not allow you to reliably coordinate with that one guard who has a loose conscience, if sucha man even exists. Most of the time, subterfuge simply is not possible.

Progress? Retreat?

It’s hard to say whether “most assaults” were successful or unsuccessful. In many of the most famous sieges, an attacker’s first assaults rarely succeeded (which is part of what made them long, arduous, and ultimately famous!).

Usually, there were several cycles of assault, repulsion, iteration, and assault again, before the defenders began to be worn down.

In the event of a successful assault, whatever happened next would depend entirely on the castle’s defensive situation. If the castle had multiple levels of defense (like a motte & bailey design or a concentric castle as shown below), then the defenders could retreat to the next level of defenses.

Most castles—unlike Beaumaris here—had a central keep, which functioned as the main residence and the last line of defense. We’ll talk a lot more about castle design next time.

Basically, if there is a successful assault, that does not mean the siege is over. It may just mean the first layer of Onion Castle has been peeled away, and now the whole process of preparation and assault can repeat itself. And, as the inner defences get smaller and smaller, they require less and less manpower to defend. It’s not unusual to hear about the final stages of a siege occurring against a keep where there are single-digit-numbers of defenders.

The Cycle Repeats

Then, the cycle of preparation, counter-preparation, and assault, will play out until the siege ends.

As I said above, castle sieges usually ended with a formal surrender. Defenders must hold out long enough to see their duty done (or else face punishments for failure), to say nothing about their legitimate desires to see an invader repelled.

But the earlier calculus is still in play: everyone is running out of food, disease is ramping up, no one wants to die.

The defenders of a castle may be able to sally out and deal a blow to their besiegers by destroying a siege engine, stealing food, or inflicting casualties, but engaging an enemy that overwhelmingly outnumbers you is likely suicidal. The only way they could ever repel the enemy on their own is if the enemy is poorly-organized, poorly-trained, poorly-led, not so numerous as to be overwhelming, and likely caught off guard to boot. If that does happen, it’s more likely to happen in the early stages of investment. Not here.

It was possible that an attacker might simply leave. Perhaps the cost could be too high for them. Their supplies could dwindle too quickly. Winter might set in. There might be a political crisis back home or some other change in the winds of war and the attackers have to lift the siege for some more important reason. But all of that was completely out of the defenders’ control.

In other words, the defenders do not actually have any way to win a siege. There’s a lot they can do to frustrate, resist, and delay defeat. There is no way for them to win on their own. If they do simply outlast, it was probably as much about what they did before the siege (e.g. build up food stores, defensive architecture, moat-digging) as what happened during it.

The attackers, meanwhile, do have a win condition: kill the defenders, or convince them to surrender. An attacker that was well-provisioned, prepared, and determined would—eventually—prevail.

Once a siege commences, a defender’s only real hope lay in the prospect of relief. And that brings us back to investment.

Messages were so important for the defenders. Is help coming? Does the king know we’re under siege? Will our allies save us? How far away are they? Do they stand a chance of victory in the field? If the defenders had knowledge of allied support, they could endure. But to a group of beleaguered, starving men, complete silence from the outside world offers them nothing with which to make decisions except their own food stores and their grumbling stomachs. This is why defenders and their allies would try desperately to communicate across siege lines, risking the lives of many messengers to do it.

In the midst of all of this, there were usually many more rounds of negotiations. The attacker might offer safe passage for the defenders, with their arms and all honor. Live to fight another day. Alternatively, death.

The defender would have to judge whether resistance was pointless. Moments of negotiation were usually preceded by many of the milestones we mentioned above, because those were moments where the attackers could “prove” that resistance was indeed pointless.

“We have completed our siege engines. You can see them. You have tried and failed to destroy them. When we assault, we will win, and you will die. Surrender now and live. You have until sunset.” Or “we have breached the walls with our trebuchet and can do it again with impunity. No one is coming to help.” And so on.

Oftentimes, because the defenders were in the dark, they would propose their own deadline. “If no relief army arrives by such and such date, we’ll surrender.” If the deadline passed and no relief army came, then they would have to surrender or face annihilation. Such deadlines might be negotiated once the siege is well underway, once the defenders know their situation.

There were really only a few ways a siege could end:

1. The attackers give up. This was unlikely if the invasion was well-planned and coordinated. Rarely would a determined invader just walk away without other external pressures.

2. The defenders are relieved. This was the most common form of defensive victory, with a castle’s overlord coming to relieve his beleaguered subjects. This might result in a pitched battle, but just as often the relief army knows how big the invading force is and comes in even greater force. The besiegers, having failed to secure their objective and facing down a larger relief force, bugger off.

3. The defences are stormed. The attackers take control of the castle after a successful assault and no defenders are left capable of resistance.

4. The defenders surrender. This could be negotiated ahead of time, or it might follow from a major development, such as a successful assault, heavy casualties, the exhaustion of supplies, or the defeat of a relief force. This might also occur after a castle is partly or even mostly captured, with the last survivors negotiating for their lives.

Where Does That Leave Us?

Besieging a castle was a slow, grinding, and grueling project. The clock begins ticking for both sides the moment a siege begins, initiating a contest of endurance and sheer, stubborn will.

Rarely would brute force alone achieve victory; more often, it was the culmination of weeks or months of attrition, attack, counterattack, and calculated displays of strength. And then a lot of brute force.

Castles were designed to make every option costly, but no castle was actually impervious; even the best defenses are of no use to a starving man.

The stories that these castles hold are far richer than the simple “show up and storm the walls” narratives that a lot of fiction gives us. These were not the speedbumps that they so often appear to be in fiction; they were the stages for long, desperate dramas, upon which history turned.

In future parts of this series, I’d like to look at the castles themselves to see their stories, and follow the evolution of their design. From there, I want to look at a few examples from fantasy fiction (and perhaps medieval fiction more broadly), to see what storytellers get right, and what they get wrong.

I’m building this series as I write it, however, so I’m not sure exactly how many more posts there will be, or exactly when they’ll be ready.

But thanks for being here while I hammer it out.

And thanks for reading.

If you want to help me write more stuff like this, consider becoming a Forgemaster by taking out a paid subscription. I offer my Forgemasters exclusive short stories, behind-the-scenes posts, and a direct voice in my creative process. Join below 👇

You can also help me by simply by liking, commenting, or sharing this piece.

Share

Just want to keep reading? Check out the post below, or see the rest of my writing on this page.

✹ ✹ ✹

Then, I’ll be unpacking An Unwelcome Guest, which I released almost exactly one year ago. It is a story about the average, normal citizens of Cethanwald, the everyday people who are so often overlooked and forgotten within fantasy. I…

Read more