Pawn of Prophecy
By David Eddings
Overview
When I read the Lord of the Rings for the first time as a young teenager, I was transported to a fantastic new world of magic and swords, good and evil. After finishing it in a couple days, while recovering from an appendectomy, I immediately devoured The Hobbit.
These books instilled a lifelong love of fantasy fiction in me, but also left me with a problem. J. R. R. Tolkien was not the most prolific author (of novels at least). Where could I turn to feed my new addiction? My choice was one of the most popular authors of fantasy fiction in the 80’s and 90’s. One who is mostly forgotten today while his contemporaries work continues to be republished or see big budget TV adaptions.
David Eddings was born in Spokane, Washington State, a place he called “a terribly, terribly boring town” when he returned to live there briefly as an adult. Originally hoping to be an actor a mutual hatred with a college theatre director and an English course instead gave him a love of literature, especially middle English medieval works.
After working a variety of jobs, everything from grocer to buyer for the Saturn Moon Rocket program to teaching literature Eddings first novel, High Hunt, was published. It was after failing to get another work published and on the verge of giving up Eddings had his own fateful encounter with The Lord of the Rings.
Picking up a copy of The Two Towers in a local bookstore, his surprise that the novel was still available was replace with shock when he read the publishing information and saw it was on its 73rd reprint. Deciding then and there that fantasy was where he could make money, he set out to write his own trilogy, later changed by his publisher to a five book series to keep the cost per volume down.
First published in 1983, Pawn of Prophecy, book one in the Belgariad series, was the book I picked up to satisfy my hunger for fantasy. Remaining popular and still publishing new works into the 2000’s, in the years since his death in 2009 Eddings work has faded from the fantasy cannon.
After coming across A Pawn of Prophecy in the Amazon Kindle monthly deals, I decided to give it a reread for the first time in over twenty years. Is this former juggernaut of fantasy fiction deserving of its fate, or does it still have something to give us.
A Pawn of Prophecy centres on Garion, an orphan living with his aunt Pol on an isolated farmstead in the country of Sendaria, an agricultural county that only exists because the neighbouring kingdoms felt that something needed to occupy the area. Garion spends his time playing with his friends Rundorig and Doroon and dealing with strange feelings for Zubrette, the only girl his age on the farm.
His mundane life, broken up only by the visits of the travelling storyteller Garion calls Wolf and his tales of the ancient sorcerer Belgarath and his powerful daughter Polgara, is suddenly overturned by the realisation that those close to him are more than they seem, and he is trust into an adventure with the fate of the world at stake.
Garion sets out on an adventure with ancient and powerful sorcerers to recover a stolen item of power. He will encounter kings and princes, friends and enemies, and in time reclaim his family’s birthright and save the world.
Reading the book today the first thing that comes to mind is the cliché “a product of its time”. Pawn of Prophecy was written at an awkward time for fantasy publication. A few years earlier in 1977 The Sword of Shannara, by Terry Brooks, was a publishing success proving that a mainstream fantasy series was possible. While this is undoubtedly the reason Pawn of Prophecy was published, it may also have shackled it.
David Eddings wanted to write a more mature fantasy than the chaste Lord of the Rings, bringing in sex, violence and consequences to his work. Unfortunate at the time mainstream fantasy was though of as a children’s genre, and as this was before the emergence of Young Adult fiction as a genre in and of itself, Pawn of Prophecy needed to be suitable to be sold in school book fairs, where the majority of fantasy was sold at the time.
This led to Pawn of Prophecy being rather tame by comparison to contemporary YA, never mind modern adult fantasy fiction. The violence is pretty bloodless and, in Pawn of Prophecy at least, the sex never gets more explicit than Garion wishing for a snuggle in the hay with Zubrette.
Some of the other issues are, unfortunately, more serious. For the most part the women in Pawn of Prophecy are wives who stay at home playing games while the men go about saving the world. Even Polgara, one of the oldest and most powerful beings in the world, is treated as a hysteric who needs someone (always a man) to calm he down and tell her the correct action to take.
There are also many, many problems with the depiction of races. All races in Pawn of Prophecy are defined by a single trait. Sendarians are stoic no-nonsense farmers. Chereks are sailors. Drasnians are merchants and spies, etc. Worse is that while the “good” races are based on western cultures like the Vikings, Anglo-Saxons, Normans and Romans, the Angararks are based on Persian culture. Even the one non Angarak culture that could be classified as “evil”, the Nyissans, are based on Egyptian culture rather than a European one.
I don’t think David Eddings set out to deliberately push an anti-feminist, racist message in his books. As he has acknowledged his primary purpose in writing fantasy was to make a living for his family, and he just based his races on his studies of medieval works and what he thought might sell to American schoolkids. However progressive works these are not, and this is probably the reason his works are slowly being left behind after his death.
So despite all that is it worth reading Pawn of Prophecy today? I would say a qualified yes. The writing and storytelling, while competent, will seem a bit simple to today’s readers, but they are still enjoyable. And while there are problems with the depiction of women and racism, these are still found in more modern works like Geroge R R Matins A Song of Ice and Fire (violence against women) or Terry Goodkinds Sword of Truth (the “hero’s” suggestion to solve the problem of a race of people contaminating the bloodline of magicians is ethnic cleansing, and it’s presented as a good thing? I mean come on. There’s a whole article in this, if I can ever bring myself to reread the series).
Rating:
3 ½ Eds Up
Sources:
As well as reading Pawn of Prophecy I used the following sources while writing this article. Please look them up to find out more about David Eddings and his work.
Prime U.S. Beef – David Eddings interviewed by Stan Nicholls
https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~cjwatson/eddings/interview.html
Interview with David Eddings
https://www.sffworld.com/2006/02/scifiint_170/
Does The Magic Last? Revisiting A Fantasy Classic As An Adult
