Then I came back to the States and was discharged. I had that GI Bill, so I went to the University of Washington for four years of graduate study. I’ve already told you about that, so I won’t dwell on it. During my college years I worked part-time in grocery stores, a perfect job for a student, since the hours can be adjusted to fit in with the class schedule. Then I went to work for Boeing, building rocket ships. (I was a buyer, not an engineer.) I helped, in a small way, to put a man on the moon. I married a young lady whose history was even more interesting than mine. I was a little miffed when I discovered that her security clearance was higher than mine. I thought ‘Top Secret’ was the top of the line, but I was wrong. She’d also been to places I hadn’t even heard of, since she’d been in the Air Force, while I’d been a ground-pounder. I soon discovered that she was a world-class cook, a highly skilled fisherwoman, and after an
argument about whether or not that was really a deer lying behind that log a hundred yards away late one snowy afternoon – she demonstrated that she was a dead shot with a deer rifle by shooting poor old Bambi right between the eyes.
I taught college for several years, and then one year the administrators all got a pay raise and the teaching faculty didn’t. I told them what they could do with their job, and my wife and I moved to Denver, where I (we) wrote High Hunt in our spare time while I worked in a grocery store and my wife worked as a motel maid. We sold High Hunt to Putnam, and I was now a published author. We moved to Spokane, and I turned to grocery stores again to keep us eating regularly.
I was convinced that I was a ‘serious novelist’, and I labored long and hard over several unpublished (and unpublishable) novels that moped around the edges of mawkish contemporary tragedy. In the mid 1970s I was grinding out ‘Hunsecker’s Ascent’, a story about mountain-climbing which was a piece of tripe so bad that it even bored me. (No, you can’t see it. I burned it.) Then one morning before I went off to my day-job, I was so bored that I started doodling. My doodles produced a map of a place that never was (and is probably a geological impossibility). Then, feeling the call of duty, I put it away and went back to the tripe table.
Some years later I was in a bookstore going in the general direction of the ‘serious fiction’. I passed the science-fiction rack and spotted one of the volumes of 7he Lord of the Rings. I muttered, ‘Is this old turkey still floating around?’ Then I picked it up and noticed that it was in its seventy-eighth printing!!! That got my immediate attention, and I went back home and dug out the aforementioned doodle. It seemed to have some possibilities. Then, methodical as always, I ticked off the above-listed necessities for a good medieval romance. I’d taken those courses in Middle English authors in graduate school, so I had a fair grip on the genre.
I realized that since I’d created this world, I was going to have to populate it, and that meant that I’d have to create the assorted biologies’ as well before I could even begin to put together an outline. The Rivan Codex was the result. I reasoned that each culture had to have a different class-structure, a different mythology, a different theology, different costumes, different, forms of address, different national character, and even different coinage and slightly different weights and measures. I might never come right out and use them in the books, but they had to be there. ‘The Belgariad Preliminaries’ took me most of 1978 and part of 1979. (I was still doing honest work those days, so my time was limited.)
One of the major problems when you’re dealing with wizards is the ‘Superman Syndrome’. You’ve got this fellow who’s faster than a speeding bullet and all that stuff. He can uproot mountains and stop the sun. Bullets bounce off him, and he can read your mind. Who’s going to climb into the ring with this terror? I suppose I could have gone with incantations and spells, but to make that sort of thing believable you’ve got to invent at least part of the incantation, and sooner or later some nut is going to take you seriously, and, absolutely convinced that he can fly if he says the magic words, he’ll jump off a building somewhere. Or, if he believes that the sacrifice of a virgin will make him Lord of the Universe, and some Girl-Scout knocks on his door – ??? I think it was a sense of social responsibility that steered me away from the ‘hocus-pocus’ routine.
Anyway, this was about the time when the ESP fakers were announcing that they could bend keys (or crowbars, for all I know) with the power of their minds. Bingo’ The Will and the Word was born. And it also eliminated the Superman problem. The notion that doing things with your mind exhausts you as much as doing them with your back was my easiest way out. You might be able to pick up a mountain with your mind, but you won’t be able to walk after you do it, I can guarantee that. It worked out quite well, and it made some interesting contributions to the story. We added the prohibition against ‘unmaking things’ later, and we had a workable form of magic with some nasty consequences attached if you broke the rules.
Now we had a story. Next came the question of how to tell it. My selection of Sir Perceval (Sir Dumb, if you prefer) sort of ruled out ‘High Style’. I can write in’High Style’if necessary (see Mandorallen with his ‘thee’s, thou’s and foreasmuches), but Garion would have probably swallowed his tongue if he’d tried it. Moreover, magic, while not a commonplace, is present in our imaginary world, so I wanted to avoid all that ‘Gee whiz! Would you look at that!’ sort of reaction. I wanted language that was fairly colloquial (with a few cultural variations) to make the whole thing accessible to contemporary readers, but with just enough antique usages to give it a medieval flavor.
Among the literary theories I’d encountered in graduate school was Jung’s notion of archetypal myth. The application of this theory usually involves a scholar laboring mightily to find correspondences between current (and not so current) fiction and drama to link them to Greek mythology. (Did Hamlet really lust after his mother the way Oedipus did?) It occurred to me that archetypal myth might not be very useful in the evaluation of a story, but might it not work in its creation? I tried it, and it works. I planted more mythic fishhooks in the first couple of books of the Belgariad than you’ll find in any sporting goods store. I’ve said (too many times, probably) that if you read the first hundred pages of the Belgariad, I gotcha!! You won’t be able to put it down. The use of archetypal myth in the creation of fiction is the literary equivalent of peddling dope.
The preliminaries to the Belgariad are actually out of sequence here. The Personal History of Belgarath the Sorcerer was written after the rest of the studies while I was trying to get a better grip on the old boy. You might want to compare that very early character sketch
with the opening chapters of the more recent Belgarath the Sorcerer.
Did you notice the similarities? I thought I noticed you noticing. When I first tackled these studies, I began with The Holy Books, and the most important of these is The Book of Alorn. When you get right down to it, that one contains the germ of the whole story. After that, I added The Book of Torak. Fair is fair, after all, and ‘equal time’ sounds sort of fair, I guess. The Testament of the Snake People was an exercise in showing off. (A poem in the shape of a snake? Gee!) The Hymn to Chaldan was supposed to help explain the Arends. A war god isn’t all that unusual.
The Marags are extinct, but that ‘equal time’ regulation was still in place, so I took a swing at the grief-stricken God Mara. I had fun with The Proverbs of Nedra – a sort of theological justification for pure greed. Maybe I’ll make a deal with the New York Stock Exchange, and they can engrave those proverbs on the wall.
The Sermon of Aldur was a false start, since it speaks glowingly of ‘Unmaking Things’, which UL prohibited in the next section. That section, The Book of Ulgo, was rather obviously based on The Book of Job. Note that I’ll even steal from the Bible. Gorim came off rather well, I thought. Incidentally, ‘Ul! was a typographical error the first time it appeared. I liked the way it looked on paper, so I kept it. (Would you prefer to have me claim ‘Divine Inspiration?’) I’m going to disillusion some enthusiasts here, I’m afraid. Notice that the Mrin Codex and the Darine Codex aren’t included here.