They don’t appear because they don’t exist. They’re a literary device and nothing more. (I once jokingly told Lester that I’d be going to write the Mrin Codex if he’d agree to publish it.on a scroll, but he declined.) I used the ‘Mrin’ as a form of exposition. Those periodic breakthroughs when Belkira and Beltira – or whoever else is handy – finally crack the code are the things that set off a new course of action. I catch hints of a religious yearning when people start pleading for copies of the ‘Mrin’. Sorry gang, I’m not in the business of creating new religions. This is ‘story’, not ‘revelation’. I’m a storyteller, not a Prophet of God. OK?
Once The Holy Books were out of the way, I was ready to tackle the Histories, and that’s where all the ‘ologies’ started showing up along with a chronology. When you’ve got a story that lasts for seven thousand years, you’d better have a chronology and pay close attention to it, or you’re going to get lost somewhere in the 39th century. The histories of the Alorn Kingdoms are fairly central to the story~ but it was the history of the Tolnedran Empire that filled in all the cracks. You’ll probably notice how tedious the Tolnedran History is. If you think reading it was tedious, try writing it. It was absolutely essential, however, since much of the background material grew out of it.
Most of the similarities between the people of this world and our imaginary one should be fairly obvious. The Sendars correspond to rural Englishmen, the Arends to Norman French, the Tolnedrans to Romans, the Chereks to Vikings, the Algars to Cossacks, the Ulgos to Jews, and the Angaraks to Hunnish-Mongolian-Muslim-Visigoths out to convert the world by the sword. I didn’t really have correspondences in mind for the Drasnians, Rivans, Marags, or Nyissans. They’re story elements and don’t need to derive from this world. By the time we got to the histories of the Angarak Kingdoms, we were ready to dig into the story itself, so the Angaraks got fairly short shrift. I wanted to get on with it. There were footnotes in the original of these studies, but they were included (with identifying single-spacing) in the body of the text.
These are the mistaken perceptions of the scholars at the University of Tol Honeth. The footnotes I’m adding now are in their proper location (at the foot of the page, naturally). These later notes usually point out inconsistencies. Some of this material just didn’t work when we got into the actual narrative, and I’m not one to mess up a good story just for the sake of sticking to an out-dated gameplan.
The addition of The Battle of Vo Mimbre was a sort of afterthought. I knew that epic fantasy derived from medieval romance, so just to reenforce that point of origin, I wrote one. It has most of the elements of a good, rousing medieval romance – and all of its flaws. I’m still fairly sure that it would have made Eleanor of Aquitaine light up like a Christmas tree.
I wanted to use it in its original form as the Prologue for Queen of Sorcery, but Lester del Rey said, ‘NO!.’ A twenty-seven page prologue didn’t thrill him. That’s when I learned one of the rules. A prologue does not exceed eight pages. Lester finally settled the argument by announcing that if I wrote an overly long prologue, he’d cut it down with a dull axe.
Oh, there was another argument a bit earlier. Lester didn’t like ‘Aloria’. He wanted to call it ‘Alornia’!!! I almost exploded, but my wife calmly took the telephone away from me and sweetly said, ‘Lester, dear, “Alornia” sounds sort of like a cookie to me.’ (Alon-da Doone?) Lester thought about that for a moment. ‘It does, sort of, doesn’t it? OK, Aloria it is then.’ Our side won that one big-time.
I’m not passing along these gossipy little tales for the fun of it, people. There’s a point buried in most of them. The point to this one is the importance of the sound of names in High Fantasy. Would Launcelot impress you very much if his name were ‘Charlie’ or ‘Wilbur’? The bride of my youth spends hours concocting names. It was ~ and still is – her specialty. (She’s also very good at deleting junk and coming up with great endings.) I can manufacture names if I have to, but hers are better. Incidentally, that.’Gar’ at the center of “Belgarath’, “Polgara., and ‘Garion’ derives from proto-Indo European. Linguists have been amusing themselves for years backtracking their way to the original language spoken by the barbarians who came wandering off the steppes of Central Asia twelve thousand or so years ago. ‘Gar’ meant ‘Spear’ back in those days. isn’t that interesting?
When the preliminary studies were finished, my collaborator and I hammered together an outline, reviewed our character sketches, and we got started. When we had a first draft of what we thought was going to be Book I completed, I sent a proposal., complete with the overall outline, to Ballantine Books, and, naturally, the Post Office Department lost it. After six months, I sent a snippy note to Ballantine.
‘At least you could have had the decency to say no.They replied, ‘Gee, we never got your proposal.’I had almost dumped the whole idea of the series because of the gross negligence of my government. I sent the proposal off again. Lester liked it, and we signed a contract. Now we were getting paid for this, so we started to concentrate.
Incidentally, my original proposal envisioned a trilogy – three books tentatively titled Garion, CeNedra, and Kal Torak. That notion tumbled down around my ears when Lester explained the realities of the American publishing business to me. B. Dalton and Waldenbooks had limits on genre fiction, and those two chains ruled the world. At that time, they wanted genre fiction to be paperbacks priced at under three dollars, and thus no more than 300 pages.
‘This is what we’re going to do,’ Lester told me. (Notice that ‘we’. He didn’t really mean’we’; he meant me.) ‘We’re going to break it up into five books instead of three.’My original game plan went out the window. I choked and went on. The chess-piece titles, incidentally, were Lester’s idea. I didn’t like that one very much either. I wanted to call Book V In the Tomb of the One Eyed God. I thought that had a nice ring to it but Lester patiently explained that a title that long wouldn’t leave any room for a cover illustration. I was losing a lot of arguments here. Lester favored the bulldozer approach to his writers, though, so he ran over me fairly often.
I did win one, though – I think. Lester had told me that ‘Fantasy fiction is the prissiest of all art-forms.’ I knew that he was wrong on that one. I’ve read the works from which contemporary fantasy has descended, and ‘prissy’ is a wildly inappropriate description (derived., no doubt, from Tennyson and Tolkien). I set out to delicately suggest that girls did, in fact, exist below the neck. I’ll admit that I lost a few rounds, but I think I managed to present a story that suggested that there are some differences between boys and girls, and that most people find that sort of interesting.
All right, ‘Time Out’. For those of you who intend to follow my path, here’s what you should do. Get an education first. You’re not qualified to write epic fantasy until you’ve been exposed to medieval romance. As I said earlier, there are all kinds of medieval literature. Look at the Norse stuff. Try the German stories. (If you don’t want to read them, go see them on stage in Wagnerian operas.) even China or look at Finland, Russia, Ireland, Iceland, Arabia
India. The urge to write and read High Fantasy seems to be fairly
universal.
Next comes the practice writing. I started on contemporary novels
High Hunt and The Losers. (The publication date of The Losers is
June 1992, but I wrote it back in the 1970s. It’s not strictly speaking a
novel, but rather is an allegory the one-eyed Indian is God, and Jake
Flood is the Devil. Notice that I wrote it before we started the
Belgariad.) If you’re serious about this, you have to write every day,
even if it’s only for an hour. Scratch the words ‘week-end’ and
‘holiday’ out of your vocabulary. (If you’ve been very good, I might let
you take a half-day off at Christmas.) Write a million or so words.
Then burn them. Now you’re almost ready to start
This is what I was talking about earlier when I suggested that
most aspiring fantasists will lose heart fairly early on. I was in my
mid-teens when I discovered that I was a writer. Notice that I didn’t
say ‘wanted to be a writer’. ‘Want’ has almost nothing to do with it.