Like the Riyria books, this is epic / high fantasy in the classic Tolkinian tradition, contrasting a race named the Fhrey (don’t call them Elves, that’s an insult in their language — and you do not want to insult a Fhrey) with humans (to the Elv … err, Fhrey, “Rhunes”, which means something between “barbarians” and “pond scum”) and a third race known as Belgriclungreians, which mouthful is eventually shortened to “Dwarves” for everybody’s but their own convenience. There are also ancient beings known as Grenmorians (giants) and goblins, both of them essentially subserviant to the Fhrey. The ElvFhrey are arrogant, tall, generally blond with startling blue eyes and tear-shaped / pointed ears and have a life span of approximately 3000 years (you can see why this “prehistory” series is set almost exactly three millennia prior to what is “present day” in the Riyria cycle); the humans are … human (generally dark- or red-haired with brown eyes) with a life span in which not everybody reaches their sixties and anybody even older is considered ancient, and the Dwarves are short, stocky, generally surly, great builders and miners, known to carry grudges, braid their hair and beards, and prefer life underground to life above ground. (Contrary to popular belief, their women do not have beards, however; they have round faces and their cheeks are reminiscent of ripe apples.) Somewhat later in the series, dragons also make a rather noticeable appearance, even if the vast majority of those that we meet don’t hatch from eggs but are created under rather harrowing circumstances — and, last but not least, there’s also a host of gods owing their existence to a mash-up of Ancient Greek / Roman and Norse mythology and creational legends, liberally sprinkled with bits of naturalist paganism. So far, so much well-trodden ground.
It its initial setup, this series is essentially a culture clash between the highly-developed Fhrey — whose culture is a blend of traditional Elven lore and Ancient Rome, a monarchy ruled by a person known as the fane, with a medieval tribal division by professions, representation of the tribes in two panels that serve as advisors to the fane, a “some Fhrey are more equal than others” tribe of magicians (known as “artists”), and Tolkinian cities dominated by high towers, as well as the odd solitary tower, all thrown in for good measure — and the humans. The latters’ culture is prehistoric on approximately a Bronze Age level (or at most, the level of the “barbarian” tribes overpowered by the Romans in their conquest of the better part of the then-known world); as long as they can remember have been venerating the Fhrey as gods (in addition to their own, even elder tribal gods), thus allowing the Fhrey dominion over themselves: something the Fhrey have taken advantage of both directly, e.g. by demanding and accepting tributes and setting rules and limitations to the “Rhunes”‘ pitiful existence, and indirectly, by fostering neverending hostilities between the two main groups of “Rhunes”, the western, somewhat higher-developed Rhulyn-Rhunes and the eastern and distinctly barbaric and primitive Gula-Rhunes, in order to keep both groups busy and focused on attacking each other instead of the Fhrey, in a classic “divide and conquer” move. — It doesn’t take until book 2 (Age of Swords) that the Dwarves make their first appearance, though even in the first book we already learn that in the far distant past there has been a runious war between the Fhrey and another race (namely, the Dwarves), which is remembered with great bitterness by the members of both peoples.
This whole, from the perspective of the Fhrey of course largely satisfactory system goes pear-shaped in little more than a cosmic split second when at the beginning of book 1 (Age of Myth), in search of food, a warrior from the hardship-proof “Rhune” tribe of Dureya and his youngest (and only surviving) son Raithe brave the river dividing their lands from those of the Fhrey, to enter which is forbidden to them … and when, upon being discovered as trespassers by a passing group of Fhrey, that group’s leader kills the older Dureyan warrior and, much to everybody’s stupefaction, the Fhrey leader is killed by Raithe in turn: something that had been considered flat-out impossible up to that point. Because gods are immortal, aren’t they? — Obviously Raithe takes to his heels, in the company of a guy who intruduces himself as Malcolm, heretofore slave to the Fhrey, and thanks to whose bragging about Raithe’s deed once they are back on no-longer-quite safe Rhulyn ground, Raithe in short order becomes known as “the God Killer”.
From here on out, the Fhrey — who are actually much less united among themselves than they appear to the humans — are set on constituting an example, and it only takes the briefest of time before the two Rhulyn communities closest to Erivan, Dureya and Nadak, are razed, leaving not a single person alive and not a single building undestroyed. Raithe and Malcolm find sanctuary in the settlement of Dahl Rhen, after having come across Persephone, the widow of that community’s recently-killed chiftain, and a young seer named Suri (as well as Suri’s pet wolf Minna) in the Crescent Forest surrounding the settlement. It is here that they also meet most of the series’s other main characters, most notably a girl named Brin, the apprentice to the community’s “keeper of ways” (official collective memory and oral historian), a brash young beauty named Moya, a former cruelly abused, shy and timid slave named Roan who is so traumatized that she isn’t even aware that she is also a polymath, and a physically-disabled and seriously misshapen potter named Gifford. Things get interesting when a band of Fhrey from the warrior tribe of the Instarya, originating from the fortress city nearest to Rhulyn, Alon Rist, and led by an Instaryan prince named Nyphron, also show up in Dahl Rhen (among others, the band also includes a warrior named Tekchin); followed soon thereafter by an “artist” (sorceress) named Arion belonging to the Fhrey magician tribe of the Miralyith (pronounced MIRreleath), as well as, eventually — but not for long — her former student, the current fane’s (Lothian’s) self-absorbed, spoiled and not-very-bright son Mawyndulë, accompanied by the fane’s first minister, Gryndal. At the beginning of book 2, we also meet three Dwarves named Frost, Flood, and Rain who will remain with us for the better part of the rest of the series. And, well, then there’s also Tressa, the wife of the successor of Persephone’s husband as chieftain, whom in light of the events narrated in Age of Myth nobody really likes very much — and Tesh, a young Dureyan survivor of the Fhreys’ wholesale destruction of his native community.
For the first three books, we follow the path of the aforementioned people in what, over the course of these books, spirals into a full-out war between humans and Fhrey, with notable excursions into the Crescent Forest outside Dahl Rhen and, later, into the undepths underneath the erstwhile Dwarven capital, which are haunted by a prehistoric … thing; as well as the removal of the entire community of Dahl Rhen first to the coastal settlement of Tirre and then into southwestern Erivan, the formation of unions and alliances of both a romantic and a political nature, the growth of friendships, but also vicious enmity and power struggles on both sides of the warring lines, a ride to rival that of Paul Revere, and plenty of other excitements.
All of this is highly enjoyable stuff: not quite on Tolkien’s level of creativity, sometimes just a tad too convenient — both in terms of certain plot developments and in the way in which Brin and Roan, between the two of them, essentially fast-track the humans out of their primitive culture (and even teach the Fhrey a thing or three) by inventing, in rapid succession, the wheel, the axle, the cart, the chariot, the pocket, steel, bow and arrows, books and writing, and a plethora of other useful things –; and while I don’t necessarily need Tolkien’s deliberately formal language in a fantasy setting, Sullivan’s is occasionally just too casual and a bit too littered with contemporary colloquialisms to match the high-flying aspiration of creating a 3,000 years-old backstory for a contemporary fantasy society, which backstory has, over the course of the past three millennia, passed into the realm of myth and legend.
But it’s a fast-paced narrative, and where Sullivan’s writing really shines is in the creation of believable and fully-rounded characters, all flawed in their own ways but likeable (well, minus Mawyndulë, Gryndal and, increasingly, fane Lothian, all of whom we’re supposed to hate … and boy, did I ever): including and in particular several female characters who all — some of them, quite painfully — learn to stand their ground in an ostensibly male-dominated society and emerge as leaders in ways that their male neighbors and peers would never have expected (never mind that the reader does: even so these women’s paths, as well as, incidentally, those of the male main characters, are never easy, nor are they ever a foregone conclusion). And if there is one thing to be said for Sullivan’s sometimes rather obviously casual use of language, it’s that it very well reflects how refreshingly little he takes himself seriously as a storyteller in the first place. Despite the frequently gut-wrenching narrative, Sullivan’s sense of humor — which, for the little I’ve seen so far, is much more obvious in the Riyria books — does shine through occasionally, but it’s never self-aware and always in keeping with the characters speaking and acting at that particular point.
Book 4 (Age of Legend) begins with a stalemate between the two warring parties, but if you’d been expecting this to be a preparation for a cataclysmic, more or less directly war- / battle-related event propelling the plotline to its next major event, you couldn’t have been more wrong. Rather, the narrative mode shifts into sudden and full-on “quest” mode along the lines of a story arc borrowing heavily from Dante’s Divine Comedy — including its tripartite division into Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise — and from Hades, the underworld of Greek and Roman mythology, with half the sagas even partially set in that place (Persephone, Orpheus and Eurydice, Odyssey, Aenid, you name them) jostling for prominence as its godparents, with the Greek creational myth of Gaia and Uranus lording over it all, Cadmus and Jason merrily (and literally) sowing dragons’ teeth in the background, Yggdrasil (merged with the White Tree of Gondor) and Fenrir (merged with Cerberus) showing up just so you don’t forget the Norse contingent, and everybody at one point literally taking a yellowwhite brick road.
I assume Sullivan created this “quest” story arc in order to be able to fully introduce the deities that have been hovering in the background of the narrative all along, and who may or may not have a hand, or at least be referenced in the Riyria cycle, but about whom the main characters of the Legends of the First Empire cycle, earthbound creatures that they are, cannot possibly know anything for certain — indeed, for the better part of the first 3 1/2 books, these gods appear as nothing more than typical pagan deities, in a cult that is superstition more than anything else (in fact, don’t tell the Fhrey, but it turns out that one of these books’ three main peoples even gets the sex of their main deity wrong … and as for the Fhrey themselves, well, it’s established beyond cavil at this point that they are anything but god-like).
Anyway — while I can see a rationale for this story arc, it badly threw me, and although in itself it is well-told and contains some of the entire six books’ most harrowing and impressively-created moments, to me it nevertheless felt forced into a narrative based on an entirely different premise (namely, an armed culture clash along the well-established lines of the fantasy genre). It’s one thing, as Tolkien does in the Silmarillion, to include interactions between deities — and their “dark side” opponents — and the earth-bound peoples (humans, Elves, Dwarves, etc.) literally from word 1 of his narrative and, much in the way in which most mythologies work, to weave such interactions into virtually every constituent story of that mythological universe. It’s quite another thing to start out with the story of a war between exclusively earthbound people to whom gods are entities of pagan veneration but with whom they have never interacted — nor can they even be certain of their actual existence — and to suddenly then shift into an entirely different type of story arc prominently involving interactions with these deities, which is allowed to run its course almost completely without interruption, while the war continues in stalemate mode and nothing much happens elsewhere, either. (A few events do occur, particularly in the lands of the Fhrey, but compared to the until-then breathless pace of the build-up to the war and its cataclysmic battle, and also compared to the equally breathless pace of the “quest” narrative arc itself, this isn’t much more than what is absolutely necessary to move the story along so the “war” narrative can at last be freed from its stalemate freeze in time for the Legends cycle’s conclusion.) From a storytelling perspective, this is awkward in the extreme, and it’s certainly not helped by the fact that the quest narrative’s literary and mythological sources of inspiration are essentially plastered all over it to the point of smacking of copycatting, even if the actual events occurring during this narrative strand are in keeping both with the underlying world building of the Legends of the First Empire and with the natures and characters of the individuals undertaking the quest. (As a final side note, while I realize that the main setting of this quest narrative does not conform to an earthbound rules of geography, one of its elements also didn’t make sense to me location-wise, even if I understand why it was included in the first place.)
Still and all, this has been an enjoyable adventure, and I’ll definitely be back for more of Michael J. Sullivan’s writing.
Elan — the world in which the Legends of the First Empire and Riyria cycles are set — at the end of the Legends of the First Empire (= on Day 1 of the calendar of the empire newly founded at that time): The main areas to be concerned with in the Legends cycle are Erivan (the land of the Fhrey), Rhulyn (the land of the humans), and Belgreg (the land of the Dwarves).
(Printable map from Michael J. Sullivan’s blog)
The area in which almost all of the Legends of the First Empire are set:
- Estremadon is the capital of Erivan (the land of the Fhrey).
- Avempartha is a magic tower created above a waterfall in the middle of the Nidwalden River (on the border of the Erivan heartland surrounding Estremadon) by a legendary Fhrey fane named Fenelyus (pronounced, depending on which narrator you’re listening to, either FennelLEyas or FenNELlius), the mother of the present fane, Lothian.
- Mount Mador is an artificial mountain below which fane Fenelyus singlehandedly buried the better part of the Dwarven army in the war between hers and their peoples (note: this is backstory, not a spoiler).
- The Swamp of Ith is … a really nasty place.
- Alon Rist is the Fhrey outpost nearest to Rhulyn and is the seat of the Instarya, the Fhrey warrior tribe.
- Grandford is a battlefield south of Alon Rist.
- Rhen, Dureya, Nadak, Tirre, and Gula (as well as Melen, Menahan and Warric) are human (“Rhune”) settlements (“dahls”); of these, Dahl Rhen is home to most of the story’s human main characters, whereas Raithe and one other significant human character named Tesh are Dureyans, and Tirre is a harbor community and the only human settlement regularly trading with the Dwarves across the Blue Sea in Belgreg.
- The Crescent Forest is a large forest forming a half circle around Dahl Rhen, and
- Neith is the Dwarves’ erstwhile underground capital, which literally for eons has been haunted by a giant prehistoric creature named Balgargarath.
For reference: The distance between Avempartha and Estremadon is three days by horse-drawn cart. The distance between Dahl Rhen and Tirre is a three days’ walk for an individual person or very small group of travelers, but took over five days to cover when the whole community of Dahl Rhen moved to Tirre en bloc.
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