Ian Irvine is a marine scientist who decided he wanted to write stories and now has over a million books in print.
Ian has written twenty-four novels, including three bestselling fantasy series, The View from the Mirror, The Well of Echoes and Song of the Tears, and three eco-thrillers about catastrophic climate change, the Human Rites trilogy. His fantasy novels have been published in many countries and languages. He has also written ten novels for children and young adults, including fantasy and comic fantasy.
He lives with his family in the mountains of northern NSW, Australia. Ian’s web site is www.ian-irvine.com, and he can be contacted at [email protected].
1 See his essay “The Other: Orientalism, Colonialism, and Children’s Literature” in Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 17.
2 You can read more about these studies at http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/teenage-brain-a-work-in-progress.shtml.
3 See his article at http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10060 http://koreanish.wordpress.com/2008/01/26/grow-and-develop-james-woods-on-characters-in-fiction/.
4 For example, in one review at http://www.geocities.com/fantasticreviews/eragon_paolini.htm: “You could accuse Paolini of getting the word ‘tenebrous’ out of his thesaurus.” (Generally this reviewer likes Paolini.)
5 Murtagh, however, does seem to have been chosen by his dragon, Thorn. He tells Eragon in Eldest, “And after Thorn hatched for me, Galbatorix forced both of us to swear loyalty to him in the Ancient Language.” Perhaps there is hope for Murtagh yet; perhaps Thorn was as wise as Saphira and found a way to avoid committing to Galbatorix as Saphira found a way to avoid committing herself fully to the Varden.
6 King Arthur’s sister-lover and nasty, nasty elf-sorceress! She seduces her own brother, King Arty!
7 . . . and movie makers. Lest anyone doubt the legacy of the benign, lovely faery in later fantasy, think no further than the beautiful Liv Tyler (Arwen) and Orlando Bloom (Legolas) of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings. Consider Julia Roberts as Tinkerbell in Stephen Spielberg’s Hook, or the original animated Tink, fashioned deliberately by Disney artists after Marilyn Monroe. Okay, so one might argue that Will Ferrell hardly counts as pretty in Jon Favreau’s Elf, but still he’s arguably cute. And harmless.
8 “Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen” from The Magic Flute.
9 Homer’s Sirens were those sweet-throated babes whose songs were seemingly irresistible to sailors, with few exceptions: Only Orpheus and Odysseus/ Ulysses managed to escape their lethal lullaby lures.
10 In Geraldine McCaughrean’s Peter Pan in Scarlet, we encounter an even darker version of Barrie’s original elf.
11 Not unlike Kiefer Sutherland as leader of another gang of Lost Boys in the 1987 movie by the same name, featuring not elves but their blood-sucking vamp cousins.
12 W. B. Yeats was especially enamored of these faeries, apparently a true believer in their existence, and Purkiss suggests, decidedly keen to cast them as “essential to Irish life.” He, like Keats, preferred the “faery” spelling that Tolkien also favored. For Yeats, faeries were fraught with difficult ambivalence. They were at once a mixture of loveliness and malice yet also a source of inspiration and national identity—in other words, poetry and death (which many students and my boyfriend would argue aren’t very far apart!). His “The Stolen Child” is an abduction poem in the tradition of “The Erlkönig” and “The Song of Wandering Aengus” hearkens back to Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.”
13 And since goblin and imp are often used synonymously with elf and fairy, the truly evil Tolkien faerie folk are his goblin/orcs, upon which Paolini modelled his brutish Urgals/Kulls.
14 In his essay “Laws and Customs of the Eldar,” Tolkien admits to chaste unions between his “Good People.”
15 Puck’s famous elfish pronouncement in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
16 See, e.g., Robert Coover’s article “The End of Books” in the New York Times.
17 The beautiful lady, Duessa (in reality an ugly witch), is the personification of what was for Edmund Spenser one of the greatest evils of his time, the Roman Catholic Church. It isn’t hard to see Pullman’s Mrs. Coulter in her:The Witch approching gan him fayrely greet,
And with reproch of carelesnes unkynd,
Upbrayd, for leaving her in place unmeet,
With fowle words tempring faire, soure gall with hony sweet.
18 He does so in his introduction to the 1971 edition of William Morris’s The Water of the Wondrous Isles.
19 E.g., in David Pringle’s introduction to Modern Fantasy: The Hundred Best Novels .
THIS PUBLICATION HAS NOT BEEN PREPARED, APPROVED, OR LICENSED BY ANY ENTITY THAT CREATED OR PRODUCED THE WELL-KNOWN BOOKS ERAGON, ELDEST, OR BRISINGR, OR THE INHERITANCE CYCLE.
“Ten Things About Christopher Paolini” and “It’s in His Character” Copyright © 2008 by Jeremy Owen
“Riding the Dragon” Copyright © 2008 by Michael Dowling
“Roran: The Reluctant Hero” Copyright © 2008 by J. FitzGerald McCurdy
“The Magic of Anthropomorphic Animals” Copyright © 2008 by Nancy Yi Fan
“My Dragon, Myself” Copyright © 2008 by Kelly McClymer
“Eldest ≠ Wisest” Copyright © 2008 by Susan Vaught
“Q: How Does a Fifteen-Year-Old Do This?” Copyright © 2008 by Carol Plum-Ucci
“The Modern-Day Perceval” Copyright © 2008 by Joshua Pantalleresco
“The Thing About Elves Is ...” Copyright © 2008 by Gail Sidonie Sobat
“How the Inheritance Cycle Differs From Fantasy Epics of the Past” Copyright © 2008 by Ian Irvine
Additional Materials Copyright © 2008 by James A. Owen
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
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Secrets of the Dragon Riders: Your Favorite Authors on Christopher Paolini's Inheritance Cycle: Completely Unauthorized Page 16
