The Rivan Codex: Ancient Texts of THE BELGARIAD and THE MALLOREON (The Belgariad / The Malloreon)
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I’ll close with a recommendation. My personal favorite fantasy author is Lord Dunsany. He teaches me humility, since he does more in four pages than I can do in four hundred. Read The Book of Wonder. Get to know Slith, Thangobrind the jeweler, Pombo the Idolater, and Nuth. Ponder the fate of people who jump off the edge of the world. Consider the folly of messing around with Hlo-Hlo, the Spider idol. Journey across the Plains of Zid, through the cities of Mursk and Tlun, around the shoulder of the Peak of Mluna that overlooks the Dubious Land, and cross the bridge from Bad to Worse.
Go ahead. I dare you.
THE END
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1 This first-person narrative was written to give us a grip on Belgarath’s character and we wrote it almost twenty years ago. I always felt there was a story there. As it turned out, there were two, Belgarath the Sorcerer and Polgara the Sorceress. After we’d finished the Belgariad/Malloreon, we knew how the story ended, so we could then go back and write the beginning. Most of Part I of Belgarath the Sorcerer is an expansion of this ancient manuscript, which also dictated the first-person narrative approach.
2 The name of the village was added in Belgarath the Sorcerer to justify his name linguistically. ‘Garath’ could mean ‘of the village of Gara’ in the archaic form of several languages.
3 These old people are those Ulgos who chose not to follow Gorim to Prolgu. ‘As the branch that is cut off, they are witheréd and dying.’ (Because their women are barren.)
4 It was not until the Malloreon that we revealed the Orb’s off-world origin. At first it was simply a rock Aldur had picked up in a riverbed and modified with the touch of his hand.
5 An early indication of the prohibition against unmaking things.
6 A note here for the linguistically obsessed. ‘Bel’ may or may not be ‘the symbol of the Will and the Word’. It is more likely that it means ‘beloved’. ‘Bel’ is the masculine form, and ‘Pol’ is the feminine. Polgara’s name derives directly from her father’s name, since it’s a patronymic like ‘Ivan Ivanovitch’ (Ivan son of Ivan) or ‘Natasha Ivanova’ (Natasha, daughter of Ivan) in Russian. Note that this principle does not apply to the name of Pol’s sister, Beldaran, which perhaps indicates that Belgarath loved Beldaran more than he loved Pol.
7 Notice that Belzedar’s obsession with the Orb is introduced here.
8 This is grammatically incorrect. When using archaic language it is important to pay attention to the verb forms, which are not the same in second person familiar as they are in second person formal. The proper form here would be ‘wouldst’.
9 ‘The high places of Korim, which are no more’ are visited at the end of the Malloreon. This is misdirection from Belgarath.
10 That is not ‘another story’. It’s the core of this one.
11 This is a creation myth with resonances of the myths of several cultures on this world. It even has a flood. The flood myths on planet Earth were probably generated by the melt-down of the last ice age about 12,000 years ago. The flood on Garion’s world was the result of a volcanic incident, which is described in some detail in the preliminary studies to the Malloreon.
12 The maiming of a god has no obvious counterpoint in the mythologies of this world. Milton, however, did lock Lucifer permanently into the form of the serpent after he used that form in the temptation of Eve. The branding of Cain may also be an equivalent.
13 We changed this in Belgarath the Sorcerer. That ‘thousand leagues’ looks great in a ‘Holy Book’, but it’s too cumbersome in a story. Moreover, three thousand miles would have put them in the general vicinity of the north pole.
14 The account in Belgarath the Sorcerer differs. The pack ice of winter offered an alternative to that ‘land bridge’.
15 ‘Doom’ originates in Scandinavian mythology, and the word in contemporary English derives from the Scandinavian ‘dom’. It does not mean ‘preordained death’, but rather ‘destiny’ or ‘fate’.
16 An abbreviated version of this became the prologue for Book One of the Belgariad, Pawn of Prophecy, and Belgarath repeated it at Faldor’s farm to give Garion a reference point. It also recurs in Belgarath the Sorcerer.
17 The University of Tol Honeth has its origins in this headnote: a group who were meticulous about details, but who had no idea what was really going on.
18 The chronology was revised.
19 This passage establishes the apostasy of Belzedar. In actuality, Zedar is a tragic hero. When he originally went to Mallorea, he thought he was clever enough to deceive Torak. He was wrong, and, like Urvon and Ctuchik, he is more a slave than a disciple.
20 This is typical of the Nyissan character, and the addition of the hundreds of narcotics available to them enabled us to posit an alien culture with no correspondence to any on this world. It is reasonable for them to be the way they are. Their society has echoes of the Egyptian, but only slight ones.
21 This was written to explain the haunting of Maragor. Note that we now have two insane gods (Torak being the other). Mara recovers, however, when Taiba appears. Note also the hints of a matriarchal society.
22 The merchant class has been greatly neglected in fantasy, but wrongly. This Tolnedran ‘greed’ added an interesting side-light to the character of our heroine. Ce’Nedra loves money.
23 As mentioned in the Introduction this was a false start. We were still groping around the edges of ‘the Will and the Word’ when it was written, and this was an attempt to define it and to set some limits, the most important being that you have to believe that it is going to work. This ‘power’ is essentially Godlike. (And God said, ‘Let there BE light! And there WAS light.’) The King James version is poetic, but some of its translations are highly questionable. The West Saxon translation (eighth century) uses the word ‘Geworcht’ (‘Make’ or ‘construct’) instead of that oversimplification ‘BE’. This suggests that there’s a certain amount of effort involved in the process.
24 This is that ‘unmaking’ business that we finally prohibited.
25 Once we started on this particular Holy Book we began to see all kinds of possibilities beyond the original intention of providing background for Relg. And when we expanded the Ulgos into the Dals, the Melcenes, the Morindim, and the Karands, we had constructed much of the non-Angarak population of Mallorea.
26 Here is that prohibition, but this isn’t the final word. It was ultimately refined so that ‘Be not’ wouldn’t obliterate the entire world, but only the person foolish enough to say it. Primitive mythologies seethed with ‘forbidden words’ (‘Jehovah’ is probably the most prominent). We tampered with that idea and made the obliteration the result of a command rather than a mere word. Sin doth lie in the intent.
&nb
sp; 27 This date is not a coincidence. Garion was born in 5354, so he is fourteen at this point (and so is Ce’Nedra). This is the year when the quest begins with Garion, Polgara and Belgarath leaving Faldor’s farm to join Silk and Barak.
28 This brief section is really no more than a verbalization of the map cast in the fictionalized voice of the scholars at the University of Tol Honeth. Note that we describe only half a continent at this stage.
29 We used the ‘league’ (three miles) fairly consistently.
30 This is an absurdity, of course. Fun, though.
31 The University of Tol Honeth supposedly exists for the sole purpose of educating the crown prince. Also, we decided to distinguish between ‘your Highness’ and ‘your Majesty’. (‘Highness’ for a prince or princess; ‘Majesty’ for a king or queen.) This is not consistently followed in the royal courts of this world.
32 The use of the word ‘race’ is somewhat archaic. The Alorns are clearly Scandinavian; the Tolnedrans, Marags, Arends, and Nyissans are Mediterranean. The Angaraks, with their ‘angular eyes’ were intended to suggest the Mongols of Genghis Khan or the Huns of Attila.
33 The emperor who commissioned this study was a member of the Borune family, so the scholar who wrote this was evidently trying to ingratiate himself.
34 The dynasties provided a convenient, methodical way to establish the chronology. That was their main purpose, but the frictions between the great families also proved very useful.
35 This was significantly modified in Belgarath the Sorcerer. The notion that a race of pirates had never heard of the richest place on earth before is obviously absurd. As an aside here, note that in ‘Beowulf’, the original King of the Spear-Danes (Gar-Dena) is referred to as ‘the Sheaf Child’, an obvious derivation from the Story of Moses. The people of the dark ages did have contacts with each other, and some Viking stole the idea and shamelessly used it in ‘Beowulf.’
36 This is one of those ‘internal footnotes’ I mentioned earlier.
37 This was modified later. Kal-Torak (Torak himself) did have a second army, but it came from the south, not the east, and it was bogged down in the Desert of Araga by that unnatural blizzard.
38 This ‘history’ is a scant 40 pages (or so) in length, but it gave a grand overview of about 5000 years of history which proved to be invaluable.
39 These little details add the necessary sense of reality to a story. Note that most of them are the same as they are here in the ‘real’ world.
40 These values are arbitrary, and have little relationship to the current value of precious metals.
41 In Belgarath the Sorcerer Belgarath spends some time in Maragor after Poledra’s apparent death. This paragraph on Marag social organization served as the basis for that sojourn.
42 This xenophobic restriction was significantly relaxed during the actual writing.
43 This account differs markedly from the one in Belgarath the Sorcerer.
44 Geran becomes a boy of six in Belgarath the Sorcerer and Polgara the Sorceress.
45 This description of Barak derives from an earlier character sketch.
46 We chose not to follow the institution of thralldom (slavery). It was present in Europe during the Dark Ages, but it would have served no purpose in this story.
47 These population numbers were low throughout. We had the Dark Ages in mind, but the societies that developed in the story were noticeably more advanced.
48 The Bear-cult makes its first appearance here. At the time we had no idea how important it would turn out to be.
49 The reindeer were later eliminated.
50 We chose not to follow up on this battle.
51 This was written before the scale was established. It is in fact 80 leagues from Boktor to the Vale, and crack infantry could make that far in eight days.
52 Quite frequently the costumes proved irrelevant.
53 This was not retained.
54 The ‘secret language’ proved to be very useful, although it was just an aside in the Preliminaries.
55 This section is more detailed because ‘Our Hero’ is raised in Sendaria and believes that he’s a Sendar.
56 Mandorallen and Lelldorin grew out of this segment.
57 We expanded on the destruction of Vo Wacune at the beginning of Queen of Sorcery and during Polgara the Sorceress.
58 We largely ignored the Arendish church in the story. There were occasional references to monks and monasteries, but we saw no real purpose in getting too deeply involved in the intricacies of a religion resembling medieval Catholicism.
59 This is almost entirely misconception—something on the order of those late medieval geographies which announced (in all seriousness) that the natives of Madagascar had a foot growing out of the tops of their heads.
60 Obviously, the Algroths, Hrulgin, and Eldrakyn, among others.
61 Salmissra is modeled in part on Cleopatra, obviously, and Nyissan society is to a degree Egyptian, though not entirely. In the Belgariad the Nyissans are incomprehensible villains, but in the Malloreon Sadi proved to be an important character, as did Zith.
62 An obvious reference to the ruins of Angkor Wat in Cambodia.
63 So much for “prissy.”
64 The Tolnedrans didn’t know about southern Cthol Murgos at this point.
65 Gethel was elevated to the throne in the Belgariad.
66 This was significantly modified as the character Vella was developed.
67 In the books, there are the additional characters Ctuchik and Urvon.
68 This changed. Mal Zeth is probably bigger than Tol Honeth.
69 This was greatly modified in the writing.
70 This section is pastiche romance, intended to establish Arendish psychology.
71 Another aside which proved very important.
72 This was modified.
73 This is probably a geological impossibility. Volcanoes do erupt under the oceans of this world, and that does not produce thermonuclear detonations.
74 This derives from the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy of pre-Norman England, seven kingdoms that didn’t co-exist very well. Their dissension opened the door for the Vikings.
75 This was a common practice in antiquity. Attila the Hun, for example, spent several years of his childhood in the City of Rome. The idea was to civilize and Christianize him. It didn’t work out that way, however.
76 The Orb and the Sardion.
77 Eriond changed this.
78 This is the vision of Cyradis.
79 Read the opening canto of The Divine Comedy for a comparison.
80 The Mallorean Gospels took three months to write. It was worth the time and effort, since in a rather obscure way these Gospels provided a philosophical basis for The Malloreon. This is what Cyradis believed, and Cyradis was ultimately the core of Malloreon.
81 I always like Anheg. He has his faults, but he’s a lot of fun.
82 We dropped the apostrophe at the beginning of Zakath’s name, although it was an indication that ‘Kal’ had been omitted (‘Kal Zakath’ hints around the edges of Zakath’s insanity. Right at first he was at least as mad as Taur Urgas).
83 This was heavily revised, eliminating the meeting between Belgarath and Urvon and the confrontation between Polgara and Zandramas. The conference did not happen, and Cyradis visited the town of Rheon after Garion had put down the Bear-cult uprising at the end of Guardians of the West.
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