Stephen King's the Dark Tower: The Complete Concordance Revised and Updated

by Robin Furth

  On the way to Debaria, Roland and Jamie stop at Serenity, where they meet the giant prioress, EVERLYNNE, and the disfigured FORTUNA, who had survived an attack by the skin-man. Although elsewhere in Mid-World Roland is addressed as “son of Steven,” in woman-centered Serenity, Roland is called “son of Gabrielle.” Toward the end of the novel, after Roland and Jamie have defeated the skin-man, Everlynne invites Roland into her private chamber so that she can share her knowledge of Gabrielle’s final days. Through Everlynne, we learn that before Gabrielle left Serenity, Marten Broadcloak had come to the retreat, demanding to see the wife of Gilead’s dinh. Showing him her knife, Everlynne had sent the evil magician away, but she was certain that Broadcloak had succeeded in gaining an audience with Gabrielle anyway.

  Before returning to Gilead, Gabrielle had given Everlynne a note which she asked the prioress to hand to her son when he came to Debaria. Blotted and uneven, the writing was as disjointed and distraught as the mind of the woman who had penned it. Much to our surprise, Gabrielle’s note proved that Roland’s mother knew that she was destined to die at her son’s hand, yet she returned to her home city anyway. Roland never shared this missive with his father, though he carried Gabrielle’s dead letter with him for many years after the fall of Gilead and the disastrous battle at JERICHO HILL. Although most of Gabrielle’s letter was in low speech, the final words were in High Speech. They said I forgive you everything. Can you forgive me? Roland traced these letters over and over until the paper fell apart and the wind took it.

  I:71–72 (71 mistake: should say mother not father), I:77, I:95, I:106, I:127, I:136, I:151–52, I:159–61, I:167, I:171, I:173, I:187, I:205, III:417, IV:7, IV:107, IV:110–11, IV:223 (and Olive Thorin), IV:257, IV:317, IV:439, IV:594–95 (Roland’s memory of his parents, Lake Saroni; 595 Gabrielle of Arten), IV:619, IV:620, IV:652–58 (Roland’s matricide), IV:661–62, IV:665–66, E:195, V:36 (Roland’s mother), V:77 (Roland’s mother), V:188, V:193 (indirect), V:410, V:415, V:605, V:659 (mother), VII:22–23, VII:179, VII:529, VII:801, VII:820, VII:821, VII:822, VII:823, VII:829

  GABRIELLE DESCHAIN’S ASSOCIATES:

  **ALAN (GABRIELLE’S FATHER): In the 2003 version of The Gunslinger, we are told that Gabrielle’s father’s name was Alan.

  CANDOR THE TALL: Gabrielle Deschain’s father. VII:529

  ROLAND’S CRADLE AMAH: Roland’s childhood nurse. III:33, III:39, III:40, V:188, W:14, W:31 (mother), W:35, W:36 (mother), W:37, W:38, W:40, W:41 (her people in Beesford-on-Arten), W:53, W:67, W:68 (and starkblast), W:82–83 (mother), W:89, W:99 (indirect), 105, 106, 267 (indirect), 268 (indirect), 296–300 (299 “last shreds of sanity” letter), W:305, W:306

  DESCHAIN, HENRY (HENRY THE TALL)

  Henry the Tall was STEVEN DESCHAIN’s father and Roland’s grandfather.

  IV:270–71, W:35

  DESCHAIN, HORN OF

  See ELD, ARTHUR: HORN OF ELD

  DESCHAIN, MORDRED

  See MORDRED

  DESCHAIN, ROLAND (THE GUNSLINGER, THE REALLY BAD MAN, OLD WHITE DADDY, WILL-DEARBORN-THAT-WAS, GABBY)

  Roland Deschain began life in our world as a version of Sergio Leone’s Man with No Name, a wandering Clint Eastwood–type character traveling across a desert wasteland littered with the weapons, poisons, and machinery of an extinct civilization. However, as so often happens with characters, he soon morphed beneath the pen of his creator, STEPHEN KING, shook off the paper pulp, and stepped into the room, a full-fledged being in his own right.

  The Roland we have come to know so well over the Dark Tower series is MID-WORLD’s last hereditary gunslinger and the final human descendant of ARTHUR ELD, the ancient King of ALL-WORLD. Born in the IN-WORLD BARONY OF NEW CANAAN before the world moved on, Roland witnessed the toppling of his civilization and the drowning of his family and friends in the wave of anarchy that followed. Although he still carries the sandalwood-handled guns of his forefathers—guns whose barrels were forged from EXCALIBUR, the blade of Arthur Eld—Roland is a king without a kingdom. However, as a Warrior of the WHITE, he still has a quest—he will travel to the DARK TOWER, that linchpin of the time/space continuum, and climb to the room at the top, where he will question the God or Force that resides there.

  Although he does not realize it, Roland, Warrior of the White, is a version of the eternal hero. Like his enemies who serve the Outer Dark, Roland darkles and tincts. He will relive his quest over and over, saving both Tower and BEAMS again and again, until he comes to understand that success must not be won at the cost of either the heart or the soul. Only when he remains true to his actual destiny (symbolized by the HORN OF ELD, which he must sound at the edge of CAN’-KA NO REY) will the Tower grant him the peace he so desires.

  Since Roland is the main character of the Dark Tower series, his presence is implied in all other entries. For specific information about Roland’s various adventures, look up the other characters or places involved. For example, if you want to read about Roland’s interactions with DANDELO and PATRICK DANVILLE, look up both of those characters in the CHARACTERS section of the Concordance. If you wish to learn more about the battle of JERICHO HILL, look up JERICHO HILL in the MID-WORLD PLACES section. If you wish to learn more about Roland’s adventures in DEBARIA, where he and JAMIE DeCURRY searched for the shapeshifting SKIN-MAN, look up those references in the MID-WORLD PLACES and CHARACTERS sections.

  RING-A-LEVIO (RINGO): Ringo was Roland’s pet dog. He died when Roland was three. VII:824

  YOUNG JOE (ROLAND’S HORSE): W:48 (named here; riding longer)

  **DESCHAIN, STEVEN (ROLAND THE ELDER)

  Steven Deschain, the last Lord of Light, was twenty-ninth, on a side line of descent, from ARTHUR ELD, King of ALL-WORLD. (In other words, he was descended from one of Arthur’s side-wives, or jillies.) Before Roland gained his guns at fourteen, Steven Deschain was the youngest apprentice to prove his manhood and win his weapons. (Steven bested CORT when he was sixteen.) After he was murdered, and after the final gunslingers were defeated at the battle of JERICHO HILL, the last vestiges of MID-WORLD’s decaying civilization collapsed into complete anarchy.

  Steven Deschain (also occasionally called Roland the Elder) was the leader of NEW CANAAN’s gunslingers. Tall, painfully thin, and with a heavy handlebar mustache, the elder Deschain’s gruff looks belied his actual nobility. Like all the gunslingers, he was an aristocrat, and it was in part this class division that turned many common people against the AFFILIATION and toward the cause of the traitorous GOOD MAN, JOHN FARSON. Like his fathers before him, Steven Deschain wore the true gunslinger’s six-shooters—the ones with sandalwood grips—against the wings of his hips. He passed them on to Roland after the younger man proved himself in HAMBRY.

  In the 2003 Gunslinger, we learn that during Roland’s childhood his father managed to take control of his ka-tet (the tet of the Gun), and was on the verge of becoming dinh of Gilead, if not all of IN-WORLD. He was betrayed by the serpent in his bosom—his own counselor and sorcerer, MARTEN—who first seduced his wife and then raised the forces of anarchy in his lands. Although Steven didn’t know it, Marten was actually a shape-shifter of multiple identities, known to CONSTANT READERS as WALTER O’DIM. In all of his incarnations, Walter/Marten/R.F. served the chaotic force of THE CRIMSON KING. Hence he opposed the WHITE and all who championed it.

  Just as Steven Deschain’s decision to send Roland, ALAIN, and CUTHBERT to HAMBRY set off the chain of events of Wizard and Glass, so Steven’s decision to send Roland and JAMIE DeCURRY to DEBARIA initiated Roland’s adventures with the SKIN-MAN, recounted in Wind Through the Keyhole. In both cases, Steven’s decisions were motivated by his deep—although not always apparent—love and respect for his son. In Wizard and Glass, the elder Deschain wanted to keep Roland safe from Marten Broadcloak’s assassins and so sent him east—as far from the Good Man’s rebellions as he could. (He did not yet realize that Hambry had already fallen to the enemy.) In “The Skin-Man,” Steven wanted to save Roland from himself. (In penance for murder
ing his mother, Roland had appointed himself as the nurse and AMMIE for his broken teacher, CORT.)

  Unlike his wife, GABRIELLE, whose belief in love and romance proved to be her undoing, Steven Deschain was a hardheaded realist. Unlike Roland’s teacher VANNAY, who realized that Debaria’s skin-man was probably a shapeshifter as well as a shape-changer, Deschain secretly thought that the skin-man was no more than a murdering maniac dressed up in animal skins. Although Steven Deschain was wrong about the skin-man, his judgment of human character proved to be sound. Before sending Roland and Jamie to Debaria, Deschain told the boys to contact Debaria’s High Sheriff, HUGH PEAVY, one of the few good men left in that western part of Mid-World. Years before, Peavy and the elder Deschain had joined forces to track down a slightly different form of demon—a band of outlaws known as the CROW GANG.

  Although Steven Deschain died while still relatively young (he was stabbed by an unknown assailant), experience had transformed his face into one that was both hard and cruel. However, in the vision Roland had of him in one of the DARK TOWER’s many rooms, his father’s visage was still soft, and his eyes reflected his love for his only son.

  I:71 (mistake: says father, should say mother), I:103–6, I:107, I:109, I:110, I:111, I:151–52, I:160, I:161, I:164, I:167, I:171, I:184, I:205, I:213, I:216, II:104–5, III:11, III:50, III:276, III:375, III:377, III:415, III:417, IV:19, IV:50, IV:108–12 (grabs Roland from a whore’s bed), IV:144, IV:163–64 (Roland as “son who had lived”), IV:181, IV:183–84 (twenty-ninth generation descended from Arthur Eld’s side line), IV:258, IV:262, IV:270–71 (line of Arthur Eld, son of Henry the Tall), IV:275–76 (voice of Eyebolt Canyon thinny), IV:285 (father’s son), IV:286, IV:317, IV:436–39 (tells of Maerlyn’s Grapefruit and Maerlyn’s Rainbow), IV:443, IV:464, IV:499, IV:530, IV:531, IV:570, IV:594–95 (Roland’s memory of his parents, Lake Saroni), IV:620–21 (plot to kill him), IV:650, IV:653, IV:655–56 (Gabrielle plans to murder him), IV:657, IV:665, E:195, E:206, V:85 (Roland’s father), V:105 (knew of glass balls), V:193 (indirect), V:215, V:242 (father), V:392, V:400, V:410, V:415, V:481, V:482, V:541, V:579 (father), V:590, V:597 (father), VI:106, VI:162, VI:197, VI:295, VII:23 (indirect), VII:50, VII:111, VII:134, VII:178, VII:442, VII:473, VII:499, VII:529, VII:769, VII:801, VII:822, VII:823–24, VII:827, W:35–40, W:41, W:42, W:44 (father), W:46 (as possible trickster), W:54, W:55–61 (and crow gang: 60 map of scars & crow gang scar), W:63, W:86 (cold mind like Roland), W:97 (swear in my father’s name), W:98 (guns), W:288, W:297, W:298, W:299, W:306

  DESMOND

  Desmond was one of Roland’s original gunslinger companions. When Roland sees the neon sign for BALAZAR’s headquarters, the LEANING TOWER, he calls out this old friend’s name. For a moment, Roland believes that he has reached his final destination.

  II:121

  DESTRY (FARMER DESTRY, OLD DESTRY)

  See TREE VILLAGE CHARACTERS

  DESTRY, HUNTER

  See TREE VILLAGE CHARACTERS

  DESTRY, RANDY

  See TREE VILLAGE CHARACTERS

  DESTRY, STRAW WILLEM

  See TREE VILLAGE CHARACTERS

  DETTA

  See DEAN, SUSANNAH

  DEVAR-TOI CHARACTERS

  See WARRIORS OF THE SCARLET EYE

  DEWEY

  See DEAN, EDDIE: EDDIE’S ASSOCIATES, PAST AND PRESENT: BUNKOWSKI, DEWEY

  DEWLAP

  See GRAYS: GRAY HIGH COMMAND: TICK-TOCK: TICK-TOCK’S FAMILY AND FORMER ASSOCIATES

  DEWLAP

  See GRAYS: GRAY LEADERS: TICK-TOCK

  DIANA’S DREAM

  See MID-WORLD FOLKLORE

  DICK, GRAY

  See ORIZA, LADY

  DILLON, MARSHALL

  See DESCHAIN, ROLAND

  DISCORDIA

  See PRIM; see also DISCORDIA, in PORTALS

  DISCORDIA, LORD OF

  See CRIMSON KING

  DIXIE PIG CHARACTERS

  See WARRIORS OF THE SCARLET EYE: DIXIE PIG CHARACTERS/FEDIC CHARACTERS

  DOBBIE

  See NORTH CENTRAL POSITRONICS

  DOCTOR BUGS

  See ELURIA CHARACTERS: CAM TAM (DOCTOR BUGS)

  DOG GUARDIAN

  See GUARDIANS OF THE BEAM

  DOLLENTZ

  See KATZ

  DOLORES

  See SERENITY, SISTERS OF

  DOOLIN, BELINDA

  See DEBARIA CHARACTERS

  DOOLIN, EAMON

  See CALLA BRYN STURGIS CHARACTERS: WOLF POSSE

  DOOLIN, MINNIE

  See CALLA BRYN STURGIS CHARACTERS: ROONTS

  DOOLIN, MOLLY

  See ORIZA, SISTERS OF

  DOOM, DR.

  See WOLVES

  DORFMAN

  See MORT, JACK

  DORFMAN, STAN

  See PIPER SCHOOL CHARACTERS

  DORNING, JANE

  See DEAN, EDDIE: DELTA FLIGHT 901 CHARACTERS

  DOROTHY

  See WIZARD OF OZ

  DOUGLAS, SUSY

  See DEAN, EDDIE: DELTA FLIGHT 901 CHARACTERS

  DRABNIK, CSABA

  See DEAN, HENRY: HENRY DEAN’S KA-TET

  DRAGONS

  Dragons are mentioned numerous times in the Dark Tower series. In The Waste Lands, Roland tells his tet about a place he knew as a boy called DRAGON’S GRAVE. It was a bottomless crack in the earth, named for the great bursts of steam that erupted from it every thirty to forty days. Although BLAINE’S CRADLE in LUD was decorated with images of the GUARDIANS OF THE BEAM, at the corners of the building were hideous stone dragons. In the ruins of CANDLETON, in the WASTE LANDS beyond LUD, there were mutant birds that looked like young dragonlets. The Kingdom of DELAIN, in EASTAR’D BARONY, was known derisively as DRAGON’S LAIR, though we are never told why. In Song of Susannah, we learn that Roland’s grandfather, ALARIC, went to GARLAN to slay a dragon.

  Since there are frequent references to dragons in the Dark Tower series, and since many important Mid-World buildings have dragon gargoyles, Constant Readers have always assumed that dragons once played an important role in Mid-World folklore. However, it is not until Wind Through the Keyhole that we learn more about Mid-World’s association with these legendary monsters.

  Wind Through the Keyhole’s initial mention of dragons happens within the first few pages. “Hile, Sir Throcken,” Roland says to the bumbler OY as he, EDDIE, SUSANNAH, and JAKE continue to walk along the PATH OF THE BEAM toward the RIVER WHYE. We soon learn that this saying comes from a book called The Throcken and the Dragon, which Roland’s mother read to him when he was a child. Later on, Roland recounts another childhood tale entitled “Wind Through the Keyhole,” in which the ka of the young hero, TIM STOUTHEART is intrinsically bound to the ka of these firebreathing reptiles.

  (GENERAL): III:37 (Dragon’s Grave), III:331 (and Blaine’s Cradle), IV:13, VI:197 (Alaric), W:7 (The Throcken and the Dragon), W:110, W:111, W:120, W:133 (sound of indrawn breath), W:151 (Garlan; a bonfire of dragons); 160 (Tavares), W:218

  DRAGON OF THE FAGONARD: In the folktale “The Wind Through the Keyhole” (recounted in the novel of the same name), the young hero TIM ROSS (aka TIM STOUTHEART) had his life profoundly changed by two different dragons. The first of these huge reptiles—the dragon that supposedly incinerated his father—proved to be a nothing but a lie spun by the murdering cull BERN KELLS. However, the second dragon was extremely real. In fact, it almost roasted Tim alive.

  Tim’s encounter with a live dragon happened in the FAGONARD Swamp, while the boy was pursuing the pretty but wicked SIGHE, ARMANEETA. Fluttering flirtatiously ahead of young Tim, Armaneeta led him onto a dangerously isolated tussock and left him there. Much to Tim’s horror, the tussock turned out to be the head of a submerged dragon.

  If the dragon that Tim met in the Fagonard is anything to go by, Mid-World’s fire-breathing reptiles are extremely impressive creatures. Although by nature dragons like to submerge themselves in mud and silt, when agitated they can rise out of the water and stand on their back legs, a stance
they can maintain by fanning their wings. (The sound resembles drying sheets snapping in a brisk wind.) When they roar, green-orange fire belches from their mouths, sizzling any nearby reeds (or nearby boys). When they breathe, the gill, located between their plated breasts, flutters as they pull in air to stoke the furnace in their guts.

  Luckily for Tim, the dragon he meets doesn’t roast young boys on sight, and can be appeased by pleas and prayers. This is probably due to the fact that the MUDMEN of the Fagonard give her offerings. (Tim knows that the Fagonard dragon is female since she has a pink maiden’s-comb on her head.) Sadly, the Fagonard dragon was not destined to survive. After the STARKBLAST, Tim saw the dragon’s vast, plated corpse floating on its side in the ice-choked waters of the swamp. Although she had fought the starkblast’s cold with blasts of her own fiery breath, the storm took her just as it took everything else in the Fagonard.W:194–96 (195 pink maiden’t comb), W:197 (firemaiden), W:198, W:201, W:204 (appeasement), W:206, W:218, W:222, W:256–57

  DRAGON THAT KILLED JACK ROSS: According to BIG KELLS, the pard of BIG ROSS, Jack Ross was burned to death by a she-dragon, probably one protecting an egg. However, as the story of “The Wind Through the Keyhole” progresses, we begin to realize that Big Kells was lying. According to the tax-collecting COVENANT MAN, not even a small dragon had nested close to civilization in almost a hundred years, never mind one as big as a house. Bern Kells was lying to hide the fact that he’d killed his partner in a jealous rage. He wanted Ross’s wife, NELL, for himself. W:110, W:111, W:112, W:115–16 (probably a she-dragon protecting her egg; sometimes swallow their fire and explode), W:120, W: 133, W:144, W:151 (Garlan; a bonfire of dragons), W:158, W:160, W:173