Secrets of the Dragon Riders

About subsequent books in Inheritance Paolini had this to say in an interview with Kit Spring in The Observer: “I want to show what I can do. And I think even the first draft of . . . Eldest . . . is better than the last draft of Eragon.” He elaborated further to Dave Welch in a three-way interview with Philip Pullman and Tamora Pierce on www.powells.com: “My second and third book, as I see it, are opportunities to expand upon the original archetypes and try to bring a depth to the world that I haven’t seen done or in ways that I want to explore personally. . . . I chose to have Eragon mature and learn throughout the course of my story because, for one thing, it’s one of the archetypal fantasy elements.”

It’s a good plan. And yes, maturation is an archetypal element of fantasy. The challenge, though, is to show the hero growing older and becoming wiser without making him aware he is doing so. In Eldest, instead of maturing and gaining wisdom as a result of his adventures on the journey, Eragon voluntarily veers far off course; he consciously grows in maturity and wisdom among the elves. It’s a bit like having a character confront adversity and realize immediately its cumulative effect by exclaiming, “Cool! I just gained self-confidence!” What’s missing is the sense of the hero’s wonder when, by his actions in some future trial, he realizes that he’s been changed by something he can’t quite put his finger on. Separating the hero’s maturation from the journey is like reading a song without the music.

It didn’t work when Luke Skywalker went off to train with Yoda in Star Wars, and it doesn’t work in Eldest. For one thing, the process is far too long for what Eragon gets out of it, as we learn in the battle scenes at the end of the book; it fills 450 of the book’s 668 pages in my edition. For another, it upsets the rhythm and balance of the story and dilutes and weakens the entire journey, diminishing Eragon’s role. As a result, Eldest is less bold and original than Eragon, whose hero and dragon delighted us as they delighted in each other. There was an impressive simplicity in the way Paolini dealt with the notion of a teenage boy finding himself with a swiftly growing female dragon on his hands.

At first reading, it appears that the Roran segments were added to Eldest after the book was written, perhaps at the urging of an editor in order to sate readers’ appetites for action and to have Roran conveniently on hand at the end of the book, ready to set out with Eragon to save Katrina in book three. But in the interview on Powell’s, posted before Eldest was published, Paolini explained his plan: “In Book Two, I switch viewpoints to Eragon’s cousin, Roran. For a large part of the book, I’m flipping back and forth. That gave me the ability to move to a more mature character and explore some stuff I really can’t deal with with Eragon at this point.” For the most part, Paolini sticks with his plan in Brisingr , flipping back and forth between Roran and Eragon. (Curiously, once or twice he also flips to Saphira’s and Nasuada’s points of view. Because their brief musings do nothing to advance the plot, those segments are disappointing; I felt tricked when I thought I was flipping to Roran only to find my way blocked.)

Whatever his reason for inserting Roran into the story as a major character, Paolini could not have known that he was creating a hero whose amazing accomplishments would completely overshadow Eragon. If he had known, I think he would have left Roran back in Carvahall. There are no rules of fantasy that limit the number of heroes an author can include in a story. If there were, Steven Erikson’s magnificent Malazan Book of the Fallen, with its dozens of heroes, would be in serious trouble. But Erikson’s heroes don’t diminish one another, they complement each other, whereas in Eldest, each flip from Roran’s action sequences to Eragon’s passive study feels like a stumble.

While Roran is slogging through ankle-deep mud and tripping over corpses, fighting alongside the villagers against Empire soldiers and non-human Ra’zac, and while they are all weeping over their dead, crushed by the sight of ten-year-old Elmund among the casualties, the story flips to Eragon. We find ourselves adrift, literally, on a raft floating down the Az Ragni carrying Eragon, Orik, and Arya in the direction of Ellesméra, only to discover our erstwhile hero struggling to memorize the names of his seven dwarf companions as kingfishers and jackdaws flit above the water and the occasional bullfrog croaks from the ferns growing wild along the riverbank.

While Roran’s days and nights are filled with fear and dread, for Eragon time passes in a “hazy dream of warm afternoons” and suppers around a campfire under a blanket of magic Arya casts to keep the mosquitoes away. While the Ra’zac are snatching Katrina from Roran’s arms and Roran is struggling to save his beloved and himself, suffering a snapped wrist and a debilitating shoulder wound for his efforts, Eragon continues his uneventful journey to the land of the elves, riding an elven horse that won’t even let him fall off.

And while Roran is leading over 300 men, women, and children, not to mention the livestock, across the Spine on the first leg of their long, hard journey to Surda, we suddenly find ourselves in Ellesméra, where time seems to have stopped; while Eragon is theoretically spending long hours studying with Oromis, he doesn’t appear to actually be doing much of anything. In the images that remain, he mopes over Arya (who continues to reject his advances), shaves with magic, mopes over Arya, gets annoyed when the elves lavish more attention on Saphira than on him, mopes over Arya, and examines his ears as they metamorphose into points.

In Brisingr, while Roran is disobeying his commanding officer to save his men from sure slaughter, and undergoing severe punishment for insubordination at the whipping post, Eragon, acting as Nasuada’s ambassador to broker an alliance with the dwarves, is stomping impatiently about Tronjheim, behaving in a manner that would have a real ambassador turning away red-faced. If it wasn’t for Orik the dwarf, Eragon’s negotiations would have ended in disaster and resulted in a major setback for the Varden in their war against Galbatorix. (Orik manages to keep Eragon under control and, through his own efforts, emerges as king of the dwarf nations—no thanks to Eragon—and hero of these segments of the story.)

Whatever the reason, Paolini determined that it was important for Eragon to spend this time with the elves. Perhaps he meant it as a device to force Eragon to take that other journey that is part of the monomyth—the journey within that ultimately leads to self-knowledge. The hours Eragon spends concentrating on beetles in order to open his mind to all that is happening around him is reminiscent of what man aspired to in earlier myths. For example, in nineteenth-century mythology the hero is seized by the very essence of things. Leo Frobenius, in volume III of the Dictionary of the History of Ideas, argued that man “receives from the realities that surround him, a deeper knowledge, a kind of revelation of the inner order and meaning of nature. Ultimately, he is ‘seized’ by that which is divine in things, and this experience is the source of all creations—religious and mythological, artistic and social.” I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the author’s purpose in diverting Eragon from the main journey. He appears to have a sound knowledge of the elements that go into the making of earlier myths.

Still, despite the author’s intention, the segments dealing with Eragon’s training process are boring at times, mainly because, as mentioned earlier, they are too long. Besides, they place Eragon on the sidelines, effectively removing him from the active segments of the story and diminishing his character. Thankfully, Roran is there to pick up the slack. As he commences his own desperate journey, Roran becomes, arguably, much more interesting than Eragon ever was.

The Christian Science Monitor’s review noted that Roran’s sequences are the strongest in the book. The Boston Globe agreed: “The far better half of the book is the story of Eragon’s foster brother, Roran.” If action were the sole criterion for the making of a hero, Roran would be a hero by that standard alone. His story, jammed into 180 pages (less than one-third of the book), is perhaps even more intense because of its brevity compared to Eragon’s longer, less interesting sequences.

The ancient Greeks would have hailed Roran as a tame hero, one who exemplifies temperance—that cardinal virtue of moderation, self-knowledge, and self-restraint so admired by Greek society. He is a pillar of sanity under Galbatorix’s insane regime. And he always thinks things through and then acts accordingly, showing good sense as opposed to frivolity. Roran already possesses that which Eragon is searching for: self-knowledge. He, more than any other character in the first two books of Inheritance, truly knows himself.

Unlike Eragon, who has Saphira, a magic sword, and a following of admirers, Roran has nothing. He has lost his father and his farm. And although he and Katrina are deeply in love, without money or prospects he can’t ask her father Sloan for her hand. When Galbatorix’s soldiers, accompanied by the flesh-eating Ra’zac, descend on Carvahall looking for him and the Ra’zac devour one of the villagers, Roran comes out of hiding to help defend the village. In a fierce battle that leaves many villagers dead, Roran is forced to kill for the first time. When Katrina is taken and the Ra’zac threaten the inhabitants of Carvahall with death or slavery, Roran realizes that the village is lost. After carefully assessing the situation, he acts decisively and inspires the villagers to abandon Carvahall and follow him to Surda to cast their lot with the Varden in its war against the Empire. The last lines of his impassioned speech to the villagers are especially rousing:

We’ve fought the soldiers and the Ra’zac, but it means nothing if we die alone and forgotten. . . . We cannot stay here, and I won’t allow Galbatorix to obliterate everything that’s worth living for. I would rather have my eyes plucked out and my hands chopped off than see him triumph! I choose to fight! I choose to step from my grave and let my enemies bury themselves in it! I choose to leave Carvahall.

With no promises of a safe return, the villagers follow Roran, embarking on what will prove a long, arduous journey over land and sea before they finally arrive at their destination. The journey segments are well crafted. The pacing is excellent. Along the way, the hardships they face make them stronger and more determined than ever to press onward. The Boston Globe reminds us that “in the process, as Paolini ably shows, Roran is reluctantly becoming a king, hating leadership, counting every enemy he has to kill, wanting nothing more than to get back to farming—and doing the job because the job needs doing. Roran is a hero we want to meet again.”

While I agree with that assessment, it barely scratches the surface of Roran’s character. When we interpret his words, thoughts, and actions, we discover the qualities that define him and mark him for leadership. We like him because we want to see something of ourselves reflected in his character. We want to imagine that we are as courageous, as compassionate, as loyal as he. We trust him because we believe he’d sacrifice his own life to save ours. When he finally relents and assumes command of the villagers, Roran takes his responsibilities seriously and strives to be a good leader, a father or shepherd to his flock. While his duty to protect his people takes precedence over everything else, he makes time for the individual needs and concerns of every man, woman, and child under his care, always careful to deal with each person as an equal.

As Roran becomes a leader, the villagers begin to treat him as one. In a touching passage, somewhere between the coastal ports of Narda and Teirm one of the village women approaches Roran and asks him for a favor. Ever since her husband was murdered by Katrina’s father, her young son will not listen to her. She fears he has grown wild and willful and is stealing food to play dice with the sailors on their barge: “You have ever dealt generously with Mandel. If you talk with him, he will listen.” Roran tells her to put her heart at ease; he will speak with Mandel. Roran takes the boy under his wing, but instead of confronting him about stealing food and showing disrespect to his mother, he bolsters Mandel’s self-confidence by heaping responsibility on his young shoulders. Paolini does a fine job in showing us this nurturing side of Roran’s character.

In the following passage, Paolini treats us to a demonstration of Roran’s determination and powers of persuasion: As enemy sloops close in on Dragon Wing, the ship Roran and his companions stole in Teirm, Roran realizes that their only chance of avoiding capture is to cross the Boar’s Eye, a vast whirlpool between the coastal islands Nía and Bierland near Surda. He needs to know if it’s possible to cross the Eye. The captain is horrified.

Roran nodded. “I know it’s not something you want to risk, Uthar, but our options are limited. I’m no seaman, so I must rely upon your judgment: Can we cross the Eye?”

The captain hesitated. “Maybe, maybe not. You’d have t’ be stark raving mad to go nearer’n five miles of that monster.”

Pulling out his hammer, Roran banged it on the table, leaving a dent a half-inch deep. “Then I’m stark raving mad!” He held Uthar’s gaze until the sailor shifted with discomfort. . . . “We . . . dared to abandon our homes and cross the Spine. Jeod dared to imagine we could steal the Dragon Wing. What will you dare, Uthar? If we can brave the Eye and live to tell the tale, you shall be hailed as one of the greatest mariners in history. Now answer me and answer me well and true: Can this be done?”

This is one of the most powerful scenes in Eldest simply because it rings so true. We know it happened. We know that if we went on board the Dragon Wing, we would see the dent Roran’s hammer left on the chart table. In that passage alone, Paolini manages to convince us that Roran is believable. By that, I mean that he is believable in the same way that Odysseus is believable when, as Aldous Huxley recounts in his Collected Essays, he tells about seeing:

six of the best and bravest of his companions lifted, struggling, into the air, to hear their screams, the desperate repetition of his own name, and how he could only look on, helplessly, while Scylla “at the mouth of her cave devoured them, still screaming, still stretching out their hands to me in the frightful struggle,” and then he says that it was the most dreadful and lamentable sight he ever saw in all his “explorings of the passes of the sea.”

As Huxley remarks, “We believe Odysseus because Homer makes us believe.”

No essay examining Roran’s emergence from obscurity to fantasy hero would be complete without considering magic. For in the final analysis, it is magic, or rather the absence of magic, that wins the day in Eldest. In book one, Eragon wields magic for all the right reasons, such as healing and battling powerful enemies. Magic has a purpose and is treated with respect and awe. It is a power to be used wisely and sparingly. But, as Jack Mock found in his review in the online magazine Virtue, it “is quite a stumbling block for Eldest.” Because Eragon uses magic for mundane things like shaving, “the magic loses its sense of purpose and utterly cheapens the entire legend that Paolini created. The magic isn’t really there for a solid, reasonable purpose anymore. . . . It seems contrived and steals the show from otherwise convincing interactions with characters and well-imagined confrontations.”

In Brisingr, Eragon uses magic for almost every function he performs. On one occasion, he employs magic to extract three gold nuggets from the soil, which he uses to make amends for wrongs he did to others, such as repayment for meat he stole to feed Saphira before leaving Carvahall. This take-what-you-want-and-repay-by-magic is too easy. It’s the sort of wrong-thinking that Roran would never allow himself to be accused of.

Most likely, Paolini threw in Eragon’s shaving scenes to add touches of humor to the long maturation sequences. But there is nothing funny about Eragon’s use of magic in Brisingr, as the gold example clearly illustrates. I can’t help but wonder if Paolini acted imprudently in allowing Eragon’s capricious use of magic. It might come back to nick his hero on the chin. And we mustn’t forget about that wretched child back in Surda who knows only too well what can happen when Eragon misuses magic (though I found the elves far more frightening than Eragon in their use of magic to force nature to conform to their desires).

My point here is that Eragon is steeped in magic. Before he departs from Ellesméra to join the Varden at the battle in the final pages of Eldest, Oromis presents him with the belt of Beloth the Wise, which contains diamonds for reserves of power. He can also use the large ruby mounted in the pommel of his sword for the same purpose. But despite all his powers, despite his physical training with the elves and the decades of learning crammed into months, despite his fire-breathing dragon, Eragon performs poorly on the battlefield. His magic is nothing when he fights Murtagh.

Perhaps the most awe-inspiring aspect of Roran is that he possesses neither magic nor a fire-breathing dragon. Driven by his love for Katrina and a sense of responsibility for the villagers, he sets out on his journey armed only with a hammer. Yet through sheer determination he manages to deliver his people to Surda, only to arrive in the midst of the Battle of the Burning Plains. Undaunted, Roran assesses the situation, determines that the nasty Twins (who we suspect ran off after betraying the Varden in Eragon) pose the most serious threat, and realizes they must be eliminated. In a single paragraph, Paolini describes the most important event in the entire battle:

[Eragon and Murtagh] watched as Roran hid behind a mound of bodies. Eragon stiffened as the Twins looked toward the pile. For a moment it seemed they had spotted him, then they turned away and Roran jumped up. He swung his hammer and bashed one of the Twins in the head, cracking open his skull. The remaining Twin fell to the ground convulsing, and emitted a wordless scream until he too met his end under Roran’s hammer.

The death of the Twins is the deciding factor in the battle. The enemy falters and then flees in disarray. Once again Roran has stepped up and done a job that needed doing. And he does it all without magic. Or does he? Perhaps his magic comes from within—from that hidden core of inner strength that we hope resides in all of us to be called upon in times of need or when we struggle to do the right thing.

Who is the real hero of Eldest? By examining and comparing the roles of Eragon and Roran, this essay has attempted to show that Roran emerges, albeit reluctantly, as the hero of book two of Inheritance. Once the author decides to give him a larger role, Roran becomes crucial to the story. His extraordinary adventures provide the strongest sequences in the book and, by contrast, relegate Eragon to a lesser place. If they were deleted, Eldest would not be as satisfying a read. Despite his brief appearances in Eragon, in it Roran’s character is firmly established. He is solid, dependable, and resolute—the big brother Eragon looks up to. Paolini may not have foreseen that Roran would act in character in Eldest and through his actions rise to such heroic heights. But from Roran’s point of view, there was a job that needed doing, and he did it very well indeed. In Brisingr, his segments, more than any others in the book, advance the plot swiftly. His heroic nature remains untarnished and can’t be dulled by shorter chapters or enhanced by Eragon’s protective magic. Roran is the Everyman hero. We readily identify with him; he is a mortal, living out his life in the shadow of death and disaster, and we feel that his actions have the quality of nobility, dignity, and courage.

J. FitzGerald McCurdy was born in Ontario, Canada, but insists she grew up in J. R. R. Tolkien’s mythical land of Gondor. She is the author of the bestselling fantasy trilogy The Serpent’s Egg. Her latest series, The Mole Wars, follows the adventures of Steele and his companions in the world of the Mole People under New York City. A retired lawyer, McCurdy has also worked as a documentary film writer. She lives in Ottawa. Visit her Web site at www.jfitzgeraldmccurdy.com.