#Fionavar

[taylor-swift-is-my-robot-dog]

I'm gonna be honest with you: the sudden swerve into the Matter of Britain that Guy Gavriel Kay does in his FIONAVAR TAPESTRY is legitimately some of the most gorgeous and moving fantasy writing of the 20th century.

“I go as deep as you,” said the tall man quietly as he entered the glade. He had a drawn sword in his hand; it shimmered faintly, catching the silver of the moon. “I know who you are,” he went on, speaking softly and without haste. “I know you, Curdardh, and whence you come. I am here as champion of this child. If you wish his death, you will have first to accomplish my own.”

Medieval authors were so fucking funny. In "The Faerie Queene" this guy comes up to the main hero and is like "Don't go over to that cave, there's a guy inside that makes people kill themselves." And the hero is like "Bet." and goes into the cave. Then the old man (literally called Despair) is like "If you die, you can't commit sin." and can you guess what happened.

[thripsey-shee]

L'Arazzo di Fionavar - Guy Gavriel Kay

L’Arazzo di Fionavar – Guy Gavriel Kay

Dopo un periodo davvero lungo, lo so leggo molto lentamente, ho colmato una mia lacuna, una trilogia che mi portavo dietro da molto tempo: la trilogia di Fionavar di G.G. Kay. Ho approfittato della ristampa nel formato drago della Mondadori, formato che non amo particolarmente, ma che spesso propone titoli interessanti. Fionavar è una trilogia che strizza l’occhio al caro Tolkien, quasi fosse…

[mask131]

The Tolkienesque Renaissance and the woman-wizard

A long time ago I made a brief post about my personal vision of a certain "Tolkienesque Renaissance" era within English-speaking literature, following/coexisting with the "Tolkien Subversion" era that was formed by Earthsea, Elric, The Black Company and other classics.

It was meant to be the first post in a whole series but I kind of got busy with other things... That being said I do want to make this post about one of the fascinating traits of the Tolkienesque Renaissance. A trait which seems to be overlooked or misunderstood today due to the very polarizing matter and the quick shifts occuring in our societies about this topic, but needs to be highlighted: the gender roles. Well more specifically the gender roles within the magic part of the fantasy world.

In 1985, Terry Pratchett created a talk/article which was forgotten for a given time, until it popped up on the Internet in the 2000s/2010s, and was more recently reprinted in book format (in posthumous anthologies of his talks, articles and essais) and even translated in other languages (the only French translation of this text dates from a few years ago). This text is called "Why Gandalf never married", and it is a very important mini-essay when it comes to the English-speaking fantasy literature because it highlighted very well (and in Pratchett's usual humoristic way) the gender "norms" within the Tolkien-model of fantasy ; but more importantly how this gendered system was carried on, consciously or unconsciously, by other authors in the fantasy genre.

I strongly suggest you go check out the original article, it is disponible for free on several websites, and I won't recap it here. But it made a point that many other analysists and historians of the fantasy genre relayed. The Tolkien model of the magic-use has magic lying within the hands of a men, and escaping the hands of women. In The Lord of the Rings the magic is the domain of the Wizards - which is an order of exclusively male entities. That's the Gandalf of the title. There is no female Wizard in the Tolkienesque world, and the closest thing we get to a female magic user within The Lord of the Rings is Galadriel - but Galadriel is in this specific plotline a secondary character with not as much importance or active power as the likes of Gandalf and Saruman, and she even denies herself that what she does is magic, carefully explaining that Elves merely consider what others call their "magic" advanced craft, technology and skills. Galadriel has the appearance of an enchantress, but in truth is not, and all the true magic relies within the male-only Gandalf.

And this model was carried on into a lot of the fantasy series and novels that followed the publication of The Lord of the Rings, even those that were created specifically to subvert the "Tolkienesque fantasy". In his article, Pratchett ranked alongside Gandalf as the celibate wizard-heroes of male dominance, Ged from Earthsea... by Ursula K. Le Guin, which is an author as far from woman-hating as the Sun is far from Pluto. And yet... Pratchett did point out that in the Earthsea series it is made extremely clear that only men can be true wizards, the "wizarding school" of this setting only teaches men, and when a woman has magical power, she is a secondary and weak witch with only a handful of simple abilities, unable to match any great "true" wizard. Even worse: when a woman actually shows some great talent and manages to challenge or outbeat the wizard... it is because she derives her power from malevolent sources and evil entities. It is true in Earthsea.

Or at least it was true. Indeed, we have to put things back in context: when Pratchett made this analysis, Earthsea was just a trilogy. Not just "a" trilogy, but rather a halted series: Le Guin had written the first three Earthsea books, and she wanted to return to writing more Earthsea but in her own words something felt wrong, she didn't find how to go on, she sense there was a problem with Earthsea though she could not identify what exactly... This is part of why the fourth book of the series was released 18 YEARS after the third. And the exact reason Le Guin was weirded out by her own series is precisely what Pratchett pointed out - and something Le Guin herself had to re-discover within her own work (Now I cannot claim that Pratchett's article actually helped Le Guin see this "gendered flaw" within her own novels, because I have no reliable source about Le Guin reading Pratchett's text or being aware of this talk - but given I heard it had quite an influence upon its release I do think it played a part in it). This is also why Le Guin returned to Earthsea by the late 80s: she had identified the problem in her own work, women were trapped in a gendered system denying them access to "true magic". And from "Tehanu" onward, she worked to - not correct - but improve this worldbuilding fact, for example by pointing out the inherent misogyny of her own world, by explaining the reasons that led to women being excluded of the art of magic, and by revealing that women and men are in fact equal in magic by nature but not by society.

[Note: I do wish to say that it is not an inherently bad or evil thing to have a "gendered" magic system within your fantasy work. The entire point of the fantasy is that you can do everything and anything and explore any possibility. You can have a magic system where only one gender can have magic ; you can have a magic system where spells are bound to a specific age ; you can have magic system where only rocks can perform magic because flesh cannot stand it - in itself, it is not a bad thing... The problem here that Pratchett denounced was how a specific gendered-model of magic bearing misogynistic traits within it was spreading around and becoming an untold law of the fantasy genre, to the point even feminist writers applied it without realizing it.]

Pratchett completed his trio of "male-dominated and somehow misogynistic" magic systems by adding to Gandalf and Ged the figure of Merlin from the Arthurian romances and epics, as one of the main cultural influences of magic within fantasy... but also one of the roots of the unconscious misogyny that was growing within fantasy. Because in the Arthurian world, not only is Merlin the most prominent wizard and enchanter, he is seen as the "source" and "true bearer" of magic, with the two famous Arthurian sorceresses, Viviane and Morgan, being explicitely his students - women learned magic from a man. And not only did they learned it from him, they both used it in a bad and negative way. Morgan to become a wicked witch and the enemy of the heroes ; Viviane to betray her own mentor and trap the wizard forever (with in many versions this being seen as a selfish action, some authors even pushing it as far as making Viviane one of the instruments of the Arthurian downfall). Of course there are very interesting talks, debates and analysis to have about this strange triangle of magic-users - especially since one of Merlin's gifts was prophecy and foresight, and it is implied that he knew what he was doing when he taught these women magic, somehow accepting that his lessons would be used against him and his work... But that's a talk for another day and it doesn't change how it influenced mid-20th century fantasy in a bad way.

As such, from Merlin to Ged passing by Gandalf, Pratchett made this conclusion: in English-speaking fantasy as it existed in the mid 80s, "true" wizards were men, and magic belonged to the male gender. And when a women practiced magic (if they could even practice magic), they were either depicted as weaker and inferior to men, either as evil antagonists corrupting magic or using it for nefarious purposes. Hence "Why Gandalf never married".

This talk is also very important to understand the very origins and building of Pratchett's own brilliant parody-deconstruction-reconstruction of the fantasy genre, his "Discworld" series. In his Discworld books Pratchett prepared several entire plotlines to explain, dissert and explore the gendered cliches and normative stereotypes of magic in fantasy, with the archetype of the male-magic through the Wizards and of the female-magic through the Witches. "Why Gandalf never married" was created in 1985... two years before Discworld's third book "Equal Rites", which is a brilliant parody of these same gender norms as a girl becomes fated to become a Wizard and fights for it, in a cloistered world where women can only hope to be Witches and nothing else.

Now, all of that being said, I return to my point about the Tolkienesque Renaissance. And I will claim that this "movement" actually inherited Pratchett's point or was conscious of it because, interestingly, all these revivals of the classical Tolkien-like fantasy worked very hard to break the gender norms of magic, and have prominent female magic users not depicted as evil. Mind you, they never went as far as Le Guin or Pratchett did in their own work, and in fact several of these works came to be criticized by later generations for being themselves too-gendered, too-cliche, or even misogynistic... However I do believe that it is important to highlight how these works, which might not fit our own modern gender equality or our modern view of women, still were a first step forward, a certain breakthrough, in a fantasy landscape where women were either denied magic or locked withn the "wicked witch" stereotype.

The Fionavar Tapestry series has one of the main female characters becoming The Seer, a benevolent and respected magic user. She is not of the same "type" as the wizards of the setting and lacks a magic as powerful as them, but is still an heroic supernatural character on which the story focuses. There is also an exploration of the gendered norm by having a Council of Mages from which women are lacking (and coming with historical explanations about the role of women in relationship to them) clashing with an all-female order of priestesses of a Great Goddess (a conflict which itself also is echoed by a gendered pantheon of Great Gods and Great Goddesses working in mysterious ways towards each other).

The Belgariad makes a clear effort by "doubling" the typical wizard-mentor into a duo, Belgarath the Sorcerer and Polgara the Sorceress, with Polgara being a powerful magic user equal in strength to Belgarath and working alongside him, but staying a benevolent and heroic character (though there is a dark side to her, from her stern and harsh personality, to a worldbuilding prophetic element about her possibly turning evil).

The Wheel of Time seems to avoid the topic entirely by completely reversing the norm: all magic-users are female, the male magic-users were all wiped out, and if they exist they have to be deprived of power else they will become evil. Now we still have a more nuanced approached in terms of moral since the Aes Sedai mix in one go the all-benevolent Gandalf-like figure with the manipulative and dreaded wicked witch - but the gender treatment and balance within "The Wheel of Time" has been debated and discussed a LOT so I won't go further into this.

Memory, Sorrow and Thorn literaly has a female Gandalf in the character of Geloë - who also has a few elements of Baba-Yaga in her most positive incarnations. There's still a bunch of evil witches throughout the series outgrowing in number the rare positive female magic users, but Geloë stands out as the big powerful helpful witch of the "hero's party".

As I said, these characters are of course not perfect. There are things to be said against them in a more modern light, or they might be judged as not good characters at all... But it doesn't change the fact that Geloë, Polgara and Moiraine are quite important in the history of fantasy as breakers of a system that was imposed by Merlin, Gandalf and Ged - and while they cannot answer the question of "Why Gandalf never married", they are proofs that "Gandalf can be a woman".

[earhartsease]

so we're listening to the audiobooks of the Fionavar Tapestry, a fantasy trilogy from the 80s by the canadian author Guy Gavriel Kay

and surprisingly, the narrator is english rather than the expected north american

and even more surprisingly, and delightfully, when we first meet the elves (the lios-alfar), he give them soft welsh accents and that's a perfect and weirdly magical decision - like imagine if Michael Sheen were a small and beautiful elf (okay he is so there we go)

the story revolves around five young canadians who get drawn to another world (Fionavar) and so the narrator give them vague north american accents but the rest of the characters are not - it's early days so we don't know how far he'll go with the other characters, but so far the only dwarf sounds vaguely serbian, and it's a bit weird but in some ways predictable that the "lower classes" of humans (in the country of Brennin at least) have cockney accents

anyway we'll keep you posted as further accent choices unfurl

we have a complex relationship with these books - in some ways they're like if somebody took all the most emotional aspects of all the european myths and shoved them into one narrative and it gets more than a bit overcrowded at times - but also it's a hugely cathartic story in so many ways, an opportunity for much therapeutic ugly sobbing

[book--brackets]

Submissions for the fantasy book poll if they're still open, please

The Fionavar Tapestry by Guy Gavriel Kay

The Watch-maker of Filligree Street by Natasha Pulley

Added them both!

[do-you-ship-this-book-couple]

Do you ship...

Note in the ask:

Powerful and dangerous heirs of kings from neighboring regions fall in love as they try to outwit (and one time, attempt to kill) each other. Diarmuid's a drama queen and Sharra'd like to pretend she isn't but crossdresses as a knight occasionally. Add a brewing war for the scenery and you get an exquisite mix

[haveyoureadthisfantasybook]

vote YES if you have finished the entire book.

vote NO if you have not finished the entire book.

(faq · submit a book)

[brightwaterforarainyday]

The Collection is complete! Beyond This Dark House was the last one I needed and my copy arrived yesterday! (thanks thriftbooks)

Cannot overstate the influence Kay's work has had on me, both creatively and on my way of seeing myself and the world. Having all that collected together like this feels good, like having a piece of my life right there on one shelf.

[sonjabysonjamorgan]

okay one of the fundamental bits of magic in the runelord book i read was that ppl can like magically give their attributes to another person but it drains them of whatever it is. so like u can give up ur speed to another person but ur slowed down for the rest of ur life or until that person dies. and like noble ppl can have like a little hoard of ppl giving up their strength or intelligence or beauty to make them stronger/smarter/more beautiful. and i only read a couple of the books i think but like u can’t end the series that magic system still going no problem? also there r wizards who all get a like special connection w a specific type of animal

[tales-from-the-abbey]

Sure my favorite character was fatally wounded but as long as I don't read the words he won't die and you can't convince me otherwise

[hurlumerlu]

I think we should take all fictional characters that are basically Odin and drop them into an arena where they have to fight to the death.

[ripeteeth]

So, here’s the thing, I love well-written fantasy novels but I have a really hard time finding ones that fit my vibe? If you have recs for me, I would LOVE to hear them! I’d be super super grateful. I like a good focus on worldbuilding, complicated characters, a bit of a dark edge, and real high stakes. Some of my faves are:

The Chronicles of Amber - Roger Zelazny

The Book of the New Sun - Gene Wolfe

Tigana - Guy Gavriel Kay

A Wizard of Earthsea - Ursula K. LeGuin

Discworld - Terry Pratchett

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke

Piranesi - Susanna Clarke

Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood

To Say Nothing of the Dog - Connie Willis

Domesday Book - Connie Willis

The Lord of the Rings (esp. Silmarillion) - J.R.R. Tolkien

Gormenghast - Mervyn Peake

The Once and Future King - T.H. White

The Fionavar Tapestry - Guy Gavriel Kay

A few things I’ve tried and they just didn’t click with me:

A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin

Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman

Foundation - Isaac Asimov

Several Witcher books - Andrzej Sapkowsky

American Gods - Neil Gaiman

Also I don’t know where to put The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss because I’m deeply unhinged about it and love it and hate it in equal measure and am determined to write a better version. What a waste of a character. What a waste of worldbuilding. God I’m so Shen Yuan about it, you don’t even realize

[mask131]

I was reading this article about Guy Gavriel Kay's The Fionavar Tapestry and I thought of sharing some of the cool cover artwork this series had:

[perahn]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical (Video Game) Rating: Not Rated Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Eros (Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical)/Psyche (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore) Characters: Eros (Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical), Aphrodite (Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical), Pan (Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical), Grace (Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical), Psyche's Sisters (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore) Additional Tags: Romance, mention of past character death, Poetry, Background Pan/Grace, I guess it's technically a songfic, dammit Jim I'm a poet not a songwriter, just don't ask me what it sounds like Summary:

Some time after the Idols went public, Grace and Pan bring someone to meet Eros.

Eros deserved a happy ending.

[afatlotofchance]

Speaking of Otha and the Master... Fat sorcerers or wizards is actually something quite recurring in fantasy. There is a page on TV Tropes and Idioms called "Squishy Wizards" which highlights how wizards in fantasy typically do not have a fighting body - they are too old or too young, skinny or chubby. To have a muscular, fit, warrior-built wizard was seen for a time as a subversion of the traditional wizard (see for example The Kingkiller Chronicles, which was praised at the time for having a warrior-wizard as a protagonist).

While fat wizards do not typically lead the archetype, they're still recurring. In another 80s classics of fantasy, the Riftwar books by Raymond E. Feist (in France they're better known as the adventures of Pug the wizard), the protagonist is first tutored in magic by a Gandalf copy (elderly bearded wizard who likes to smoke a pipe), but with a few differences - he has a tiny pet dragon, he is a human court wizard instead of an otherwordly wanderer, and... he is noted to be a large and fat man with a round belly. Name's Kulgan by the way. Don't ask me more about him, because I couldn't even finish the first book of the series (while I don't mind some "cliche fantasy", there's some stereotypical fantasy that just doesn't work with me, and the Riftwar books do not click for now. Maybe if someone encourages me to read them or has positive things to say about them... But for now, nah).

A different fantasy series, but one I quite enjoyed and fully read (unlike the Riftwar one) is the 70s classic "The Fionavar Tapestry", which is basically "What if Lord of the Rings crossed over with Narnia, and was even more epic and even more mythological as we sprinkle in Cybele, and Irish mythology, and Arthuriana, and other stuff?". You have book series that pastiche and imitate in obvious ways Lord of the Rings (Shannara). You have book serie that take back, reinvent, subvert Lord of the Rings (Belgariad). And you have the Fionavar tapestry, which was actually written by one of the men who worked on compiling and studying Tolkien's works and notes to re-create things like the Silmarillion and other books, and thus literaly pays homage and soars from the world created by Tolkien to do its own thing (though if you do not enjoy hyper-intellectual, hyper-poetic, hyper-mythical fantasy this series is not for you). There's three wizards in this series. One is you Saruman ; another is your Gandalf (but with the bonus point that he is in a gay relationship with a dwarf king) ; and the third, more unique to the series, is described a curvy, bellied fat man. And when we finally get a bit of background info on him (in the third book of the trilogy) we learn that he was always the weakest of the three wizards, and mostly was into the wizard business to enjoy the comfortable life, high position and material pleasures it brought with it - hence why he is quite a fat man today. In the third book he even complains at one point that due to being involved in war activty he has lost a lot of weight, only for other characters to mention he is still quite plump and far from thin.

Technically, when it comes to the "fat wizard" archetype we can go back to the first of the Earthsea books, "A Wizard of Earthsea", with the character of Vetch. Fellow student at the wizard-school with the protagonist, later becoming his own local sorcerer in his village, and described as a stout, large boy than man with a healthy appetite and a love for food... Fan-art today does regularly depict him as a big beautiful man he is strongly implied to be - though he might fall rather into the "large sidekick/fat bestfriend/chubby companion" archetype that I evoked in an earlier post. [Note: if you ever want to check out Earthsea, don't hesitate, because not only is it one of the foundations of the genre, which influenced all the later classics, but it was also one of the early attempts at doing a non-cliche fantasy - first exploration of a wizard school in fiction, first time having a wizard as a main protagonist in a fantasy story, with an archipelago setting specifically designed to not feel European in the slightest, AND with a non-white cast! You couldn't guess it due to all the illustrations and adaptations white-washing the hell out of the books, but Earthsea was all about black-skinned and copper-skinned and distinctively non-white people, and Ursula Le Guin was always very sad and mad each time the cover-artist or movie-makers made all of her cast whiter than bread dough. There's white people in Earthsea indeed, but they are the barbarian foreign minority serving evil gods, which was quite a perspective switch for a 60s fantasy series]

More generally, the "fat wizard" idea is often used to subvert or counter the "Gandalf archetype". One of the most famous examples is the wizard Bayaz, from Abercrombie's "The First Law" trilogy. Not to be confused with "The Wizard's First Law" by Terry Goodkind, a "regular" fantasy book that opened a quite... unfamous fantasy series, but which deserves a mention because it reuses and mixes the "fat counterpart/fat is evil" fantasy elements, by having the brother of the main protagonist (Michael Cypher) being described as "smaller, heavier and softer" than his brother, and ultimately falling for the lies and tricks of the main villain leading him to oppose his brother... But back to Abercrombie's The First Law, the entire point of this trilogy is to take back the archetypal epic fantasy story, but present it in a dark, cynical, morbid light. Bayaz is here the subversion and caricature of the typical "wizard mentor", Gandalf-type - he is the main wizard of the story, the patron of the protagonists, the one who leads them in their quest... But he is also a deceiving brute, a power-hungry war-mongerer, and a shady, amoral and selfish man. And this subversion of his Gandalf type is marked in his appearance, as he is described as a butcher-like man, large and thick, built with a mix of muscle and fat (and people who compare the statues once sculpted for him to his current state do point out how since his glory days he grew a gut).

And of course, no need to tell you that the "fat wizard" archetype blooms in works where the fatness of sorcerers and magic-users is systematized - ranging from Robin Hobb's The Soldier Son, to Terry Pratchett's Discworld, two universes where being fat is basically a pre-requisite to be a wizard...