The Rivan Codex
Ancient Texts of The Belgariad and The Malloreon
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- ¥460
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- ¥460
発行者による作品情報
Comprising the ancient texts of The Belgariad and The Malloreon, The Rivan Codex is a book which stands in the same relationship to the Belgariad and Malloreon as The Silmarillion does to The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.
Before David Eddings started to write his first fantasy series, the BELGARIAD, in the late 1970s, he spent a year working on the design and mythology of the fantasy world in which it is set.
The Rivan Codex comprises the immensely readable background material to Eddings’ best-loved series, repeated information a lot of it, but it’s the books that repeat the information, and these seminal documents have about them an air of original inspiration, world-building in action. The rest of it is background which is taken for granted but not spelled out.
History, geography, myths and folktales, peoples, gods, customs, social organization, political hierarchy, laws, dress, modes of address, produce, culture, flora, fauna, all presented with so light a touch one can only yearn for Eddings to be taken up by academics so that his style might catch on in the real real world.
The 12-book long series grew out of these delightful preliminary sketches like a river growing from a spring of striking purity and constancy. Magically, the information reads fresh each time, minimal Eddings prose, beguilingly arcane, in which massive events attain an all-time perspective.
Reviews
‘The Rivan Codex is the definitive handbook to his fantasy domains by Eddings and his wife Leigh’
Weekend Telegraph
About the author
David Eddings was born in Washington State in 1931 and grew up near Seattle. He graduated from the University of Washington and went on to serve in the US Army. Subsequently he worked as a buyer for the Boeing company and taught college-level English. His first novel was a contemporary adventure, but he soon began a spectacular career as a fantasy writer with his bestselling series The Belgariad.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Though full of treasures, this farewell to the world of the authors' bestselling Belgariad and Mallorean sagas is rather a mixed bag. The book contains an autobiographical foreword, explaining the roots of the double saga in David Eddings's reading of medieval epics, the editorial influence of the late Lester del Rey, the longstanding but only recently acknowledged role of the author's wife as "unindicted collaborator" and the perils of writing high fantasy in general. The volume then presents a variety of well-crafted pseudobiblia, such as Belgarath's autobiography and many of the Holy Books. It goes on to the historical, economic and ethnographic background of the major nations of the sagas. There are many other pieces that reflect well on the Eddingses' world-building skills--as if the novels themselves had not already demonstrated their craft. This book may be unintelligible to those who are not Eddings fans, but it will be irresistible to those who are. It is also of some scholarly interest in revealing the roots of one of the founding megasagas in modern English-language fantasy. Science Fiction Book Club alternate selection.
