The Belgariad (I'm prepping for a podcast)

[Ser Not Appearing]

So, starting today, I'm reading The Belgariad for the first time in ~20 years. I'd be interested in other people's memories and thoughts on this series.

I also thought it might be interesting to see what people know about The Belgariad in terms of place and time or trivia facts. For instance, if it's ever been cited as direct influence to XYZ series or you can chart some things that he did that have carried over and influenced the genre broadly, what are they? I find that a lot of the history of literature and how the genre morphed over time is a subject I'm ill-equipped to discuss ... but I think it's important to acknowledge and I've seen people here discuss it. So I'd love to know, uh, what I don't know.

... and then also what are people's memories or relationship with it? Did you like it when you were younger and how does it hold up now?

As background, I'm reading the series in preparation for a podcast recording on it. Some childhood friends and I decided that we don't talk enough and so we started a podcast to force ourselves to get together more. The podcast centers on bringing up things that we remembered and liked and were important to us in our childhood / youth, then re-experiencing them as a more mature adults (were all about 40 years old now), seeing how they hold up and forming new memories ... that sort of thing.

Once upon a time, my best friend and I thought this was the best book series of all time. We both remain fans of the fantasy genre in general, though I read (listen to audiobooks) quite a bit more than he does.

I'm not trying to self-promote and spam our podcast here. In fact, it's mostly just for ourselves, family and friends and we've only just gotten started with two episodes released and no dreams of fortune or fame. I do think it's cool and we've mostly reviewed movies so far. If you're ever interested then PM me and I'll tell the name and shoot you a link ... but that's not why I'm posting and I really don't want to give the impression that growing listenership is my goal, so I'm intentionally not posting the podcast name. Not sure if that's lame or cool but, either way, it's me.

I'll probably also post some longer ramblings as I read through the books in the next month or so.

[Argonath Diver]

I can't exactly recall my childhood series of first-reads, but it definitely was one of the first series other than Lord of the Rings I read by the time I was 12 or so. I remember thinking the sequel series The Malloreon was the most wildly epic series possible, and also that that second series had the coolest book covers ever.

By junior high school I had moved on to true masterworks like Shannara and Feist's Magician series, and the most Epic Thing Ever, the Wheel of Time. Then I had a job at our public library, put a barcode on a shiny silver book by an author I'd never heard of, so I check it out to myself and took 70 pages or so to reach an incestuous queen watching her brother murder a kid, and I went from there.

I reread The Belgeriad as an adult and enjoyed it, while of course recognizing its straightforward prose aimed at teens. I don't think I went through The Malloreon. I'm sure if I re-read them again I'd have a fun time with it.

Once your podcast is published, I'll give it a listen! That series is certainly one of my cherished stepping stones in my 90s fantasy evolution.

[Ser Not Appearing]

Yeah, Shannara was my first (6th grade), then a bunch of Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms. I got to The Belgariad at maybe 15 or 16 and thought I was pretty well read at that point ... lol.

[Lord Patrek]

My gateway to fantasy was Weis and Hickman's Dragonlance Chronicles. That was in 1986, during my first year of junior high. Read the Dragonlance Legends afterward and pretty much everything TSR released in the next couple of years.

Like many of my generation who followed the same path, I then upped my game and started reading more "serious" stuff. Eddings, Brooks, and Feist were my first non-TSR SFF authors and I read everything they had written.

I've never read any of Eddings' early works as an adult. That might be why I have fond memories for the Belgariad, the Malloreon, the Elenium, and the Tamuli series. Not sure how they hold up in this day and age. But I have a feeling that most teenagers or young adults new to the genre would probably find a lot of things to love about these books.

From Belgarath the Sorcerer on, everything is pretty much on the crappy side of things. Or maybe I was just getting older, more mature, and more demanding as a reader. By then, Del Rey's big guns were competing against Tor Books' powerhouses (Jordan and Goodkind). The market was changing and Eddings couldn't hold his own against the genre's new superstars.

[Werthead]

Are you going to mention their history as child-abusers? It feels like that'll be a fairly massive elephant in the room through the whole project.

I thought the Belgariad was fairly tedious and childish nonsense when I read the first book at around 10 years old, and reading it again as a teenager as part of the "fantasy canon" didn't do much to disabuse that notion. I did finish it, but The Malloreon was pretty horrific in terms of writing. The Elenium was a bit better-written and had some interesting ideas, as I think they were trying to write a more adult and gritty fantasy series but could not sustain it and by the second book had fallen back into their bad old habits. The Tamuli was easily one of the two or three worst fantasy series I've ever read.

As writers the Eddings are pretty dreadful. It feels like they have stock phrases on copy+paste which they just use to fill the text up, and they have no descriptive powers to speak of. Their worldbuilding is poor and often nonsensical (I think the journey in The Malloreon ends up spanning something like 15,000 miles, and it feels like a Sunday hike in the woods). The characters are flat.

I ascribe the immense popularity of the series in the 1980s to the fact there was very little else around in the fantasy field, and the books are immensely easy to read with almost no mental engagement required. Beyond that they have aged horribly. Of their contemporaries, Feist had a much stronger early run of books (though he tailed off big time at the end), Weis & Hickman started better and got a lot better (before again phoning it in later on), Brooks started off probably as bad but also got a lot better over time. The Eddings started poorly and got a lot worse.

[polishgenius]

Like Wert I was pretty young when I read it, ten at the oldest (I might have been younger, but I think Belgarath the Sorcerer, which came out when I was 8, was already out when I read it, or at least finished it. Polgara the Sorceress definitely wasn't coz I bought that new). 


Unlike Wert it blew my tiny shiny mind, though I will say I did find its depiction of races off even then- didn't quite get through that it was horrifically racist, which it obviously is in hindsight, but simplistic and not quite right. 

Also I wasn't super-familiar with Star Wars at the time but in hindsight the story of a sandy-haired farmboy living with his aunt who gets dragged off on a magical adventure by a grumpy old magician mentor figure and turns out to be a secret chosen one who eventually fights a burnt-faced, metal-mask clad bad guy with glowing swords is a little familiar.


I think the success was in part, yeah, because there wasn't a lot around back then, but also because they did have a knack of making characters seem... iconic is too strong a word, but they tapped into archetypes well I'd say. Or at least far out of proportion to their overall level as writers. Like, Belgarath, Polgara, Silk were cool, and the antagonists worked well enough. In the Malloreon the image of the Seeress and her guide always sticks in my head. Also, the prose is unskilled but just rolls and goes down easy. 

I don't remember well enough to judge the actual imagery, in terms of prose description, now, but I do remember that they had some neat ideas, especially in the Mallorean and later books. Things like the baddie being turned into stars at one point.

 

ps if you think the Tamuli was bad you should see the later ones. Redemption of Althalus really tried to do something different with a time-travel plot and some genuinely neat ideas and locations, but just ends as a pile of barely-coherent nonsense. But at least it was readable, the first book in the Dreamers was the first book I ever didn't finish. It somehow broke my brain, since from that moment on I have not finished many many books, including much, much better ones that I didn't click with (though some I do come back to).

[ljkeane]

Yeah, I loved the Belgariad, Mallorean and Elenium when I was younger. The follow up to the Elenium (was that the Tamuli?) I think I started to find a little tedious. The Redemption of Althalus was terrible and I dropped out at that point.

[VigoTheCarpathian]

The Belgariad/Mallorean (and Piers Anthony Xanth novels) were the only thing in the fantasy section in our rural library for myself and my brother after reading and re-reading the hobbit and LoTR, around 4th/5th grade.

I loved the books (and agree about the huge drop off in quality/plotting, noticeable even to a 5th grader) for several years until new friends introduced me to D&D, dragonlance and feist (and then on to WoT) and pretty much never looked back at them.  I have a vague nostalgia, and it did fill a niche but would probably never recommend them to a soul.

Belgariad is the Eragon of the 80s.  Bafflingly broad exposure, given its relative quality/originality.

[Ser Not Appearing]

On 11/13/2022 at 4:42 AM, Werthead said:

Are you going to mention their history as child-abusers? It feels like that'll be a fairly massive elephant in the room through the whole project.

That's ...  interesting. I don't know how we'll handle it. Just looked it up for the first time and found this.

It's certainly tangential to discussion of my past enjoyment but it's rather relevant to my re-experiencing it now as adult an adult. I don't want to dwell on it but ... I don't know.

 

 

 

[Madame deVenoge]

1 hour ago, Ser Not Appearing said:

That's ...  interesting. I don't know how we'll handle it. Just looked it up for the first time and found this.

It's certainly tangential to discussion of my past enjoyment but it's rather relevant to my re-experiencing it now as adult an adult. I don't want to dwell on it but ... I don't know.

 

 

 

I think you make some initial mention of it, to give the issue its due and also provide a background:

You’re aware of the recently uncovered history, here, but you’re going to separate the art from the artist (as it were) and discuss the work solely in context of being a YA reader in the 80s/90s / vs how well the novels hold up now, etc.

I am of the path….omg, did not realize that we were all on the same path, here, people, in the mid-late 80s and 90s….

Anne McCaffrey, Piers Anthony, David Eddings, Feist, Weis & Hickman, Anything Forgotten Realms…

[Lord Patrek]

9 hours ago, Chataya de Fleury said:

I am of the path….omg, did not realize that we were all on the same path, here, people, in the mid-late 80s and 90s….

Anne McCaffrey, Piers Anthony, David Eddings, Feist, Weis & Hickman, Anything Forgotten Realms…

You know what this means, right? We're getting old!

[Ser Not Appearing]

*inserts "I'm a man, I'm 40" gif*

[Relic]

12 hours ago, Chataya de Fleury said:

Feist

o h man, i havent thought about him in ages. Now im weirdly sad...

[baxus]

I read Belgarath and Polgara back in the day when I was just trying to get my hands on any fantasy books, especially in English. Parts were fun, other parts were tedious, but overall I found it to be enjoyable. Picked up Belgariad later on when it was translated to Serbian and thought it was rather cliche but fun. Picked up Malloreon later, didn't really enjoy it, I don't even think I finished it.

Wouldn't re-read any of it, to be honest since I've read some stuff since that's raised the bar significantly.

[ljkeane]

2 hours ago, Relic said:

o h man, i havent thought about him in ages. Now im weirdly sad...

I read the first book of his most recent series a while ago in a fit of nostalgia. It, er, wasn’t great.

[Madame deVenoge]

3 hours ago, ljkeane said:

I read the first book of his most recent series a while ago in a fit of nostalgia. It, er, wasn’t great.

I re-read the one with Salmissra after I did a chemical peel and my skin was shedding like a snake. 

[Wilbur]

When the first four series arrived in bookstores, it received a tremendous amount of publicity and shelf space.  You would go into a mall bookstore, and the fantasy section would have eight or ten copies of the newest book, plus five or six of the previous ones, with cardboard shelf headers announcing "the newest release from David Eddings!" with catchy visuals.

When I read the books, they seemed very straightforward, even simplistic, but easy to follow, stories.  This may have been one of the reasons they were so popular, because they were so simple to read compared to contemporary books from, say, Stephen R. Donaldson's complex characters with moral flaws, or Stephen Lawhead's questions of religious versus spiritual virtues.  Eddings characters identify an objective, then proceed towards that goal with some adventures in between and little or no moral or ethical consideration.  They were sort of "middle-class D&D characters", as one of my friends described them - no Cugel the Clever here.

My own experience was that the stories started off at a sort of junior varsity, but acceptable level, then headed for cringey as more books came out.  As the 90s began, I wasn't too keen on the 40-year-old knight having a relationship with the teen princess.

On the other hand, the books always had some arresting cover illustrations that were often better than other books that came out in the same years.  Consider 2fa6729fd7a06478ccedc010.L.jpg (334×500) (media-amazon.com) compared to 81f8zi9X69L.jpg (928×1408) (media-amazon.com) and see which one a teenager would want to pick up and read.

[Lord Patrek]

It's worth noting that even about a decade ago, at a time when Eddings was often an object of ridicule among current SFF fans, folks at Del Rey told me that his backlist still managed to sell over 100,000 units every year. Which was pretty incredible, in my opinion. Then again, all 5 installments of the Belgariad could be found in Amazon's top 100 fantasy books basically every month back then, and that with zero marketing or publicity from the publisher.

I wonder if the Corgi editions still sell as well. . .

[Loup Jo]

This was the first long fantasy series I read ( I had only read the Hobbit before). Probably was around 13 when I started reading it. I read the Belgariad, Mallorean, and the two stand alones (Polgara + Belgarath.) I once started reading the Redemption of Athalus but i never finished it. 

At the time I really liked it. It was easy to follow. It was exciting enough at the time. The whole journey and all the characters they encountered I thought was really interesting. I really enjoyed it and it definitely was a gateway for other fantasy series after that.

I liked the main characters a lot,  Garion was a nice enough protagonist. Polgara, Barak, Silk and Belgarath were quite cool I found. Eriond was sweet. I didn't like Ce'Nedra too much as she could be fairly annoying.

By the time I read the Mallorean I did think there was a lot of repetition and i lost some of my interest. I then really liked the two stand alone novels; I thought they were great when I read them.

I've never re-read the series and it wouldn't hold the same appeal at all anymore I think given it is rather simplistic in its world-building and adventures + a lot of repetition. 

I do think that it could still appeal to younger readers these days, the stories are pretty accessible and there are some fun adventures in there.

[Durckad]

I don't remember exactly at what age I first read The Belgariad, but I was at least 10 (I read The Hobbit and LotR when I was 9 or 10) so I was probably 11 or 12 and I was fully into my "fantasy binge" phase where I would try to read anything with a sword on the cover.

While I largely agree with Wert, I thought the series was great when I first read it. Great enough to read through it at least twice. The characters were fun, the dialogue was quippy in a sort of adolescent Joss Whedon way, the stories were enjoyable, and the world was mostly engaging. Even as pre-teen I knew it was all a bit shallow, but I still enjoyed it. 

After that, I wasn't sure what series to read next so I actually picked up The Tamuli without first reading The Elenium. I hated The Tamuli. I don't think it was due to the fact that I hadn't read The Elenium, as the series does a good job of establishing characters and the events of the prior books. I think I didn't like it because it felt very much, both in writing, story, and characterization, like a supremely watered down Belgariad with some of the worst villains ever.

I then decided to read The Elenium and The Mallorean next. The Elenium I actually really enjoyed. It felt far more mature. It still had the light, quipy characters, but the events and story had a more serious edge to them. I still have fond memories of the series today. The Mallorean, on the other hand, was just... okay I guess. It felt like a better Tamuli and after finishing this series, I think Edding's weaknesses as a writer become really apparent. He is very fond of recycling, whether it's dialogue, characters, or plots, he endlessly reuses them. That doesn't make his earlier books bad, but it does show how quickly he fell into a pattern.

Belgarath The Sorcerer I have very fond memories of and I actually think is probably easily his best book. The "epic" scale of the story and the fact that it bucks the recycled structures of his other books made it stand out quite a bit to me at the time. This was probably the last Eddings book I read as around this time I think I started getting into WoT and that pretty much consumed my reading habits for several years.

I did pick up Redemption of Athalus when it came out several years later. I was fully into my "edgy teenager" phase and so shit had to be "dark" and "mature" and Athalus was definitely not that. Not that that was why I didn't like it, Athalus was just a terrible book. It was more of the same, more recycled plots, characters, dialogue, and uselessly inept villains. One of the worst things was that Athalus, the main character... wasn't that bad. It was Eddings at his absolute worst. I got about halfway through the book before I DNF'd it. 

Disregarding his pernicious past, I do have overall fond memories of his works. The Belgariad is a pretty foundational work of a certain kind of light, YA fantasy that just isn't seen much anymore and The Elenium is a bit more refined and mature, not exactly adult but certainly not exclusively for nerdy kids. The rest of his work? Eh, I think the less said the better.

Would I reread it now? No probably not. I enjoy my fond memories of them and I doubt they'd hold up. Some things are just better left in the past.