RIP David Eddings

June 7, 2009 4:39 PM

According to the BBC, US fantasy author David Eddings has died at 77 due to natural causes. More coverage at the Guardian. (via bureau42)
posted by reptile (84 comments total)

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posted by Mitheral at 4:48 PM on June 7

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I loved and reread both the Belgariad and the Mallorean. Great books that don't adhere to the typical D&D archetypes.
posted by Mach5 at 4:50 PM on June 7

The Belgariad was I favourite of mine when I was a kid, although the time I spent reading Belgarath and Polgara is time I wish I could have back. Perhaps he and Leigh can now collaborate with Robert Jordan on something on an even more epic scale?
posted by nowonmai at 4:55 PM on June 7

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I don't believe I've ever read anything by Mr. Eddings. Can anyone suggest a good starting point?
posted by zarq at 4:56 PM on June 7

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Read Belgariad/Mallorean when I was much younger. I enjoyed them for what they were, although I'm sure if I revisited them they wouldn't hold up. Still, it sounds like his final unfinished project would have been an interesting take on the genre. I'd love to take a look at it, if it's ever published.
posted by Donnie VandenBos at 5:03 PM on June 7

I don't believe I've ever read anything by Mr. Eddings. Can anyone suggest a good starting point?

The Belgariad, when you were 13, in 1988.
posted by empath at 5:04 PM on June 7 [40 favorites has favorites]

I'm just at my reunion at Reed College, where his death was announced. He was an alum. He also just gave a giant donation to the college, millions of dollars. Thanks!
posted by Nelson at 5:12 PM on June 7 [1 favorite has favorites]

Read all ten of the Belgariad and Mallorean books one college summer when I was in Russia. Didn't speak the language and my girlfriend worked all day, so I read a lot.

I remember loving the Belgariad but getting one book into the Mallorean and thinking "WTF, this is the *exact same* story, with the children this time!"

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posted by bpm140 at 5:15 PM on June 7

I enoyed Eddings in my early teens until the Sparhawk series made me aware of exactly how profoundly racist the worldview espoused was. Once I noticed that and looked again at his earlier stuff, it kind of ruined it for me. That aside, the Belgariad and the Mallorean was bracing, fun stuff when i was a white boy in my mid-teens. It might have struck me differently if I was a girl.
posted by rodgerd at 5:21 PM on June 7 [1 favorite has favorites]

I enjoyed The Mallorean more when it was called The Belgariad. I stopped reading Eddings after that, actually--some authors have only one story to tell, but are big enough names that they can get it published over and over and over again, raking in more dough each time. The Belgariad actually was a great fantasy series. He just should've stopped there.
posted by fatbird at 5:21 PM on June 7

Read The Redemption of Althalus and loved it. I'd recommend it as a starting point, too.
posted by AdamCSnider at 5:24 PM on June 7

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posted by polexa at 5:29 PM on June 7

His books actually were one of the prime factors that forged my current relationship - which has lasted 12 years now. Endnull and I both loved his books - and gave each other copies of the later books as they came out.

He may not have been the most original, he may not have even been the best writer - but he knew how to use a formula to tell a story.
posted by strixus at 5:31 PM on June 7 [1 favorite has favorites]

I enoyed Eddings in my early teens until the Sparhawk series made me aware of exactly how profoundly racist the worldview espoused was.

How so? I've never read his work, but I'm just curious.
posted by brundlefly at 5:36 PM on June 7

the Sparhawk series made me aware of exactly how profoundly racist the worldview espoused was.

I wouldn't say his work is racist as much as it's racialist, and I would say he's no worse than Tolkien or D&D in that regard.
posted by empath at 5:37 PM on June 7 [1 favorite has favorites]

I hope this is an experiment in the nature of writing 700 page Bealgariads whatever. Garion, you are hawt.
posted by longsleeves at 5:38 PM on June 7

I read The Belgariad starting at, heh, the edge of seventeen and finished The Mallorean in my 20s. I identified so much with Belgarath that forevermore any online persona I create, including this one, has contained the word "wolf" in it, in homage to the wizard who was often called the Old Wolf. I'm seriously saddened by Eddings passing, so likeable and charming were the characters he placed into his admittedly fantasy-lite stories.
posted by WolfDaddy at 5:50 PM on June 7

Like others here, I enjoyed The Belgariad and The Mallorean as a teen. Even though I lost my fondness for those books a long time ago, I'm still grateful for having had them at the time.

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posted by never used baby shoes at 6:03 PM on June 7

I'm just at my reunion at Reed College, where his death was announced. He was an alum. He also just gave a giant donation to the college, millions of dollars. Thanks!

Reed '86 here! I was going to mention the college connection but had never heard about this donation. Wonder if Dr Demento's legacy will eclipse this one.
posted by ethnomethodologist at 6:16 PM on June 7 [1 favorite has favorites]

Racist? Really? I've read every book in both the Belgarion and the Sparhawk series several times and it never so much as crossed my mind that the books were racist so much as . . . I don't know, almost told from a viewpoint that comes off as very medieval to me? In any case, I re-read those books probably once a year just for the sheer fun and fluff of them - they are so fast, so easy, to read. Are they sophisticated? No. But they're good clean fun as far as I'm concerned. Godspeed, sir.
posted by Medieval Maven at 6:22 PM on June 7

I've read some of these, though it's been twenty years. (God, am I really that old?) This is what I remember. It's rambling, but that's how I remember it:

Belgarath was this old wizard guy who doesn't die and is loved by the gods. Belgarion is his grandson (?), who grows up and also becomes a wizard, and Polgara is his wife. They have a weird relationship. The gods in this world are actually, in personality, kind of surprisingly like ordinary people, and so are the wizards.

"Bel" is a prefix that indicates wizardliness. Before flipping the Magic Bit, the two characters were Garath and Garion.

There's this one bit where Garion, unused to shape shifting, turns into a wolf and has a great time. Too great; he starts to become a wolf in mind as well as body, and the other two have to perform something like psychic surgery on him to make him think he's a human again.

Belgarion has a voice in his head. At first you think it's just Garion's internal voice, but it turns out to be an actual voice, and it's trying to save the unverse. Belgarath also had the voice once before. It's single-minded (mostly) in its goal, and there's lots of stuff it doesn't tell Belgarion since it knows the future. That's what the Belgaraid is about, the voice is trying to adjust the fate of the world towards a good outcome, while the bad guys have their own counterpart voice (who we don't hear) trying to make a bad outcome. It's one of those tipping-the-balance-of-fate things, with Belgarion's son, who's been kidnapped by the bad guys, being the lynchpin. After he's rescued, before leaving the voice tells Belgarion all the things he wasn't allowed to tell him before.

Belgarion's son is just a kid here. His mother is Ce'Nedra, a.k.a. Apostrophe Girl, who's actually a dryad. She's short, like four feet tall, which is strange when you think of the hero boning her. She apparently has a fetish involving plants, which thankfully is not well-explained to us. Her dryad sisters off in the forest are just that, all female, who capture passing males for sexual services. (When you're a teenager, scenes like that tend to stick out in the memory.)

Anyway, the stuff with Ce'Nedra is weird. She's left alone in charge of the kingdom (nearly forgot, Belgarion has a kingdom too), and leads their armies against the forces of evil while Belgarion is off with the folks trying to get his son back. She (the queen at this point) has no combat skill but gets a special suit of armor made for her and, with her short stature, becomes something like a mascot to the troops. Ol' Ce'Nedra is actually one of the more interesting characters; she was raised by the rulers of the merchant nation in the world, whose name escapes me, and doesn't have many lingering traces of dryadness about her. It doesn't seem to pay off in the end, though.

Belgarion, early in his wizarding career, figures for some reason he'll just whip up a storm for reason. So he does, and magic being easy to perform and all-powerful in this world it works. But the storm messes up weather patterns around the world, and the gods spend a long time sorting it out. They're pissed and are beginning to have second thoughts about Belgarion and this magic thing, but Belgarath get them to relent. That's the check on magic power in this world, it turns out, the possibility of unexpected consequences. I couldn't help thinking they could have provided a user's manual to Belgarath, though, explaining all this before letting him magic stuff around.

I remember two other things. First, every chapter begins with a quote from one of the world's figures or publications (which seemed weird to me, since the world didn't actually seem to be all that deep). Second, there was another, evil wizard guy who made Belgarath (to remind, the grandfather wizard) angry earlier, and he buried him, still alive, in solid rock without hope for escape, and he's still there, suffering agony for all time. The lesson is not to meddle in the affairs of wizards, because they can turn your arms into angry weasels, and then there you are with weasels for arms, and how you going to eat without getting weasel slobber over everything? Seems kind of a gyp, though, that Eddings never got around to letting that guy out. (At least, I assume he didn't; I never read the later books.)

I liked them at the time, but now I realize that they were mostly pretty shallow. Lots of cool things lying around that, in the end, didn't seem to add up to anything. As previous posters have noted it's definitely teenager fiction, but weird and imaginative for that. There are worse things to give your kids to read.
posted by JHarris at 6:26 PM on June 7 [1 favorite has favorites]

I have fond memories of The Belgariad but regretted reading almost everything else he did. The Mallorean is a tied rehash and none of his other series really got me interested. It's hard to say what made The Belgariad so readable, Eddings wasn't the best author and the "orphan boy finds out he is really a wizard" wasn't original even back then.

Like rodgerd, I also consider Eddings work to be unfortunately racist - certain (fictional) human races were constantly referred to as (and seen to be) dim and/or warlike. You can say that same thing about Tolkien I guess, but that doesn't make it more palatable.

Still, I am sad to see another piece of my childhood dying.
posted by AndrewStephens at 6:27 PM on June 7

An old friend of mine who was a complete literary snob who turned his nose up at science fiction and fantasy at every turn had one exception: The Belgariad series. He would wax rhapsodic about that series and managed even to use it as a tool for his snobbery; he thought it was so good that there was no reason to read any other fantasy (or sci fi, for that matter) books. I started the first book years and years ago and vaguely remember epic happenings and lots of hard to pronounce place and people names, but I never finished it. Maybe I'll give it a try...but man alive, that's a lot of books.
posted by zardoz at 6:36 PM on June 7

Racist? Really?

Biological determinist, anyway. There was one incident with a snake-people character IIRC, that made the suspicion gel for me. I think it happened sometime in The Mallorean.

Still, The Belgariad helped me through some awful years.

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posted by cybercoitus interruptus at 6:38 PM on June 7

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posted by dchrssyr at 6:45 PM on June 7

The Belgariad, when you were 13, in 1988.

In case anyone thinks this is a joke: It is not. The Belgariad can be stunningly good when you are 13 years old. The 13 years old part is the magic ingredient and I say this as somebody who will defend to the death the literary potential of SF.

An old friend of mine who was a complete literary snob who turned his nose up at science fiction and fantasy at every turn had one exception: The Belgariad series. He would wax rhapsodic about that series and managed even to use it as a tool for his snobbery; he thought it was so good that there was no reason to read any other fantasy

This is the dumbest thing I've read in quite some time. It's like a literature snob making fun of fantasy except for, you know, that incredible DRAGONLANCE stuff. It just doesn't make any sense. I would laugh except I'm sort of appalled. He might as well be a film snob claiming that all television is crap and, anyway, he doesn't need to watch television because he's seen the only truly excellent television series with artistic merit ever made. CSI: MIAMI.
posted by Justinian at 6:47 PM on June 7 [10 favorites has favorites]

Racist? Really?

Yeah, really.

Here's the setting of the Sparhawk novels: Sparhawk is from a place with a Western European climate. He's a member of a millitant monastic order (Templars!). In his home country, there's a bunch of people with magic-using skills and different religious beliefs who have only his religious order as friends. The bunch of people bear more than a passing resemblence to the status of Jews in medieval Europe. If Jews could do magic and had Templars and friends. So far, so good.

One of the major plot arcs takes Sparhawk into the desert realms of the world. The people who live there are dirty, ignorant, heretics who believe in a bullshit bastardisation of the one true faith. Their ignorance is nigh-universal, as is their credulity for their appalling religious leaders. Also, they eat mutton.

Now, it's possible that I missed something in some later series, or that Eddings was doing some clever point-of-view writing that is intended to make us question Sparhawk's understanding of the world (Good White People of the One True Faith and Dirty Brown Desert Dwellers), but on the face of it, it seemed like a pretty unsublte Dirty Arabs Suck Amirite?

(I'd actually be pleased to be proven wrong, incidentally; Eddings is fun and I'd like to go back to enjoying him.)

The comparisons with Tolkien are pretty unflattering to Tolkien, incidentally. Tolkien's "inherently bad guys" were seperate species created by a dark God for th purposes of being Bad. The Sparhawk series reads like the worst bits of the last of the Narnia books stretched out across many novels (Your God is a misbehaving gorilla and a donkey in a tent!).
posted by rodgerd at 7:00 PM on June 7 [1 favorite has favorites]

The way every character's personality is determined by his or her nationality is a constant feature in the Belgariad, and I wouldn't quite say it's racist, but it's getting there. He shares with Tolkien the way all the best people live in the North-West and resemble Nordic/Germanic Europeans, whereas the East and South are full of swarthy mysterious evil-doers. Again, I wouldn't go so far as to call it racist, but he was no Ursula le Guin when it comes to politically-correct world-building.
I don't really worry about that stuff when I was 13 and this was the best book series in the world, though.
posted by nowonmai at 7:14 PM on June 7 [1 favorite has favorites]

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posted by Lynsey at 7:15 PM on June 7

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The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost... - Galadriel

Damn. English language fantasy writing has changed so much in so short a time. Fortunately, writers like Joe Abercrombie and Scott Lynch step to the plate as greats like David Eddings and Robert Jordan lay down their pens.

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posted by christhelongtimelurker at 7:20 PM on June 7

Isn't there a thing early in the Belgariad where everybody felt they couldn't say the bad guy's name, because they knew he could hear it across the world and gain power from it? I vaguely remember that, then remember encountering a similar concept in the first Harry Potter book years later, where everybody was like, "Don't say You-Know-Who's Name!", and I thought, "Hey, she totally stole that from Eddings!"
posted by jbickers at 7:23 PM on June 7

Your God is a misbehaving gorilla and a donkey in a tent!

You did what?! I just meant that you could ride the donkey into town and hire a prostitute!

*RIMSHOT*
posted by infinitywaltz at 7:31 PM on June 7

Cracked the first book open at age 15 after all my DnD nerd friends were raving about it. Got 2/3 down the first page, made the mid-1980s equivalent of "wtf?!", closed it, and never read any more.

Eddings was a superstar at HarperCollins, though. That boy could shift product.
posted by scruss at 7:33 PM on June 7 [1 favorite has favorites]

Isn't there a thing early in the Belgariad where everybody felt they couldn't say the bad guy's name, because they knew he could hear it across the world and gain power from it? I vaguely remember that, then remember encountering a similar concept in the first Harry Potter book years later, where everybody was like, "Don't say You-Know-Who's Name!", and I thought, "Hey, she totally stole that from Eddings!"

He stole it from Tolkien, and it's older than Tolkien.
posted by empath at 7:55 PM on June 7

Oh. I didn't expect it to hurt so much, learning this. I left his books behind years ago, but they were instrumental in forming my love for fantasy literature, and also my first foray into online forums (joining alt groups that talked about Eddings or fantasy). Even my username is a variant of Ce'Nedra.

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posted by Alnedra at 8:02 PM on June 7

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I did enjoy reading the Belgariad when I was 13 or so.
posted by motty at 8:09 PM on June 7

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When I was 13, in 1991. They don't wear well with time, but when I was 13 they were just what I needed.
posted by PsychoTherapist at 8:28 PM on June 7

I loved his books too as a teen. Reread them while living in Taiwan in my late 20:s, as they were free English language books procured from one of the expat watering holes. They didn't hold up. At all. Still doesn't change the fact that they were a great read way back when.
posted by gemmy at 8:44 PM on June 7

I think I avoided him for the reasons people have spoken of above, having come across him later in life, having seen so many charicatures of his work as recycling in a less interesting way than Moorcock and having read blurbs for his later books that were the very definition of extruded fantasy product. That said, I wish him well in whatever afterlife he may have imagined.
posted by Sparx at 8:53 PM on June 7

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I was BelGarion.
posted by PigAlien at 8:58 PM on June 7

I actually think Harry Potter is mostly a rip-off of the Belgariad.
posted by empath at 9:07 PM on June 7

I think it's possible that the count-per-page of the word "bleak" may be higher in the Belgariad than in any other published work in the English language.

"Bleak", you see, is the expression that the less-savory-yet-still-heroic characters wear while contemplating doing something unsavory. There are several of them, and they do a lot of contemplating.

Like so many others here, I enjoyed these as a teen very much, but revisited as an adult, they're badly in need of a better editor. Story's still pretty good, as fantasy goes, but the writing gets repetitious. If you approach it as cotton-candy fantasy, you'll be pleased by the parts with genuinely good storytelling, and won't be too put off by the largely substanceless bulk that comprises most of the novels.

And stick with the Belgariad. If you like it, wonderful -- don't bother with the Mallorean, because it's another three thousand pages of the exact same thing in the exact same order. No matter how much you enjoyed the story, it's much poorer the second time through. I finally tried again on the Mallorean last year, at least fifteen years since I'd read the first set of books, and I still lost interest by Book 2 or so. After fifteen years it was still too repetitious to stomach.
posted by Malor at 9:13 PM on June 7 [1 favorite has favorites]

So *that's* why I never "got" the Harry Potter series.

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Thanks Eddings for the innoculation!

/was a slave to Edding's novels until about 15 or 16, then barfed whenever I remembered that I had read Eddings.
posted by porpoise at 9:45 PM on June 7

Spawrhawk is awesome and I still want to own his "I don't give a fuck, fuck off or I kill you" demeanor.

Edings writing action scenes with "par 3, parry4, riposte 2" &c, was what wrote me off of everything else that he wrote.
posted by porpoise at 9:50 PM on June 7

Belgarath was this old wizard guy who doesn't die and is loved by the gods. Belgarion is his grandson (?), who grows up and also becomes a wizard, and Polgara is his wife.

Belgarion was his grandson many many times removed. Polgara was Belgarath's daughter and Belgarion's Aunt many many times removed.
posted by Bonzai at 10:06 PM on June 7

My local and school libraries only had incomplete sets of the Belgariad and the Mallorean (which justly raised the ire of every nerdish boy aged 12 to 14, and set us off on furious snuffling quests to find the missing books), and I remember it prompting my first ever Big Purchase: shiny new editions of every single one of those wonderful, dopey Eddings epics. They provided perfectly-tuned escapism for some pretty awkward years.

It gave me great pleasure, when I was 18 and moving out of home, to donate all of my Eddings books to the Wangaratta High School library. I was never going to read them again, but I knew that there, they'll be read and reread by grubby 13-year-olds until they fall apart at the seams.

RIP, Mr Eddings ~ not a writer of tremendous artistic significance, but I really don't think he ever meant to be. The man mastered a craft, knew his audience, and could play them like a banjo.
posted by Rumpled at 10:10 PM on June 7 [1 favorite has favorites]

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posted by lundman at 10:11 PM on June 7

13, 1992. Greatest books ever, at the time. Thank you, Mr & Mrs Eddings.

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posted by dirtynumbangelboy at 10:16 PM on June 7

I read the two big series off my 7th-grade teacher's bookshelf, so I must have been 12 or 13 as well.

I sense a theme here.
posted by casarkos at 10:35 PM on June 7

"I am here to teach a generation or two how to read. After they've finished with me and I don't challenge them any more, they can move on to somebody important like Homer or Milton."

"I'm never going to be in danger of getting a Nobel Prize for literature."

The man accepted his place. Many of us - myself included - do the 'we read him at 13 and then went on to other stuff." And he was totally fine with that, because it made us want to seek out the other stuff.

Thank you, Mr. Eddings. You taught me that sometimes snappy patter and a bit of thought could be far more helpful than a strong arm in some situations.

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posted by mephron at 10:36 PM on June 7 [8 favorites has favorites]

I started reading The Belgariad in 1984. Not at all coincidentally it seems, I was 13 years old. When I read the series, Enchanter's End Game, the fifth and last book in the series, was not out yet. I remember hearing that the last book was out at school, and begging my mom to drive me to the nearest book store likely to have it. The store had one copy left, with its white cover (each cover in the series had a different color, I recall - Yellowish orange, green, pinkish red, blue, and white).

I remember that my friends and I all agreed that it was quite superior to Tolkien, in that it actually got to the action and that the sorcerers' (Garion, Belgarath, and Polgara) magic actually counted for something; that they could actually do things with it, unlike Gandalf, who mostly ran away from threats (and whose greatest triumphs were offstage). They were, in short, bad-asses, and we, as 13 year olds, were quite taken with bad-asses. My friend Shane, I remember, was most impressed that no character in the Belgariad stopped the story for three pages to sing a song, or recite a poem.

I read most of Eddings's novels as I got older, and it seemed to me, in addition to the plot reiteration that many other posters have commented on, that each character was becoming more and more similar to each other. In other words, by the end of the Mallorean or the Tamuli there wasn't a hair's breadth of difference between the personalities of the main characters -- you could imagine every one of them saying dialogue attributed to any one of them.

But, the Belgariad... that elusive quality of "sensawunda" that those of us who still doggedly read and watch sci-fi dream of -- for this thirteen year old boy, at least, the Belgariad had that in spades.

Good night Mr. Eddings. You made this teenager (and all my friends) want to read more. I happen to think that's about the best thing a writer can do.
posted by Palquito at 10:50 PM on June 7 [2 favorites has favorites]

Isn't there a thing early in the Belgariad where everybody felt they couldn't say the bad guy's name, because they knew he could hear it across the world and gain power from it?

It was a she, Zandramas I think.

I was introduced to the books at about 13 too and it was the start of a love of fantasy. I still have them all on my shelf. They were the books I always used to go back to, I've probably read through them all at least 3 times. Not mind-blowing but characters I was happy enough to always read about again.

Wasn't the point of the Mallorean that everything was the same as the Belgariad - the characters even saying so if I remember correctly. Because of the 'accident', they were destined to repeat everything until things were set right again at the end of the Mallorean?

Man I loved those books so much. Thank you Mr Eddings.
posted by Ramo at 11:12 PM on June 7 [1 favorite has favorites]

Wasn't the point of the Mallorean that everything was the same as the Belgariad - the characters even saying so if I remember correctly. Because of the 'accident', they were destined to repeat everything until things were set right again at the end of the Mallorean?

Yeah, even the characters comment on it. That doesn't make it better.
posted by Justinian at 12:07 AM on June 8

I enjoyed these books as well; similarly, starting at about the age of 12 or 13. Honestly, I still read them now and again, simply because of how short they are. You can read an entire book in a few hours, pretty easily.

The Mallorean, despite the fact that it is structurally the same as the Belgariad, still has a few good moments. I liked Zakath, I liked it when they headed south into the land of the Murgos. There were some neat odds and ends.

I also rather liked the Ellenium and Tamuli, because they were at least different from the first two series.

I did find it odd though, his fascination with 18-year old women marrying 45 year old men though.
posted by vernondalhart at 1:17 AM on June 8

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At 17, in 1989, it was too late for Eddings to do anything for me. At the right age, I was too busy in Shannara and Majipoor.
posted by fleacircus at 2:30 AM on June 8 [1 favorite has favorites]

nowonmai: The way every character's personality is determined by his or her nationality is a constant feature in the Belgariad, and I wouldn't quite say it's racist, but it's getting there. He shares with Tolkien the way all the best people live in the North-West and resemble Nordic/Germanic Europeans, whereas the East and South are full of swarthy mysterious evil-doers. Again, I wouldn't go so far as to call it racist, but he was no Ursula le Guin when it comes to politically-correct world-building.

I don't really worry about that stuff when I was 13 and this was the best book series in the world, though.

Word. I've been thinking about taking on a project of revisiting the books now that they're far enough in the past that I can be a bit objective, and maybe writing a commentary as I read them. The nationality aspect bothered me a great deal as I formed a better idea of my politics. But I loved Polgara and Silk and Zakath and Hettar, and I wanted to learn the thieves' hand language, and I used to use Adara's name for, erm, MUDding.

(I was totally 12/13, too - 1994-5, and I must have read them all four or five times.)
posted by carbide at 2:41 AM on June 8

Like many others here, these books were an essential part of my childhood. Sure, they weren't deep stuff, but I wasn't there for that. It was enough to get into the silly banter that the characters endlessly indulged in, the same in-jokes that they all made. It was like revisiting old friends who happily never changed.

Thank you very much to both the Eddings for giving us their world.
posted by so much modern time at 3:04 AM on June 8 [1 favorite has favorites]

Having read the Belgariad in my teens, I'm a little disturbed that I don't remember a single thing about it plot-wise. I remember that Polgara sneered and gave subtle looks at people all the time, and THIS WAS IMPORTANT. Somehow.

So RIP. Loved reading those books when I was young, but I'll be damned if I can remember a single thing from them unlike, say, Asimov or Tolkien. Those guys had some regrettable moments as well, but I can at least discuss the main plots of their most famous novels.
posted by bardic at 3:30 AM on June 8

I came to his books the opposite way to most here, first the two Sparhawk trilogies, and then I sought out the Belgariad/Mallorean.

I loved them on first reading, though they don't hold up awfully well on repeat. It becomes more noticeable that Mr Eddings seemed to have made a list of his characters, and had gone down it and assigned each one two traits, to which he would then refer every time the character appeared. They're still near the top of my 'comfort food' reading list, though.

Mostly i'm grateful to Mr Eddings because my husband is badly dyslexic, and has been ashamed of his reading inability his entire life. He'd never read a book for pleasure. He loved to hear me give plot summaries of all the books I read, though, and one day when I was describing the first Sparhwk trilogy, he asked to borrow the first book. He took it out on a short army deployment, and came back hooked.

He's since read all 6 of those, and many others besides. He can read almost as fast as me now, and he loves it. So i'm more thankful than I can possibly say for David Eddings, I can say with no understatement that he gave my partner the gift of reading, and loving words. No small thing to me.
posted by pseudonymph at 3:32 AM on June 8 [12 favorites has favorites]

They're trashy, but oh, what entertaining trash...I reread the Sparhawk series once every couple of years. Of course, this may be like how some people really like to eat Kraft Mac & Cheese, because it reminds them of their childhood. (And yep, I must have been about 12 when I first started reading them.)
posted by leahwrenn at 4:49 AM on June 8

I just read the Belgariad again recently when I was having a shitty week. The books are easy to read and uncomplicated and very funny. It feels a little silly to be schlepping them around ever time I move (especially in my mid 20s), but they still work to cheer me up. Thanks Mr. Eddings for creating a world I'll continue to enjoy, especially on rainy days.
posted by Mouse Army at 5:08 AM on June 8

Total trash, but for the record, Silk was awesome.

RIP, Mr. Eddings.
posted by bettafish at 6:10 AM on June 8

14 years old, 1990. I had a crush on Garion, until I got sick of his whining, and switched to Silk.

And looking it up, I see that the big Viking-style warrior character was called Barak. I thought I'd been imagining that...
posted by harriet vane at 6:17 AM on June 8

.

Never heard of this Sparhawk series, but I read the Belgariad almost precisely when empath recommends (1987 at 14 years old, in my case). Enormously entertaining at the time, but extremely hacky even when I look back on it in my brain-movies. And yes, even at 14 years of age, I suspected there WAS something a little racist about the different cultures that Eddings outlined; especially the Murgos, who were darker-skinned and tinged with evil. The characters were cardboard cutouts, and all this started to dawn on me when I read through the first book of the Mallorean, making it impossible for me to finish.

Still...I must have read the Belgariad about a dozen times. At the time, it struck me as one of the best things ever written in the English language. This feeling was not to recur until a couple years later, when I came across Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series'. I still think those are good, but it's been ages since I confirmed that.
posted by Edgewise at 6:33 AM on June 8

I have to say, I never imagined Eddings had such a following.

I read the Belgariad when I was a freshman in college, and thought it was sort of a mild satire of fantasy, in that it was having fun with certain fantasy tropes.

The only reason I finished the Mallorean was because I was positive after the first half of the first book that Eddings simply could NOT mean to tell the same story twice, he simply was setting the reader up for some brilliant plot/story change that would justify this blantant repackaging of the Belgariad. I finished the series, and have condemned him to all who will listen as a hack ever since.

Best wishes to his family and all that, but from where I sit fantasy as a genre is better off without Eddings.
posted by magstheaxe at 6:36 AM on June 8

I was going to make an angry post, defending Eddings and everything he stands for, but you know what? This is the Internet, and people disagree on things, and that's okay. So instead, I'll just post this:

Dear David Eddings (wherever you may be right now):

I fucking love your books. I don't care if people say they're not "deep" enough, or that they're racist. I don't care that people sneer at you because you wrote fantasy for the money, instead of for some holy and pure love of the genre. I don't care if they're derivative of Tolkein, or Lewis, or anyone else. The Belgariad, the Mallorean, the Elenium, and the Tamuli rocked my adolescent world. I've spent hours and hours and hours and hours reading and re-reading the books. Sure, I read other books, too, but I always come back to the well-worn, dog-eared pages of the books you wrote. They entertain me. They make me laugh, they make me cry, but most importantly, they take me outside of the bland world I'm living in, and put me somewhere more exciting. And really, isn't that what writing (and especially fantasy writing) is all about?

So from the bottom of my nerdy, book-loving, internet-posting heart:
THANK YOU.
posted by specialagentwebb at 6:50 AM on June 8 [7 favorites has favorites]

I read a couple Sparhawk and a handful of Belgariad and just didn't think he was a very good writer. Too precious by half. Still and all, he was a genre name and it sounds like he had a good head on his shoulders about the whole thing.

.
posted by adamdschneider at 7:36 AM on June 8

.
posted by Iridic at 8:13 AM on June 8

as greats like David Eddings and Robert Jordan lay down their pens.

I loved the Belgariad as a teen and would dig Jordan's body up if I could make it just tell me how the damned Wheel of Time series ends, but "greats"? Really?
posted by JaredSeth at 9:45 AM on June 8

Oh and

.
posted by JaredSeth at 9:45 AM on June 8

.
posted by mygothlaundry at 10:18 AM on June 8

Ahem.

MalloreOn.
posted by dirtynumbangelboy at 11:08 AM on June 8

.
posted by domo at 11:09 AM on June 8

.

I read Eddings (along with Spider Robinson, Stephen Donaldson, and others all over the SF/fantasy shelves) when I was a 19/20-year-old newlywed Army wife, homesick, expectant mother/new mom, away from everything familiar. The formulaic writing and predictability were comforting.
posted by notashroom at 11:24 AM on June 8

I also loved the Belgariad and Mallorean as a teenager. A lot of the criticisms above are valid, but that does not diminish my love for the series, or David Eddings, because I still acknowledge the place they had in my life at that particular time.

I just want to add a couple of things that I loved about his writing that I hadn't seen mentioned. First, although I realize now that this is a very common fantasy trope, I loved the fact that Garion was a regular kid who eventually became a powerful magician and a king. I could identify with him. I also loved the dialogue between the different characters. This is what really drew me into Edding's writing. The characters bantered and felt like they were actually friends. Finally, his series was one of the first series I read where the magic seemed truly powerful. It wasn't just memorizing a bunch of spells, or collecting weird artifacts.
posted by bove at 11:27 AM on June 8

I grew up in a messy house full of books, and would discover books in the house the way you come across books at a second hand bookstore. I found the last book of the Belgariad first, and hunted through the house over a period of months to find the rest of them. I was probably 12 or 13. Loved 'em.
posted by stray at 11:44 AM on June 8

In fact, does anyone know where I can buy an ebook of the Belgariad? I have a friend who's about to embark on a long plane trip who would probably enjoy reading it.
posted by stray at 11:48 AM on June 8

I too discovered Eddings at about 13 when the first series was just coming out, and enjoyed them immensely. I read the 2nd with dismay as I realized he had only one story to tell, though he admittedly did a good job. For a long while, I just ignored the rest of what he published.

Just a few years ago, though, I ended up stuck in an airport for many hours, and had already read all I'd brought with me. I hit the airport bookstore, and saw the first book of the Sparhawk series. I picked it up, and started reading. Once we got on the plane, I discovered that the printer had made some sort of error and some 150 pages of the middle of the book were a repeat of the first 150 pages.

So, having no other recourse, I just skipped the repeated section and kept reading. As far as I could tell, nothing of any significance happened in that missing section of the book, as I couldn't find any references to anything that had happened in that section. It was sort of a

I finished off that series just for completeness sake, but haven't read anything he'd published since.

All that said,

.
posted by Blackanvil at 1:32 PM on June 8

I enjoyed introducing the Belgariad to my daughters last year. They both enjoyed them and my older one went out and bought both the Sparhawk series. They will be sad to hear he passed. I may have to read those Sparhawk books now, in memory.
posted by feersum endjinn at 3:58 PM on June 8

Yeah, I should be clear that my statements that being 13 is the magic ingredient with Eddings isn't intended to slag him off. I can't overstate how much I enjoyed the Belgariad at that age. I honestly can't remember the last time I read something that gripped me in the same way. Getting older sucks.
posted by Justinian at 4:05 PM on June 8

"Got 2/3 down the first page, made the mid-1980s equivalent of 'wtf?!', closed it, and never read any more."

You read one, maybe two, paragraphs of a five book series (which sold millions of copies) and that your peer group (whom one would hope would know your interests) was hyping to you and you decided then and there to never touch anything by the author again? You must be the world's toughest sell.
posted by Mitheral at 5:50 PM on June 8

Having read the Belgariad in my teens, I'm a little disturbed that I don't remember a single thing about it plot-wise.

I remember a few of scenes, but that's about it, and I may have those wrong. I remember Silk teasing a guy by sticking his arm through a wall and waving back through a window, Polgara explaining how hard it is to control the weather because air is so heavy, an old shaman who was amused at how hard the kid was trying to keep his sword invisible, and Belgarath imprisoning another wizard deep underground. That's about it. I also realized that I've got pieces of the Belgariad, the Riftwar Saga and the Fionavar Tapestry all mixed up in my head. It's been such a long time. Maybe I'll reread one of them when I've got a lazy afternoon to kill.
posted by homunculus at 8:48 AM on June 9

Since others are talking about what they remember, I just spend 30 seconds seeing if I could bring back much to memory. I haven't read these books in, oh, 18 years. And here's what I remember from the first couple pages:

Garion is a kid on a farm in a western ruralish province of the world called... Sendak or something close to it. The farm grows a lot of turnips. His strongest and fondest memories are of spending time in the kitchen with his aunt Polgara, who he knows only as "Pol" at this point. Garion's father figure is the blacksmith, Durnik, who has an obvious crush on his aunt Pol. There's a bunch of description of Garion hiding under the table in the kitchen, the smells, etc.

Obviously the books had a big impact on me, because that's a lot better than I thought I would do.
posted by Justinian at 6:07 PM on June 9

It was a she, Zandramas I think.

Maybe her too, but the idea that names have power is first introduced early in the first book of the Belgariad:

"I want you to listen to me, Garion," Aunt Pol said, "and I want you to listen carefully. You are never to speak the name of Torak again."

"It's Kal Torak, Aunt Pol," Garion explained again, "not just Torak."

Then she hit him--which she had never done before. The slap across his mouth surprised him more than it hurt, for she did not hit very hard. "You will never speak the name of Torak again. Never!" she said. "This is important, Garion. Your safety depends on it. I want your promise."

posted by Chrysostom at 10:54 AM on June 10