7) Innovation
Someone was explaining Eragon to me before I read the book and complained that it was full of unoriginal ideas. “He got this from here,” they’d say, “exactly like it was written by so-and-so.” Accusations of cliché or outright plagiarism always follow anyone who writes a bestselling novel. The editor of this issue, James Owen, was once accused by a slew of people of ripping off characters from Neil Gaiman, prompting Neil to respond by writing the foreword to a collection of James’s comic Starchild. Neil writes: “What writers do is this: we borrow, and we invent and we embroider. . . . We build upon what went before. . . . We loot and pillage and we hone and we shape. . . . We never start nor finish in a vacuum, or alone.” In other parts of the text, he explains that the characters in question, Oberon and Titania, have been used by Neil, James, Shakespeare, and others stretching back to the legends told before stories were written down. Paolini doesn’t use names we’ve read before, but the situations seem familiar because they are. Tales of Good versus Evil stretch back to the creation of Good versus Evil. The farm boy revealed as a princely figure is only slightly younger than that. You may find similarities to other stories, and be that as it may, Eragon’s world belongs to Christopher Paolini. If you think Christopher Paolini stole the ideas he writes about in Eragon and Eldest, he didn’t. He just told an old story in a new way and you’re just jealous because you couldn’t do as good a job.
8) Languages
Next we come to Paolini’s use of the elder languages. I will admit there is a bit of a flaw here. Creating a new language is a hard thing, especially when it has to sound as finessed and regal as his ancient language should. There are times when the language stumbles, sounding more like an unusable form of German than the language of ultimate truth, but let’s take a step back and look at the measuring stick we’re using. J. R. R. Tolkien was a master of ancient languages. He understood how dead languages were thought, written, and spoken. I’m sure it was no easy task to create the languages used in his Middle-earth stories, but if anyone had the knowledge to do it and make it sound real it was him. At the other extreme we have the Klingon language, proof positive that if you have a large enough group of nerds living in a fantasy world eventually they will find a way to communicate with one another. People with huge amounts of time on their hands and nothing better to do then discover to appropriate syntax and delivery of the phrase “bortaS bIr jablu’DI’ reH QaQqu’ nay’” are the type of people judging Paolini. It’s really not fair. Paolini was by himself when he came up with the ancient language. He didn’t have a lifetime of studying ancient script or innumerable nerdlings to aid him in his endeavor. If you hate Christopher Paolini because you felt he didn’t do a good job on the ancient language, I challenge you to come up with a better word than brisingr and then put it in a sentence where all the rules of grammar apply. Go on, try it, you pansy. Not so easy, is it? I predict that your continued attempts to rewrite the rules of pig latin will fail you miserably.
9) Wording
Coming close to the bottom of the list, we find that some people are put off by some of the word choices in Eragon and Eldest. I’m sure that when Christopher was writing his story he was expecting the readers to have advanced beyond the Fun with Dick and Jane books. That may not be the case. If you have ever been reading one of Paolini’s books and were shocked to be staring at a grouping of letters that defied you, I offer this: As you are reading, think about the context and usage of the large words; sometimes this will help in determining their meaning. Have a small notepad and pencil handy as you read and jot down any words that continue to confound you, giving you a chance to look them up later. Pretty soon you’ll find yourself reading at the same level as my nine-year-old daughter and the big words won’t be as much of a problem anymore. If you continue to grouse about Christopher Paolini’s word choices I recommend a particular bit of advice a second time: community college. If you did what I told you to before then you’re already there, so how hard will it be to take a second class and expand your horizons? If that doesn’t work for you, I suggest one of those word-a-day calendars.
10) Fair Folk
I’ve been asked if we really need another story about elves. I have to retort that Eragon and Eldest are not really stories about elves, they are stories about dragons and the elf-like boy who rides one. “But Eragon is so like the Lord of the Rings books,” they say, “elves and dwarves and....” At this point in the conversation it is probably a good thing to just turn around and walk away. The other person may not even notice you leaving. There is always room for something done well. If a book sits on the shelf next to the great books of the past and manages to hold its own, then it belongs.
It seems to me that the main reason people hate Christopher Paolini is because he’s managed to accomplish things they haven’t been able to do. They’re not justified in judging him, and they know it. People hate to be proven wrong, they hate to look bad or foolish, they hate to admit that some people get where they belong because of hard work, talent, and creativity. It’s hard to look at someone else’s success because it reminds them of the potential they’re too lazy to use or opportunities wasted and long gone. Christopher Paolini is where he belongs. We should be glad we have him as an example.
If you’ve gained nothing else from this list, I hope you’ve realized this: If you’re so passionate about criticizing someone’s accomplishments that you have no time to create anything of your own, you need to rethink what you’re doing. You’re wasting energy that could go toward creating something wonderful. If you do it right, someone may think up ten reasons they hate you.
Jeremy Owen has worked as a stonemason, a carpenter, an artist, a writer, an animatronics engineer, and more. He is collaborating with his brother James on several illustrated books, and is working on his first novel. He lives with his family in Silvertown, Arizona, where he currently works as the production manager at the Coppervale Studio.
Riding the Dragon
The Child as Author
TOBIAS DRUITT
Paolini’s youth is a central point of his greater story, but there are many aspect of that point beyond the generic question “He’s how old?” that are important to consider. From a unique perspective (see his bio) Dtruitt examines the similarities between the story Paolin wrote, and the story he lived, as the Eragon phenom enon caught fireand swept the world-and in the process underscores just how unique an achievment it is for a child to create, sell and survive an extraordinary story
Eragon, as most reading this know, is the story of a fifteen-year-old boy who gets a dragon’s egg by accident. When the dragon hatches, he bonds to it and becomes its “Rider.” But his problems have only just begun. He is living in a kingdom governed by the evil Galbatorix, a Rider who wiped out all the other Riders and dragons apart from the thirteen evil Riders who had joined him, their dragons, and three eggs. So when evil servants of the evil king kill Eragon’s uncle (with whom he is living because his mother mysteriously disappeared after his birth, and never named his father), Eragon specifically sets out to get revenge, though he has other motives too. The book was published internationally in 2004 but had been published at the author Christopher Paolini’s home before, in 2002. Like his hero, Paolini was fifteen when he began writing it (though he was nineteen at the time of its international publication by Knopf).
What I find interesting in the bald story of Eragon is that the book contains an obvious symbol of the process of its own creation. The plot concerns a child, a child learning something he would not otherwise know about or know how to do. Just as Eragon in the book learns about riding and looking after dragons, so Paolini learned about writing, and about publishing and self-promotion. Both of these sets of skills—dragon care and writing—are things you would not expect a child to do, let alone (alas, the prejudice against the young creeps stealthily in here) be good at. The world of Eragon is just as surprised at the boy’s maturity as the world of books was at Paolini’s achievem
ent. No wonder, then, that there is a clear parallel between the dragon, Saphira, and the story itself. I cannot say what Paolini’s experience of writing was like, but I can say from my own experience of writing that, like Saphira, stories do have a tendency to come up with ideas of their own about where they want to go, and it is very hard to get them to change their minds. They take you on long flights, and you don’t always know where or when those flights will end.
There are other parallels between dragon-rearing and writing. Both of them are enjoyable and make you feel as if you have a special and secret identity that makes you different from other people, even your family. Most people think both sound really great. But just as most writers can tell starry-eyed dreamers about the negative side of being an author, so Paolini shows that being a Dragon Rider has a downside: Dragons are uncomfortable to ride, and your specialness attracts lots of attacks. As well, the dragon eventually grows beyond your control, as books do when they go out into the world . . . no writer can control the way a book is going to be read. Just as there are other, older writers, so there are other, older Dragon Riders for Eragon to meet. And riding a dragon, like writing, is in some respects a leveling experience: Small children can make up really brilliant stories, and a teenager like Eragon is boosted to adult status by owning a powerful dragon. As another essay in this volume shows, Eragon’s youth doesn’t stop him winning arguments with his elders, and often being right.
As for the second book, the very title says that it’s all about age. Eldest is the oldest dragon alive in the world, Glaedr. (The word eldest might also refer to Murtagh, Eragon’s older brother. They are both fathered by evil Morzan.) Glaedr and his Rider Oromis are authority figures for Eragon, and train him to be a Rider. They learn an ancient magical language (echoes of Le Guin and Tolkien) and Saphira learns combat flying. Education, education, education! Glaedr and Oromis replace Eragon’s parents as authority figures. Is this to do with Paolini himself breaking free of the parental help he stresses so heavily in the acknowledgments to Eragon? Philip Pullman says that everyone’s story begins only when they realize they’ve been born into the wrong family. This is Eragon’s story too.
The third book too shows Eragon learning and mastering various skills, from the making of his new sword to more advanced fighting and spellwork. Arguably, by this book Paolini has more comfortably settled into his role as a writer, even as he has grown older, and this book is less about experience than about what all writing should be about: telling a story, and telling it well. Even the sly cultural references he slips in show a growing ease with his storyline, a willingness to play with the boundaries of his universe.
But while all this is true and very important, the point I find interesting in the story of Eragon is the age of its author. I will now attempt to explain why.
We are, so very often, told that we are at the pinnacle of freedom. Every adult can vote, has rights, yet those rights are not completely unrestricted so as to preserve the rights of others. But this is all a rather glorified lie. We are not at the pinnacle of freedom yet. There is one last group, one final minority everywhere, that has not achieved the rights and responsibilities that normally come with freedom.
Children.
They have no political rights, and are condemned for working, just as women were fifty and a hundred years ago. (Being condemned for working goes with low wage rates, or none, as women and illegal immigrants could tell you. So could the kids who work for fast-food chains.) Through my discussion of Eragon, I will focus on one space where many children have tried to break this rather oppressive mold: authorship. There are several published child authors, most of whom write children’s fiction. I am one of these. There are hundreds or maybe thousands of other children who write and finish books. There are also many children who write and don’t finish books. Yet there always seems to be a semi-negative reaction if you tell any adult about your writing. A taken-aback response. (Here comes a whinge about my own experiences.) Some adults begin rabbitting on in an embarrassed way about how clever I must be and how great it is. I am not sure what they expect me to say my book is about, but when I say it is a retelling of Greek myth that brings back into it the original stories’ grittiness, they put on very shocked faces. Alternatively, they go into aggression mode, asking me how much of it I wrote and how much my mother did, asking me why it is under a pseudonym, etc. Yet the recurrent theme of the reactions seems to be surprise that someone my age can have written and published three books, have finished the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh and be revising them (some however I have decided are irredeemable and am simply throwing aside, or reincarnating), and have begun the eighth and ninth. Surprise, or shock?
This adult surprise and even alarm are the themes of this essay. I want to study the reactions toward child authors of children’s fiction from both adults and children, taking as my example Eragon, Eldest, and Brisingr. My interest in Paolini’s achievement is that of a reader, a child reader, but also that of a fellow writer, a fellow child writer. We will see later why it’s important that I am not only a reader, but a child reader, and not only an author, but a fellow child author.
Eragon and Its Critics
Eragon has been praised, but has also attracted some very intense criticism. Why did the book divide opinion so strongly? To try to understand people’s dislike (or, indeed, their like) of Eragon I took a look at some reviews on Amazon.com. Most people’s reviews are either one star or five. There appears to be no median. There are tons of good reviews, several bad reviews, but very few in between: nearly twenty five- and four-star reviews, and seven one- and two-star reviews, but only one three-star one. But what is more worrying is the content of the reviews. Almost all the negative ones either say it is bad because it is derivative, bad because of its style (only one, and much of it was misspelled), or bad because it is in the style a teenager would write in. One of the others was attempting to get you to burn the book (!). And the positive ones are almost all incorrectly spelled and grammatically wrong. I can understand a few reasonable typos, but they can’t ALL have happened to misspell several words. Does that mean they are not very experienced reviewers—i.e., children? And the content of the positive reviews is the sort of thing the other reviews are criticizing: a lack of depth and critical commentary, and an uneasy use of playground slang, with clichés and descriptions of the book as “cool” abounding. One five-star review just states the fact there will be four books. Most of them simply stress how great the story is, and nothing else at all. I know this isn’t a proper study, that Amazon.com reviewers are a self-selecting sample who don’t represent anything but themselves. But in the global village of Amazon.com, I still feel worried at this lack of inbetweeners, rational people who are trying to see the book’s good points and bad ones too. This lack of a median is not actually typical of Amazon.com reviews. Most frequently reviewed books attract four- and three-star reviews. Not this one. I can see that there are two different types of people reading the book, yelling at each other with fervor rather than engaging in rational debate. Why?
Reviewers’ Criticisms
The bad reviews often stress what they say is Eragon’s terrible style and derivativeness. Here is an example: I am quoting it in full, with any spelling and grammar mistakes intact, because the details are important:Though the book starts off slightly strong the book becomes weak eventually. I actually put it down half way through. The dragon rider idea was pretty great the first time I read it . . . when it was called “Dragonlance.”
I enjoyed the dragon’s growing and coming of age. The bond between Sapphira and Eragon was attractive at first, but the book then becomes basically a journal of a LONG journey to a SHORT distance. Like a “and then they walked. and then they slept. and then they walked. and then they fought.” For a quest where everyone is supposedly looking for them, there is a remarkable lack of an antagonist after long chapter;s
This book is great for someone who is a novice writer about a subject that he a
dds nothing to. If you have a child who has no introduction to the realm of fantasy reading (and I don’t mean Harry Potter; not that its bad, it’s quite good, it’s just a diffrent realm of fantasy), then sure, let them read Eragon. Otherwise, i’d recommend the Dragonlance Chronicles by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. The starting book is “Dragon’s of Autumn Twilight.” And if you want some grit to your fantasy, I recommend Icewind Dale trilogy by R.A. Salvatore. starting book is “The Crystal Shard.” There’s not alot of dragon’s in the latter trilogy, though it actually adds a new dimension to the fantasy realm.
Secrets of the Dragon Riders: Your Favorite Authors on Christopher Paolini's Inheritance Cycle: Completely Unauthorized Page 2