Secrets of the Dragon Riders: Your Favorite Authors on Christopher Paolini's Inheritance Cycle: Completely Unauthorized

by James A. Owen

  Our love for anthropomorphic animals runs deep in our veins. Confucius once said, “A good horse is praised for virtue, not for strength.” I think the underlying meaning of this remark is that humans ultimately want to search for humanness in other creatures. One would think that an ideal horse would be one who does what we want efficiently: plowing, or pulling a wagon. What do we define as virtue in a horse? The ability to share our values, to fortify what we stand for. We want animals to understand us—to be our friends. Even if wild horses show more strength and speed than the virtuous domestic horses, we do not call them “good horse,” because they are so distant from humans. Perhaps we feel deep inside ourselves that humans and animals are intricately linked.

  We turn to stories with anthropomorphic animals to gratify our curiosity, as I have expressed in the poem below:Animal characters parade across the pages

  And out to us, raising wings and tails, together cradling

  The dreams of small, sleeping children.

  What are they but some sort of strange art,

  Like a bronze mirror. We pick it up and look at it

  Because it’s different. But in the end

  We see ourselves. They seem to say—

  Animals and humans, we breathe the same air,

  We share the same nature. Combined,

  Humanlike animals envelop us in a fine crystalline mist

  Showing us our past, present, and future

  through all space.

  Anthropomorphic animals are like a kaleidoscope. Human characteristics and animal characteristics whirl together, amazing us with bits of originality, surprising us, assuring us with their everlasting charm. We watch, riveted, through all the colorful, unending variations—emotional horses, brave mice in armor, tea-drinking birds . . . and among them a blue dragon, swooping in the air, thoughts linked with her Rider’s. . . .

  What magic.

  Nancy Yi Fan is the New York Times bestselling author of Swordbird (2007). She spent the first part of her childhood in China, where she was born in 1993. She is a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and has been a straight-A student since elementary school. Birds, a lifelong passion of the author, provided the inspiration for Swordbird and her new fantasy novel Sword Quest (2008). When she isn’t writing, she performs martial arts and takes good care of her pet lovebirds, Ever-sky, Dippler, and Pandora. She currently lives in Florida with her parents.

  My Dragon, Myself

  KELLY MCCLYMER

  The bond between dragon and Rider is an essential part of the Inheritance strory-each is made stronger by the other trhough a literal symbiosis Differing experiences, strengths, and points of view make the whole greater than the sun of its parts. But is that necessarily good? Is it possibly even dangerous? or do the benefits outweigh the risks? McClymer asks these questions and more while- examining the relationship between Saphira and Eragon-wich, more than anything else. might be about learning to trust another person (or dragon), whether you expected to or not.

  Confession time: I love dragons, and have since the first time I heard of the mythical creatures who liked to kidnap princesses and test the princes who would rescue them. Only the best, bravest, smartest—smartest was always the key—could beat the evil, ravening, blazing beasts and free the princess. This appealed to me, maybe because I loved to doodle and the only recognizable thing I could doodle was a princess: billowing triangulation for a base, round head with long flowing hair, stick arms, and a pair of slippers peeping out under the skirt. Easy peasy. I must have doodled a million princesses in my time in school. Occasionally I’d try a dragon (theoretically a snake with scales and wings, right?). But my artistic talent was limited, so I always went back to princesses.

  I can’t remember when I first learned about dragons, but I recall they were all vicious, cranky creatures who were only good for starting forest fires and allowing brave princes to defeat them—the embodiment of evil that could not be reasoned with, as it were. It was Kenneth Grahame’s The Reluctant Dragon that clued me in that there was a side of the story I’d been missing. Maybe a few of those princesses had not wanted to be rescued? Maybe. It was hard to imagine at first, but there were other authors who had asked the question, and other stories for me to read that gave the dragon’s side of things. I teetered toward sympathy for dragons at last. Maybe they’d just gotten a few millennia of bad press? Maybe they weren’t all evil flame and poison smoke? Evil or just misunderstood—what was the truth?

  I had my answer after I heard “Puff the Magic Dragon.” My heart bled for the poor misunderstood dragon abandoned by little Jackie Paper. I knew I would never have abandoned my old friend Puff if I’d been lucky enough to have a dragon for a friend. Eagerly embracing the idea that dragons weren’t always bad at last, I devoured the works of Anne McCaffrey and other authors who portrayed dragons in a more enlightened fashion. These beasts could be friend or foe, had good and bad traits, and were never the mindlessly evil beasts of the old tales like Beowulf, where the dragon is fierce enough to give the fabled warrior a mortal wound in an epic battle but where naturally Beowulf gets top billing and the dragon gets the part of the bad guy.

  In college, I studied the stories using terms like motif, metaphor, allegory, and symbolism. Early storytellers had liked the idea of the dragon as a symbol for evil (body of snake, wings, fire-breathing—all great clues to a rather nasty character, I guess). Contemporary storytellers—we curious creatures—began to explore the dragon’s point of view further. It must be trying to have everyone hate you, right? The dragon metaphor developed from one of primal destruction and pure evil to one representing great power—power not necessarily in the service of evil, but not necessarily in the service of good either. Most often the power of dragons in contemporary literature is leashed and guided by humans. Working together, human and dragon can do great good or great evil. Writers have been, and are still, transforming the classic symbol of the dragon into something more powerful and three-dimensional.

  Eragon impressed me, when I first heard of it, primarily for the fact that it had been written by a teen. Having written over a dozen novels myself, I knew the commitment, talent, hard work, and luck that went into the writing of a novel—never mind the hard work and luck that goes into getting it published. I was curious about this novel by a mere teenager, especially considering my fondness for dragons. I was delighted, however, when I delved into the books and discovered Paolini had continued the trend of expanding the dragon mythos and then taken it even further.

  I confess I read the story of a young boy and his exploration of the Spine with a touch of impatience. I was waiting for the dragon I knew was to come (how could Eragon become a Dragon Rider, as the book blurb promised, unless there was a dragon to be introduced?). What kind of dragon would it be? I wondered as Eragon found a blue rock. I pictured something friendly, an ally, as he tried to trade his rock for meat and the butcher refused. I wondered if the dragon would breathe fire as the trader struck the rock with his blade and created a ringing noise.

  For some reason, I had been expecting a full-grown dragon. Saphira surprised me when her egg—the blue rock—finally hatched. A baby dragon? What good was that when the Ra’zac were after Eragon? But Paolini took care of my disappointment even before it had fully formed. Eragon hears the dragon’s thoughts, and she his. His discovery of an intriguing blue “stone” in the Spine results in a bond between himself and the newly hatched baby dragon—formed with a touch and represented by the dragonmark burned onto his palm—that in effect makes the boy and the dragon two halves of a powerful whole that cannot survive apart. He feeds the baby dragon, names her, hides her from the eyes of others until she is too large to be easily killed by those afraid of dragons.

  Yet, despite this bond—not entirely desired or easily accepted by either boy or dragon—and despite a growing reluctance to separate from each other even when they must—as in Brisinger when, seeing Saphira for the first time after sen
ding her away while he stayed behind in Helgrind, Eragon realizes that he “had not truly felt safe since he and she had separated”—each still retains their own strengths, weaknesses, and quirks. Neither can force the other to act; each must use reason and argument to sway the other, and they must work together to save their land from the destructive henchmen of King Galbatorix.

  Paolini’s dragons are not powerful draft animals to be taught to obey the lead of a human master. They are intelligent creatures who have agreed to become interdependent with humans and elves for the sake of the world in which they all live. Old and wise almost from birth, Saphira is not friendly to the boy she has bonded to, the boy she must protect if she herself wants to continue to live. She is not unfriendly either. She is instead suspicious, jaded and weighed down by the knowledge that her species has been hunted almost to extinction. That the hunt continues to this day and that Eragon, an untried boy of fifteen, is all that stands between Saphira and death is not comforting for the dragon—as it is not for Eragon when he learns just what he has brought upon himself by finding the dragon’s egg and becoming bonded to Saphira for life. However, Paolini is careful to make it clear that boy and dragon both had a choice at the moment of bonding.

  Saphira may wonder if Eragon is up for the epic battle ahead of them, but she knows that he has the potential to be a brave and wise partner, if she can keep him safe through training and treachery. She does not hesitate to reassure him of this when the elves question his ability to handle magic and he finds out they believe Saphira made a mistake in choosing a human as her Rider instead of an elf. Saphira reveals that Eragon’s discovery and her hatching had not been chance: Arya had exposed Saphira’s egg to all the elves, and Saphira did not choose any of them. Instead, she chose to hatch for a fifteen-year-old human boy who found her while hunting in the Spine and then attempted to sell, trade, and finally crack her egg with a hammer.

  The Saphira introduced to readers of Eragon would be at home in battle with Beowulf. She is fierce and cynical and quick to distrust—it is not until Brom has touched her with not just his mind but his hand that she accepts that this human, the second she has met, is not simply a queer creature but a possible friend to Eragon and to herself. She literally stands between Eragon and Murtagh, growling with warning, when Eragon is injured in a battle with the Ra’zac and Murtagh offers help. There is a raw edge to her power that shows no deference to humans- though she does not devour the head of the slaver that Murtagh struck off in Eragon, she “opened her mouth slightly, as if to snap it up, then appeared to decide better of it and prowled to Eragon’s side.”

  Nevertheless, her restraint indicates that if she were to enter a battle with Beowulf, she’d have a good reason for doing so, and the conflict would not be black and white. Saphira is no evil symbol, nor is she a misunderstood and persecuted creature. She is awesome power embodied, more than capable of bringing quick death to those who challenge her even a few months after her hatching. But she does not seek death for death’s sake. Even when she discovers that Murtagh is the son of the first forsworn, Morzan, she stops herself from tearing him to pieces, despite her “fangs, bared, tail raised threateningly.” Along with her wisdom comes a patience that tempers the terrible powers that she possesses. Most of the time, Saphira has the ability to tame her suspicions while she gathers evidence.

  Saphira’s concern with Eragon’s youth and inexperience comes through occasionally, especially during Eragon: When Eragon says after a close call, “I’ll not forget that again,” she retorts, “You shouldn’t have forgotten at all.” But Paolini shows how her bond with Eragon grows stronger as they travel together, surviving one misfortune after another. The first time Saphira says, “I love you, little one,” occurs in Eragon directly after Eragon and Murtagh have quarreled over the beheading of the slaver, and after Eragon has struggled with his own conscience and decided firmly that “It was still wrong.” Still, Saphira doesn’t hesitate to show her own fierce nature—one that would be untempered if not for Eragon—by saying in Murtagh’s defense, “The men who buy and sell other humans deserve every misfortune that befalls them.” She confesses that if it were not for the need to bring Arya to the healers, she would track all the slavers and tear them apart. But her wisdom shows too, in this same scene, when she counsels Eragon to put aside his confusion about the actions of the past, understand that there are not always answers, and “learn what you can about Murtagh and forgive him.”

  Paolini illustrates the uneasy—and potentially dangerous—alliance between boy and dragon right from the beginning, first when Eragon is knocked senseless the first time he touches the baby dragon, and next when Eragon, a young and fragile human, must ride the dragon bareback in order to flee his uncle’s killers. On that first mad flight Saphira’s rough scales rub the flesh off Eragon’s thighs until he is bloodied and almost unable to hang on until they reach safety. And yet the dragon is not all razor-sharp spines and sandpaper scales. When they are stranded high in the frigid air of the Spine, her wings shelter the exhausted Eragon from the wind and cold.

  Paolini lays out the dangers to both Eragon and Saphira due to their bond in the tales Brom tells of the tragic history of the dragons and the Dragon Riders who were hunted to near extinction by the treacherous King Galbatorix. A pact between the humans, elves, and dragons that created the first bonds of alliance made the dragons’ lives forfeit if their Riders died. Though Riders did not die if their dragons did, they lived the rest of their lives among their fellow humans—who had never felt the awesome power of the dragon bond—always keenly aware that half of them was gone forever. Paolini creates a world in which the fates of dragons and their Riders are inextricably entwined, so it is not only necessary but satisfying to root for Saphira, no matter that she is cynical and deeply distrustful of humans.

  There’s a part of us human readers that admires the idea of a powerful dragon so tightly bonded to a human boy despite her opinion that humans are “queer creatures.” And the deference shown to the powerful young dragon by human, dwarf, and elf alike makes Saphira a creature anyone would covet having as a protector, partner, and friend. Still, Saphira is capable of snapping up any of them in a moment of pique and swallowing them whole, and Eragon, despite the interdependence of their bond, has only so much influence over Saphira’s behavior. Brom’s careful conduct around Saphira is convincing evidence that he knows the dragon is no tame pet.

  Speaking of the intertwined nature of dragon and Rider, let’s dip into the realm of metaphor to explain how this interdependence of dragon and human expands the dragon myth. Saphira, once bonded to Eragon, literally cannot live without him. She can read his thoughts, even at some distance, and he can read hers. They each sense when the other is in danger and can offer advice and—if close enough—physical support. Yet they are more than capable of independent thought and action. Paolini gives life to the proverbial saying “Two heads are better than one” with a winged, fire-breathing twist.

  What Paolini has created is a two-headed metaphor for the choice that exists in all of us between using our individual power for good or using it for evil. Eragon possesses many good traits when we first meet him: curiosity and the spirit of adventure as he, a boy on the edge of manhood, explores the Spine when grown men will not; the ability to trust others, such as Brom and Garrow; an innocence that allows him to believe that life will continue on its same contented path. But he has little power in a world where he is an orphan with little to his name except an interesting blue stone he found in his exploration of the Spine—a place most villagers fear and distrust so much that a bit of that mistrust falls on Eragon just because he goes there often.

  Saphira possesses a depth and breadth of knowledge and power that Eragon would never achieve alone, even once he was grown to manhood and had some experience in the ways of the world. She is also hampered, in some ways, by the byproducts of that knowledge: cynicism and the sense that the unknown contains more danger than is worth risking; suspic
ion of others and the inability to trust anyone but Eragon, whose thoughts she can read; a weary knowledge that disappointment lurks behind every sunrise and that those who fear the power of dragons will do anything to destroy Eragon and Saphira both.

  Paolini does not divvy up all the good to Eragon and all the bad to Saphira, however. That would be too simple for the complex interdependence boy and dragon navigate. Eragon can be rash, as when he uses magic without fully understanding the risk to himself and others, and he can let his anger overcome his good judgment. Saphira’s wisdom allows her to consider more of the picture than the youthful and inexperienced Eragon can even fathom. The dragon’s ability to quickly move past the first rush of anger and determine the actions that will ultimately get them to their goal with the least cost to their lives and their souls is often responsible for their survival; her devotion to the pact between humans, elves, and dragons is absolute and unquestioned.

  Both Eragon and Saphira possess strengths that can help them achieve their goals, and weaknesses that can cause them to fail. It is in working together, amplifying their strengths and buffering their weaknesses, that they are able to tap into the power they need to succeed. However, their interdependence alone does not guarantee that their goals are good ones. Galbatorix stands as a warning that the power of Rider and dragon can be turned to the side of evil. The true depths of his evil is revealed when Eragon learns that Galbatorix undermined the dragon-Rider alliance and used sorcery to gain his second dragon instead of allowing the dragon free choice in his Rider.5