229 pages
Published 1976
Read from May 21 to May 23
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
This is one of those shaggy old fantasy classics from the era when seemingly no one knew how to write fantasy. It begins with a clear and concise image: “Morgon of Hed met the High One’s harpist one autumn day when the trade ships docked at Tol….” That gives us an intriguing atmosphere, with the promise that we’ll learn who these people and what these places are in due time, right? Instead, we backtrack to witness an argument between Prince Morgon and his two siblings and various farmers and retainers in our rustic little princedom, all of them introduced bickering back and forth over things we haven’t learned to care about yet. From the way no one permits anyone to finish a sentence and no one explains anything, you’d think this was a teen fantasy from the 2010s. It all culminates in the prince’s brother tackling him into the mud, and their sister dumping a bucket of milk over their heads.
Twice before now, that opening thwarted my attempts to get invested enough to continue. We don’t even meet the damn harpist until page 14.
When you manage to persist through that first scene, you quickly discover why a 220 page book needs six pages of glossary for its places and people. Without it, imagine having to keep track of An and Aum and Awn, Uon and Oen, Re and Rhu and Rood, Morgon and the Morgol. (No one, however, could forget the redoubtable Snog Nutt.)
The story as a whole is a 1970s lords-with-swords number, full of the prophesied paint-by-numbers destiny of its reluctant chosen one. Yet it carries promises of McKillip’s future talents: glimpses of delicate description, atmosphere, and character beneath the heroic fantasy slop. For much of the book Morgon is appealingly in over his head, his grasp of reality eroding into dreams, his mind swept in and out of magical fugues, pulled back and forth by forces larger than his understanding. He tries to nope out from his great destiny more often than he tries to face it (which, for the time this was written, was a pretty fresh twist). But the riddle of his own destiny keeps pulling him back in.
So, we need to talk about riddles. The word riddle does a lot of heavy lifting in this book. In case you were wondering, yes, McKillip does pull from The Hobbit to have our hero win a high-stakes riddle game by asking an unanswerable question: the mystery of his own destiny, and of the three stars on his brow. Which would make it not so much a riddle as a prophecy. But you see, in this setting, “riddles” are actually didactic anecdotes, little snippets of history with an approved moral attached, and not actually anything we would call riddles.
McKillip uses these riddles just like any other heroic fantasy novelist would use prophecies: plot devices to motivate the action. The bad guys want to kill our hero because of his three stars; the hero is driven to the ends of the earth to discover his fate so he can keep living. This was a training-wheels era for the genre, though, so we can’t expect much more sophistication than that.
That lack of storytelling sophistication, predictably, extends to Morgon effortlessly picking up every magical skill he needs, from riddle-mastery to mind-reading, shape-changing to the Great Shout. Standard chosen one stuff. And as with so many classic fantasy trilogies, Hed ends abruptly, half the story untold, Nonetheless, the quiet beauty of McKillip’s prose elevates this book and makes it worth spending time in this world.
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