Not Another F*cking Ent

Books read this week: The Eye of The World  5/10 (Robert Jordan), The Saxon and Norman Kings 6/10 (Christopher Brooke)

I've been reading a lot online about the Song of Ice and Fire series, as Game of Thrones is HBO's next big thing. The one comment that people keep making, and which continually surprises me is that the Song of Ice and Fire is original and subverts expectations. It's not a bad series, but it's a long way from original and most of the characters are pretty close to stock stereotypes (well written, enjoyable stock stereotypes, but stereotypes nonetheless). And then I read The Eye of the World, and it all made sense. This is the first book in Jordan's gigantic Wheel of Time series. It's one of the big, highly rated series in fantasy, but I just found it derivative. And by that I mean not that I could see the influences of other works in it, but that it read like a carbon copy of the Lord of the Rings; to the point where, when meeting new characters I would think who is this? Oh, you're an ent. And who is this now? It's Gandalf. And we've just arrived in Bree. When I realised how utterly unoriginal the characters and the setting were, I suddenly worked out why everyone is so impressed with the Song of Ice and Fire; the characters in that don't act like they've stepped straight out of Tolkien. They act like they've stepped straight out of medieval history. Which, it has to be said, does make them rather more convincing as characters, but it doesn't make them original; to understand Joffrey, one has to know Richard II; to understand Tyrion (and Ned Stark, actually) look no further than Richard III. It also explains why everyone hates Jaime Lannister (this isn't strictly on topic, but it's really been bugging me). Medieval society had a low literacy level, no proper police force and a massively inefficient legal system. The only thing that allowed society to function was the understanding that you could trust a sworn oath. If you can't trust someone's word (no matter how good a reason they had for breaking it) then you can't have any kind of dealing with them. This was, of course, Richard II's underlying problem. He never recovered from "villeins ye are, and villeins ye shall remain."

My second book, The Saxon and Norman Kings does exactly what it says on the tin. I found it quite interesting; the most entertaining bit of the book was the discussion of whether William Rufus was killed as part of some kind of satanic ritual staged by a witch cult he was a member of. There are two answers to this, a short one: no, and a long one: no, don't be fucking stupid. I also think it's interesting (and a fascinating hook to hang a story on) that both William II and Edward V were murdered by knights called Tyrel.