Meredith Mansfield, Author

There are stories that don’t fit the Tolkien mold. Not as many as there should be, but it’s hard to defy reader expectations.

For my money, the best of these is Lois McMaster Bujold’s SHARING KNIFE series, which consists of four full-length books, and one novella: BEGUILEMENT, LEGACY, PASSAGE, HORIZON, and “Knife Children”.

Like LORD OF THE RINGS, the SHARING KNIFE is not really a series in the classic sense, but more of one long story published in four parts, with the follow-on novella published later. It shares a lot of other similarities with LoTR, too. Intentionally, since the author was consciously writing an answer to LoTR.

The world of THE SHARING KNIFE doesn’t have a single Dark Lord. Instead, an ancient magical experiment went very wrong, seeding the world with an unknown number of dormant monsters called malices or blight bogles that emerge randomly. Each malice essentially eats the essence of the world around it, creating a blight reminiscent of the aftermath of a nuclear blast—everything in the area dies and nothing can live in that area for decades, centuries, or, in extreme cases, millennia. It’s dangerous even to step into such blight. And the longer a malice lives, the more powerful it becomes and the more of the world it blights to sustain itself.

And only one group of humans, called Lake Walkers, can kill malices. Only they, with their innate magic, can make the weapon necessary to kill a malice—a knife made from the thigh bone of a Lake Walker and primed by being plunged into the heart of a dying Lake Walker, so that the knife can capture the essence of that death to share with a malice and teach it to die. Two Lake Walker deaths for each malice death.

Lake Walkers patrol obsessively to find and kill malices before they can do too much damage, with no hope that the threat will be eradicated in their lifetimes. Only hoping that the long war will not be lost in their lifetimes. Their lives are defined by this task. Meanwhile the rest of humanity lives largely in blissful ignorance, most not even believing that blight bogles exist. But if ever a malice escapes such a death, it will destroy the world.

For further analysis of the similarities—and differences—between LotR and THE SHARING KNIFE, try these two articles:

Tussling with Tolkien: Lois McMaster Bujold’s The Sharing Knife: Horizon | Tor.com 

Absent Gods, Absent Catastrophes : The Sharing Knife and The Lord of the Rings – DataHead — LiveJournal

I love LotR, but there are more than enough stories now following that pattern. And, frankly, one-dimensional dark lords and simple solutions are beginning to get a little old.

I want more stories like THE SHARING KNIFE, too. And others in which the answer isn’t simple—or immediate. (Simple is not the same as easy. Destroying the ring to destroy Sauron is a simple solution, but anything by easy to accomplish.) But that kind of story—even though it may have many exciting battles—doesn’t seem to satisfy readers of epic fantasy, who have been taught to expect the one battle to end all battles.

I don’t know, maybe we need a new sub-genre of epic fantasy for these kinds of story. But what would we call it?

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I mostly want to share some of my thoughts about reader expectations of epic fantasy. This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while.

It’s probably best to start by defining what epic fantasy is—and what it’s not. Epic fantasy is defined by the reason the characters attempt whatever it is they’re trying to do and the stakes if they fail. As with the Hero’s (or Warrior’s) Journey, the characters in an epic fantasy set out to accomplish something that will be of benefit to more than just themselves. Frodo goes to save Middle Earth from enslavement by Sauron, for example. (There’s a reason why epic fantasy usually has at least on character who is also on a Hero’s (or Warrior’s) Journey.) And the stakes, if they fail, are greater than just the chance that the hero may die. The stakes in LORD OF THE RINGS are all of the world, including Frodo’s beloved Shire, being cruelly enslaved.

This is what differentiates epic fantasy from its first cousin, sword and sorcery. The two sub-genres are superficially similar. Both tend to be second world fantasies and very often involve a quest. But sword and sorcery is much more about some personal gain for the characters—adventure, treasure, or revenge, most often. And the stakes are usually the risk that a character may die in pursuit of that goal. For sword and sorcery, that’s the ultimate failure. Whereas, in epic fantasy, a character’s death is not a failure so long as it helps to achieve the larger goal.

Sword and sorcery stories are usually smaller in scale to match the smaller goals and stakes, though, of course, the characters may have more than one adventure over the course of a series, like Conan the Barbarian, to name only one classic example. By contrast, epic fantasies have a greater tendency to be . . . well, epically long. The greater stakes can support a bigger—longer—story.

But all of that is not what really defines reader expectations of epic fantasy. That’s more defined by the story that really popularized the sub-genre: LORD OF THE RINGS. More on that in my next post.

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