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One of the major problems when you're dealing with wizards is
the 'Superman Syndrome'. You've got this fellow who's faster than a
speeding bullet and all that stuff. He can uproot mountains and stop
the sun. Bullets bounce off him, and he can read your mind. Who's
going to climb into the ring with this terror? I suppose I could have
gone with incantations and spells, but to make that sort of thing
believable you've got to invent at least part of the incantation,
and sooner or later some nut is going to take you seriously, and,
absolutely convinced that he can fly if he says the magic words, he'll
jump off a building somewhere. Or, if he believes that the sacrifice of
a virgin will make him Lord of the Universe, and some Girl-Scout
knocks on his door - ??? I think it was a sense of social responsibility
that steered me away from the 'hocus-pocus' routine.
Anyway, this was about the time when the ESP fakers were
announcing that they could bend keys (or crowbars, for all I know)
with the power of their minds. Bingo' The Will and the Word was
born. And it also eliminated the Superman problem. The notion that
doing things with your mind exhausts you as much as doing them
with your back was my easiest way out. You might be able to pick up
a mountain with your mind, but you won't be able to walk after you
do it, I can guarantee that. It worked out quite well, and it made
some interesting contributions to the story. We added the
prohibition against 'unmaking things' later, and we had a workable form
of magic with some nasty consequences attached if you broke the
rules.
Now we had a story. Next came the question of how to tell it. My
selection of Sir Perceval (Sir Dumb, if you prefer) sort of ruled out
'High Style'. I can write in'High Style'if necessary (see Mandorallen
with his 'thee's, thou's and foreasmuches), but Garion would have
probably swallowed his tongue if he'd tried it. Moreover, magic,
while not a commonplace, is present in our imaginary world, so I
wanted to avoid all that 'Gee whiz! Would you look at that!' sort
of reaction. I wanted language that was fairly colloquial (with a
few cultural variations) to make the whole thing accessible to
contemporary readers, but with just enough antique usages to give it a
medieval flavor.
Among the literary theories I'd encountered in graduate school
was Jung's notion of archetypal myth. The application of this theory
usually involves a scholar laboring mightily to find correspondences
between current (and not so current) fiction and drama to link them
to Greek mythology. (Did Hamlet really lust after his mother the way
Oedipus did?) It occurred to me that archetypal myth might not be
very useful in the evaluation of a story, but might it not work in its
creation? I tried it, and it works. I planted more mythic fishhooks in
the first couple of books of the Belgariad than you'll find in any
sporting goods store. I've said (too many times, probably) that if you
read the first hundred pages of the Belgariad, I gotcha!! You won't be
able to put it down. The use of archetypal myth in the creation of
fiction is the literary equivalent of peddling dope.
The preliminaries to the Belgariad are actually out of sequence
here. The Personal History of Belgarath the Sorcerer was written after the
rest of the studies while I was trying to get a better grip on the old
boy. You might want to compare that very early character sketch
with the opening chapters of the more recent Belgarath the Sorcerer.
Did you notice the similarities? I thought I noticed you noticing.
When I first tackled these studies, I began with The Holy Books,
and the most important of these is The Book of Alorn. When you get
right down to it, that one contains the germ of the whole story. After