I first met the character of Ricarin some years ago. He and his son – who readers will now meet in the second book – were climbing a mountain in search of an ancient evil as part of a two-person play. It was intended to be an examination of masculinity and generational trauma seen through the tropes of heroic fantasy. It’s a truism to say that all young boys see their fathers as heroes. I wanted to examine what that meant – and what would it mean if it was actually true.
My idea from the beginning was to try and understand what makes a hero and examine the relationship between fathers and sons and the ideals of masculinity that have been passed down in my own family.
My father, who had just been diagnosed with cancer when I wrote that first play, is a combat vet with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from the Vietnam war. He volunteered as a medic early in the war because he knew he’d be drafted if he didn’t and he didn’t want to kill anyone. He might have tried harder to avoid the draft, as many of his peers did, but our family has a long history in the military and on some level he believed he was going to keep a proud family tradition alive and be a hero.
The version of masculinity that I inherited along with my family’s history of military service and violence – strong, silent, stern, inflexible, unable to show affection, numb to violence and often perpetuating it – reads like the diagnostic criteria for PTSD. My father’s father dealt with that trauma by becoming an alcoholic and beating his wife and children, and the stories of what he did and the lasting damage to my father and his brothers has rippled across generations.
Ricarin’s struggle with the memory of his father’s violence mirror’s my father’s. Transposing that struggle into the heroic fantasy stories I read voraciously through my childhood as I hid from that trauma seemed an ideal way to cut away the cultural baggage and see the thing itself.
There is irony here. Tolkien – the father of the genre – knew PTSD well, though of course the term didn’t exist back then. We see symptoms of it clearly in Frodo at the end of his journey as he is unable to settle back into life in the Shire.
But trauma doesn’t just affect gentle souls like Frodo, it affects everyone who deals in violence. And it affects their families long after the war is won or lost.
So much of fantasy has not learned this lesson! I wonder how often Arwen woke in the night over the long years after the War of the Rings to find Aragorn crying out in pain or guilt over all the many orcs and “wicked men” he killed?
There is no moral ‘blank check’ in warfare the way there is in far too much fiction. Murder does not stop being murder just because a General orders it or because the enemy looks different. To forget that fact is to forget ones humanity. Ricarin has to wrestle with what he’s done and the people he kills every day, as I’ve seen real veterans do. He carries that moral weight. In so doing, I hope to honor my father and grandfather and the burdens they have carried.
On the other side of the War of the Rings, Saruman pulls an Uruk-Hai army from the earth, breeding orcs and men together but somehow leaving no families behind them – no mothers or children to mourn them when they fail at Helm’s Deep.
Ailith’s storyline in my book shows that missing piece. She is a monster, but she is more than just a monster. She loves her husband, her children, and dreams of something better for them and her people. She is not above violence – she is Sealgairean after all – but her biggest struggle is learning to be free in a society that is determined to make her an object. The incomparable Ursula Le Guin once wrote that most female action heroes are boys in womens bodies playing at being men – deprived of everything that could make them women. I have tried to do better with Ailith and Scatha, I hope I have succeeded.
So what is the story about?
It’s about violence and pain, resilience, hope, determination to do what is right even when it seems impossible.
It is about a working class man who is on his own in a dangerous and hostile world, and has to do his best to make his way without losing himself.
It’s about masculinity and patriarchy and gender roles and how those things shape us, whether seen from the inside or outside.
It’s about two very different women’s struggles to make their way within that patriarchy and the systems of violence that dominate their worlds.
It’s about colonization and identity and how the pain and trauma of what has been done before are sometimes so heavy that people feel they have no choice but to do the same things again.
And most of all it’s about being willing to ask – What is the moral thing to do, right here, right now? – and then having the courage to do it. Even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard. Even when the cost of doing so is so high you may never recover.
It’s about what it means to be a hero.