Book description
Comprising the ancient texts of The Belgariad and The Malloreon, The
Rivan Codex is a book which stands in the same relationship to the
Belgariad and Malloreon as The Silmarillion does to The Lord of the
Rings and The Hobbit.
Before David Eddings started to write his first fantasy series, the
BELGARIAD, in the late 1970s, he spent a year working on the design and
mythology of the fantasy world in which it is set.
The Rivan Codex comprises the immensely readable background material to
Eddings' best-loved series, repeated information a lot of it, but it's
the books that repeat the information, and these seminal documents have
about them an air of original inspiration, world-building in action. The
rest of it is background which is taken for granted but not spelled out.
History, geography, myths and folktales, peoples, gods, customs, social
organization, political hierarchy, laws, dress, modes of address,
produce, culture, flora, fauna, all presented with so light a touch one
can only yearn for Eddings to be taken up by academics so that his style
might catch on in the real real world.
The 12-book long series grew out of these delightful preliminary
sketches like a river growing from a spring of striking purity and
constancy. Magically, the information reads fresh each time, minimal
Eddings prose, beguilingly arcane, in which massive events attain an
all-time perspective. 'The Rivan Codex is the definitive handbook to
his fantasy domains by Eddings and his wife Leigh'
Weekend Telegraph David Eddings was born in Washington State in 1931
and grew up near Seattle. He graduated from the University of Washington
and went on to serve in the US Army. Subsequently he worked as a buyer
for the Boeing company and taught college-level English. His first novel
was a contemporary adventure, but he soon began a spectacular career as
a fantasy writer with his bestselling series The Belgariad.
