The Rivan Codex: Ancient Texts of the Belgariad and the Malloreon

Eddings, David and Leigh

ISBN 10: 0002246775 / ISBN 13: 9780002246774

Published by Voyager Books, 1998

About this Item

VGC.Voyager, 1998. First UK edition-first printing (1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2). Blue hardback (gilt lettering to the spine) with Dj(two small nicks and crease on the edges of the Dj cover), both in VGC. Illustrated with b/w drawings, maps. Nice and clean pages but slightly tainted and yellow on the outer edges, previous owner's inscription written on the edges of the front endpaper. The book is in VGC with light shelf wear. 394pp including Afterward. Price un-clipped. Seller Inventory # 10761

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Rivan Codex: Ancient Texts of the ...

Publisher: Voyager Books

Publication Date: 1998

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Very good

Dust Jacket Condition: Very good

Edition: First UK edition-first printing.

About this title

Synopsis:

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.

Review:

David and Leigh Eddings take readers on a fascinating behind-the-scenes tour of the extensive background material they compiled before writing their epic fantasy The Belgariad and the Malloreon and the two companion volumes, Belgarath the Sorcerer and Polgara the Sorceress

The tour stretches from the wealthy Empire of Tolnedra to the remote Isle of the Winds, from the mysterious mountains of Ulgoland to the forbidding reaches of darkest Mallorea. Readers visit the time before Time when two opposing Destinies began the cataclysmic struggle for supremacy that would involve Gods and men alike, crack a world asunder, and threaten to unravel the fabric of the universe itself. One also gets to see the origin of the Orb of Aldur and glimpse the final act upon the Sardion Stone.