"Books - David Eddings - Rivan Codex, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Eddings David)

Please bear in mind the fact that these studies are almost twenty
years old, and there are going to be gaps. There are places where
some great leaps occurred, frequently flowing out of the point of my
pen during that actual writing, and I wasn't keeping a diary to
report these bursts of inspired creativity. I'll candidly admit that
probably no more than half of these 'strokes of genius' actually
worked. Some of them would have been disastrous. Fortunately, my
collaborator was there to catch those blunders. Trial and error enters
into any form of invention, I suppose. This book may help others to
avoid some of the missteps we made along the way, and it may give
the student of our genre some insights into the creative process
something on the order of 'connect wire A to wire B. Warning! Do
not connect wire A to wire C, because that will cause the whole thing
to blow up in your face.'
Now that I've explained what I'm up to here, let's get the lecture
out of the way. (Did you really think I'd let you get away without
one?)
After I graduated from the US Army in 1956, one of my veteran's
benefits was the now famous GI Bill. My government had decided
to pay me to go to graduate school. I worked for a year to save up
enough for some incidentals (food, clothing, and shelter) and then
enrolled in the graduate school of the University of Washington in
Seattle. (A good day in Seattle is a day when it isn't raining up.) My
area of concentration was supposed to be modern American fiction
(Hemingway, Faulkner, and Steinbeck), but I had those Ph.D exams
lurking out in the future, so I knew that I'd better spend some time
with Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton as well. Once I'd mastered
Middle English, I fell in love with Chaucer and somewhat by
extension with Sir Thomas Malory.

INTRODUCTION


Since what is called 'Epic Fantasy' in the contemporary world
descends in an almost direct line from medieval romance, my
studies
of Chaucer and Malory gave me a running head start in the field.
'Medieval Romance' had a long and honorable history, stretching
from about the eleventh century to the sixteenth, when Don Quixote
finally put it to sleep. It was a genre that spoke of the dark ages in
glowing terms, elevating a number of truly barbaric people to near
sainthood. The group that is of most interest to the English-speaking
world, of course, is King Arthur and his knights of the Round
Table. There may or may not have been a real King Arthur, but that's
beside the point. We should never permit historical reality to get in
the way of a good story~ should we?
Since the issue's come up, though, let's take a look at someone
who was historically verifiable and who had a great deal of impact
on the fledgling genre in its earliest of days. The lady in question
was the infamous Eleanor of Aquitaine.