Hugin & Munin Journal

Cover image: The Shadow Rising by Robert Jordan, published by Tor Books. Cover art by Darrell K. Sweet. Used here for purposes of review and commentary. Robert Jordan's The Shadow Rising used to sit, alongside The Fires of Heaven , at the absolute peak of The Wheel of Time for me. I thought so when I first read the series, and I still thought so when I returned to it perhaps fifteen years ago. This time was different. I still recognise the book I loved, and some of its best sequences remain among my favourite parts of the series. What has changed is how much I am prepared to accept between those sequences. The length bothers me more, but length is only part of it. Character behaviour that once generated tension now often feels like machinery designed to keep people in conflict. Mysteries I once enjoyed analysing can look like unnecessary branches when I already know where they lead. Some of Jordan's psychological assumptions are harder for me to believe than they were w...

Fantasy has many ways to tell us that an army is dangerous. It can give the soldiers black banners, iron discipline, strange weapons or a reputation for leaving burned cities behind them. One of the most unsettling choices is simpler: remove the human face and replace it with something that looks less like a mask than a new anatomy. A line of soldiers advances in segmented armour. Their helmets flare into mandibles, their visors suggest compound eyes and their plates overlap like shell or chitin. The bodies underneath may be human, but the surface says that the people inside have already been processed into units. Armour no longer protects the soldier. It appears to have absorbed them. This is why insectoid armour belongs so naturally to fantasy empires. It turns hierarchy, obedience and replaceability into a visible body. Yet the image is politically unstable. It can expose the machinery through which an empire erases individuality, or it can perform the same erasure on behalf of ...

In fantasy, a raven is rarely allowed to be only a bird. It may arrive as a messenger, spy, familiar, omen or royal emblem. It perches on ruined towers, circles battlefields, whispers to gods and carries letters that alter the fate of kingdoms. Even when it does nothing more than watch from a branch, the story quietly asks us to assume that its presence means something. The raven survives as a symbol because it is unusually efficient. It gathers thought, memory, death, prophecy, kingship, surveillance, communication and war into one recognisable shape. It can belong to a god, a witch, a corpse, a king, a prison tower or a messenger network. Few animals move so easily between wisdom and rot. That range was not invented by fantasy writers reaching mechanically for a black bird. Ravens were intelligent scavengers, battlefield presences, vocal imitators and uneasy neighbours of human settlement long before the genre turned them into symbols. Myth amplified qualities people believed t...

Honor systems in fantasy and science fiction are often treated as moral decoration: a way to make a culture feel old, proud, disciplined or dangerous. The strongest fictional codes do more than tell characters how to behave. They make behaviour legible. A code of honor turns action into public language. It tells a society what counts as courage, shame, debt, loyalty, insult, repair, betrayal and restraint. People can anticipate how others will judge them, and disputes can be placed into recognised categories before a court, ruler or police force intervenes. That legibility is useful, but it is never neutral. Someone must interpret the code, decide whether an obligation has been met and determine which violations deserve punishment. Every honor system therefore creates two structures at once: a shared method for coordinating conduct and a political system for judging it. The Aiel in The Wheel of Time , Klingon society in Star Trek , Westerosi chivalry, the oaths of the Knights Rad...

Fantasy and science fiction repeatedly return to the desert warrior: a people shaped by scarcity, hardened by discipline and bound together by belief. The figure is rarely only a fighter adapted to difficult terrain. The desert becomes an explanation for an entire social order—its restraint, violence, rituals, memories and susceptibility to prophecy. The most obvious examples are the Fremen in Frank Herbert’s Dune and the Aiel in Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time . Both inhabit forbidding landscapes. Both treat endurance as a collective virtue. Both become entangled with an outsider who appears to fulfil a messianic role: Paul Atreides as the Lisan al-Gaib and Rand al’Thor as He Who Comes with the Dawn. The resemblance is striking enough to obscure the more interesting differences. Scarcity does not move directly into belief, as though the environment wrote the culture by itself. Hardship creates pressure. History, ritual and institutions decide how that pressure will be understoo...

Magic in fantasy often arrives with the promise that reality is more flexible than it appears. Wounds can be closed, distances folded and fate bent by sufficient power, knowledge or sacrifice. Then the story reaches a body that will not rise. Again and again, someone kneels beside the newly dead and reaches for an ability that has worked before—only to discover that it can repair flesh without restoring the person who inhabited it. Other stories permit a return, but only through divine intervention, temporary apparitions, altered bodies or an underworld journey that confirms death rather than undoing it. These scenes reveal more than the limits of a magic system. They force the world to decide what a person is, where identity goes when the body fails and who, if anyone, has authority to call it back. At the edge of death, magic stops being a collection of abilities and becomes metaphysics. Spoiler warning: This essay discusses major events from the Earthsea cycle, The Wheel of T...

There was a time when the chosen one seemed to be everywhere in the fantasy I read. Garion in The Belgariad , Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings , Rand al’Thor in The Wheel of Time and, a little later, Harry Potter all appeared to share a familiar promise: the world had already decided that one person mattered. The resemblance was never exact. Some heroes were named in prophecy, some inherited authority, some possessed unique power and some simply accepted a burden that other people could have carried. Fantasy has also been questioning these arrangements for a long time. Paul Atreides enters a messianic role prepared by political design; Thomas Covenant is given significance without the character that seems worthy of it; Rand discovers that being chosen can mean losing any ordinary claim over his own life. What has changed is not the disappearance of the chosen one but the pressure placed upon the idea. A conspicuous strand of modern fantasy still allows prophecy, blood and exceptio...