<- Remembering The Realms: R. A. Salvatore Part 1
SUBTITLE: The Good And The Great
SUB-SUBTITLE: These posts really should have been a podcast
Okay, so after a nice long look at R. A. Salvatore himself, let's actually get to looking at some of the writing that put him at the very tippy-top of the Forgotten Realms novel food chain.
One of Salvatore's greatest strengths as a writer is his consistency. Some lauded authors, like, say, Stephen King, have incredibly high highs and some extremely groan-worthy lows. Others, like George R. R. Martin, start strong but deteriorate with time as their britches get too big to be constrained by any notion of editorial oversight. With Salvatore, however, you're always guaranteed a well-paced action-fantasy experience with just the right amount of melodrama and not-exactly-funny-but-inoffensively-amusing-enough humor, right in the 7-to-8.5-out-of-10 range. His work, while rarely mindblowing and never especially challenging, is nevertheless intensely readable in a way few of his contemporaries could reliably achieve. In my journey of re-reading my childhood collection, I found that I could often knock out Salvatore's books in a couple sittings, with only a few exceptions that I'll get to in the next post.
This consistency synergized nicely with the other strengths of Salvatore's Forgotten Realms work - his ability to create memorable, easily-summarized characters, and the fact that, as one of the setting's first and most successful writers, he was allowed to do BASICALLY whatever he wanted with the world. Lesser Forgotten Realms writers frequently wrote as though they were consulting the Dungeon Master's Guide every two paragraph, but Salvatore never let any overriding devotion to existing D&D lore or mechanics get in the way of telling a good story. (His most noticeable D&D-pilled writing tic is characters almost exclusively being referred to as what their respective D&D classes would be. Wulfgar is always referred to as a barbarian, Morik is always a rogue, Drizzt is always a ranger, Artemis is always an assassin, etc etc etc. It doesn't matter that Wulfgar lives almost exclusively in cities, has been fully trained as a blacksmith, has held multiple day jobs, and hasn't even had much of a temper in decades - he's still a Barbarian.)
But all that's still pretty abstract, right? You're here to learn about the Realms, so let's get to some of my favorite contributions from Salvatore! Note: I'm not going to be shy about spoilers in this series of posts. I figure that since even the most recent books in my collection are almost 20 years old at this point, nobody's going to get too upset.
The Dark Elf Trilogy
Salvatore likes trilogies. He'll occasionally dabble in quartets, he even wrote a quintet one time, but trilogies are where it's AT for the man. The Dark Elf Trilogy was the second set of three books he ever wrote in the Forgotten Realms setting, and as you might have intuited from the title, they explore the backstory of Drizzt Do'Urden, the dark elf who had been the breakout star of Salvatore's first trilogy (The Crystal Shard, Streams of Silver, and The Halfling's Gem.
It might be helpful if I quickly summarize the major concepts & characters introduced by theCrystal Shard trilogy:
- Drizzt Do'Urden: Our leading drow! Black of skin, white of hair, pointed of ear, absolutely cracked with his dual scimitars, is a ranger who nominally follows Mielikki (goddess of forests & forest creatures). Broods a lot, but is also kind of an adrenaline junkie.
- Guenhwyvar: Drizzt's animal companion, a 600-pound astral panther who Drizzt can summon every 12 hours using a small panther-shaped statuette. Guen is Drizzt's best friend in the entire world and she's just a little (very big) kitty cat.
- Bruenor Battlehammer: Dwarf, leader of the Battlehammer Clan, king of the briefly-lost dwarven stronghold of Mithril Hall, which the gang hunts down in book two. Drizzt's best non-panther friend. The dwarfest-ass dwarf who ever dwarfed.
- Wulfgar, son of Beornegar: A human from the Elk Tribe, one of several barbarian¹ tribes that roam the icy tundra of Icewind Dale. Wulfgar is taken hostage by Bruenor after an alliance of the tribes make a disastrous attempt at conquering Ten-Towns (the collection of fishing & trading settlements around the dale's four lakes), with whom he lives for several years and comes to think of as an adoptive father. Bruenor crafts the magical warhammer Aegis-Fang for Wulfgar as a "you're not a hostage any more" present (Aegis-Fang is JUST distinct enough from Mjolnir to avoid legal action). Wulfgar is tall, strong as hell, has a quick temper but grows into one of the more interesting characters in the thing.
- Catti-Brie Battlehammer: Bruneor's other adoptive human child. The team Girl. Talks like a dwarf, red-haired, beautiful. She's "spirited", which is code for "very few discernible personality traits beyond being very straightforward and brave and The Girl". In book two she finds Taulmaril, a magic bow that shoots a never-ending supply of arrows that are as strong as lightning bolts.
- Regis: The last member of our main crew. A halfling thief who fled his Calimport thieves guild after stealing his boss's hypnotic ruby pendant. Unlike the others, Regis isn't an ultra-powerful killing machine - he's kind of just a dude, which makes him one of my favorite characters. He's sort of lazy, a little cowardly, and spends the first few books being cheap comic relief, but like Wulfgar grows beyond this role into a pretty complicated caretaker for his friend group of suicidal daredevils. Often referred to as "Rumblebelly" by Bruenor, because Regis has a bit of a paunch and Bruenor is a dwarf, in case anyone forgot.
- Artemis Entreri: A human assassin from Calimport tasked with hunting Regis down and bringing him back to the thieves guild. Like Drizzt, he's a two-weapon fighter, though he prefers a longsword and dagger. Him and Drizzt hate each other sooooooooo bad and they're Fated Rivals and they don't want to kiss and fuck each other to death at ALL. They have a completely heterosexual obsession with one another and have several brutal duels over the course of the series. Artemis Entreri fucking rules.
- Crenshinibon AKA The Crystal Shard: Mega-powerful evil magic artifact. Sentient, wants to be wielded by a powerful evildoer (a demon, for preference) who'll enact its will to raise thousands of huge crystal towers and dominate the entire world. Allows its wielder to dominate armies of mind-slaves and shoot very powerful beams.
- Errtu: A balor (a high-ranking fiend (which are DISTINCT from devils, fiends are from The Abyss, devils are from Hell, which are different places)) with a big demon hard-on for The Crystal Shard. Got his hands on it once way back when and has been chasing that high every since. Drizzt kicks his ass apart in book one, but when demons get killed on the Material Plane they just respawn back in The Abyss.
Okay. Jesus Christ. That wasn't quick at all. But it'll save us a lot of confusion down the road, I promise.
Back to The Dark Elf Trilogy. With Drizzt undeniably being the most interesting and popular thing to come out of the Crystal Shard trilogy, Salvatore deciding to devote his next three books to explaining how the ebon-skinned sonofagun came to be tussling with yetis on the Icewind Dale tundra was a natural next step. And he really smashed it out of the park.
In order to explain Drizzt and his whole deal, Salvatore had a LOT of blanks to fill in - Ed Greenwood's description of the drow before Salvatore hit the scene was that they were evil, lived underground, were matriarchal, and worshipped Lloth, The Spider Queen. From these table scraps Salvatore cooked up an impressively weird and evocative banquet of subterranean delights, chief among which is the drow metropolis of Menzoberranzan, with its many great & powerful Houses of ruling drow nobility - Xorlarrin, del'Armgo, Oblodra, Baenre, and, of course, Do'Urden. Menzoberranzan features a number of impressive landmarks (presuming you have the infravision necessary to perceive them): Narbondel, the massive central stalagmite that's regularly ensorceled to heat and cool with the rising and setting of the sun above. Tier Breche, home to Arach-Tinilith, Sorcere, and Melee-Magthere, the three academies of drow instruction in clerical devotion to Lloth, the mystic arts, and weaponcraft. Qu'ellarz'orl, seat of the city's most powerful noble houses.
Salvatore had to KNOW he was cooking when he was writing The Dark Elf Trilogy. Like, it's just FUN. Dark elf shit is FUN. The horny leather-clad matriarchs performing dark sexy rituals to their dark sexy spider goddess. The fact that their entire system of government is based on a system of organized betrayal and murder. The neverending plotting, scheming, manipulating, double-crossing, cheating, lying, and generalized skullduggery. Drow society as Salvatore describes it barely holds up to the slightest of serious scrutiny, but you're an idiot if you don't think its concepts aren't insanely ripshit resonant. If you can track down the collected Dark Elf Trilogy, I highly recommend giving it a read - you really don't need any Dungeons and Dragons or Forgotten Realms foreknowledge to enjoy it.
Allow me to offer up some tidbits about Menzoberranzan:
- Status as a drow in Menzoberranzan depends largely on your gender (girls>boys) and the standing of the noble House you belong to. Houseless male drow are therefore regarded as being barely above non-drow races, with one exception: the all-male mercenary company of Bregan D'Arthe, a private army contracted by the noble Houses whenever they need plausible deniability. Jarlaxle, the leader of Bregan D'Arthe, is the swaggiest character in all of Forgotten Realms and Salvatore wants to fuck him SO bad.
- Noble Houses can only gain in status by invading Houses higher than them in the pecking order and murdering every member of that House's noble family, but it only counts if no outsiders see it happening.
- The most powerful house is House Baenre (which Baldur's Gate 3 players might recognize as the House that Minthara comes from). One reason for its power is that the Matron Mother, Yvonnel Baenre, lived a crazy long time and had a frankly WILD number of children. Here's a full list of all of her children: Gromph (oldest son, archmage of Menzoberranzan, most powerful male drow in the city), Triel (oldest daughter), Bladen'Kerst (second daughter), Doquaio (second son, died during a botched sacrifice), Jarlaxle (remember him? His botched sacrifice killed his older brother), Quenthel (third daughter), Dantrag (fourth son, he got to live because Jarlaxe living and being a Baenre was hushed up), Vendes (fourth daughter), Sos'Umptu (fifth daughter), and Berg'inyon (fifth son).
- Staple foods in Menzoberranzan are mostly mushroom-based, but their meat, milk, and cheese comes from rothe, a kind of huge shaggy underground yak. The city's rothe were almost exclusively cultivated on an island on Lake Donigarten and managed by House Hunzrin.
As for the actual PLOT of the books, I don't think the Drizzt Formula has ever worked better. See, another one of Salvatore's Secret Sauces was the fact that "a Neutral Good drow elf must frequently navigate being judged by the color of his skin rather than the content of his character" was, by the standards of mass-market pulp fantasy novels in the 1990s, blisteringly insightful social commentary. Almost every novel with Drizzt in it features several instances of him gracefully navigating some form of racial micro/macroaggression, usually with his trademarked pained smile, almost always while wondering dolefully if he'll ever manage to outpace the fearsome reputation of his people. Re-reading these parts, they came off corny as hell, but you have to trust me that back in the day, it slayed. From a structural standpoint, the fantasy racism angle fails for all the usual reasons that fantasy racism as social commentary fails - it's completely reasonable for the people of Toril to be concerned about dark elves because in Dungeons & Dragons "evil" is a quantifiable resource and dark elves are RICH in it, something that is provable with a level 1 cleric spell. Drizzt also doesn't really make sense as any kind of allegory for oppression, because he's a peerless, charismatic warrior who is best friends with many of the most powerful people in the northern half of the continent and has access to basically all of the money and magic he could ever need for the rest of his life. After, like, the tenth book or so, Drizzt has so much clout banked that he could retire from adventuring and live out the rest of his days in Mithril Hall or Silverymoon without ever encountering anyone who didn't think he kicked ass.
In The Dark Elf Trilogy however, the formula WORKS. Like I said, the trilogy charts Drizzt's journey from his birthplace of Menzoberranzan all the way to where we first meet him in Icewind Dale. Homeland covers his youth in Menzoberranzan, how he was trained by his also-good father Zaknafein, how he came to acquire Guenhwyvar, and how he ultimately broke free from his birth family and fled the city. Exile tracks Drizzt navigating the dangerous wilds of the Underdark (the perils of which take him from merely being a talented fighter to a creature of instinctive deadliness) and attempting to cling to his sanity all while fleeing from his family's attempts at retrieving him. Finally, Sojourn takes us through his first few years on the surface world, how he came to be a captial-R Ranger, and how he wound up making his way up to the frozen butthole of nowhere.
The formula works in these books for the simple reason that Drizzt is VULNERABLE in these stories in ways he simply isn't in most of the books that come after. In Exile, there's constant tension from him being this good-hearted little wiener in a callous, brutal society that wants to either kill or corrupt him and doesn't really care about the distinction between the two. Exile takes this tension and doubles it, removing Drizzt from even the structures of the society he's known since birth and forcing him to navigate literal armies of subterranean nightmares, all while terrified that doing what he needs to do to survive is burning away his identity. Finally, Sojourn, while definitely being the weak sister of the trilogy, is nevertheless a strong story about the challenges that might be faced by a good-intentioned dark elf who just wants to fit in with the folks who live on the surface. The boy STRUGGLES, and not just against things that have an appropriate Challenge Rating! It's good books!
I'm just scrolling back and realizing how fucking much I've already written about this trilogy so I'm just going to move on. I promise the book summaries won't ALL be this meaty and girthsome.
The Spine Of The World
This book might be the single most impressive in Salvatore's body of work, simply because it is so fundamentally unlike any of his other books. Drizzt isn't even IN this one, other than in his little pre-act ramblings (more on these in the next post). No, The Spine Of The World is a book about Wulfgar having pretty much one of the worst months it is possible for a person to have. And it fucking boinks.
In this book, Wulfgar has purposefully estranged himself from the rest of the group after being dead for six years and spending most of that time being tortured by demons before coming back to life, which is great but the experience left him with a TINY bit of trauma. He goes from being a giant-punching, dragon-slaying badass to an alcoholic bouncer for a dock bar in Luskan whose boss is about to fire him because of how erratic and belligerent he is. His only friends are Delly, his barmaid girlfriend and, uh, Morik, the biggest criminal in the city (who likes drinking with Wulfgar because he knows Wulfgar's the only dude in town who doesn't want him dead, and hanging out with a seven-foot-tall Conan lookalike tends to keep your haters at bay).
This shitty little life gets upended when two things happen: first, one of Wulfgar's co-workers swipes Aegis-Fang (his magic hammer that Bruenor made for him, one of the last surviving symbols of the life he left behind) while Wulfgar is passed out drunk, on the not-unreasonable belief that "huge angry drunk with a powerful magic weapon" is a very bad combination, selling it to a visiting pirate captain. Second, Wulfgar and Morik are framed for attempted murder, and made to suffer a brutal period of imprisonment and torture before ultimately being released and fleeing into the Spine Of The World mountain range, where they make a halfhearted attempt at becoming highwaymen, which leads them to collide with the other half of the book.
See, while Wulfgar has been having his No Good Very Bad Life, another drama has been unfolding in the postage-stamp-sized country of Auckney, a tiny region in the Spine Of The World. There, young Lord Feringal Auck has fallen in love with a peasant girl, Meralda Ganderlay, and wishes to wed her. Meralda is torn between Feringal (who is actually quite decent as far as lords go) and her similarly-low-born sweetheart, Jaka. She ultimately accepts Feringal's offer in order to secure clerical treatment for her sick mother, but not before Jaka pressures her into one last tryst, which leaves her with a pregnancy that she doesn't discover until after she's accepted the proposal. She's sick with worry over how she could possibly get herself out of this mess until the solution presents itself in the form of Wulfgar and Morik robbing her carriage, knocking out her coachman but otherwise leaving her unharmed.
Figuring that she'll never see the men again, Meralda lies to her new husband that Wulfgar forced himself on her, which conveniently explains her very inconvenient pregnancy. Unfortunately, her understandably-pissed-off new husband happens to have a friend in a powerful wizard, who is able to find and apprehend Wulfgar, delivering him to Auckney to again be imprisoned and tortured for a crime he didn't commit. Meralda has a change of heart and frees Wulfgar, afterwards imploring her husband to leave well enough alone. We're not done yet, though! Some time after escaping, Wulfgar and Morik learn that Meralda has given birth far too early for her version of events to make sense, and Wulfgar decides he's going to stick his neck out for the woman who saved him when she didn't have to. He singlehandedly storms Castle Auckney and busts in to take "his" child, making up some bullshit about how children from his tribe always come early because of how strong and badass they are (it should be noted that Meralda gives him her blessing). He then rides off into the sunset, having decided to raise the baby as his own.
The worst thing I can say about this book is that it's not an ESPECIALLY good fit for Remembering The Realms as a project, since it honestly doesn't interface THAT much with the Dungeons & Dragons trappings beyond magic and magical races being a part of the setting. Instead, it's far more of a bodice-ripper/court intrigue-type novel than Salvatore's typical action-fantasy fare, about a deeply-traumatized fantasy action hero fucking up a lot and being miserable and sucking ass and it's so, so compelling. I kind of couldn't believe Salvatore devoted an entire book to this stuff (I HATED this book as a dumbass teen, I was mainly in it for the cool fights and this book has very few of those). You wouldn't learn very much about Forgotten Realms by reading The Spine of The World, but you'd be reading a very good book nevertheless.
Servant Of The Shard
My all-time favorite of Salvatore's books, and another in which Drizzt doesn't actually technically appear (again, we'll get into that in a future post). This book is all about Swagmaster Power Couple Artemis Entreri and Jarlaxle absolutely fumbling the fuck out of ruling Calimport from the shadows. They fuck up so bad that they wind up having to destroy Crenshinibon (AKA The Crystal Shard, remember?) just to finish the book with points on the board.
Let me get you better-acquainted with the character of Artemis Entreri. He isn't JUST a good fighter - he is, as far as he knows, the BEST fighter that there's ever been, full stop. Dude has been winning fights since before he needed to shave, and he essentially sees himself as having sacrificed everything that's good about himself to be good at fighting and killing. He has no friends, he trusts no-one, and indulges no vices - he's cocky and preening and arrogant, but it's all just papering over the fact that if he didn't have his martial ability, he'd be nothing. And then, while bringing Regis back to Calimport, he meets Drizzt. Drizzt, who is every inch as cracked a fighter as Artemis, but... has friends? Is a good person? Possesses passions beyond just maintaining his status at the top of the world's most depressing food chain? This pisses Artemis off HARDCORE, and he becomes absolutely obsessed with 1v1ing Drizzt to essentially prove that he hasn't wasted his entire life.
The Artemis Entreri we start with at the beginning of Servant Of The Shard is an Artemis Entreri who thinks he's finally won that fight - in his last appearance, Jarlaxle pulled some shenanigans to make a duel between Drizzt and Entreri happen (while stealing the Crystal Shard from Drizzt's party), and then pulled further shenanigans to make Entreri think he'd managed to kill Drizzt once and for all. Jarlaxle and his all-drow-male mercenary band, Bregan D'Arthe, have essentially conquered Calimport's criminal underworld and have installed Entreri as their human representative so that no surface governments raise a stink about a bunch of drow moving in on surface enterprises. Entreri is more powerful than he could ever have imagined, he believes that he's defeated his greatest rival, and he is Fucking Miserable. Oopsie, you're a dickhead whose shallow ambitions have all been realized and your nihilistic worldview hasn't in any way prepare you for what comes after!
This book has it all, man. It has some of the sickest fights ever committed to page. It has tons of great ancient-sentient-artifacts-manipulating-their-wielders content. There's so much dark elf infighting and backstabbing. Artemis Entreri's best friend is a halfling guildmaster whose brother he mercy-killed and he's so embarrassed about it. Jarlaxle is in there. The theme of "you got the exact stupid selfish thing you wanted, and it's going to destroy you" runs thick through every single character (including Crenshinibon). The whole thing is delicious good fun. One thing about Forgotten Realms books is that they almost NEVER hold the camera on characters from the deep end of the alignment pool for entire books, but the ones that do are almost exclusively bangers.
The Hunter's Blade Trilogy
I'm going to try to make this one as quick as possible because this post is already absurdly long.
Luckily, the synopsis for these three books is pretty simple: hundreds of orc tribes from all over the Spine of the World have united under the banner of a single king: Obould Many-Arrows. In addition to his army of thousands of orcs and goblins, Obould is backed by a clan of powerful frost giants, and has even managed to make an alliance with the trolls of the Trollmoors. Behind the scenes are a quartet of renegade drow who have been egging Obould on in hopes of throwing the entire north of Faerun into chaos. Obould has a specific hate-on for the dwarven Citadel Adbar, which he briefly conquered years ago before being forced out again, and wants to steamroll over all the dwarven settlements in the region - including Mithril Hall.
It's no secret that orcs (and all the goblinoid races) have historically gotten pretty short shrift in both Forgotten Realms and Dungeons & Dragons at large, which makes having a canny, charismatic orc villain a rare treat. Obould is underestimated at every turn by ally and enemy alike, everyone assuming him to be a rage-fueled simpleton who'll self-destruct the moment he encounters sufficiently organized resistance. And yet, time and again, Obould turns defeat into victory - when a party of dwarves exploit a huge idol of Gruumsh One-Eye (patron god of all orcs) in order to rescue Bruenor from Obould's army, Obould uses their sacrilege to whip his followers into a religious frenzy, and even manages to essentially become a Chosen of Gruumsh in the process. When his siege of Mithril Hall costs him thousands of soldiers and his only son, he doesn't overextend himself by marching on Adbar - instead, he digs in and establishes borders on the surface, forcing the dwarves to operate underground. And he manages to beat Drizzt in single combat TWICE.
You might be wondering "damn, this Obould guy sounds pretty crazy, I wonder how they manage to beat him", that's the best part: they don't! At the end of the trilogy, Obould is still alive and his army controls a huge chunk of territory between Mirabar, Mithril Hall, and Silverymoon, with the Trollmoors also effectively under his control after his troll allies raze Nesme. Obould takes heavy losses and definitely doesn't win as much as he wanted to, but he unquestionably comes out on top. That fucking rules!
There's lots of other good stuff in these books, of course. Drizzt believes Obould succeeded in killing Bruenor for most of the second and third books and gets completely revengepilled about it. There's a ton of juicy political drama between the communities of Mirabar and Mithril Hall based around the Mirabarans realizing that while it might SOUND cool and epic for a lost dwarven kingdom to be reclaimed, it's actually kind of inconvenient when said kingdom starts dramatically outperforming you in terms of ore quality and trade goods. There are so many good fights. But I mainly just love it for Salvatore having the guts to basically hand the bad guys a huge W and in doing so majorly shake up the status quo of his playground.
Conclusion
Alright, that's enough of Salvatore's good stuff! Join me next time when I get into some of the clunkier and more problematic aspects of his writing, as well as the books of his that are just plain Bad.
¹Obviously, calling a group of nomadic indigents "barbarians" has some pretty unsavory racial overtones to it, particularly when said indigents are frequently portrayed as stupid, hot-tempered, and violent! I'll be digging more into stuff like this in the next post.
