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

The Rivan Codex was the result. I reasoned that each culture had to
have a different class-structure, a different mythology, a different
theology, different costumes, different, forms of address, different
national character, and even different coinage and slightly different
weights and measures. I might never come right out and use them in
the books, but they had to be there. 'The Belgariad Preliminaries'
took me most of 1978 and part of 1979. (I was still doing honest work
those days, so my time was limited.)
One of the major problems when you're dealing with wizards is
the 'Superman Syndrome'. You've got this fellow who's faster than a
speeding bullet and all that stuff. He can uproot mountains and stop
the sun. Bullets bounce off him, and he can read your mind. Who's
going to climb into the ring with this terror? I suppose I could have
gone with incantations and spells, but to make that sort of thing
believable you've got to invent at least part of the incantation,
and sooner or later some nut is going to take you seriously, and,
absolutely convinced that he can fly if he says the magic words, he'll
jump off a building somewhere. Or, if he believes that the sacrifice of
a virgin will make him Lord of the Universe, and some Girl-Scout
knocks on his door - ??? I think it was a sense of social responsibility
that steered me away from the 'hocus-pocus' routine.
Anyway, this was about the time when the ESP fakers were
announcing that they could bend keys (or crowbars, for all I know)
with the power of their minds. Bingo' The Will and the Word was
born. And it also eliminated the Superman problem. The notion that
doing things with your mind exhausts you as much as doing them
with your back was my easiest way out. You might be able to pick up
a mountain with your mind, but you won't be able to walk after you
do it, I can guarantee that. It worked out quite well, and it made
some interesting contributions to the story. We added the
prohibition against 'unmaking things' later, and we had a workable form
of magic with some nasty consequences attached if you broke the
rules.
Now we had a story. Next came the question of how to tell it. My
selection of Sir Perceval (Sir Dumb, if you prefer) sort of ruled out

'High Style'. I can write in'High Style'if necessary (see Mandorallen
with his 'thee's, thou's and foreasmuches), but Garion would have
probably swallowed his tongue if he'd tried it. Moreover, magic,
while not a commonplace, is present in our imaginary world, so I
wanted to avoid all that 'Gee whiz! Would you look at that!' sort
of reaction. I wanted language that was fairly colloquial (with a
few cultural variations) to make the whole thing accessible to
contemporary readers, but with just enough antique usages to give it a
medieval flavor.
Among the literary theories I'd encountered in graduate school
was Jung's notion of archetypal myth. The application of this theory
usually involves a scholar laboring mightily to find correspondences
between current (and not so current) fiction and drama to link them
to Greek mythology. (Did Hamlet really lust after his mother the way