![]() ![]() Except for the ruins of man’s greatest cities and monuments, the world as everyone had known it had disappeared. The nations of man were destroyed, and the environment and climate in many places was made entirely barren.īirth of the Four Lands and The First CouncilĪfter an extremely long amount of time, the Earth had more or less recovered from the cataclysm of the Great Wars. Sometime in the early 22nd century, mankind all but destroyed itself through nuclear, biological, and chemical holocaust. The Elves and their magic remained hidden, as memories of their existence become nothing more than “Fairy Tales”. Thousands of years passed while man and science ruled. The Elves still existed, but quickly found themselves few in numbers compared to the quickly growing human race and decided to go into hiding. Thousands of years later, the age of man came into being. As long as the Ellcrys lived, the Demons would remain locked away. The integrity of the prison was upheld by a magical tree known as the Ellcrys. The Forbidding locked the demons away in an alternate universe from which they could not attack the Elves. When the Demons tried to eradicate the rival Elves altogether, the Elves proved victorious by creating a magical prison called the Forbidding, to which they banished the Demons. For example, the Elves used their magic to care for the earth, while the hateful Demons used theirs to dominate and destroy. Like any power (be it wealth, technology, or physical strength), magic was used by some for good and some for evil. History of the Shannara World Age of FaerieĪt the beginning of time, in what was known as the "Age of Faerie", the Earth was inhabited only by Faerie creatures most or all wielded magic. ![]() 3.9 The Dark Legacy of Shannara Trilogy.3.7 The Voyage of the Jerle Shannara Trilogy.1.4 Birth of the Four Lands and The First Council.Without glossary guides like the ones Robert Jordan provided, we are left to craft our own sounds, which I’d argue is one of the joys of fiction reading. For those of us who come to fantasy by reading, we hear the names first in our heads. I’ve since learned that Shannara has the accent on the very first syllable- per Terry Brooks himself. And to its credit, the Shannara Chronicles did pass the Bechdel test.īut what surprised me was hearing the characters’ names: pronouncing Al lanon as if he were named after the drinking recovery group-I’d always had the accent on the penultimate syllable saying the last “e” in Amberle-which I’d always taken as silent. Game of Thrones for teens), I had anticipated that I might find a racially homogenous world jarring, especially after Star Wars: The Force Awakens populated the galaxy with badly-needed or controversial (to the trolls) diversity. When I watched the Shannara Chronicles (a.k.a. Which brings me to the point of this post. Though fewer writers possess that *other* talent of Tolkien’s, to invent entire language families, science fiction and fantasy writers fill their worlds with new words. Naming characters and places makes worlds jump to life. ![]() And now it’s something of a convention to open fantasy, especially epic sagas, with a map of Westeros, Seanchan and the Westlands, Earthsea, or Mallorea.Īnother key element is naming. It’s one of the joys of fiction writing to put to paper the contours of a fully lived-in world, even if the action only takes place in one corner of it. They’ve gotten pleasurable dimensionality from cartography. World-building is one of the best parts of science fiction and fantasy.Įver since Tolkien neatly drew hand-penned maps of Middle Earth, fantasy authors have mined more than just verisimilitude out of rendering landscapes. ![]()
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