Brisingr Spork Chapter 50: The Tree of Life
Hello everyone! It’s time to get unwanted hugs from the Menoa tree!
Let’s just thank our stars that this isn’t that tree. Although seeing Eragon take a phallic branch up the arse would definitely qualify as some good gallows humor in my book.
Yes, fellow Anti-Shirts, we are back to the Brisingr sporking with “The Tree of Life”. This is another chapter title I have to quibble with, because since when has the Menoa tree been so associated with life? It’s definitely some kind of bizarre overlord of trees, but it’s not freaking Yggdrasil. Oh, wait, that’s why he did it: he wanted to imitate Norse mythology again.
Goddammit, Paolini.
The chapter begins with Eragon and Saphira flying to the Menoa tree, which gets a whole giant paragraph dedicated to describing it. Here’s a tl;dr version: it’s fuckhueg and there are woodland creatures climbing in it.
Being denser than a brick, Eragon decides not to look beneath the roots of the Menoa tree, like the stupid prophecy thing said, but among them. Obviously, he doesn’t find anything, so rather than actually trying to look harder, he just picks up a piece of bark and asks Saphira if he “could kill a soldier” with it if he cast enough spells. This is classic Eragon: give him a task that requires even the slightest effort, and he’ll barely give it a cursory attempt before giving up and trying to weasel around it, usually in a manner that involves using his magic like some kind of Get Out of Work Free card rather than any kind of intelligence.
Saphira tells Eragon that he “could kill a soldier with a blade of grass if [he] wanted to”, but that he probably shouldn’t try it against Murtagh or Galbatorix. Or rather, that “against Murtagh and Thorn, or the king and his black dragon, you might as well attack them with a strand of wet wool as that bark”.
That was one of the most painful attempts to adapt a real world idiom into Fantasyland I’ve ever seen. For those of you who didn’t catch it, Paolini basically just tried to invent an Alagarbledygook equivalent of “wet noodle”. For this idiocy, I hereby sentence him to an hour of Chinese water torture with the dripping administered via an actual wet noodle dangling over his forehead. *bangs gavel* COURT DISMISSED!
Eragon starts brainstorming as to what kind of weapons the tree could be hiding, and eventually thinks that maybe a Menoa-tree-wood staff would be cool. However, he has no idea how to get the tree to allow him to take a branch off of her, and in response, Saphira says… well, this.
“If any creature tried to harm the Menoa tree, she said, I doubt they would live long enough to regret their mistake.”
Trust me, guys, that line is going to become hilarious by the end of this chapter.
They waste a few more hours (yes, Paolini does specify) searching the clearing for any sign of a weapon, and Eragon has immediately gone back to hoping for a sword. He thinks that by all rights, he should be wielding Brom’s sword, since Murtagh has his own father’s.
Wow, he sure processed that reveal quickly. Let me just remind you guys that despite there being a good four chapters in between this one and the one where the Brom-bomb got dropped, in-story it is still the same day.
Just… take a moment and let that sink in. Everything that has happened since the beginning of Chapter 45 has been in the course of one goddamn day. The characters spent so long sitting and talking that they stretched a single day over the course of five fucking chapters, and then some.
Yeah.
Having run out of ideas, Eragon tries to make mental contact with the Menoa tree, but “the tree took no more notice of him than he would of an ant flailing its feelers by his boots”. Which quite honestly is probably the correct response to Eragon.
As Eragon and Saphira give up and leave, we get a time reference: it’s evening. Again: one day. We get a lot of unnecessary description of their quarters in Ellesméra and the food they eat, and Eragon lies in bed thinking about “Brom and the mystery of his mother”. I see Selena has been relegated to Nameless Womanly Role status like the womb-on-legs she really is in this story. This leads to Eragon having Angsty Dreams™ where he speaks with his parents, doesn’t hear anything they say, and yet knows that they luuuuurve him and are so proud of him. And with that, the five-chapter day finally ends.
The next morning, Eragon goes to meet up with the guy from House Valtharos, escorted by “a slim elf-maid”. Why Paolini decided to give us that description, I have no idea, but it jumped out at me as yet another example of this series’s casual sexism. On the way, he notices that there aren’t a lot of elves around, and Saphira makes a dramatic little declaration about how few elves remain behind when they go to war, and is it just me, or does that kind of make it sound like the elves enjoy fighting?
The guy they’re brought to meet is not really described himself, but his clothing definitely is. He’s wearing a green and gold wizard robe with a ridiculously big collar, and carrying a wand topped with a pearl. Thankfully, we’re spared the word-by-word of their greeting, probably because Paolini wanted to fast-forward to describing the sword Eragon is checking out: Támerlein.
...but not before Lord Fiolr gives us a giant infodump about its history, of course! See, Támerlein was wielded by Fiolr’s “mate”s brother, Arva, who went to defend Ilirea with the loyalist Riders, and was mortally wounded by a Forsworn named Kialandí. With his dying breath, Arva dramatically gave the sword to his sister, who fought her way out and managed to retreat to Iliera with an unnamed Rider, where she died of her wounds. So wait, none of the elves thought to heal her? Heck, the Rider she fled with didn’t heal her? PLOT HOLE!
Fiolr fingers his wand (heh heh) and then goes on to talk about how incredibly precious Támerlein is to him, and how he’d sooner die than give it away, so if Eragon decides to take it, he has to give it back if Fiolr or any of his relatives ask for it. Eragon agrees, and finally Fiolr takes him and Saphira “to a long, polished table grown out of the living wood of the floor”, giving me a nice reminder of how Lovecraftian Ellesméra is and also making me wonder how the hell Saphira managed to fit through the door to this place. I guess this is either a) another of those times when things are ridiculously big, because big things are Epic; or b) another of those times when Saphira conveniently grows or shrinks so that she can do whatever is required of her by the (alleged) plot.
Anyway, we now get the overblown description of Támerlein, and because I'm feeling a little spiteful right now I’m going to quote the entire thing.
The blade of Támerlein was colored a dark, rich green, as was its sheath. A large emerald adorned the pommel. The furniture of the sword had been wrought of blued steel. A line of glyphs adorned the crossguard. In Elvish, they said, I am Támerlein, bringer of the final sleep. In length, the sword was equal to Zar’roc, but the blade was wider and the tip rounder and the build of the hilt was heavier. It was a beautiful, deadly weapon, but just by looking at it, Eragon could see that Rhunön had forged Támerlein for a person with a fighting style different from his own, a style that relied more on cutting and slashing than the faster, more elegant techniques Brom had taught him.
Now, I know Paolini was probably going for some kind of broad, thick Viking sword, but the impression I got from that description was this.
Epic.
Eragon picks up the sword and immediately starts mentally whining about how it doesn’t feel right. I would be a lot more forgiving of this if he said that the balance wasn’t good for him, but no, it’s all about how it doesn’t “feel like an extension of his arm, as had Zar’roc”. Eragon isn’t going for effectiveness here, he’s going for some kind of emotional connection with his weapon. He still hesitates to say no because there aren’t many Rider swords left, but Saphira basically tells him to go with his gut because “if you are to carry a sword into battle, if your life and mine are to depend upon it, then the sword must be perfect”.
That’s, um… that’s really getting into the essence of Eragon’s Sue-ness there, isn’t it? Everything he gets has to be perfect. His dragon is beautiful and powerful and a talented flyer; she’s perfect. His “love interest” is an elf woman whose gorgeousness keeps getting praised to the skies: perfect. His friends are rebel leaders and dwarf kings and are all (allegedly) great fighers and leaders and shit: perfect. His father was not the villain, but the mentor character: perfect. And now he’s being told to hold out for a sword that’s perfect, and we all know that it’ll drop into his lap because Paolini is never satisfied with giving Eragon anything short of, well, fucking perfect.
Oh, and they also don’t like the condition of “give it back”, because Eragon and Saphira are entitled assholes.
Eragon tells Lord Fiolr that he’s not interested in the sword, and notices “a flash of satisfaction” in his eyes. Personally, I’d be more inclined towards relief; this kid breaks everything he touches. Still, good on you, Fiolr, for not wanting to give the Sue everything he wants just because he’s a Sue. Never mind that it’s just so he can get a better sword.
Now that that nasty bit of whining and entitlement is over, Eragon and Saphira head to Rhunön’s place and find her working on some kind of metal sculpture. Her no-nonsense attitude as she greets them actually makes Eragon wince, which gives her quite a few points in my book. He confirms to her that Murtagh took Zar’roc from him, and she says that it’s fitting for Morzan’s son to have Morzan’s old sword and then... well, she says this.
“Understand me, Shadeslayer, I would prefer it if you had kept hold of Zar’roc, but it would please me even more if you had a sword that was made for you. Zar’roc may have served you well, but it was the wrong shape for your body. And do not even speak to me of Támerlein. You would have to be a fool to think you could wield it.”
This kind of brings up a point I haven’t gotten to talk about yet: why did Murtagh even want Zar’roc? Sure, it’s an unbreakable blade and technically his rightful inheritance and all, but it also split his back open, and similarly to what Rhunön just said about Eragon it’s not the right kind of sword for his fighting style. Murtagh has always favored a hand-and-a-half sword; heck, that was how a lot of readers recognized him when he showed up at the Battle of the Burning Plains. Zar’roc is more of a traditional longsword: the blade is shorter, and it’s designed to be wielded with one hand. Wielding it is going to slow Murtagh down, because it’s not the kind of weapon he’s used to.
Anyway, Eragon seizes upon Rhunön’s bit about Morzan’s son wielding his sword and asks if Brom’s sword would be right for him. Rhunön asks why, and Eragon proudly drops the Brom-bomb. Rhunön gains even more points in my book by being completely unimpressed by this, and then griping about how stiff and polite the elves have become. Apparently, before the Blood-Oath, elves used to be a lot more fun. She then immediately snaps back to the topic of swords, making me wonder why we needed that little digression, and says that Brom’s sword Undbitr is out of the question because no one knows where the fuck it is. Eragon’s response?
“What, then, should I do, Rhunön-elda?”
He follows it up with talking about that falchion he had earlier, but I just love how pathetic that line sounds in my head. “Oh no, all the things I thought of didn’t work! Someone, please hand me the solution on a silver platter!”
Rhunön scoffs and talks a bit about how Rider swords are made by singing over the metal or some shit, and Eragon asks if she’d make him a sword. She frowns at him and reminds him that she took an oath not to do that. The conversation can’t end there, though; after all, this is the part where Eragon convinces Hattori Hanzo to come out of retirement, so Rhunön has to ask him why she should make him a sword, even if she hadn’t taken that oath. Eragon spouts some bullshit about putting an end to Galbatorix, and Rhunön seems vaguely interested and mentions that there might be a way to help, but then brushes it off because she doesn’t have the metal she needs.
As it turns out, what she needs is freaking starmetal.
Well, okay, she calls it “brightsteel”, but it comes from meteors, so I’m just going to call it starmetal. Suck it, Paolini. Anyway, apparently this starmetal makes the strongest, hardest, most flexible, and above all shiniest swords you could ever imagine, and she can only make a Rider sword if she has it. Of course, it’s also incredibly rare, and she doesn’t have a speck of it in her workshop, despite searching at length the previous night after Oromis came to set up this little meeting (which, why would she do that if she was only now convinced that she should loophole her oath for him?). And so, the conversation ends with her saying that if Eragon can somehow find some starmetal, they’ll talk about forging him a sword.
They leave, and Eragon finally puts two and two together and says that there must be some brightsteel under the Menoa tree. Saphira pointlessly asks how he could know that, and they exchange a little banter about not knowing where to start chopping the roots away to get to the stuff. I love how their immediate solution to the starmetal being buried is to chop through the roots of a sapient tree that can presumably feel pain. Our heroes, ladies and gentlemen!
With that, we scene-break to Eragon and Saphira flying back to Oromis’s place, where Eragon learns how to do teleportation and Oromis brings up that “magic gets harder with distance” thing that’s been punching holes in the plot ever since FUCKING WARDS came into play. Apparently teleportation breaks that rule. Distance doesn’t increase or decrease the energy cost; it’s just a flat reduce-mana-to-1% kind of thing that should only be used as a last resort.
Um, Oromis? If teleportation is that energy-consuming, then please explain how you and Glaedr were able to make your escape from Kialandí and Formora after teleporting both of you. Because if what you just said is true, you should have both been falling over with exhaustion.
I swear, guys, every rule Paolini tries to introduce in this magic system gets broken. Every. Single. One.
Anyway, Eragon tests out teleportation by sending a pebble from his hand to the middle of a clearing, and just like Saphira’s egg it creates an explosion… or rather, “a loud detonation”. Paolini, the term “detonate” was coined in the 18th century; if you put it in a medieval fantasy novel, it’s going to look blatantly out of place. You have no business talking about how you’re so careful to avoid anachronism when you do shit like this.
Eragon stumbles from the mana drain, but Paolini promptly forgets about it and has him awake and engaged for the rest of the lesson, which is thankfully glossed over. Oromis asks if he and Saphira will be staying much longer, and Eragon says he’s not sure, but he’s got something he wants to try with the Menoa tree. Oromis asks him to come see him before he leaves, this pointless section ends, and now, finally, we come to this chapter’s big scene.
Oh yeah.
Our brave heroes are about to piss off the Menoa tree.
We start this scene with Saphira asking why they’ll find the starmetal now when they couldn’t do anything before, and Eragon says that “it will work because it must”. This is entirely accurate; the only reason anything that happens in the following scene works is because Paolini forced it to in order to further his plot.
Saphira says she doesn’t like the idea, because the elf who became the Menoa tree killed a guy once and she might get violent again. I’m not sure why that line is there, and suspect padding. Eragon says the tree wouldn’t dare hurt him with Saphira there to protect him, and Saphira says “Mmh”. How exactly does one make an “mmh” sound telepathically? Grunts and uncertain noises don’t seem like a thing that should be carried over into mental speech, in my opinion.
They land at the base of the tree, frightening the small woodland creatures, and Eragon runs up one of the roots with his arms out. Wheeee, I'm an airplane! He stops at the trunk and starts poking the tree with his mind, and we get a big description of what its mind is like as it ignores him. The description actually says that it seems to be asleep.
So, with the tree sleeping, what do our heroes do? Shout loudly in its mental ears, of course!
Eragon and Saphira start bombarding the tree with pleas for help and images of all the shit they’ve seen. They also feed it some of their energy, and I just have to pause here and note that they are attempting to bribe a tree. That is the kind of sentence you never expect to actually write.
The tree continues to ignore them, and eventually Saphira says they can’t spare any more energy and Eragon agrees. Still, despite stopping with the energy-bribery, they continue to mentally shout at the tree for hours.
Finally, Saphira gets fed up, and… well… this happens.
Then Saphira snarled, and every bird within hearing fled in fright. Enough of this groveling! she declared. I am a dragon, and I will not be ignored, not even by a tree!
Yeah, she’s about to attack the tree. Still… isnt’ that line absurdly funny taken out of context? “I will not be ignored, not even by a tree, because for some reason trees have some power to ignore everything!”
Also, that should be “earshot” rather than “hearing”, Paolini.
Eragon, actually acting sensibly for once in his life, yells at Saphira to stop, but she ignores him and starts clawing and flaming at the Menoa tree. Eragon tells her again to stop, and she says she’ll stop when the tree responds. Eragon… pretty much folds.
The area gets all dark, and Eragon notices that the trees are all leaning into the clearing as if they’re about to attack. He calls for Saphira, who takes one look at this eldritch bullshit and tells him to get on her back, puffing up like “a riled cat” as she does so.
Eragon moves to hop on his flying blue cat-horse and skedaddle, but then the tree goes all Evil Dead on their asses and grabs them. Oddly enough, despite having to wrap around pretty much all of Saphira, they manage to immobilize Eragon just by grabbing his ankle. I wonder if that’s the Standard Female Grab Area for men or something? Or maybe it’s just a variant on the age-old Achilles’ Heel trope. Or Paolini did a goof with his words again.
Anyway, Saphira opens her mouth to flame the tree again, but stops when it finally talks. It’s described as having a whispering voice, and it asks them to introduce themselves so it will know the names of the people it kills.
If only that threat had been followed up on.
Eragon tells the tree their names, and the tree tells them to “die well”, but he tells it to wait because he hasn’t finished explaining who they are. The tree pauses for a moment, during which I like to imagine she was rolling her nonexistent eyes and internally muttering about kids and their stupid lists of titles or something like that, and allows him to continue. Eragon regurgitates his and Saphira’s standard sob story about being the last free dragon rider and last female dragon in all of Alagarbledygook, and at this point the tree realizes that she’s talking to a Sue, because she “sighs” her line as she asks why Saphira attacked her.
Saphira explains that it’s because they were told to look for a weapon under her roots and she wouldn’t listen to them, and the Menoa tree teases us with her promise to kill them again by saying that she will “die in vain” because no such weapon exists. Eragon says that by “weapon” they mean starmetal, and the tree decides to take a look, which apparently involves so much root-movement that it frightens away all the small woodland creatures. Wait, they didn’t all run away when Saphira went all Trogdor the Burninator?
A bunch of elves come to do nothing but point and stare, and Eragon thinks about trying to find Oromis and Glaedr, but is thankfully stopped from doing so by the Menoa Tree coming back and confirming that yes, there’s some starmetal by her roots. However, she refuses to give it to him because “you bit me and you burned me, and I do not forgive you”.
Eragon panics and plays the “last female dragon” card again, and the tree basically reacts with a “meh”. Saphira says that if she and Eragon die, Galbatorix will come and burn the forest, and the tree says that if he tries, she and the rest of the forest will kick his sorry ass. Oh, just like you kicked Durza’s ass when he burned large swathes of the forest in the freaking prologue? Or had Paolini not come up with your forest-Cthulhu status yet when he wrote that?
Eragon suggests that the energy they gave the tree is enough to heal the damage, and that should be “compensation enough” for Saphira’s bitch-fit. Nice way to try to spin your bribe, asshat. Also, Paolini fucked up his word order. It’s “is it not”, Paolini, not “is not it”.
At this point, Paolini injects about a billion CC’s of Plot Convenience serum into the Menoa Tree, calming her down enough to ask what the hell Eragon is. Apparently getting demi-elfed really did turn him into something so Yooneek and Speshul that she has no fucking idea. He says the dragons did it during the blood oath bullshit party so he could fight Galbatorix. Apparently that convinces the tree that they’re too important to kill, so she asks if he’ll “give [her] what [she wants] in return”, and Eragon proves that he has not seen Evil Dead by immediately agreeing to whatever conditions the tree might choose to set. Way to go, idiot; I hope you enjoy having all your orifices repeatedly violated by phallic roots.
The tree goes and fetches the starmetal from underground, and then we get the bit that spawned a thousand fan theories and handed me a Consequence plot point on a silver platter:
As the ore came to rest on the surface of the rich black soil, Eragon felt a slight twinge in his lower belly. He winced and rubbed at the spot, but the momentary flare of discomfort had already vanished. Then the root around his ankle loosened and retreated into the ground, as did those that had been holding Saphira in place.
I’ve seen a lot of Wild Mass Guessing about what caused that twinge in Eragon’s belly. Some people say that the tree took some kind of “sample”, so that she could figure out what the hell the dragons turned him into. Some say that it sterilized him, though I’m pretty sure Paolini has shot that one down at some point.
And some say that the tree took Saphira’s eldunarí.
It makes sense, really. Eragon feels something, but it’s gone quickly and there’s really no way the tree could have done anything to him; she was only holding onto his ankle. Saphira, however, was pretty much covered in roots. Note also that the tree doesn’t let them go until after the belly-twinge, which gives her the opportunity to have snatched it before letting them go.
Paolini, of course, has responded to most fan theories with “no comment”, which leaves this free game until he decides to step up and actually give us an answer. And thus, I am free to turn this little scene decidedly against Eragon and Saphira without being accused of fucking up the canon.
This is what happens when you leave too many questions unanswered, Paolini.
The tree tells Eragon to take the starmetal and GTFO, and he’s completely confused because he has no idea what the tree wants from him. She doesn’t respond to any further questions, though, so he picks up the chunk of meteorite and heads for Rhunön’s place. As they leave, Saphira admits that she shouldn’t have attacked the tree, but Eragon brushes it off.
We end on… two rather interesting notes. First, Eragon notices that the elven onlookers are watching him in a rather odd way.
Not once did the elves speak, only stared with their slanting eyes, stared as if they were watching a dangerous animal stalk through their homes.
I doubt Paolini thought anything of including that line, as he never does anything with it, but I’ve definitely written down “elven PR faux-pas” in my Consequence notes.
Finally… we have this.
A puff of smoke billowed from Saphira’s nostrils. If Galbatorix does not kill us first, she said, I think we shall live to regret this.
Oh, you will, Saphira… you definitely will. *cracks knuckles and opens Consequence draft*
Next up will be “Mind Over Metal”, sporked by CmdrNemo with some editing by yours truly.
Let’s just thank our stars that this isn’t that tree. Although seeing Eragon take a phallic branch up the arse would definitely qualify as some good gallows humor in my book.
Yes, fellow Anti-Shirts, we are back to the Brisingr sporking with “The Tree of Life”. This is another chapter title I have to quibble with, because since when has the Menoa tree been so associated with life? It’s definitely some kind of bizarre overlord of trees, but it’s not freaking Yggdrasil. Oh, wait, that’s why he did it: he wanted to imitate Norse mythology again.
Goddammit, Paolini.
The chapter begins with Eragon and Saphira flying to the Menoa tree, which gets a whole giant paragraph dedicated to describing it. Here’s a tl;dr version: it’s fuckhueg and there are woodland creatures climbing in it.
Being denser than a brick, Eragon decides not to look beneath the roots of the Menoa tree, like the stupid prophecy thing said, but among them. Obviously, he doesn’t find anything, so rather than actually trying to look harder, he just picks up a piece of bark and asks Saphira if he “could kill a soldier” with it if he cast enough spells. This is classic Eragon: give him a task that requires even the slightest effort, and he’ll barely give it a cursory attempt before giving up and trying to weasel around it, usually in a manner that involves using his magic like some kind of Get Out of Work Free card rather than any kind of intelligence.
Saphira tells Eragon that he “could kill a soldier with a blade of grass if [he] wanted to”, but that he probably shouldn’t try it against Murtagh or Galbatorix. Or rather, that “against Murtagh and Thorn, or the king and his black dragon, you might as well attack them with a strand of wet wool as that bark”.
That was one of the most painful attempts to adapt a real world idiom into Fantasyland I’ve ever seen. For those of you who didn’t catch it, Paolini basically just tried to invent an Alagarbledygook equivalent of “wet noodle”. For this idiocy, I hereby sentence him to an hour of Chinese water torture with the dripping administered via an actual wet noodle dangling over his forehead. *bangs gavel* COURT DISMISSED!
Eragon starts brainstorming as to what kind of weapons the tree could be hiding, and eventually thinks that maybe a Menoa-tree-wood staff would be cool. However, he has no idea how to get the tree to allow him to take a branch off of her, and in response, Saphira says… well, this.
“If any creature tried to harm the Menoa tree, she said, I doubt they would live long enough to regret their mistake.”
Trust me, guys, that line is going to become hilarious by the end of this chapter.
They waste a few more hours (yes, Paolini does specify) searching the clearing for any sign of a weapon, and Eragon has immediately gone back to hoping for a sword. He thinks that by all rights, he should be wielding Brom’s sword, since Murtagh has his own father’s.
Wow, he sure processed that reveal quickly. Let me just remind you guys that despite there being a good four chapters in between this one and the one where the Brom-bomb got dropped, in-story it is still the same day.
Just… take a moment and let that sink in. Everything that has happened since the beginning of Chapter 45 has been in the course of one goddamn day. The characters spent so long sitting and talking that they stretched a single day over the course of five fucking chapters, and then some.
Yeah.
Having run out of ideas, Eragon tries to make mental contact with the Menoa tree, but “the tree took no more notice of him than he would of an ant flailing its feelers by his boots”. Which quite honestly is probably the correct response to Eragon.
As Eragon and Saphira give up and leave, we get a time reference: it’s evening. Again: one day. We get a lot of unnecessary description of their quarters in Ellesméra and the food they eat, and Eragon lies in bed thinking about “Brom and the mystery of his mother”. I see Selena has been relegated to Nameless Womanly Role status like the womb-on-legs she really is in this story. This leads to Eragon having Angsty Dreams™ where he speaks with his parents, doesn’t hear anything they say, and yet knows that they luuuuurve him and are so proud of him. And with that, the five-chapter day finally ends.
The next morning, Eragon goes to meet up with the guy from House Valtharos, escorted by “a slim elf-maid”. Why Paolini decided to give us that description, I have no idea, but it jumped out at me as yet another example of this series’s casual sexism. On the way, he notices that there aren’t a lot of elves around, and Saphira makes a dramatic little declaration about how few elves remain behind when they go to war, and is it just me, or does that kind of make it sound like the elves enjoy fighting?
The guy they’re brought to meet is not really described himself, but his clothing definitely is. He’s wearing a green and gold wizard robe with a ridiculously big collar, and carrying a wand topped with a pearl. Thankfully, we’re spared the word-by-word of their greeting, probably because Paolini wanted to fast-forward to describing the sword Eragon is checking out: Támerlein.
...but not before Lord Fiolr gives us a giant infodump about its history, of course! See, Támerlein was wielded by Fiolr’s “mate”s brother, Arva, who went to defend Ilirea with the loyalist Riders, and was mortally wounded by a Forsworn named Kialandí. With his dying breath, Arva dramatically gave the sword to his sister, who fought her way out and managed to retreat to Iliera with an unnamed Rider, where she died of her wounds. So wait, none of the elves thought to heal her? Heck, the Rider she fled with didn’t heal her? PLOT HOLE!
Fiolr fingers his wand (heh heh) and then goes on to talk about how incredibly precious Támerlein is to him, and how he’d sooner die than give it away, so if Eragon decides to take it, he has to give it back if Fiolr or any of his relatives ask for it. Eragon agrees, and finally Fiolr takes him and Saphira “to a long, polished table grown out of the living wood of the floor”, giving me a nice reminder of how Lovecraftian Ellesméra is and also making me wonder how the hell Saphira managed to fit through the door to this place. I guess this is either a) another of those times when things are ridiculously big, because big things are Epic; or b) another of those times when Saphira conveniently grows or shrinks so that she can do whatever is required of her by the (alleged) plot.
Anyway, we now get the overblown description of Támerlein, and because I'm feeling a little spiteful right now I’m going to quote the entire thing.
The blade of Támerlein was colored a dark, rich green, as was its sheath. A large emerald adorned the pommel. The furniture of the sword had been wrought of blued steel. A line of glyphs adorned the crossguard. In Elvish, they said, I am Támerlein, bringer of the final sleep. In length, the sword was equal to Zar’roc, but the blade was wider and the tip rounder and the build of the hilt was heavier. It was a beautiful, deadly weapon, but just by looking at it, Eragon could see that Rhunön had forged Támerlein for a person with a fighting style different from his own, a style that relied more on cutting and slashing than the faster, more elegant techniques Brom had taught him.
Now, I know Paolini was probably going for some kind of broad, thick Viking sword, but the impression I got from that description was this.
Epic.
Eragon picks up the sword and immediately starts mentally whining about how it doesn’t feel right. I would be a lot more forgiving of this if he said that the balance wasn’t good for him, but no, it’s all about how it doesn’t “feel like an extension of his arm, as had Zar’roc”. Eragon isn’t going for effectiveness here, he’s going for some kind of emotional connection with his weapon. He still hesitates to say no because there aren’t many Rider swords left, but Saphira basically tells him to go with his gut because “if you are to carry a sword into battle, if your life and mine are to depend upon it, then the sword must be perfect”.
That’s, um… that’s really getting into the essence of Eragon’s Sue-ness there, isn’t it? Everything he gets has to be perfect. His dragon is beautiful and powerful and a talented flyer; she’s perfect. His “love interest” is an elf woman whose gorgeousness keeps getting praised to the skies: perfect. His friends are rebel leaders and dwarf kings and are all (allegedly) great fighers and leaders and shit: perfect. His father was not the villain, but the mentor character: perfect. And now he’s being told to hold out for a sword that’s perfect, and we all know that it’ll drop into his lap because Paolini is never satisfied with giving Eragon anything short of, well, fucking perfect.
Oh, and they also don’t like the condition of “give it back”, because Eragon and Saphira are entitled assholes.
Eragon tells Lord Fiolr that he’s not interested in the sword, and notices “a flash of satisfaction” in his eyes. Personally, I’d be more inclined towards relief; this kid breaks everything he touches. Still, good on you, Fiolr, for not wanting to give the Sue everything he wants just because he’s a Sue. Never mind that it’s just so he can get a better sword.
Now that that nasty bit of whining and entitlement is over, Eragon and Saphira head to Rhunön’s place and find her working on some kind of metal sculpture. Her no-nonsense attitude as she greets them actually makes Eragon wince, which gives her quite a few points in my book. He confirms to her that Murtagh took Zar’roc from him, and she says that it’s fitting for Morzan’s son to have Morzan’s old sword and then... well, she says this.
“Understand me, Shadeslayer, I would prefer it if you had kept hold of Zar’roc, but it would please me even more if you had a sword that was made for you. Zar’roc may have served you well, but it was the wrong shape for your body. And do not even speak to me of Támerlein. You would have to be a fool to think you could wield it.”
This kind of brings up a point I haven’t gotten to talk about yet: why did Murtagh even want Zar’roc? Sure, it’s an unbreakable blade and technically his rightful inheritance and all, but it also split his back open, and similarly to what Rhunön just said about Eragon it’s not the right kind of sword for his fighting style. Murtagh has always favored a hand-and-a-half sword; heck, that was how a lot of readers recognized him when he showed up at the Battle of the Burning Plains. Zar’roc is more of a traditional longsword: the blade is shorter, and it’s designed to be wielded with one hand. Wielding it is going to slow Murtagh down, because it’s not the kind of weapon he’s used to.
Anyway, Eragon seizes upon Rhunön’s bit about Morzan’s son wielding his sword and asks if Brom’s sword would be right for him. Rhunön asks why, and Eragon proudly drops the Brom-bomb. Rhunön gains even more points in my book by being completely unimpressed by this, and then griping about how stiff and polite the elves have become. Apparently, before the Blood-Oath, elves used to be a lot more fun. She then immediately snaps back to the topic of swords, making me wonder why we needed that little digression, and says that Brom’s sword Undbitr is out of the question because no one knows where the fuck it is. Eragon’s response?
“What, then, should I do, Rhunön-elda?”
He follows it up with talking about that falchion he had earlier, but I just love how pathetic that line sounds in my head. “Oh no, all the things I thought of didn’t work! Someone, please hand me the solution on a silver platter!”
Rhunön scoffs and talks a bit about how Rider swords are made by singing over the metal or some shit, and Eragon asks if she’d make him a sword. She frowns at him and reminds him that she took an oath not to do that. The conversation can’t end there, though; after all, this is the part where Eragon convinces Hattori Hanzo to come out of retirement, so Rhunön has to ask him why she should make him a sword, even if she hadn’t taken that oath. Eragon spouts some bullshit about putting an end to Galbatorix, and Rhunön seems vaguely interested and mentions that there might be a way to help, but then brushes it off because she doesn’t have the metal she needs.
As it turns out, what she needs is freaking starmetal.
Well, okay, she calls it “brightsteel”, but it comes from meteors, so I’m just going to call it starmetal. Suck it, Paolini. Anyway, apparently this starmetal makes the strongest, hardest, most flexible, and above all shiniest swords you could ever imagine, and she can only make a Rider sword if she has it. Of course, it’s also incredibly rare, and she doesn’t have a speck of it in her workshop, despite searching at length the previous night after Oromis came to set up this little meeting (which, why would she do that if she was only now convinced that she should loophole her oath for him?). And so, the conversation ends with her saying that if Eragon can somehow find some starmetal, they’ll talk about forging him a sword.
They leave, and Eragon finally puts two and two together and says that there must be some brightsteel under the Menoa tree. Saphira pointlessly asks how he could know that, and they exchange a little banter about not knowing where to start chopping the roots away to get to the stuff. I love how their immediate solution to the starmetal being buried is to chop through the roots of a sapient tree that can presumably feel pain. Our heroes, ladies and gentlemen!
With that, we scene-break to Eragon and Saphira flying back to Oromis’s place, where Eragon learns how to do teleportation and Oromis brings up that “magic gets harder with distance” thing that’s been punching holes in the plot ever since FUCKING WARDS came into play. Apparently teleportation breaks that rule. Distance doesn’t increase or decrease the energy cost; it’s just a flat reduce-mana-to-1% kind of thing that should only be used as a last resort.
Um, Oromis? If teleportation is that energy-consuming, then please explain how you and Glaedr were able to make your escape from Kialandí and Formora after teleporting both of you. Because if what you just said is true, you should have both been falling over with exhaustion.
I swear, guys, every rule Paolini tries to introduce in this magic system gets broken. Every. Single. One.
Anyway, Eragon tests out teleportation by sending a pebble from his hand to the middle of a clearing, and just like Saphira’s egg it creates an explosion… or rather, “a loud detonation”. Paolini, the term “detonate” was coined in the 18th century; if you put it in a medieval fantasy novel, it’s going to look blatantly out of place. You have no business talking about how you’re so careful to avoid anachronism when you do shit like this.
Eragon stumbles from the mana drain, but Paolini promptly forgets about it and has him awake and engaged for the rest of the lesson, which is thankfully glossed over. Oromis asks if he and Saphira will be staying much longer, and Eragon says he’s not sure, but he’s got something he wants to try with the Menoa tree. Oromis asks him to come see him before he leaves, this pointless section ends, and now, finally, we come to this chapter’s big scene.
Oh yeah.
Our brave heroes are about to piss off the Menoa tree.
We start this scene with Saphira asking why they’ll find the starmetal now when they couldn’t do anything before, and Eragon says that “it will work because it must”. This is entirely accurate; the only reason anything that happens in the following scene works is because Paolini forced it to in order to further his plot.
Saphira says she doesn’t like the idea, because the elf who became the Menoa tree killed a guy once and she might get violent again. I’m not sure why that line is there, and suspect padding. Eragon says the tree wouldn’t dare hurt him with Saphira there to protect him, and Saphira says “Mmh”. How exactly does one make an “mmh” sound telepathically? Grunts and uncertain noises don’t seem like a thing that should be carried over into mental speech, in my opinion.
They land at the base of the tree, frightening the small woodland creatures, and Eragon runs up one of the roots with his arms out. Wheeee, I'm an airplane! He stops at the trunk and starts poking the tree with his mind, and we get a big description of what its mind is like as it ignores him. The description actually says that it seems to be asleep.
So, with the tree sleeping, what do our heroes do? Shout loudly in its mental ears, of course!
Eragon and Saphira start bombarding the tree with pleas for help and images of all the shit they’ve seen. They also feed it some of their energy, and I just have to pause here and note that they are attempting to bribe a tree. That is the kind of sentence you never expect to actually write.
The tree continues to ignore them, and eventually Saphira says they can’t spare any more energy and Eragon agrees. Still, despite stopping with the energy-bribery, they continue to mentally shout at the tree for hours.
Finally, Saphira gets fed up, and… well… this happens.
Then Saphira snarled, and every bird within hearing fled in fright. Enough of this groveling! she declared. I am a dragon, and I will not be ignored, not even by a tree!
Yeah, she’s about to attack the tree. Still… isnt’ that line absurdly funny taken out of context? “I will not be ignored, not even by a tree, because for some reason trees have some power to ignore everything!”
Also, that should be “earshot” rather than “hearing”, Paolini.
Eragon, actually acting sensibly for once in his life, yells at Saphira to stop, but she ignores him and starts clawing and flaming at the Menoa tree. Eragon tells her again to stop, and she says she’ll stop when the tree responds. Eragon… pretty much folds.
The area gets all dark, and Eragon notices that the trees are all leaning into the clearing as if they’re about to attack. He calls for Saphira, who takes one look at this eldritch bullshit and tells him to get on her back, puffing up like “a riled cat” as she does so.
Eragon moves to hop on his flying blue cat-horse and skedaddle, but then the tree goes all Evil Dead on their asses and grabs them. Oddly enough, despite having to wrap around pretty much all of Saphira, they manage to immobilize Eragon just by grabbing his ankle. I wonder if that’s the Standard Female Grab Area for men or something? Or maybe it’s just a variant on the age-old Achilles’ Heel trope. Or Paolini did a goof with his words again.
Anyway, Saphira opens her mouth to flame the tree again, but stops when it finally talks. It’s described as having a whispering voice, and it asks them to introduce themselves so it will know the names of the people it kills.
If only that threat had been followed up on.
Eragon tells the tree their names, and the tree tells them to “die well”, but he tells it to wait because he hasn’t finished explaining who they are. The tree pauses for a moment, during which I like to imagine she was rolling her nonexistent eyes and internally muttering about kids and their stupid lists of titles or something like that, and allows him to continue. Eragon regurgitates his and Saphira’s standard sob story about being the last free dragon rider and last female dragon in all of Alagarbledygook, and at this point the tree realizes that she’s talking to a Sue, because she “sighs” her line as she asks why Saphira attacked her.
Saphira explains that it’s because they were told to look for a weapon under her roots and she wouldn’t listen to them, and the Menoa tree teases us with her promise to kill them again by saying that she will “die in vain” because no such weapon exists. Eragon says that by “weapon” they mean starmetal, and the tree decides to take a look, which apparently involves so much root-movement that it frightens away all the small woodland creatures. Wait, they didn’t all run away when Saphira went all Trogdor the Burninator?
Click to viewA bunch of elves come to do nothing but point and stare, and Eragon thinks about trying to find Oromis and Glaedr, but is thankfully stopped from doing so by the Menoa Tree coming back and confirming that yes, there’s some starmetal by her roots. However, she refuses to give it to him because “you bit me and you burned me, and I do not forgive you”.
Eragon panics and plays the “last female dragon” card again, and the tree basically reacts with a “meh”. Saphira says that if she and Eragon die, Galbatorix will come and burn the forest, and the tree says that if he tries, she and the rest of the forest will kick his sorry ass. Oh, just like you kicked Durza’s ass when he burned large swathes of the forest in the freaking prologue? Or had Paolini not come up with your forest-Cthulhu status yet when he wrote that?
Eragon suggests that the energy they gave the tree is enough to heal the damage, and that should be “compensation enough” for Saphira’s bitch-fit. Nice way to try to spin your bribe, asshat. Also, Paolini fucked up his word order. It’s “is it not”, Paolini, not “is not it”.
At this point, Paolini injects about a billion CC’s of Plot Convenience serum into the Menoa Tree, calming her down enough to ask what the hell Eragon is. Apparently getting demi-elfed really did turn him into something so Yooneek and Speshul that she has no fucking idea. He says the dragons did it during the blood oath bullshit party so he could fight Galbatorix. Apparently that convinces the tree that they’re too important to kill, so she asks if he’ll “give [her] what [she wants] in return”, and Eragon proves that he has not seen Evil Dead by immediately agreeing to whatever conditions the tree might choose to set. Way to go, idiot; I hope you enjoy having all your orifices repeatedly violated by phallic roots.
The tree goes and fetches the starmetal from underground, and then we get the bit that spawned a thousand fan theories and handed me a Consequence plot point on a silver platter:
As the ore came to rest on the surface of the rich black soil, Eragon felt a slight twinge in his lower belly. He winced and rubbed at the spot, but the momentary flare of discomfort had already vanished. Then the root around his ankle loosened and retreated into the ground, as did those that had been holding Saphira in place.
I’ve seen a lot of Wild Mass Guessing about what caused that twinge in Eragon’s belly. Some people say that the tree took some kind of “sample”, so that she could figure out what the hell the dragons turned him into. Some say that it sterilized him, though I’m pretty sure Paolini has shot that one down at some point.
And some say that the tree took Saphira’s eldunarí.
It makes sense, really. Eragon feels something, but it’s gone quickly and there’s really no way the tree could have done anything to him; she was only holding onto his ankle. Saphira, however, was pretty much covered in roots. Note also that the tree doesn’t let them go until after the belly-twinge, which gives her the opportunity to have snatched it before letting them go.
Paolini, of course, has responded to most fan theories with “no comment”, which leaves this free game until he decides to step up and actually give us an answer. And thus, I am free to turn this little scene decidedly against Eragon and Saphira without being accused of fucking up the canon.
This is what happens when you leave too many questions unanswered, Paolini.
The tree tells Eragon to take the starmetal and GTFO, and he’s completely confused because he has no idea what the tree wants from him. She doesn’t respond to any further questions, though, so he picks up the chunk of meteorite and heads for Rhunön’s place. As they leave, Saphira admits that she shouldn’t have attacked the tree, but Eragon brushes it off.
We end on… two rather interesting notes. First, Eragon notices that the elven onlookers are watching him in a rather odd way.
Not once did the elves speak, only stared with their slanting eyes, stared as if they were watching a dangerous animal stalk through their homes.
I doubt Paolini thought anything of including that line, as he never does anything with it, but I’ve definitely written down “elven PR faux-pas” in my Consequence notes.
Finally… we have this.
A puff of smoke billowed from Saphira’s nostrils. If Galbatorix does not kill us first, she said, I think we shall live to regret this.
Oh, you will, Saphira… you definitely will. *cracks knuckles and opens Consequence draft*
Next up will be “Mind Over Metal”, sporked by CmdrNemo with some editing by yours truly.