Brisingr Sporking 51 Mind over Metal
I am not prepared. A demon hunter tells me this with a certain regularity. The Boy Scout in me bristles at the idea. In this instance it is completely true. I am attempting to spork the chapter Mind over Metal in Paolini’s Brisingr. I have never read this book. I have no intention of reading anything outside my self-assigned chapter here. This will be a disaster. Are you prepared?
“Where did you find that?” demanded Rhunön as Eragon staggered into the atrium of her house and dropped the lump of brightsteel ore onto the ground by her feet.
By Grabthar’s hammer what have I gotten myself into here. Brightsteel? Really. Was mithril not nerdy enough for you? Had to go for lower hanging fruit?
I love what this sentence says about Eragon’s personality. Just barges into someone’s house and drops the rock like a mic at a rap battle, all ‘yo, deal with it.’ No handing the ore over to the master ore worker person like it is precious or valuable, like a polite person would. Just, drop it like it’s hot the first chance you get. Cool. Dick.
I promise I’ll cut down on the quotes and the line by line soon.
"In as few words as possible, Eragon explained about Solembum and the Menoa tree."
So, dramatic entrance with a mic drop... followed by off screen exposition. Wow. Worst use of a dramatic entrance ever. Are we sure these books aren’t parodies of the usual over the top fantasy fare? Because that went from 100 to 0 so fast my airbag went off.
Rhunön squats to look at it. WTF? Why not pick it up? She just squats there poking at a rock and praising Eragon. That isn’t awkward looking at all. Why not just have her kneel before his obvious greatness, or would that be to dignified for the elf?
Oh, and Saphira is aware of these events and willing and able to communicate telepathically with one or both of them. Here’s a thing about telepathy: I have no idea where Saphira actually is right now. Is she in the room? I don’t know how big the room is, so, maybe. But, because of her telepathy, we don’t know. The dragon could be on the moon right now, and it would make no difference.
What she’s asking is, “Is there enough ore for a sword?”, which is a bit stupid. They clearly asked the tree for enough ore to make a sword. So either there is, or the sword can be made of a steel *sigh* brightsteel alloy. The answer can only be ‘yes’, so what’s the point of the question? And why doesn’t Eragon ask it? Unless he knows it’s enough, but if so, is she soulmate thought bonded with Eragon, knowing what he knows, or not? Because this question says not.
Wow, I’m like 3 sentences in. I need to chill for a bit.
Ronan the Forger promises to make the bestest most special snowflake sword for snowflake of precious specialness the bestest Eragon. I can waste words too Paolini. You aren’t special.
Eragon is all “oh noes your oath”
Elf is all “forgetaboutit”
KILL BILL EVERYONE!
Also precious snowflake weapon must be made with impossible speed. I can think of 2 reasons.
1: Rush to do a crap job.
2: Eragon is bad at scheduling.
This is an important literary device. It shows us that Eragon has not yet learned any leadership skills. Giving him an important flaw that will come back to bite him later.
I’m going to stick with Ronan. My keyboard isn’t set for other characters and I just don’t care enough to change things. Sorry.
Ronan picks up the approximately 3 to 5 lbs of rock using her knees, not her back. This is emphasised. Also, it doesn’t require much effort, so that’s a thing. Clearly it’s supposed to make her look cool and tuff and tuff and cool.
Here’s a great line: “Only a clumsy smith uses gloves.”
So elven. Very smug. Much superior.
Is everyone in this book a jackass?
Don’t answer that.
I can skip a bunch. The two of them (still no idea where Saphira is, even though she promised to be involved; probably fighting off mooninites in the 8th dimension) are building a smelter. Sure I could look up how smelters are built and check the validity of the details provided, but I could also just short circuit that and ask, WHY ARE THEY BUILDING A SMELTER? More importantly, why am I watching them build a smelter? There’s measurements and everything going on here. Sudden break from fantasy novel time. Right now we have ikea smelter instructions to read. Also apparently it’s a Japanese smelter. Of course it is.
Lunch break, bread and cheese.
Then the elf spends an hour lighting and tending the fire. Okay, fine. You lit the fire using magic, you have a dragon, and you are in a hurry. Clearly getting the fire up to temperature at exactly the right rate using traditional methods is important. If these were new bricks or river rocks, then sure, I’d buy it. Don’t want them to explode from trapped moisture.
Screw it. Paolini declares “I HAVE DONE THE RESEARCH STOP BOTHERING ME ABOUT IT.” It’s loud enough I don’t buy it.
Eragon puts the ore in there using his bare hands instead of tongs. Bet you wish you had gloves doing that, don’t you? Idiot.
Oh hey, Saphira’s here now. Several yards away. Not involved. Thanks, dragon. Thagon.
Ronan wants to chemically fuse the brightsteel with carbon to create damascus brightsteel.
Cool cool cool.
Ronan avoids dragon fire for chemistry reasons. Which is fine. It doesn’t matter if it’s realistic or not as long as the blacksmith thinks it’s true and worth the effort. They don’t need to know these things exactly.
Eragon spends uncounted minutes pumping the bellows. This sounds like the sort of thing that should be handled by a waterwheel. Whatever. Eragon is involved in the mindless drudgery of sword making so he can claim he was involved in crafting the best sword ever.
That appears to be this whole chapter.
He’s helping mix paints so he can claim he helped paint the Sistine Chapel. No one is impressed. Is he even that involved? It might be more accurate to say he’s helping lift lumber for the scaffolding.
Metal melted. A white hot piece in the oven. Now is clearly the time to design the sword. Also great bit. They don’t ever draw it out. I thought she was supposed to be a pro. You never make anything without a drawing. The most important tool any tradesman has is a pencil. The second most important tool is a knife. The knife is used to sharpen the pencil.
She suggests a narrow tip to pierce armour. Which has apparently improved over the centuries. Armour piercing weapons tended to have a sort of + shape from head on. To stop them from bending with a thrust. What she is suggesting might work because the metal involved is magically powerful. I can’t comment on this whole process. The metal is imaginary and magical. So I have to assume whatever mechanics or chemistry she uses is valid.
Eragon is still an idiot. I need this thing to work perfectly or I’ll die. Oh, I don’t care how well it works as long as it looks good.
Quick audience is still listening check.
“A sword for killing Galbatorix,” said Eragon.
Rhunön nodded. “And as such, it must be well protected against magic…” Her chin sank to her chest again.
Is it just me or is there a slight sense of “I can’t believe you are still falling for that” in the elf there?
Proof of research scene is briefly interrupted by fire poker dueling scene. Yes, that is a thing that happens. I’m not sure what he was going for. The text first suggests that they stop when they bend the pokers, then clarifies that the pokers are as bent as the branches of a yew tree. Which is to say, ruined and useless. So we can add “destroys everything he touches” to the list of Eragon’s traits.
Oh, I remember this bit now. Ronan decides she isn’t going to break her oath to never make another sword by mind controlling Eragon and puppet-mastering his body to make the sword instead. Which works perfectly fine if the exact wording of her oath is ‘my hands will never again make a sword’ and fails utterly in any other case.
Paolini would make a terrible lawyer.
At least the text points out how stupid this is. Or does that make it worse?
Saphira does a thing. She punches the semi hardened formerly molten rock.
Well, looks like that’s enough Saphira for a bit. Most vital character ever.
I was wrong. She also asks another stupid question. Ronan has been explaining every step in this process in painful detail, so obviously Saphira has to ask what the next step is. Otherwise… she wouldn’t be any more involved in this mess than I am. I would like to feel involved; intellectually, emotionally, sarcastically. Enough to know I had some response to these events.
A few years back I worked in an analytical laboratory. Every process in the lab had to be documented. We had binder after binder on the shelf, full of Standard Operating Procedures for every single thing that was supposed to happen in the lab. I had to rewrite the lot of them. They were very old and had originally been written by someone for whom English was not their first language, and it showed. Those technical documents written in Engrish were substantially more fun to read than this book is.
Also:
"The first thing Eragon noticed about Rhunön as their minds met was the low chords that echoed through the dark and tangled landscape of her thoughts. The music was slow and deliberate and cast in a strange and unsettling key that scraped on his nerves. What it implied about Rhunön’s character, Eragon was not sure, but the eerie melody cause him to reconsider the wisdom of allowing her to control his flesh. But then he thought of Saphia sitting next to the forge, watching over him, and his trepidation receded, and he lowered the last of the defences around his consciousness."
"It felt to Eragon like a piece of raw wool sliding over his skin as Rhunön enveloped his mind with hers, insinuating herself into the most private areas of his being. He shivered at the contact and almost withdrew from it, but then Rhunön’s rough voice sounded within his skull: Relax, Shadeslayer, and all shall be well."
"Yes, Rhunön-elda"
Is it just me, or is that super creepy and wrong? Ignore the technical errors for a moment; I know I suck at the technical details, so it’s easier for me than you. Sorry. The way this is written, there’s a sort of “mind raped by a lovecraftian monster” theme going on. A sword is not worth it, dude.
Oh joy. Life of a meat puppet described. Could not have lived without that bit. Why does this chapter exist? Am I learning anything new about Eragon? The world? I refuse to type out Arglebargleandia proper. The elves? Does any of this matter?
More needless Eragon and elves are awesome and worthy of praise commentary.
They use dragon fire to remelt the brightsteel, so I guess Saphira has some value, since she makes this process look slightly cooler. Still less than 20% cool. Right now we’re sitting at about 0.02 Fonzies on the metric cool scale. If anyone wanted an approximate measure.
"At the elf’s request, Saphira heated the steel, opening her jaws only a fraction of an inch so that the blue and white flames that poured from her mouth remained focused in a narrow stream and did not spill over into the rest of the workshop."
That is an actual thing written in this actual book. This was published and sold millions of copies. I dare not stop. If I stop this, try to split this into multiple attempts, I will never touch it again. I’ve put my hand in an oven here. Once I take it away, I will not do it again.
Two pages are devoted to “this plan isn’t working, I’m going to try a different approach”.
I am delighted to discover that the magic system in these books does respond well to singing. There was hope it might. The final climax of this story could have been an epic rap battle of fictional history. Maybe a battle of the bands. That would have been so good. I’m going to be lost in an “Eragon loses to the Wyld Stallyns” mental image for a bit. Feel free to join me. Call it a last minute intermission. There can’t be much left to this chapter. All that’s happening in the story is ‘elves are better than you’ on repeat anyways, so we aren’t missing anything.
Some more details on the exact process of forging a magic sword of imaginary metal using a dragon forge. I wouldn’t recommend this in a real world forge, but it would be unfair to bash it in universe. How can I say his imaginary stuff doesn’t obey his imaginary rules? That sounds needlessly harsh.
Regardless, there’s a certain randomness to it. I can’t predict what magic is allowed to do and what it isn’t. I can only assume it works off a Rule of Cool as determined by someone who has a very different idea of what cool is than I do.
"From her memories, Eragon learned that she would normally spend a week or more polishing a blade, but because of the song they sang, she, through him, was able to complete the task in a mere four hours."
Ouch, my comma! So… why? Why doesn’t she sing the song every time? Does it need to be a duet? Eragon is a mindless puppet in this. She ought to be able to find a volunteer or paid assistant to show up and sing for a bit. It saves her over a week of work; she’d be mad not to do it without good reason. So what good reason can she have? Everything I can think of is negated except that Eragon is so special every rule of reality is always broken just by his presence and the elves can take full advantage of that.
The sword is pretty. Isn’t that nice? No? Surprising.
In the end: Elf children are Children of the Corn levels of creepy. Why is Saphira? Expert blacksmith works without a plan. Eragon does little, but takes all the credit.
Then Eragon sleeps.
The lack of preparedness hurts.
I’m going to end this with a rant about Kill Bill. Hattori Hanzō made an oath. He vowed to never again make or sell a sword. The wiki says this is because he feels guilty for making instruments to kill humans. The movie, however, implies a different motive. It implies he did this because of Bill. When the Bride shows up and demands that he make and give her a sword and he says yes, it’s not because of the Bride herself. It’s because Bill was his mistake, so killing Bill is a deliberate effort to fix that mistake. This chapter is an attempt to ape the drama and tension of these scenes without any understanding of why they exist. The Bride was so cool a master swordsmith broke an oath to give her a weapon. Eragon is a ‘better’ character, so an elven master swordsmith broke a magically unbreakable oath to give him a weapon. It’s all surface. You can replicate the feeling of reading this chapter by listening to the scenes from Kill Bill while reading a wikipedia article on forging.
I’d drop the mic now, but they’re really expensive and the techs hate it when you do that. I’ll just put it down gently. Thanks for reading, and thanks to Anya, Hergrim, and Clover for your help.