The Burdens of History in the Epic Fantasy of Tad Williams

The epic fantasy maestro consistently displays a subtle engagement with history.

There’s a moment near the conclusion of Empire of Grass, the second volume in Tad Williams’ series The Last King of Osten Ard, in which a character makes a remarkable statement about history. The character in question, Tzoja, is a slave of the Norns, a quasi-immortal race who harbor a deep and abiding hatred of both humans and their cousins the Sithi. At this point, she has been forced to accompany the Norns’ terrifying queen, Utuk’ku, as she journeys toward Naglimund, the human fortress that has been, for the second time in a generation, conquered. “The infamous fortress was a vision of war and destruction,” she thinks, “but the destruction seemed new-minted, as if only moments, not decades, had passed here in this valley since the Storm King’s War. Tzoja stared, unable to look away, and her heart was cold and anxious. It seemed to her that Time, like the serpent-symbol of the Hamakha clan, had swallowed its own tail. Naglimund was in flames, and the past had returned to devour the present.” 

It’s a chilling line, especially for those who, like me, have also read what is arguably Williams’ magnum opus, Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, a series that takes place several decades before The Last King of Osten Ard. One of the key battles in that earlier series also took place at Naglimund, and it ended similarly badly for the mortals, with the noble Prince Josua forced to flee into exile while his home burned behind him, filled with the corpses of the mortal dead. As brutal and ugly as the conquest, however, it is but the most recent iteration of a centuries’-long conflict between immortal and mortal. 

Indeed, the entire plot of Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn is premised on the ugly, brutal legacies that are a key part of Osten Ard’s history. The series’ primary antagonists, the Norn Queen Utuk’ku and the undead Storm King Ineluki, both have legitimate reasons for hating the mortals, the former because her son perished as a result of mortal actions, the latter because the mortals not only failed to save his brother from a dragon but also brought about the ruin of his home and the final exile of his people. Though we are, of course, led to identify with the various mortals and their fight to keep their kind from being exterminated, the ugly truth is that it's the actions of their ancestors in the past that have brought their world to the brink of a cataclysmic conflict. Just as neither Utuk’ku nor Ineluki can ever let go of history, neither can mortals ever escape its smothering influence, and the hero Simon’s dreams are constantly haunted by the image of the great wheel of history, which always threatens to grind him, and all that he loves, into dust. 

The sense that history is nothing more than a great wheel becomes even more apparent by the time that The Witchwood Crown opens. By now, the High Ward has been at peace for several decades, but the seams are starting to show. The old hatreds that were seemingly put aside in order to fight back against the existential threat posed by the Storm King have now begun to bubble to the surface again, and Queen Utuk’ku is more determined than ever to bring about an end to the mortals once and for all, once again reaching into the past to find the weapon that she needs. In this case, she uses a fell combination of dark magic, the armor of the fabled Ruyan the Navigator, and the bones of Ineluki’s brother Hakatri to create a weapon that she believes will at last allow her people to emerge triumphant, not only over the mortals, but also over the Sithi, whom she views as treasonous because of their alliance with humans. By the ending of the second volume, Empire of Grass, it certainly seems as if she is on the threshold of success. And that is just one of the threats that Simon and Miriamele, the heroes of the first trilogy, must face.

For those of us who remember the happy ending of To Green Angel Tower, the concluding volume of Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, this sense of impending doom can feel a bit depressing. After all, who wants to hear that the happy ever after didn’t end up so happy, after all? But that’s precisely the point that Williams seems to want to make, here. No victory is ever permanent; there will always be those who want to disrupt the peace and plunge the world back into the fog of war. We can’t help but feel for these characters, as we helplessly watch their hard-won victories turn to ashes. 

There is, then, a powerful and potent melancholy that permeates all of Williams’ Osten Ard novels, and in some ways it’s not dissimilar to a similar feeling that was also a key part of Tolkien’s world. The Sithi, like Tolkien’s Elves, are a fading people, constantly fighting back against their own obsolescence, even as they know that it’s inevitable. They are a people obsessed with death and with their own demise, and indeed the very threat of Unbeing–which destroyed their far-off home, The Garden, lives perpetually in their awareness. Their solution to this problem has been to withdraw further and further into their forest homes, disavowing their connections to the outside world. 

The Norns, by contrast, take the opposite approach, and where The Last King of Osten Ard is most different than its predecessor is in its willingness to give us the point of view of various Norn characters, particularly Viyeki, one of the Order of Builders and his daughter, Nezeru, who is the product of his sexual union with Tzoja. Through their eyes, we come to understand, if not always to sympathize with, the Norns’ approach to possible extinction. Faced with ruin, they ride out to fight, determined to reclaim the continent that was once entirely theirs. Even these two stalwart loyalists, however, find their loyalties tested by the realities of the present, and they even come to question their people’s received and sacred understandings of history.

To me, this engagement has always been the best thing about a genre like fantasy. You can take all of the elements that make particular periods of history exciting and thrilling and change them up, experimenting with various “what ifs?” Just as importantly, you can also use the genre to ask some of the big questions that history as a discipline also thinks about. How much agency does an individual have in a given historical moment? Is it ever possible for a single person, or a group of persons, to change the fate of nations and of worlds? Given what is happening in Ukraine as I write this,

It’s precisely this exploration the pressures of history that makes Tad Williams one of the best writers working in fantasy today.  His use of several points of view—from the highborn to the common—allows us as readers to get a kaleidoscopic of the great conflicts that occupy center-stage. We come to understand the tremendous impact that the burden of history has, not just on kings and nobles and sorcerers, but also on soldiers and chambermaids. As the series comes to a conclusion—the last two volumes are due out soon—we’ll finally get to see whether the Norn threat will be silenced forever, or whether the eternal conflict between humans and immortals is doomed to go on forever. Knowing Tad Williams, the answer won’t be an easy one.