#thomas covenant

[oldschoolfrp]

Thews, blood, and steel (Les Edwards cover for White Dwarf 16, Games Workshop, Dec/Jan 1979/80, featuring articles for D&D, Gamma World, Boot Hill, and Traveller)

[nerdymaps]

The Land, lore rich continent from The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant epic fantasy novels 🗺️🌋🌳

You can find many fantasy maps on my store: https://nerdymaps.etsy.com

[mrkapao]

"My Lord, we have not reached our end. True, the work of our lifetime has been to comprehend and consolidate the gains of our forebearers. But our labour will open the doors of the future. Our children and their children will gain because we have not lost heart, for faith and courage are the greatest gift that we can give to our descendants. And the Land holds mysteries of which we know nothing - mysteries of hope as well as of peril. Be of good heart, Rockbrothers. Your faith is precious above all things."

- Stephen R. Donaldson ‘The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant: Lord Foul's Bane’

[nocertainties]

SMH about how bad Thomas Covenant is at being isekai’d. He doesn’t wait for the isekai truck, just sees a police car, thinks “Good enough”, and drops to the road in front of it and waits! It doesn’t even end up hitting him!

[lesserjoke]

TV #52 of 2023:

Fantasy Bedtime Hour, season 1

Okay, this is probably the most obscure show that I’ll ever review, but here goes. Fantasy Bedtime Hour was a public-access cable television series that aired in San Francisco and a few other California markets from 2002 to 2007. It consists of its two hosts, Heatherly and Julie, playing exaggeratedly ditzy versions of themselves as they lie in bed together, seemingly nude under the covers, and discuss the 1977 novel Lord Foul’s Bane, the first volume in Stephen R. Donaldson’s epic fantasy saga The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever. In each of its forty episodes, the girls read/paraphrase a short extract of the book, attempt to analyze it, cut to a pre-filmed and very low-budget recreation of the week’s scenes, and then invite on an ‘expert’ (really just anyone who’s read the novel before) who either patiently tries to correct their many misunderstandings of the text or else gives in to the goofy vibes and just riffs along with them.

And it is absolutely hysterical. I’m sure it helps to already be a fan of the source material, but the specific ways that the creators find to misinterpret Donaldson’s writing are truly inspired. They get character names wrong and draw specious conclusions of meaning from them — Atiaran becomes Atrium, Lord Mhoram becomes Lord Mormon, Tuvor becomes Tuvok, Fangthane becomes Fangthang, etc. — and take clearly-metaphorical turns of phrasing quite literally, to disastrous effect. In my favorite bit, they interpret the villain’s comment that the powerful artifact the Staff of Law “was lost ten times a hundred years ago” not as an archaic way of describing a millennium, but rather to mean that one hundred years ago, the device was lost ten times. Cut to that episode’s reenactment, which is filmed like an old-timey silent movie and, sure enough, shows somebody misplacing or being tricked out of his walking stick over and over and over again.

But for as much as they get hilariously wrong about the story, it’s a clear labor of love. (It would have to be, right, to spend five years on a project like this?) Donaldson himself even appears on the program late in its run, and seems tickled by the attention even as he playfully chastises them for some of their more egregious errors. Yet their commitment to that Ali G / Cunk / Colbert Report stance of comedic ignorance can’t hide how well they themselves understand the book and what they’re doing with it. Still, they start every interview by asking the current expert, “How many times have you read Lord Foul’s Bane?” — followed swiftly by, “And how many times would you say that you understood Lord Foul’s Bane?” — and act suitably impressed no matter what the answer is.

The Covenant books have never been super popular, and for fans like me, it’s poignant both to see a TV show dedicated to them and to realize that its silly little ‘fantasy action sequences’ may well be the closest we ever get to a true film adaptation. I imagine I’ll have the actors’ stilted intonation of lines like “Don’t touch me! I’m a leper!” running through my head the next time I reread the series myself. Yet I think the jokes would still land just fine even if you’re unfamiliar with the novels and are as perplexed by the Unbeliever’s strange journey as Julie and Heatherly seem to be.

Tragically, the one-season show is verging on lost media today. It never got an official DVD release or anything, and I doubt that any of its music was licensed through proper channels, though setting the opening credits to “What’s Up?” by 4 Non Blondes remains a pretty apt choice. The website http://www.fantasybedtimehour.com was still online when I began watching the program earlier this year, but now appears to have gone down, presumably for good. At least a version has been preserved on the Internet Archive, along with copies of every episode (which I’ll link below, as they’re so hard to track down these days).

That’s a lucky fluke, as two decades on, the Fantasy Bedtime Hour has become a curious time capsule and representation of the disposability inherent to entertainment of its pre-streaming, Web 1.0 era. I can’t find much surviving documentation of how contemporary audiences received the thing, or whether the networks censored any of the profanity that persists in the digital uploads (and which grows more blatant as the series goes on, along with the hosts’ drinking of stronger and stronger alcohol on-camera). The whole effort feels like a passion project among friends that, although made for broadcast, perhaps wasn’t supposed to stick around for this long afterwards. But personally, I’m glad that it has and that I got to see it before it disappeared forever.

Links to episodes 1-34: https://archive.org/details/vlog_fantasybedtimehour Episode 35: http://ia802709.us.archive.org/17/items/FantasyBedtimeHourEp35/FantasyBedtimeHourEp35_512kb.mp4 Episode 36: http://ia904701.us.archive.org/12/items/FantasyBedtimeHourEp36/FantasyBedtimeHourEp36_512kb.mp4 Episode 37: http://ia902606.us.archive.org/25/items/FantasyBedtimeHourEp37/FantasyBedtimeHourEp37_512kb.mp4 Episode 38: http://ia600706.us.archive.org/29/items/FantasyBedtimeHourEp38/FantasyBedtimeHourEp38_512kb.mp4 Episode 39: http://ia804708.us.archive.org/10/items/FantasyBedtimeHourEp39/FantasyBedtimeHourEp39_512kb.mp4 Episode 40: http://ia802304.us.archive.org/31/items/FantasyBedtimeHourEp40/FantasyBedtimeHourEp40_512kb.mp4

[Content warning for ableism including slurs and discussion of rape.]

★★★★☆

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[pepperkat-is-back]

Asking for Recommendations Again :)

I just finished an epic fantasy trilogy that made my heart race. But, it left me hungry for that same complex, epic quest, world building, demon slaying, hero-beat-to-the-brink-of-death story with a female protagonist. So I'm looking for recommendations! Has anyone read Dune, Thomas Covenant, LOTR, or anything similar that they would recommend with a female lead??

[hereisaquote]

"There's only one way to hurt a man who's lost everything. Give him back something broken"

Thomas Covenant in The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant - The Wounded Land by Stephen Donaldson

[lesserjoke]

Book #213 of 2021:

The Atlas of the Land by Karen Wynn Fonstad

This reference book is a true labor of love for the first six volumes in Stephen R. Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant fantasy series. (It was published in 1985, well before the final quartet arrived. And it’s been out of print ever since; I was lucky enough to finally find a cheap secondhand copy myself.) For 200 pages, author Karen Wynn Fonstad provides gorgeously-illustrated maps and other diagrams to lay out a complete geography of the setting, going well beyond the official frontispiece in the novels. To construct this corpus, she’s drawn from the texts themselves, interviews with their writer, and her own body of geographical knowledge. And it’s an authorized production too; he mentions in a foreword “the dozens of hours of work I’ve done at her request, explaining my ideas, verifying hers, and checking the finished product.” Simply put, this is the best, most accurate representation of how its creator imagined and intended for the Land to look.

I am not a very visual reader, so I’ve found it extremely helpful to have these layouts available to supplement the written descriptions in the stories. Fonstad’s own captions aid as well, divorced from the immediacy of pressing plot concerns. Decades after initially encountering this fictional world, I only now feel I have a solid grasp of where some of its regions are in relation to others, or the exact paths that characters would have traveled across the landscape. I particularly enjoy the section at the end depicting a day-by-day chronology of those journeys, which is really great for tracking where everyone is at any given point over the diverse events and bifurcated narrative of The Illearth War.

I wouldn’t recommend this title for novices to the franchise, since it’s incredibly spoiler-heavy and arranged by location rather than time, so for example we see the town of Mithil Stonedown as described in both Covenant’s original visit and the millennia-later Sunbane era. But it would be invaluable as a companion for a reread, or for fans who already know the books so well. I wish more of my favorite genre works could be awarded this sort of treatment, and I’m thrilled to have acquired this one for my shelves.

★★★★☆

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