The paper that follows is the full text of what I drafted to present at the 2024 International Congress on Medieval Studies, hosted at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Adjustments have been made for formatting and for expectations of the medium.

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The origins of this paper [1] lie alongside the origins of the Tales after Tolkien Society; its genesis was in response to Helen Young’s call for papers for the 2013 International Congress on Medieval Studies. That call for papers yielded two paper panels at the 2013 Congress, both of them scheduled for Sunday morning. [2] It made for an interesting time for those who had taken part in the Saturday night entertainments traditional to the Congress; it certainly did for me as I sat in the audience for the first of those panels and listened to Molly Brown, Shiloh R. Carroll, Rachael Mueller, and Helen Young give their papers, in no small part because from those papers, and from the discussion that followed, I realized that my own paper—“A Divergent Medievalism in Robin Hobb’s Tawny Man Trilogy”—was, in a word, wrong. There was not time to rewrite the paper to make it right, not with me realizing in an 8:30 session that the paper I was to present in a 10:00 session needed fixing, so I gave the paper anyway and remarked at its conclusion and during discussion that I had realized the error.

Helen Young was generous enough to let me correct the mistake when she assembled and edited the Society’s twin volumes, The Middle Ages in Popular Culture: Medievalism and Genre [3] and Fantasy and Science Fiction Medievalisms: From Isaac Asimov to A Game of Thrones [4]—volumes that garnered the her and the Society a spot on the finals list for the 2016 World Fantasy Awards. [5] My correction came in the form of a chapter in that second volume—“Moving Beyond Tolkien’s Medievalism: Robin Hobb’s Farseer and Tawny Man Trilogies.” In the chapter, I make the case that, while there is evidence to support a reading of Robin Hobb’s Realm of the Elderlings milieu as operating in the Tolkienian tradition of ambiguously mimicking medieval England and the lands with which it interacted, there is more and better evidence to support a reading of the milieu as an interpretation of the North American continent, more specifically the Pacific Northwest. Looking at the North American aspects of the milieu, not just the Eurocentric, offers a richer reading of Hobb’s texts, and Hobb’s texts, read thus, offer a richer basis for interpretation of the possibilities of fantasy literature—within the Tolkienian tradition [6] and without it.

The chapter, published in 2015, only treats the Farseer and Tawny Man trilogies, skipping over the Liveship Traders trilogy that came between them both in terms of time in milieu and of publication. Part of the reason it did so was that the Farseer and Tawny Man trilogies focus on many of the same characters and take place within much the same region in the broader world described by the novels as a corpus; the Liveship Traders novels take place in a different nation than the Farseer and Tawny Man series, and while there is some overlap of character, most of the major actors in the series are different. Too, the nation of the Liveship Traders is substantially different from those of the Farseer and Tawny Man novels; the technologies and social orientations are markedly distinct, and, frankly, I did not realize at the time how they fit in. Subsequent rereadings, as well as continued publications of novels in the Realm of the Elderlings milieu, suggest that they—as well as their sequels, the Rain Wild Chronicles—reinforce the North American-ness of the milieu, if perhaps moving away from the specific focus on the Pacific Northwest. This paper, then, seeks to address the earlier omission, looking at how the Liveship Traders and Rain Wild Chronicles novels reinforce the North American-ness of the Realm of the Elderlings milieu while still leaving it grounded enough in the prevailing Tolkienian tradition of fantasy literature to read well as part of it.

The Liveship Traders Novels

The Liveship Traders novels—Ship of Magic, Mad Ship, and Ship of Destiny—center on the fortunes of the Vestrit Trader family, which are bound up in the interactions between the colonial center of Jamaillia, its colonies of Bingtown and the Rain Wilds, the pirates that ply the waters between, and dragons. (It is a fantasy series, after all.) Those fortunes begin to assert the North American-ness of the milieu early on in the series; in the first novel, the chapter titled “A Change of Fortunes” presents depictions of conditions aboard slave-ships that echo or parallel those of the Middle Passage, [7] as well as speaking to the oft-noticed willingness of people in positions of some wealth to avoid engaging with the implications of how wealth is accumulated, even if they are not, themselves, directly participatory in the overt exploitation of human life and worth. That is, people now are reported to be willing to enjoy the benefits of exploitative practice even if they are not the ones directly enforcing unfair or unsafe working conditions (and it must be noted that the circumstances of this paper’s composition are themselves benefits of exploitative labor systems); many are more inclined to turn systems to their benefit than to undo those systems. The same is true for the pirate captain, Kennit, upon whom the chapter focuses, even if it is decidedly not the case for those among his crew who have seen and experienced systems of oppression.

Later chapters in the novel continue to parallel tropes strongly associated with North America, both the United States and the other countries on the continent. For instance, a chapter titled “New Roles” follows one of the Vestrits—Althea—as she joins a seagoing butchery under an assumed name. [8] The conditions aboard the butcher-ship, as well as its depicted work in hunting and rendering down marine mammals, parallel the seal-hunting and whaling industries of the Atlantic coast of the 18^th and 19^th centuries—such as are depicted in Moby-Dick, for example. While it is the case that seal-hunting and whaling were not and are not restricted to the Americas, and it is the case that some of the bodies of literature from which fantasy literature borrows (at varying degrees of remove) do treat of such things, they are not typical features of fantasy literature in the Tolkienian tradition, while they are fairly standard parts of the histories and legends of North American nations and peoples. Their inclusion in the Liveship Traders novels, then, helps to mark that series as borrowing specifically from North America—which means their milieu does the same.

More parallels come out later in Althea’s work aboard the butcher-ship. As she and others of the crew enjoy a night in port, they are beset by crimpers—agents of other ships looking to forcibly conscript crews into service. [9] While some of that practice predates colonization of the Americas, to be sure, and there are instances of it in Tolkienian-tradition fantasy literature, it is a decided part of Anglophone North American history; it is noted as being among the grievances leading to the American Revolution and to the War of 1812, for example. Again, then, the inclusion of such things into the novel works to identify its milieu as borrowing from more than the sources of the usual Tolkienian tradition. Similarly, the appearance of cindin in the chapter echoes chewing tobacco or coca leaf—and while smoking tobacco is a noted part of Tolkien’s work, chewing it is not, and neither is coca. Nor yet does Tolkien’s work treat the negative effects of the material’s use. For Tolkien, it is a beneficial practice, while Hobb openly acknowledges that, despite some pleasant effects—cindin is a stimulant in the novels—it is both addictive and disfiguring, causing sores in the mouth when indulged in at length. In the depiction, Hobb presents another point that comes across as similar enough to Tolkien’s work to make clear that, as Hobb herself notes, [10] she writes from his literary tradition, but that she also expands upon it to employ North American—and more generally American—ideas and backgrounds.

Cindin is not the only intoxicant that links the Realm of the Elderlings milieu to North America more than only to the Eurocentric Tolkienian tradition. [11] Later in Ship of Magic, another major character, Brashen Trell, finds himself drinking with an old crew-mate—and the libation is specifically rum. [12] As I note in an earlier treatment of the chapter, “that liquor has origins in southern Asia—there are early attestations in India and Persia—it is indelibly associated with the Caribbean and with the Americas through the horrors of the slave trade (with which topic the present novel also grapples), as well as with the pirates that continue to feature in the text and which, themselves, are a traditionally New World phenomenon.” [13] Or the way they are presented in the text is generally of the New World, anyway, with ships in styles and with descriptions taken from Hobb’s observations of her husband and the maritime communities of which they have been part. [14]

The next novel in the series begins to move to what I think are stronger North Americanisms, continuing many of the same features but adding to them political structures and instabilities that diverge significantly from the model laid out in the Middle-earth corpus and echoed by so many other fantasy writers. Late in Mad Ship, a legate from the colonial center of Jamaillia heads toward Bingtown and the Rain Wilds, overtly recognizing them as being colonies long exploited and concomitantly ripe for changes in their structures of governance and relationship to the imperialistic core. [15] In effect, Bingtown and the Rain Wilds are identified in the book as “colonies long exploited for economic gain that begin to chafe under the changing terms of remote rule, both with troubled settlement and immigration histories, both based on genocide of which a great many people remain ignorant.” [16] And that is not so much the case with the Euro-mimetic nations in Tolkien and many of his successors as it is for the countries of North America (and, to be fair, elsewhere). The in-milieu “historical” circumstances and the outright recognition of them come off as a particularly strong motion beyond Tolkien’s medievalism.

That motion is carried yet further in the third novel of the trilogy, if with what seems a narrower focus on parallels to the United States. In Ship of Destiny, Bingtown does a fair impression of the Revolutionary War and the lead-up to it, at least in the compressed forms that it is often taught in schools and which gets referenced and presented in film and on television (which form is that most commonly understood in the United States, with problems for it not unlike those Sturtevant identifies as attendant on the medieval, generally [17]). In the chapter “Traders and Traitors,” for example, following the outbreak of violence at a major sociopolitical event and ensuing social unrest, the legate from Jamaillia finds herself confronted by evidence of motions against the dominance of the colonial core. [18] While this comes as something of a surprise to the legate, she does work to exploit divisions among the Bingtowners to maintain Jamaillian control—and to keep herself in a position of authority there.

More of the parallel to the (idealized) revolutionary United States emerges later in the novel. In the chapter “Surviving,” the continued progress of violence against Bingtown by Jamaillia prompts formal disaffiliation from the colonial center by the erstwhile colony and the formal establishment of government that explicitly takes in formerly disadvantaged populations. While some earlier comments about the chapter explicitly note the corrective to history being presented, [19] the history being corrected is that of the nascent United States rather than that of a more “normal” fantasy antecedent. So much is reinforced by the chapter “Bingtown Negotiations,” which reads as much as a recapitulation and refiguring of the Continental Congresses [20] and the Constitutional Convention [21] as it does anything else. (Indeed, something like the Intolerable Acts seems to be at work in Bingtown in the broader context of the novel.) The overt fractiousness and exigencies demanding compromise echo the tensions taught as being present among the delegates to the Congresses and the Convention as the United States separated from the United Kingdom, and while the explicit equalization of populations does differ from the historical circumstance Hobb mimics, that they are explicitly treated is itself no less strong a parallel than the organizational structure depicted as being in place. [22] And that there is such reliance on and reinforcement of that parallel, so much done to make Bingtown’s independence mimetic of that of the United States and other former colonies, especially after no small effort is made to present so much of the physicality surrounding it mimetic of the New World, marks the series as moving beyond Tolkien’s medievalism, decisively and emphatically.

The Rain Wilds Chronicles Novels

The sequel series to the Liveship Traders, the Rain Wilds Chronicles, is a tetralogy consisting of Dragon Keeper, Dragon Haven, City of Dragons, and Blood of Dragons. It also does more to cement the North American-ness of the milieu than the trilogy it succeeds. A large part of this is because less is made of colonial and imperialist dynamics in the later series than in the earlier. A larger part is that significant portions of the series are taken up with an exploratory venture that calls to mind both Marquette & Joliet and Lewis & Clark; “pioneering” and “exploration” are deeply embedded in the cultural mythoi of the United States—and they are not exactly foreign to the histories of that country, Mexico, or Canada, either. Indeed, there is something not unlike the Spanish colonial search for El Dorado in the efforts by the young dragons and their keepers—on which efforts the Rain Wilds novels largely center—seeking out a city full of ancient treasure: Kelsingra. (There are key differences, of course; Kelsingra is real within the milieu, as El Dorado was not in the readers’ world, and the dragons are returning to an ancestral homeland rather than coming in to dispossess and despoil an existing people of their own.) There are parallels to be found, of course, in such things as the Arthurian Grail Quest or searches for Atlantis or the Land of Cokaygne, but there is an awful lot of “search for a lost city” in the myths and legends of North America.

More concretely, the Rain Wilds novels more or less open with reference to the United States-ness of the later Liveship Traders; the front matter recapitulates the arrangements for the independence of Bingtown and the Rain Wilds from Jamaillia, for example, [23] something echoed at the beginning of the first chapter of Dragon Keeper—with the addition of a new dating system, [24] one explicitly citing the emergence of a new polity. The parallel between “Year the 7th of the Reign of the Most Noble and Magnificent Satrap Cosgo / Year the 1st of the Independent Alliance of Traders” [25] and “in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty-four, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and forty-eighth” [26]—for but one easy example—seems clear.

Similarly evident is the situation in the first chapter of Dragon Keeper between one of the major characters of the series—Leftrin, captain of the Tarman—as a character type notable less in mainstream Tolkienian tradition fantasy literature than in such works as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. [27] The less-reputable Traders in the Liveship Traders novels are still largely rule-abiding, generally careful to remain within bounds of law and custom, even if they approach perilously close to those bounds and find rebuke for doing so (Davad Restart in the earlier novels comes to mind as an example, [28] as does Caern [29]). Leftrin flatly contravenes convention and law, and he does so knowingly—but in the interest of further profits. There is, in the literature of the United States no less than in its prevailing cultural currents, a valorization of “entrepreneurs” who are willing to set aside “restrictive” regulations in the interest of their own enrichment; there are strong strains of “I know better than the bureaucrats” and “You can’t tell me what to do” at work in the US zeitgeist (even if, as not seldom, the wide-ranging “entrepreneur” ends up softening that stance, often due to romantic interests). They are less pronounced in Tolkienian-tradition fantasy literature, and they are less lauded where they appear; Hobb’s use of the trope is yet another way she moves beyond Tolkien’s medievalism.

Too, and again, there is a strong sense of exploration at work in the Rain Wilds novels, with much of the second of them, Dragon Haven, occupied by slow progress up the Rain Wild River to the ancient city of Kelsingra. I’ve written about the location previously, [30] and it is one to which the characters in Hobb’s Realm of the Elderlings frequently repair across series. For the dragons in the series, it is a dimly remembered ancestral domain, a place where their ancestors (whose memories they share; it’s complicated) were venerated, praised, and attended to; it is a decidedly desirable place for them to be, all the more so when contrasted with the squalor in which they emerged into the world [31] and in which they persisted for years. [32] As the dragons, their keepers, and the Tarman proceed up the Rain Wild River, Leftrin charts the waters and makes note of the surrounding lands, [33] keeping a detailed log of how to get to the location against the need to do so again, musing that the information will be of value to the Traders—again, something reminiscent of the Marquette & Joliet and Lewis & Clark expeditions, as well as those of de Soto and de León. Too, as the group’s progress continues, with increasing attention to the dwindling supplies carried from the “settled” Trader lands and the growing need to forage and hunt for unfamiliar food speaks to the kinds of things treated not only in formal “pioneer” narratives, but even pop culture staples such as Oregon Trail. [34] It speaks to the kinds of stories on which schoolchildren in the United States are trained, the kinds of stories the United States likes to tell about itself—stories that lie outside the common reference base for works in the Tolkienian fantasy tradition.

Even amid all this, I do note some frustration of the parallels to the Americas in Hobb’s reference base. If it is the case that Bingtown and the Rain Wilds are stand-ins or analogues of the United States, [35] then Jamaillia becomes something like (later) Hanoverian England, but the other major power in the region—Chalced—is a less clear refiguration. [36] Admittedly, it is not the case that every culture in a work of fantasy have a real-world parallel; by its very nature, fantasy gets to move away from the constraints of the real world. Admittedly, too, Hobb moves away from real-world cultures in other aspects of her writing, doing so in ways that make sense, given the particular magics at work in the Realm of the Elderlings corpus; the dragons themselves are perhaps the major example, but they are certainly not the only one. It may be that Chalced can be read as a decidedly backhanded figuration of the worst of Spanish colonial practice (here including the Reconquista on the Iberian Peninsula); it may instead be that Hobb is falling victim to the kind of Orientalist thought Said describes or is engaging in the kind of pop-culture association of Mesoamerican peoples with various savageries. None of the readings are particularly comfortable, to be sure, but the difficulty the interpretations introduce to understanding Hobb’s Realm of the Elderlings as an invocation of the Americas in fantasy literature do have to be acknowledged.

Despite so much, however, there is quite a bit in the Rain Wilds novels that furthers reading the Realm of the Elderlings as drawing largely from the Americas. The fauna described offer additional examples. In Dragon Haven, the dragons, their keepers, and the Tarman make note of creatures they call “gallators,” creatures living in an environment familiar from descriptions of the Florida Everglades or the swamps and bayous of southern Louisiana; they are clearly supposed to be alligators—distinctly tied to the Americas—or something so much like them as to make no difference. [37] In City of Dragons, as the group approaches Kelsingra, they spot game described in terms that echo nothing so much as moose—and while there are moose in Eurasia, they are far more prevalent in descriptions of North America than in the Old World [38]—or in refigurations of the Old World.

With the Rain Wilds novels, as with the Liveship Traders, there is more socio-politically than geographically to support the notion that Hobb draws largely from the Americas in undergirding her narrative milieu. Given that the people of the Rain Wilds are themselves akin to the Bingtowners—they acknowledge each other as such, their original colonial arrangements with Jamaillia hold them in common with one another, and their secession from Jamaillian rule brings them into union as a single nation—much or all of what holds true for Bingtown also holds true for the Rain Wilds, if with necessary modifications for their respective situations. Hobb does not leave so much tacit, however.

For one, her work makes much of the tensions arising from concerns of “when my people came to this part of the world,” notably regarding the formerly-enslaved Tattooed. While it is the case that, legally, the Tattooed are accorded equal status in the nation arising from the secession from Jamaillia, [39] it is also the case that law and practice differ in that regard, and concerns about the putative purity of bloodlines remains a concern. [40] Those concerns follow even the dragon keepers as they begin to restore Kelsingra to a livable community, with those aligning most closely to the way things had been done effectively espousing segregation for no better reason that that it had been how things were done before. [41] Jim Crow would seek to fly among the dragons.

For another, the work expresses concern for the way in which the artifacts of Kelsingra will be treated by those who follow after the initial group of dragons, their keepers, and the crew of the Tarman. In City of Dragons, Alise Kincarron, herself a student of history and legend, walks among the ruins of Kelsingra, considering how best to catalog and describe what lies in the city—and fretting about how what she sees there will be despoiled by rapacious Traders who will certainly follow and auction off pieces of (pre)history as curiosities. [42] Her worry is not without justification. The wealth of the Rain Wilds had arisen from their exploration and exploitation of the ruins of abandoned outlying Elderling cities; Kelsingra, as a core city, has more and neater stuff. Too, her husband follows after her not out of love for her, but out of desire to appropriate what he thinks would be her share of the spoils of Kelsingra. [43] And several of the members of the party that had set out for Kelsingra initially did so with the explicit intention of slaughtering the dragons—thinking, communicating beings—and selling their parts. [44] The novels do deplore such rapacious attitudes; those who hold them either change those attitudes or die ignominiously—but they are still presented as norms, the defiance of which marks out the more “heroic” characters. In such things, the wealth-at-any-cost ethos that pops up, the sheer financial greed, seems to echo the hyper-capitalist orientation for which the United States is known in much cultural product; it is one more way in which Hobb’s fantasy moves beyond Tolkien’s medievalism.

A final point to consider: one of the major components of the mythology of the United States, one of the things that is among the best of its ideals, is that the country is a place where people can escape from the constraints of their old lives and make new ones for themselves—with hard work across many years, perhaps, but still a thing that can be done. It is the case that the country falls far short of the ideal; too many find themselves turned away who seek the espoused freedom in hope and willingness, and many are bound as they are born, with structures conspiring to continuously create an underclass that can be exploited in part to enable the exploitation of others yet. But the idea persists that the New World, that the US, can serve as a beacon of hope to others—the proverbial “city on a hill.” In the novels, Kelsingra does offer that opportunity, if with possible caveats; more people are more free to pursue themselves and their desires in it than in the places whence they come, and there is more acceptance of difference there than in many other places. [45] While it must be acknowledged that Hobb moves beyond Tolkien in showing the underbellies of sources other than the generic Eurocentric medieval, it must also be acknowledged that she brings in the brighter ideals of those same sources. And there is some value to such a thing.

Conclusion

There is still more work to do, of course, to bear out how Hobb’s Realm of the Elderlings milieu works with and extends beyond the generic Eurocentric medievalist tropes at play in the broader Tolkienian fantasy tradition. For one, a conference paper can only take in so much at a time. Additional details from the novels could be incorporated and explicated, and much more in the way of documentary research could be carried out to identify the parallels, both in historical circumstances and geographical realities. For another, there are other works in the Realm of the Elderlings milieu than even the four series noted already; in addition to the Fitz and the Fool novels, there are novellas and short stories set in the Six Duchies and Rain Wilds, and there is some suggestion of more novels to come. [46] Whether any of the other materials will do as much to present the idea of a North American-centered fantasy milieu as the texts already reviewed is unclear, I couldn’t at this point say, but I think they will do at least some work that way, and it will be a pleasure to find out.

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[1] I am not worrying much about formal citation for this paper. The only publication it will see is online; informal citation should be enough for most or all of it.

[2] https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1050&context=medieval_cong_archive

[3] https://www.cambriapress.com/pub.cfm?bid=628

[4] https://www.cambriapress.com/pub.cfm?bid=626

[5] https://worldfantasy.org/2016-world-fantasy-convention/

[6] There are some useful comments about the phrase “Tolkienian tradition” here: https://talesaftertolkien.blogspot.com/2023/08/a-requested-clarification-for.html

[7] https://elliottrwi.com/2020/06/29/a-robin-hobb-rereading-series-entry-110-ship-of-magic-chapter-9/

[8] https://elliottrwi.com/2020/07/24/a-robin-hobb-rereading-series-entry-117-ship-of-magic-chapter-16/

[9] https://elliottrwi.com/2020/08/07/a-robin-hobb-rereading-series-entry-121-ship-of-magic-chapter-20/

[10] Okay, a formal citation: Robin Hobb, “A Bar and a Quest,” in Meditations on Middle-earth, ed. Karen Harber (New York: St. Martin’s P, 2001), 85-100.

[11] There is also whiskey to consider, as noted here: https://elliottrwi.com/2021/06/25/a-robin-hobb-rereading-series-entry-206-ship-of-destiny-chapter-27/. As commented, however, the parallel is less strong and overt, and it doesn’t fit well in the main text of the paper at this point, anyway. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter, though.

[12] https://elliottrwi.com/2020/10/02/a-robin-hobb-rereading-series-entry-135-ship-of-magic-chapter-34/

[13] Ibid.

[14] https://web.archive.org/web/20050724083052/http://www.robinhobb.com:80/5000words.html

[15] https://elliottrwi.com/2021/02/08/a-robin-hobb-rereading-series-entry-167-mad-ship-chapter-29/

[16] Ibid.

[17] https://elliottrwi.com/2018/05/25/in-another-response-to-paul-sturtevant/

[18] https://elliottrwi.com/2021/03/26/a-robin-hobb-rereading-series-entry-181-ship-of-destiny-chapter-2/

[19] https://elliottrwi.com/2021/05/03/a-robin-hobb-rereading-series-entry-191-ship-of-destiny-chapter-13/

[20] https://history.state.gov/milestones/1776-1783/continental-congress

[21] https://history.state.gov/milestones/1784-1800/convention-and-ratification

[22] https://elliottrwi.com/2021/05/17/a-robin-hobb-rereading-series-entry-196-ship-of-destiny-chapter-17/

[23] https://elliottrwi.com/2022/07/15/a-robin-hobb-rereading-series-entry-315-dragon-keeper-front-matter/

[24] https://elliottrwi.com/2022/07/18/a-robin-hobb-rereading-series-entry-316-dragon-keeper-chapter-1/

[25] Ibid.

[26] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2024/05/03/a-proclamation-on-national-hurricane-preparedness-week-2024/

[27] https://elliottrwi.com/2022/07/18/a-robin-hobb-rereading-series-entry-316-dragon-keeper-chapter-1/

[28] For instance, here: https://elliottrwi.com/2020/12/21/a-robin-hobb-rereading-series-entry-156-mad-ship-chapter-18/

[29] Witness this: https://elliottrwi.com/2021/05/14/a-robin-hobb-rereading-series-entry-195-ship-of-destiny-chapter-16/

[30] https://elliottrwi.com/2021/05/19/sites-of-memory-in-robin-hobbs-realm-of-the-elderlings/

[31] https://elliottrwi.com/2022/07/22/a-robin-hobb-rereading-series-entry-317-dragon-keeper-chapter-2/

[32] https://elliottrwi.com/2022/08/01/a-robin-hobb-rereading-series-entry-321-dragon-keeper-chapter-6/, https://elliottrwi.com/2022/08/05/a-robin-hobb-rereading-series-entry-323-dragon-keeper-chapter-8/, and https://elliottrwi.com/2022/08/12/a-robin-hobb-rereading-series-entry-325-dragon-keeper-chapter-10/

[33] https://elliottrwi.com/2022/10/17/a-robin-hobb-rereading-series-entry-335-dragon-haven-chapter-2/

[34] https://elliottrwi.com/2023/01/30/a-robin-hobb-rereading-series-entry-341-dragon-haven-chapter-9/

[35] Complete with disdain for the correspondents to the First Nations, the Six Duchies and the Out Islands as putatively less civilized, noted in https://elliottrwi.com/2020/08/07/a-robin-hobb-rereading-series-entry-121-ship-of-magic-chapter-20/

[36] https://elliottrwi.com/2023/06/05/a-robin-hobb-rereading-series-entry-351-city-of-dragons-chapter-1/

[37] https://elliottrwi.com/2023/04/24/a-robin-hobb-rereading-series-entry-348-dragon-haven-chapter-18/; note, too, the exile-of-exile dynamic at work, as discussed

[38] https://elliottrwi.com/2023/06/19/a-robin-hobb-rereading-series-entry-353-city-of-dragons-chapter-3/

[39] https://elliottrwi.com/2021/05/17/a-robin-hobb-rereading-series-entry-196-ship-of-destiny-chapter-17/

[40] https://elliottrwi.com/2023/07/10/a-robin-hobb-rereading-series-entry-355-city-of-dragons-chapter-6/ and https://elliottrwi.com/2023/08/21/a-robin-hobb-rereading-series-entry-362-city-of-dragons-chapter-12/

[41] https://elliottrwi.com/2023/07/24/a-robin-hobb-rereading-series-entry-358-city-of-dragons-chapter-8/

[42] https://elliottrwi.com/2023/07/17/a-robin-hobb-rereading-series-entry-357-city-of-dragons-chapter-7/

[43] https://elliottrwi.com/2023/09/06/a-robin-hobb-rereading-series-entry-364-city-of-dragons-chapter-14/, https://elliottrwi.com/2024/01/08/a-robin-hobb-rereading-series-entry-381-blood-of-dragons-chapter-15/, and https://elliottrwi.com/2024/01/29/a-robin-hobb-rereading-series-entry-384-blood-of-dragons-chapter-18/

[44] https://elliottrwi.com/2022/11/28/a-robin-hobb-rereading-series-entry-338-dragon-haven-chapter-6/

[45] https://elliottrwi.com/2024/01/29/a-robin-hobb-rereading-series-entry-384-blood-of-dragons-chapter-18/

[46] https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid02h1b7LcPTxeDgEKQ2WGzDTUhQMB3L72VA7DGUp8qCVy7KS44C8L7srNSj1nKoKZmJl&id=100044978681137&mibextid=Nif5oz&paipv=0&eav=AfYoMIzm-AM56rn1vlsg6Y2lUNlnW0IglKWXpiK0eAvG053ePqigvJ7uze_ZgBLou-4&_rdr

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