After I gave a a spoiler free overview of the Realm of the Elderlings, as well as a very long series by series review and reading experience report, I want to analyze some aspects of this series as a whole (but mostly regarding the books with Fitz as the main character). In this post, I’ll dive deep into the characters and themes of the series.

SPOILER WARNING: This entire post contains heavy spoilers for the Realm of the Elderlings book series! Proceed to read at your own peril!

Born a conflict

FitzChivalry Farseer is the protagonist of 9 of the Realm of the Elderlings books, and they are narrated by him in first person – The Farseer Trilogy, The Tawny Man Trilogy and the Fitz and Fool Trilogy. He is an incredibly complex and interesting character, and there are so many different interesting aspects to him that it’s challenging to discuss them all.

One thing that becomes apparent throughout the series, is that he always seems to be forced into roles without having much say in it. As the bastard child of royalty, he was born a conflict. Being the child of a prince born out of wedlock puts great shame upon said prince, and puts Fitz’ own life in danger, since he is a threat to the rightful, legitimate heirs of the line of Farseer royalty. However, his family (mainly his grandfather the King, and his uncle) had mercy on him, and decides to shape him into a useful tool for the throne, thereby trying to ensure his loyalty to the Farseers.

In the first trilogy, after initially having a somewhat free roaming childhood living in the stables and being raised by the stablemaster, he is later trained as an assassin while simultaneously also trying to master the Farseer’s magic, the Skill.

During his training, he suffers greatly at the hands of other characters, fueled by the stigma of the circumstances of his birth. As the first trilogy progresses, he is tortured, hunted and under constant threat of being killed. No wonder that he wanted to let go of all the pain he suffered and spent 15 years living as a recluse afterwards. Because really, how much pain can one man suffer? If you’ve finished Assassin’s Quest, you’ll know: a lot. And more. Despite the insane amount of suffering he went through, he always remained loyal to his true king, Verity, Verity’s wife Kettricken, and their heir.

Even though Fitz was always being forced into a fate he didn’t really seek, he is ironically also the one who shapes fate. This is prevalent in the name that his wolf Nighteyes gives to him, Changer, and in his relationship to the Fool as being the Catalyst to the White Prophet. This theme is further manifested in the later novels, where again and again he causes the world to change due to his actions. The final novel of the series concludes with the theme that without Fitz, the world would not have returned to what it was once before: a world shared by humans and dragons (as opposed to the dragon-free world which the asshats of Clerres wanted for themselves).

Fitz’s books are by far my favorites of the Realm of the Elderlings. He is such a great narrator, and he goes through so much. He is a fascinating hero because he’s a very reluctant hero, all the while he is also deeply flawed. He doesn’t want most of the roles he’s forced into and there are many of them, and one of the things central to him are the Wit and the Skill.

Conflicting identities

Fitz was born with two types of magic, the royal magic that the Farseers are known to possess, the Skill, and the beast magic, the Wit, which is feared and ostracized and occurs more in the general (lower class) population. The two magics can be interpreted as juxtaposing upper and lower class, one socially accepted, the other inspiring witch hunts. Fitz possessing both magics increases the sense that he never really feels like he truly belongs anywhere and his otherness is a central theme.

Despite the extraordinary feat that Fitz possess two types of magic, he’s not an all-powerful character – on the contrary, we see him struggle and suffer from his magical powers a lot, and they cause him just as much pain and heartbreak as they can give him benefits. This mostly applies to the Skill, which was tainted for him by having a corrupt instructor, after which it took him decades to really become good at Skilling.

Fitz’ Wit, on the other hand, is natural to him. It lets him telepathically communicate with animals that are open to the Wit, and throughout the novels we see him bonding to two dogs, a wolf, and to a limited extend to a few other animals such as horses and crows. However, as mentioned before, the Wit is greatly feared and stigmatized among the general population, and Witted ones are hunted and gruesomely killed. This has been described as an allegory for queerness and homophobia by scholars, and the fight for the Wit to become socially accepted is not only an internal struggle Fitz has, but later becomes a larger theme of the series.

What a snarky wolf can teach you about mindfulness

Fitz establishes a Wit bond with his wolf Nighteyes, and they remain bonded for almost 20 years. This magic is so beautiful, as is shows how man and wolf can become natural extensions of one another, while both remain equal personas. Nighteyes shares his keen wolf senses with Fitz, and Fitz shares some human, especially social aspects with Nighteyes. As their bond develops, both take on more characteristics of the other’s species.

Nighteyes himself is a wonderfully written character. He is a wolf and he thinks like a wolf. Reading his character is such a joy, because he just makes so much sense. He doesn’t understand Fitz’ worries about the past or the future and often dismisses them with wolfish sarcasm. He cares about the hunt, the kill, and the comfortable rest in his den afterwards. He only really cares about the now, and very often, he gets Fitz out of difficult situations with something akin to mindfulness. Breathe, focus on the world in front of your senses, forget about your silly disruptive emotions.

Unfortunately Nighteyes is only truly part of 3 of these books, since the life span of wolves doesn’t quite match that of humans – even humans who have the ability to extend lives by the use of the Skill. Loss and grief become central topics of these novels as Nighteyes ages and dies. Losing Nighteyes, Fitz also lost a part of himself, and his grief overwhelms him so much that he refuses to ever bond to another animal throughout his life. However, some part of Nighteyes remained with Fitz, and the lines of where Fitz ever began and Nighteyes ended become blurred.

Jack of all Trades, Master of Nothing

Fitz is a man who is moderately skilled in the Skill, who could be described as being part wolf, who can communicate telepathically with some animals, who is knowledgeable about taking care of horses, who is trained by an assassin and knows many ways to kill a person, who spent some time as a scribe’s apprentice, and who spent some time as a ship-bound warrior.

He is a jack of all trades, very knowledgeable in a lot of things, but not a true master of anything. This becomes obvious whenever he’s juxtaposed with characters that have mastered their own things, for example when seeing Burrich as a reluctant master of the Wit (and an excellent stable master), or Web as the embracing master of the Wit. Or when seeing Chade, a masterful assassin who excels at disguises and weaves networks of spies and informants.

But being a master of nothing is one of the reasons why Fitz is a great hero – he’s not perfect. He’s not a Mary Sue who magically excels at everything. Aside from being good but not great at most things, very often he is also infuriatingly stubborn or downright stupid. This is especially the case when it comes to him wanting to protect others and keeping them from danger. A recurring example is him leaving the Fool behind – when going to Aslevsjal, and similarly when he wanted to set off to Clerres. I can be really annoyed with Fitz and still love him as a protagonist, and empathize will all the things fate had in store for him, because he’s such a flawed character.

Beyond gender

Flawed characters and relationships are a recurring theme in the Elderlings novels, and one of the most central, most complicated, and probably most flawed relationships is the one Fitz has with the Fool. The Fool is probably the most fascinating, most mysterious character of the whole series. In the first trilogy we learn only very little about him. He is introduced as the King’s jester, and described as inhumanely pale, and according to Fitz’ wit bonded animals, scentless. Later we learn that he is indeed not truly human, but a “White”, and ancient type of somewhat androgynous being that have the gift if prophecy with very long life spans. He is very reminiscent of elves in other fantasy, but certainly a lot weirder.

One of the weirder parts of the Fool is are his ever-changing personalities. In The Liveship Traders, one of the side characters is Amber, a craftswoman who is known for her carving skills, who forms a bond with the mad ship Paragon. The hints built up very slowly, but throughout the series we learn that Amber is also a “White” with the gift of prophecy, and at the end of it, my mind was blown when it was revealed that she was actually the Fool all along. It really shouldn’t have been such a surprise because already at the end of The Farseer Trilogy there are quite a lot of hints at the Fool’s ambiguous gender identity. The Fool is a character that seems to transcend gender, and he’s as much the Fool as he is Amber. His gender-fluidity is left open to the reader’s imagination, personally I think that he (and most Whites) are androgynous, or even possibly intersex or genderless in nature.

Bromance without boundaries

In the third trilogy, The Tawny Man, the Fool returns to Fitz’ life under yet another new guise, the larger-than-life Lord Golden. In this trilogy, what was hinted at in The Farseer Trilogy is made obvious: the Fool is actually in love with Fitz. Fitz’ reactions to this, and to his revelation that the Fool spent some years living as a woman, is complex – he is once again, infuriatingly stubborn, but understandably so since he is a medieval person with medieval,  heteronormative concepts of gender and relationships. Them having different ideals and desires for their relationship leads to a fairly silly conflict in The Golden Fool, which personally I found a bit annoying because they both behaved like sulking teenagers instead of just having an adult conversation.

Nevertheless, their relationship and their (platonic) love for each other begins to deepen the further the novels progress. While they were never lovers, they became something more than that. Transcending the boundaries of each other, they become one and the same person when Fitz brings the Fool back from death. They establish a unique, magical bond that later produced their daughter Bee, a child of Fitz, the Fool, and to some extend, Nighteyes – and of course Molly. What a beautiful, polyamorous family they could have been, if not for their displacement in time and space.

And at the end of Assassin’s Fate, Fitz, the Fool and Nighteyes do actually become one and the same being. Fitz, dying from the Fool’s quest to Clerres, carves his dragon in the form of Nighteyes, and together with the Fool, they go into him with the last bit of Nighteyes’ spirit that still remained with Fitz. It’s not really death, but it’s a bittersweet ending for all of them as they transcend their bodies and the boundaries of their spirits.

Puny humans

Fitz and the Fool leave behind a new world, shaped by their actions as the White Prophet and his Catalyst. Their actions directly caused the return of the long-lost dragons to the world, first in the form of the stone dragons, and later with actual dragons Tintaglia and IceFyre, the dragons hatched from the serpents, and the dragons that came from the liveships. It was a very, very long process to bring dragons back to the world, sending both Fitz and the Fool through an insane amount of trauma.

Bringing dragons back to the world marks the end of a period of time of increasing anthropocentrism in this medieval-style world. Humans were growing confident that they’re the most important beings in this world, leading to them to start to abuse the nature around them for their own purposes and profit. About time that someone challenges their surpremacy, and as dragons return, they are forced to readjust their lives to having these gigantic, intelligent predators in the world. Dragons don’t care about puny humans, and they see the world as theirs. This is one of several aspects of the series that speaks for ecocentrism as a central theme.

The embodiment of this nature-focused ecocentrism is also the Wit. Fitz using the Wit is often described as an interconnectedness of all life, in that he can sense living beings with his Wit before he hears or sees or smells them. Reminding us of our role in the grander scheme of things, and focusing on the interconnectedness of nature is one of the many themes that make Realm of the Elderlings such a great series. It’s magical, intrinsical storytelling like nothing I’ve ever read before.

This concludes my deep dive into this series. There are certainly a lot more topics worth discussing when it comes to this series, but these are the ones I found most interesting to discuss. In my final post I’ll wrap up my series of posts on Realm of the Elderlings with a little bit of data.