The Farseer Trilogy

Overview

Most epic fantasies of the mid-1990s were told from above, cutting between kings, armies and prophesied heroes. The Farseer Trilogy is told from inside one bruised head. FitzChivalry Farseer, the illegitimate son of a prince who abdicated in shame, narrates his own life as an old man looking back: a boy handed over to the castle stables, trained in secret as the king's assassin, used, broken and used again by the family he loves. Robin Hobb's Assassin's Apprentice (1995), Royal Assassin (1996) and Assassin's Quest (1997) became the foundation of one of fantasy's most beloved long sagas, and a quiet revolution in how close the genre could get to its characters.

Origins

Robin Hobb was a new name in 1995, but not a new writer. Margaret Astrid Lindholm Ogden, raised partly in Alaska, had published contemporary and urban fantasy as Megan Lindholm, including Wizard of the Pigeons (1986). For the Farseer books she adopted an androgynous pseudonym, partly because the narrator was male and partly to signal a new direction, separate from readers' expectations of her earlier work. The trilogy was published by Bantam Spectra in the United States and by Voyager in the UK.

The story

Fitz is six when his grandfather delivers him to Buckkeep Castle, seat of the Six Duchies. The king's stablemaster, Burrich, raises him; the mysterious Chade, a scarred royal half-brother living behind the walls, trains him in poisons and killing. Fitz possesses two magics: the Skill, the Farseer line's telepathic art, which he struggles to learn under a cruel master, and the Wit, a bond with animals that the kingdom despises and punishes with death. His deepest bond is with the wolf Nighteyes.

Meanwhile the coasts are ravaged by Red-Ship Raiders who "Forge" their captives, returning them as soulless husks. The king's younger son, Regal, schemes for the throne; the heir, Verity, exhausts himself holding off the raiders with the Skill and finally goes on a quest for the legendary Elderlings. Fitz's fate is bound to a pale, prophetic jester, the Fool, whose relationship with him becomes the emotional spine of the whole Realm of the Elderlings.

Reception & impact

The trilogy was a word-of-mouth success and rose steadily in reputation. Readers responded to what Hobb did differently: little large-scale battle, great attention to injury, trauma and loneliness, and a narrator who is often wrong about himself. Its twin magics are a tidy example of the genre's growing interest in rule-bound magic systems, but they are always about cost — the Skill is addictive; the Wit is a secret that can get him killed.

The books also stand out for their animals. Fitz's Wit-bond with Nighteyes, conveyed in wordless shared sensation, gives the trilogy some of its most moving passages, and Hobb treats the kingdom's hatred of the Wit as a study of prejudice — the Witted are hunted, hanged and burned, and Fitz spends years hiding what he is.

Hobb's work arrived in the same years as A Song of Ice and Fire and deep into The Wheel of Time, and it offered a third model for 1990s epic fantasy: not sprawling, not grimly political, but intensely personal. Unlike many of its peers, the trilogy never became a game or a screen production; its main adaptation has been in comics, notably the French L'Assassin Royal (2008–2016), with an English comics adaptation of Assassin's Apprentice, co-written by Hobb, scheduled by Dark Horse from December 2022.

Legacy

Farseer was only the beginning. Hobb went on to The Liveship Traders (1998–2000), The Tawny Man (2001–03), The Rain Wild Chronicles (2009–13) and The Fitz and the Fool (2014–17), sixteen novels in all, which together form the Realm of the Elderlings. The final book, Assassin's Fate (2017), closed Fitz's story. By then the series had sold more than 1.25 million copies in the UK alone.

The saga is complete. What it left behind is an example: an epic fantasy whose most memorable scenes are conversations, and whose greatest battles are with memory and grief.