When the Despiser first whisked me to Kevin's Watch and started prouncing his dark prophesies, I'd simply explain to him that he was in bad faith with himself, that his attempts to wholly define himself as Despite were merely a flight from his own freedom and responsibility to decide, that all his h...

A few more thoughts on freedom. Sartre gives a famous analysis of acrophobia of which SRD is surely not unaware. It is, he says, not a fear of falling from a height--it is the fear we will *jump* off the height. It is the fear of our own freedom, our freedom to jump. It is surely no accident that th...

Now, on another level, the statue also represents freedom. Bannor is Pure Law--which we learn when Elena wields the Staff of Law for the Despiser is not the opposite of Despite. Covenant, as SRD says, represents pure passion unbounded by Law--he is from outside the Land and hence not bound by its La...

I see a lot of things represented in the Convenant/Bannor statue, and it teaching Mhoram first the Ritual of Descration and along with it the secret to Kevin's lore. Obviously, SRD has given one of the things it represents. However, there are clearly other, interrelated levels of meaning going on he...

Plotinus, great post! You might want to post part of it to the GI for SRD to reply to. About the Covenant/Bannor sculpture... <searches memory> ... I thought that when TC saw the sculpture, he did recognize that it was of himself, but didn't want to acknowledge it. So he said something to the effec...

Let me try yet one more explanation of what I mean. A reader comes across an event in the plot of the series, that Elena's Covenant-Bannar statue teaches Mhoram the Ritual of Descretation. One thing the reader might do is just accept that on face value as an event like, "an apple fell from a tr...

Ok, for another example, take what is also a recurring theme in the series, the idea of a Covenant, or Vow, or Oath. This is explicitly a recurring theme in the work, from the name Covenant itself, to the Vow of the Bloodgaard, to the Oath of the Lords, to the ring itself as explicitly a symbol of a...

Let me try to clarify my position again, as some seem to be misinterpreting it. I am *not* saying the author wrote the Covenant series "about" existentialism--he wrote it about a story, and the characters in that story. Nor am I saying he wrote it express some specific "moral", l...

Malik, Thanks, I'll check out Donaldson's website, I didn't know one existed. I just googled up Thomas Covenant last night because some things about the series still rattle around in my brain every once in a while (like the Covenant-Bannor statue), and found this place. Also, I didn't mean that the ...

Of course, even on the ring itself, I've hardly exhausted the symbolism and meaning. That Covenant's last name is *covenant*, promise (first name Thomas, as in doubting Thomas, Doubting Promise?), that his ring is a symbol of the violated marriage convenant, etc., would flesh out more levels of symb...

It is possible to read the Covenant series simply as an interesting series of events. However, to do so is to miss much of the work. Take, for instance, the ring. You could just see it as a source of power like magical rings in other fantasy novels, in which case it will seem completely arbitrary th...