How Covenant was 1st introduced & captivated your soul

studraver69 · Post by **studraver69** » Thu Nov 24, 2005 7:06 am

I was first introduced to this series at the age of 13 in 1985 as one geeky kid to another writhing in the morbid fascinating dark mystery of anti-hero complexities of a man driven to desperation, burned and abandoned by his wife, afflicted with leprosy and driven in desperation to rape or "ravage" . . . .

Woa is that one weird way to go into your pubescent years, reading a story about a man driven to desperation to go out and rape !!!!

And then the weird part is this village of Stonedowns considering Thomas Covenant a prophet and savior nonetheless

. . . . it all seemed so bizarre . . . at first . . .

And then it's like a continuing epic description of absolute tormented agony long and drawn and full of mocking sardonic twists and turns of "The Land" tormented . . . . . miserable and elaborate and such a weird twist of another version of the Lord of the Rings except without the fruity little hobbits and epic King Aragorn. Imagine Aragorn or Frodo raping some elf princess?

It got to the point where I put down the books many times throughout the rest of the 80's . . . somewhere after "The Wounded Land"

Sometime around 1994 I picked up "The One Tree" and finished it with excruciating difficulty growing sick and weary of the passages of misery . .

absolute misery . . . . And then I heard someone talk of the Sardonic humor of Linden and Thomas Covenant travelling to that Island with the stuck up, conceited, snobby fruity faeries creatures living on an island on the book cover treating them all the ringbearer and all his companions like shit. Contrast that with how the Elves in Lothlorian or Rivendale treated everyone with hospitality in LOTR. . .

I never really got around to reading all of White Gold Wielder . . . in fact I just read ahead to the money shot of Thomas Covenant and Linden Avery finally getting around to fucking . . . or was that in "The One Tree" ?

I can't remember . . .

And the FINAL other culmination money shot of kicking Lord Foul's ass . . .

Trying to wade through the misery.

Now it seems I have another interest to start reading these books again . . .

Post by **Avatar** » Thu Nov 24, 2005 9:36 am

Uh, welcome to the Watch. Look around, there are thread dedicated to discussing the similarities/difference between LOTR and the Chrons...(maybe in the Tolkein Forum in the Library? I'm not sure) not to mention many other subjects to capture the imagination.

--Avatar

Post by **Usivius** » Thu Nov 24, 2005 1:48 pm

Well, it is a shame you never got around to finishing WGW. It is a gem.

To answer the posted question:
I was a very introverted, prone-to-depression, teenager, and picked up LFB because of the cover. Yes, dammit, I bought the darn thing because of the cover.
I had read many works of fiction (sci-fi, fantasy, etc.) but it was fantasy that always hooked me, with authors such as Eddings and Tolkein... But SRD was different and it spoke TO me. The first book of its kind to do that. I gobbled up all the TC books, then Mordan't Need came out, and that grabbed me by the literary testicles and I bacame a true SRD fan.

Today, as I have re read the TC books, the character no longer 'speaks' to me in the same way it did as a teenager, partly because I am a very different person than I was WAY back then... But I still love SRD's writing and find the newest (Runes) to be a great leap forward from the first two Chrons, and I am eating it up!
Can't wait for Fatal Revenant!...

Post by **Xar** » Thu Nov 24, 2005 4:14 pm

I remember the first (and only) Italian translation of The Chronicles hitting the shelves when I was about 8 or 9... At that time, I was consumed by Tolkien, and anyway, the title of the first book, in its Italian incarnation, was ridiculous... Let's just say that translating it back into English it would sound like "The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Incredulous".

I never gave those weird books a second thought (and they eventually disappeared from libraries), and then three years ago during my student exchange program, I met a group of friends with whom I started playing RPGs. During one of our talks, we started talking about books, and I came up with the Wheel of Time (which I was reading at the time), whereupon one of the other guys mentioned "well, to me, lots of things in those books are rip-offs from The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant". He proceeded to explain more or less what they were about. Three months later I went to London for a week, and one day as I was visiting Borders in Oxford Street, I saw the omnibus version of The Chronicles. I told myself, "well, why not?" and I bought it... It took me a little while to adjust to SRD's style (I admit I stopped dead for a month or so when I got to the rape scene, and I only picked up the book again because it irked me that I had spent lots of money on the omnibus and then I had barely read five chapters of the first book), but by the time I finished the Chronicles, I was left with a desperate hunger for more.

I remember I got the Second Chronicles through Amazon, and I read the last pages on New Year 2003 (I had no party that year due to several reasons) and it was very weird to read the last paragraph just as New Year arrived

Once I finished them, I desperately hoped there were rumors about the Third Chronicles, and that's when I found Kevin's Watch, which in turn introduced me to Mordant's Need and the short story anthologies.

Post by **kevinswatch** » Thu Nov 24, 2005 4:33 pm

I first found out about Covenant by reading an article in Inquest magazine that had different fantasy characters fight it out. One of those was "Rand al'Thor vs Thomas Covenant."

Of course, I didn't really know anything more about the series, and didn't have any desire to read it until this girl I met in high school convinced me it was worth reading.

Heh.

Welcome to the Watch.-jay

The Inquest Article

Website · Post by **The Somberlain** » Thu Nov 24, 2005 4:53 pm

There's quite a significant mistake in that picture...

Post by **Warmark** » Thu Nov 24, 2005 5:08 pm

The Somberlain wrote:There's quite a significant mistake in that picture...

I had TC recommended to me, I never expected to like it.

Post by **Nerdanel** » Thu Nov 24, 2005 6:13 pm

I moved to a new city to start my studies at an university. After a few weeks I found a strange old book at my new local library. The book was called in Finnish The Return of Berek Halfhand(!) but a closer observation indicated it probably wasn't a sequel to something I had never read, had an unattractive Darrell K. Sweet cover, and was written by someone I had never heard of, but it was marked as fantasy which made me by-default interested. I figured this Donaldson fellow was probably a minor dead fantasy author from the thirties or something.

When I started the book I saw the copyright page and found out that the book was actually only a few decades old. Weird. A little into the book I started to notice the quality of the translation which was nothing less than abysmal. I don't usually notice translations unless they are very bad, or at least I used to be that way. This particular translation was even worse than the Finnish Shannara translations that made Brooks sound like he couldn't string together a fluent sentence. The mystery of why Donaldson was unknown in Finland was explained. I found the names and terms particularly painful. In the Finnish translation the Staff of Law is made of "particulartree" and Lord Foul is called something that sounds like it had come from a bad comedy written in the early twentienth century.

Because of the Lovecraftian horror of a translation, I didn't really get to enjoy the book. However I found that I couldn't forget the story and Thomas Covenant. I felt I had read something special, if by nothing else then because the book had actually managed to shock and disconcert me, and I have a background in reading horror. So then when I found The Wounded Land in English at the city's main library I borrowed it and was hooked within pages. It was quite a circuitous route to become a fan.

Post by **CovenantJr** » Thu Nov 24, 2005 7:10 pm

My dad saw me reading something by David Gemmell and said "I read something a bit like that once. Here." and handed me his copy of LFB. I was 16. That's that

Post by **The Laughing Man** » Fri Nov 25, 2005 2:29 am

The Somberlain wrote:There's quite a significant mistake in that picture...

Website · Post by **The Somberlain** » Fri Nov 25, 2005 3:02 pm

Hahaha. That's the one.

Post by **The Laughing Man** » Sat Nov 26, 2005 6:48 am

seems noone else caught it yet, heh.

Post by **sgt.null** » Sat Nov 26, 2005 6:55 am

i had a friend in junior high named George Woods, (I am Dennis Wood) they would mix us up and call the wrong one to the office. on one occassion the first book was sitting in the waiting room to the assist. principal's office. he came out, told me they wanted George. I asked if the book belonged to anyone, he said no and told me to take it. and thus it began.

Post by **drew** » Sat Nov 26, 2005 2:49 pm

When My sister aksed me what I wanted for Christmas when I was 15--I told her to buy me any kind of SCIENCE-FICTION...but since she's an idiot, and the Sci-fi was in the same section as the Fantasy, she bought me the book with the pretty horses on the cover.

Post by **Seareach** » Sat Feb 04, 2006 1:16 am

An aquaintence of mine introduced me to the Chronicles when I was 13. I'd always been an avid Tolkien fan when I younger (having read Lord of the Rings when I was 10), and I guess the "comparable to Tolkien at his best" on the front cover made me think "hey, I might like this". After I finished the first Chronicles (which were, admittedly, a little over my head in a lot of ways...and a bit of a hard read for me at) I wrote SRD a letter and he was silly enough to reply. For what ever reason that inspired me to read the second Chronicles...and everything SRD has written since.

Post by **Loredoctor** » Sat Feb 04, 2006 2:42 am

Wasn't. I had read the Gap series and decided to follow up on more of SRD's writings.

Post by **Avatar** » Mon Feb 06, 2006 10:36 am

As I think I've mentioned elsewhere, LFB was given to me by a guy who used to work for my father when I was 13 or 14. A cadaverous-looking junky, well read and intelligent. He thought I might enjoy it. I did.

--A

Post by **KAY1** » Mon Feb 06, 2006 1:22 pm

LFB was given to my older brother and as I thought the cover was pretty and I liked the idea of someone being transported to a mystical world, I thought I would give it a go! I think I was 12 or 13 at the time. My brother only managed to get as far as reading halfway through the 1st chrons I think but I was hooked!

Post by **danlo** » Wed Feb 15, 2006 1:19 am

Geez! I hope I didn't move this topic by mistake--It really belongs in the TC Discussion forum...

Post by **Avatar** » Wed Feb 15, 2006 8:35 am

Nah, pretty sure that the poster occasionally known as studraver put it here deliberately.

But I agree, that it belongs in the TC forum.

--A