Kevin's Watch

I’ve just started to reread TIW, and I came across a passage that made me wonder if the first Lords to come about after the Desecration made a deliberate attempt to make it next to impossible for Wards 2-7 to be discovered and understood.

“The First Ward he gave to the Giants, and when the exile was ended they gave it to the first of the new Lords, the forebears of this Council. In turn, these Lords conceived the Oath of Peace and carried it to all the people of the Land - an Oath to guard against Kevin's destroying passion.”

I wonder if they knew what the secret to understanding Kevin’s Lore was, and feared what it’s understanding and survival would mean for the future of the Land. So they made a conscious choice in creating the Oath of Peace, so that future generations would be unable to understand what the Lore meant, unable to move beyond Ward number one.

I don't like it.
It reduces to "Earthpower is evil."
It makes choices meaningless.
It says: Knowledge is the problem, not Kevin's mistake/lack of understanding.
It gets even worse, MORE evil than that, taken into the Last C's.
but I can't say why without spoiling.

On a more "in story" note:
How would those people have that knowledge?
And why wouldn't they [if they knew that] say "Put that shit away before someone sees it! Now go destroy it!"

They could have known from stories passed down what knowledge the Wards would ultimately contain, but not necessarily how to unlock the Wards to get to that knowledge. These Lords were much less far removed from the time of Lord Kevin; information hadn’t been diluted/changed/lost so much by time yet. So they could have been told “Kevin’s hidden Wards hold the secret to the Ritual of Desecration,” and what kind of mindset a person would have to have to comprehend it. And so by taking an Oath of Peace, they ensured that no one would be able to perform a desecration again.

It wouldn’t be a perfect solution or even the one that was most wise. But the series has other examples of choice being taken away (ie. the Bloodguard being sent off before the Desecration) and I don’t think this is much different.

And of course, this is just speculation

Kevin's Lore required the capacity to destroy, the willingness to risk desecration. The New Lords, having lost this Lore, didn't realise this until Lord Mhoram worked it out in TPTP. But Kevin's Lore wasn't the only way to use Earthpower - if it was, Mhoram wouldn't have been able to make such big progress in creating new lore after TPTP.

Trying to stick to Kevin's Lore when they had the Oath of Peace was what held the New Lords back; they needed to find their own way.

I don't think there was any deliberateness to their self-limitation, else they would have tried to find new Lore sooner.

I think that all the evidence indicates that the new Lords wanted nothing but to understand Kevin's lore and return to their golden age. They were frustrated and disappointed that this wasn't coming about.

As Murrin said, no one figured out what the problem was until Mhoram. Which sort of suggests that it was a problem to them in the first place.

Yes, the original new Lords were aware of the dangers of Kevin's Lore. But no, they didn't know that the Oath of Peace would sabatoge their efforts to understand it. What they thought they were doing was taking sensible precautions, handling the new lore with dedicated care. They didn't know that they were blocking themselves off from it completely.

I didn;t make it back to TPTP yet, but in it Mhoram realizes that their oath of peace is what is neutering Kevin's lore, right? And vows to find different lore, that can work with their oath?

Anyone else ever wondered exactly how we went from that, to the Sunbane? I wouldn't mind seeing some kind of recap of exactly went on when Covenant wasn't around.

P.S. If such a recap is in the second saga, don't shoot me, I have so much love to give still.

P.P.S. I was wondering if the...awfulness of the Sunbane and the corruption of the land in the second saga, was partially due to not wanting to write sequels? 'Cuz that whole second trilogy is a super huge slap in the face to Mhoram. frownyface.

Yeah, the recap is in The Wounded Land, when the Clave gives Covenant a vision.

I'm Murrin wrote:Yeah, the recap is in The Wounded Land, when the Clave gives Covenant a vision.

That would be the "Soothtell", if I remember correctly...

Just a quick response to Vraith's post above - does this not conflate Kevins Wards and Earthpower to too high a degree. The Ward's are not Earthpower in themselves, they are a 'course' of training in the use of Earthpower. As such the idea that they were a tool to be very tightly reigned with respect to who could use them and how much, does not of itself imply any judgement of Earthpower itself. We know by the manner in which they were hidden and sequentially revealed (at least that was the idea) that the first 'new' Lords took the risks and responisibility they had very seriousely - but I don't believe they went as far as deliberately designing the OOP to put a stumbling block in the way of Lords yet to come; this I believe was an un-intended consequence.

peter wrote:Just a quick response to Vraith's post above - does this not conflate Kevins Wards and Earthpower to too high a degree. The Ward's are not Earthpower in themselves, they are a 'course' of training in the use of Earthpower. As such the idea that they were a tool to be very tightly reigned with respect to who could use them and how much, does not of itself imply any judgement of Earthpower itself. We know by the manner in which they were hidden and sequentially revealed (at least that was the idea) that the first 'new' Lords took the risks and responisibility they had very seriousely - but I don't believe they went as far as deliberately designing the OOP to put a stumbling block in the way of Lords yet to come; this I believe was an un-intended consequence.

It WOULD conflate them as you say, IF the Oath was blocking only a tool/technique of wielding Earthpower [specifically, in this case, the Old Lords methods or parths thereof.]
But it isn't that kind of rule, and blocking the old Lore is only a side effect.
What it really blocks is the spirit/capacity of people to fully understand/express Earthpower.
They BELIEVE they're taking away the making and wielding of swords. But they're really chopping off their dominant hand, so take away the use of ALL tools except in weak and clumsy fashion.
IF some "early new lords" KNEW that is what they were doing, [as the OP suggested] then they would, in fact, be shifting some of the blame to the instruments themselves...not in the form that we say "control guns" and get the response "guns don't kill people...etc."....not the same because a gun IS just an instrument.
But, in the Land:
Passion is necessary [and wasn't Kevin's error] for the wielder BECAUSE Passion is an attribute of Earthpower.

Heck, Vraith, I would do it one better, and say that the Oath blocks the capacity for anyone to express any power. In the Land - actually, anywhere under the Arch - passion is a requisite of any power, not just Earthpower.

wayfriend wrote:Heck, Vraith, I would do it one better, and say that the Oath blocks the capacity for anyone to express any power. In the Land - actually, anywhere under the Arch - passion is a requisite of any power, not just Earthpower.

Hmmm...I'm not sure, you'd have to persuade me.
Other's surely require passion of some sort to WANT power/knowledge [of whatever variety].
But do they need passion to make it WORK?

But Earthpower does find it's expression in many other ways than via the teaching of Kevin's Lore. Hurtloam would be hurtloam without the Wards as would Aliantha. The Wraiths would still celebrate spring and the Unfettered persue their own vision. Would the Land have really been much the less without the Wards - they did afterall seem to have a particular capacity for leading their users to desicration. That there were other means to acess and put to benneficial uses the power of the Earthblood is evidenced by the decision of the Lords at the end of TPTP to abandon Kevin's Lore and pursue their own path (hem-hem, and we all know where that lead don't we but still...). All in all the Wards *were* a very mixed blessing, but they did provide a defence against Foul (up to a point at least) and they were the best thing the Lords had to hand in this respect. But by and large Earthpower served the people best when it was left to do it's own thing as in say the bestowal of Earthsight etc.

I've always wondered about Wards #3 thru #6 being secreted somewhere in The Land --- and still have never been discovered.

Spoiler

The people are running out of time to find them. The WotWE might devour them.

Billy G. wrote:I've always wondered about Wards #3 thru #6 being secreted somewhere in The Land --- and still have never been discovered.

"Covenant hardly heard her. 'The First and Second Wards' He gestured towards the shining caskets. 'The Third Ward? Did they find the Third Ward? . . ."
(TSCOTC, pg.292)

"Finding the Third Ward they had looked no further for knowledge."

(TSCOTC, pg.303)

So 4-6 could still be out there... not that I think it matters at this point, but with the strangeness of the 7th ward, it makes you wonder what the others were like

Maybe 4-6 were destroyed by the sunbane. It killed off most everything else right?

Wildling wrote:Maybe 4-6 were destroyed by the sunbane. It killed off most everything else right?

That's a point, especially if they were "hidden" within bounds of the Land.
I'm kinda interested, "outside" of the story, in what kind of stuff might have been in them.
Inside the story, though...
[crap...deleted a bunch of stuff cuz it would be spoiler here.]

[quote="Billy G."]I've always wondered about Wards #3 thru #6 being secreted somewhere in The Land --- and still have never been discovered.

What would it really matter? Kevin, the mightiest of any Lord, couldn't beat the Despiser. You can't beat a being not of the world with power of that world. Covenant recognized this.

Vraith wrote:[crap...deleted a bunch of stuff cuz it would be spoiler here.]

Good call. Orlion has been taking lessons from certain other steely-eyed mods and brooks no spoilers. Best not to rile him...

To those curious...RAFO!