Haruchai are human.
Their environment has given them an attitude.
Suffice. Distrust lore. Contain emotions. Their environment and their attitude have given them physical characterisrics - strength, endurance, tenacity.
All idiosyncratic phenomenon seen with
Haruchai are usually related to being
more human, more like us, rather than less. Tull's emotion. Bannor's humility. Cail's and Brinn's seduction. Brinn's ambition. Cail's desire.
Donaldson made them heroic, and made their heroism usual, for a specific purpose. He wanted Covenant to be in a Land of heroes.
In 'Epic Fantasy in the Modern World: A Few Observations', Donaldson wrote:I wanted to bring the epic back into contact with the real world, I chose the technical device of reversing Tennyson's method. He took one epic character, Arthur, and surrounded him with "real," "modern" human beings. I took one real, modern human being, Thomas Covenant, and surrounded him with epic characters: the Giants, the Bloodguard, Lord Mhoram, the Ranyhyn, the jheherrin: characters or images which don't in any way pertain to our real experience of life, but which do pertain to the part of us which dreams, the part of us which imagines, the part of us which aspires. And in Covenant's case those characters or images do seduce him - away from cynicism and bitterness and hatred; toward love, friendship, and loyalty, toward the willingness to risk himself for things larger than he is.
It would defeat the purpose if the
Haruchai were not human, if their efforts were inate rather than heroic.
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