By Grace Catherine Greiner

This story begins with a book that was given, and then taken away.  It was Christmas Eve, the night my family and I traditionally exchange gifts.  My youngest sister took her turn doling out packages, many of them small, rectangular—the size of books.  My brother and I were recipients of two such similarly-sized, book-shaped packages.  We were instructed to open them simultaneously (with the caveat that they might be mixed up, that I might be holding his, and vice versa).  I tore off the wrapping paper from my book and behold: it was the wrong book. 

This is how Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind (NW) first made its way into my hands:^[1] briefly, and only to be snatched away and swapped with another mainstay of contemporary fantasy writing—Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings.  This first encounter, however, is hardly inappropriate given the particular place of books—the ways they circulate, the value they hold, the physical spaces in which they’re stored—in Rothfuss’ Kingkiller Chronicle, a trilogy whose third installment has yet to appear on shelves (though an off-shoot novella, The Slow Regard of Silent Things, has offered readers an interlude while they wait for no. 3).

The Chronicle is, from its earliest chapters, exactly what it says on the box: a chronicle—events which are being written down by the appropriately-monikered Chronicler, who records, by hand, the life events of the narrator, Kvothe—musician, student, and would-be arcanist-turned-innkeeper by the time we meet him in the outer narrative frame of The Name of the Wind.  Kvothe’s life story, as told in The Name of the Wind and its sequel, The Wise Man’s Fear,^[2] follows his development as a young boy who grows up among an itinerant troupe of performers (thespians, musicians, and magicians) and is singled out, at a young age, as a prime candidate for education at the (apparently singular) University and instruction in the arcane (read: magical, but also scientific and plastic) arts.  Before the troupe’s massacre by the mysterious Chandrian (a traumatic event which kindles his desire to enter the University in order to gain access to its famous Archives and learn more about his family’s killers), Kvothe begins his training in the art of sympathy with the skilled arcanist who travels with the troupe.  From this arcanist, he inherits a book—a book that he later hocks to fund his first term’s tuition at the University, where he undertakes study in a variety of subjects, quickly passing from one rank of the Arcanum to the next whilst also facing an inordinate number of extracurricular trials and adventures along the way.

As the title of the trilogy and its first installment suggest, names, stories, and storytelling should be at the forefront of our minds as we read the Chronicle—stories which we witness literally coming into being as stories as we listen to Kvothe tell them and watch Chronicler write them down on one broad sheet of paper after another.  But it’s not only stories themselves which fascinate Rothfuss and his characters in the Chronicle.  It is also the physical forms through which stories and histories are transmitted that matter.  That is, for Rothfuss and his characters, books matter. 

Continue reading ““Finding Nothing Can Be Finding Something”: Medievalism, Book History, and Accessing the Archives in Patrick Rothfuss’ Kingkiller Chronicle“ →