Murtagh Group Spork: Part 1, Chapter 2: The Fulsome Feast

I have issues with the name of this inn. First, it is very silly. Second, the word “fulsome”, while having credible established roots as far back as the 13th century, has a bunch of historically negative connotations that are decidedly NOT what an innkeeper would want their food to be associated with. Fantasy world aside, in the late 14th century through to pretty much the 20th century, the word “fulsome” had the meaning of being disgusting, sickening, or nauseating, as in the feeling of having overeaten. In the 15th century that developed into “offensive to taste or good manners”, and it wasn’t until the 1960s that it started to return to its original more positive meaning of “abundant, plentiful”

(via the Online Etymology Dictionary)

According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, in the 19th and early 20th centuries fulsome was “used disapprovingly to describe excessive, insincere praise and flattery”

So either Alagaesia is set in the fantasy mid 13th century, long before the sort of 14th to 15th C. arms and armour that are commonly seen in Alagaesia were invented, or it’s set in the 1960s or even more recently. Groovy.

I really don’t think any self-respecting innkeeper or hotelier would have advertised that their food is “so offensive to good taste, you'll be feeling nauseous!"

On an unrelated note, remember those interviews back in the early days of his fame when Paolini would brag about all the research he put in to using historically-correct words, and avoiding modern terms like “backpedal”? Fun times.

I should admit here that I’ve written this entire section about the chapter title without even opening the book yet. So let’s get into it.

The Fulsome Feast

The chapter opens with a fairly standard description of a medieval fantasy inn. The description isn’t notably bad, but is also completely forgettable.

Except for the line “mugs behind the polished bar were arranged in mannered rows”, because “mannered” is completely the wrong word here. “neat rows” would have been far better and more visual, and less glaringly wrong.

Here’s an obnoxiously-described bard in the corner, and a few other incredibly forgettable Fantasy DnD Inn details.

Murtagh introduces himself as “Tornac son of Tereth”. Which is kind of a touching tribute to his mentor and surrogate father figure, but I think it would have been much more emotionally powerful if he had chosen a different name and introduced himself as “son of Tornac.”

Murtagh wasn’t about to miss an opportunity for a hot meal, not when he didn’t have to cook it for once.

This is really awkwardly phrased. I can appreciate the sentiment, but the way it’s phrased just seems awkward. The italic ‘he’ just adds to the awkwardness, like Paolini couldn’t figure out how to get his point across without tonal emphasis. Usually an italicised he is used to refer to someone that the character doesn’t like. Oh, he thought. It’s him. There's a tone of... scorn? about italicising the pronoun like that. What's she doing here?

I would probably have written something along the lines of After weeks on the road, Murtagh wasn’t about to miss the opportunity for a hot meal.

The cooking for himself is implied.

Sigling was already moving toward the back room. “Won’t take more ’n two shakes of a lamb’s tail, Master Tornac.”

I appreciate the attempt to give the dialogue some colour with metaphor and idioms, but this specific line is a distinctly British and Australian saying that was first recorded in 1840. A medieval innkeeper is not likely to use this particular expression. “at a trice” is from the 14th or 15th C. and would therefore be a lot more suitable for this situation.

Murtagh thinks about the Tornac whose name he’s using, and wonders whatever happened to the horse he lost back at the end of Eragon. He can’t have been too upset, considering this is the first time in 4 books he’s thought of it.

A couple of workers make to sit at Murtagh’s table, but he politely mentions that he’s waiting for a friend. One of the workers “looked like he wanted to argue”, but the other one talks him down, to which he replies:

“Ah, fine. Aight. Hands off.”

Aight?

When did the setting suddenly switch from medieval fantasyland to 2010s New York?

And yes, I did do some research. “aight” as a contraction of “all right” is unique and specific to modern African American slang,. It has spread to other communities through social media, but it began in African American communities. Other cultures and dialects have ways of contracting “all right”, but nobody else (on record) used “aight” or “ight” until 21st C. AAVE.

On one hand, it’s good that Paolini was clearly trying to avoid the anachronistic “okay”, but on the other hand he’s replaced it with something even more anachronistic.

Taking a look at Wiktionary’s list of Middle English Interjections (yes, that's a thing that exists), something more appropriate but with similar meaning might be avoy, clum, hush, wel or well, or even hey. Any of those would have been less immersion-breaking that “aight”.

Anyway. The goons leave Murtagh alone, so he can listen to the song that “troubador” is singing by the Fireplace.

And, gentle antis, we have ourtself our first Paoem.

For newer members who might be asking, what is a paoem? It’s a poem, but one written in Paolini’s inimitably terrible style.

We have had great fun examining Paolini’s various attempts at poetry through is writing career, starting with Eragon and continuing right through to To Sleep In A Sea of Starts, and it seems now he’s continuing the tradition of including terrible poetry and songs.

So buckle up, this spork just fell off the rails.

At first the words of his song were hard to make out, but Murtagh watched the man’s

lips and concentrated, and by and by, he made sense of them. And the troubadour sang:

—and so to dread Urû’baen.

Rejoice! Rejoice! The dauntless Dragon Rider flew to fight,

To free our land from danger and fright.

Then mighty Eragon faced the king in bloody conquest,

In a great and terrible contest.

And with flaming blade and blinding light,

He slew that horrid tyrant, that ageless blight,

Galbatorix, bane of dragons and Riders alike.

First point, before we get to the song: lip-reading doesn’t work like that. The best you can get from lip-reading is maybe one in three words, not an entire word-perfect song. ESPECIALLY with songs, because the mouth moves very differently when singing than it does when speaking normally.

Speaking from experience as a hearing impaired person who doesn't sign.

And I’m suddenly reminded of the frustration I felt when going through the previous poems. Because there’s some semblance of rhyme, but the rhythm of the first two lines (excluding the half line at the start, because we missed the beginning of it) is ruined by the third.

-/ -/ -/-/-/-/-/

-/-/-/- -/

-/-/- -/-/-/-/-

- -/-/-/-

- -/-/-/-/

-/-/-/- -/-/

/-/- - - /-- /- -/

There’s just no consistency from line to line. The first two are fine, the first line is even consistently iambic, but then none of the following lines fit the same pattern. And the metre is all over the place:

14, 9, 14, 8, 9, 11, 13

There’s not even an attempt at a consistent rhythm. At least there are some decent end-rhymes of flight/fright, conquest/contest, and light/blight/alike. That makes the rhyme scheme aabbccc, which isn’t terrible or uncommon, but in the format of a song I think something more traditional like an aacbbc or ababcc scheme would have worked better. But really, the rhyme isn’t important when the syllable counts are all over the place. The aabbccc pattern is a perfectly useful and valid rhyme structure, but even a basic abab rhyme can struggle with such inconsistent metre.

As a narrative poem there isn’t much scope for heightened metaphor or lengthy descriptions, but it still lacks that sense of loftiness for which poems like Beowulf or Sigurd The Volsung are so loved.

Overall it’s not the worst poem Paolini has written, but it’s also not his best. Like Sweet Aethrid O’Dauth from Brisingr, the rhythm runs into the syllable inconsistency no matter what kind of tune you try to put to it.

The irony is this is meant to be intentionally bad, as indicated in the text, but I can’t really tell much difference between Paolini being intentionally bad and Paolini sincerely trying his best.

Moving on, Murtagh makes some surprisingly self-aware comments – by which I mean, it was surprising for Paolini to admit it, as it paints Eragon in a less than ideal light – about how Eragon “would have lost if not for me”, and complaining that nobody, including Nasuada and Arya, have actually spoken out in his defence.

Murtagh’s pseudo-Byronic brooding is interrupted by the inkeeper’s return with his food and drink.

“You need aught else, you shout my name an’ I’ll be back right quick-like.”

It feels wrong, but actually his use of “aught” here is not only correct but historically appropriate. Since the late 12th century, “aught” has had the meaning of “something, anything”, so in the phrase “if you need something/anything else”, using aught here is appropriate. Even though “anything” is equally archaic but more easy for modern readers to parse.

It just feels wrong.

“quick-like” is similarly not technically wrong, it’s just terrible. It sounds like dialogue of an 18th century London urchin, not a medieval innkeeper. “right quick” would be perfectly fine, but “right quick-like” is… again, it just feels wrong.

Which I think is going to be a common complaint about Paolini’s word choices, especially in dialogue. I almost miss the more no-nonsense modern dialogue of Fractal Noise. Err, of the non “ethnic” characters, like Alex and Jonas. Pushkin’s dialogue can be thrown into the hole.

There’s some more thinking, and eating, and Murtagh notes offhandedly that the fork is wrought iron. This much be a really fancy inn, to not only provide utensils to each patron, but iron ones at at that. If I was a wandering traveller spending a night at a fantasy medieval inn, I’d expect to bring my own knife and spoon. Forks weren’t widespread in Western Europe until as late as the 18th century, despite being commonplace in Persia and the Middle East. Generally English, French, German etc. people, especially the lower classes, used spoons, knives, and their hands.

I suppose it could be interesting if Murtagh commented on the unusual-ness of eating with a fork, and the innkeeper replied with something like “they’re the latest thing from the elves! All the rich folk are using them.” That could have been a fun little detail.

Murtagh eats his dinner of roast mutton and turnips with half a loaf of black rye bread and thinks it is simple fare, but better than his own cooking.

I was going to make a point about roast mutton not being “simple fare”, but I found some historical sources that indicated that the average citizen of Barcelona in the 1400s was eating almost half a pound of red meat (most of it from sheep) per day, regardless of class or wealth. And staff and household members in an Earl’s household in England are anywhere from 1 to 2 pounds of meat per meal (source:https://www.medievalists.net/2020/11/medieval-europeans-meat-consumption/)

So roast mutton isn’t a feast-day rarity like a lot of re-enactors and historical fictions assume, but considering he’s been on the road for “the past twelvemonth”, having to hunt his own food and prepare and cook it himself, Murtagh should really be a little more grateful for a hot meal instead of calling it “simple fare” like a spoiled git.

Spoiler: this is not the last time he ends up behaving remarkably like ~~a spoiled sociopathic brat~~ Eragon.

Also, can I just say one more thing before I move on to the next page? “twelvemonth”? When, in the entire series so far, has anyone, anywhere, from any race or political or social group, referred to a year as “[a] twelvemonth”? This weird phrase comes completely out of nowhere, with no precedent anywhere in the established world of Alagaesia, and serves absolutely no purpose except to make Murtagh look like he’s stumbled into the story from some other even worse-written book.

Hahaha, ‘worse-written’. I do like to joke.

SUDDENLY Murtagh’s dinner is interrupted as a young girl bursts through the door! Antis and Gentle-Shurts, if you have already read The Fork The With and the Worm, you can safely skim the rest of this chapter. I almost want to do a side by side comparison to see how much overlap there is between these two scenes.

Murtagh spends entirely too much of his attention on the girl’s appearance, including noticing that “had [the innkeeper’s mouth and chin.” The girl sits opposite him, and he notes that she is “so young, so pure.”

I’m… just going to keep moving on. The have a conversation in which the girl shares that her name is Essie. They shake hands, and Murtagh notes that her hand is “startlingly smooth”.

So far in this spork, my document has been keeping pace with the page count: I’m on page 6 of my spork, and I’m also on page 6 of the chapter. Just so you know.

Essie explains how another girl, the daughter of the Earl, is mean to her and tried to blackmail her via her father’s money. Essie was forced to humiliate her friend—

You know what, just go read The Fork. It’s literally just a perspective-swapped rewrite. The dialogue is exactly the same, only the perspective and descriptions are slightly different.

The chapter ends on a cliffhanger halfway through the The Fork story, and it will be up to the inimitable Epistler to walk up through the second half of The Fork, in the next chapter: Fork and Blade.

Thoughts: This is not a second chapter. This is something you’d expect halfway through a story, not at the start. There’s no tension, no stakes, we don’t learn what Murtagh’s goals are, or what’s stopping him from reaching them; we don’t learn what the main plot of the story is going to be about.

Nothing that we should learn in the first two chapters of a book. Even in Eragon, we at least learned a bit about what to expect from the story (a magic mcguffin is being hunted by the villain, and then it appears in front of the protagonist).

Plus, it is insultingly lazy to simply recycle an already published scene that readers have already paid for, into a new book that readers have had to pay for again. It’s insulting to the readers, and it’s insulting to the craft of storytelling.

There's nothing particularly terrible about this chapter, but I still feel insulted and ripped-off.