Lois McMaster Bujold’s Sharing Knife tetralogy never, I think, equalled the popularity and recognition of her Miles Vorkosigan novels or her World of the Five Gods work (Curse of Chalion, Paladin of Souls, The Hallowed Hunt, and the Penric and Desdemon novellas…) but it remains, for me, a revelation about the kinds of stories that it is possible to tell in fantasy, and the struggles it is possible to reflect.
Many fantasy novels involve potentially world-ending threats, and supremely dangerous entities that must be fought. But for most of them, the threat is a discrete thing, a single sprint or at most an occasionally-recurring marathon, not an endless relay handed on through generations of unrelenting vigilance and constant, quotidian, repetitive work, where the margins for error are unforgiving but every disaster must be recovered from, with enough strength left over to go straight back to work.
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Beguilement
In the world Bujold draws in the Sharing Knife books (Beguilement, Legacy, Passage, Horizon, and the novella Knife Children), malices, otherwise known as blight bogles, pose a threat to all life. They hatch and drain life from their surroundings, and suborn—and create—animals and humans to further their ability to drain life from further away. As they grow, they molt—their first stage is sessile, but with every molt they gain more abilities, and with every life they consume they learn more. At first they operate on little more than instinct, but the more mature a malice is, the more dangerous it is. Their origins are lost to history, but there’s no telling where or how often a juvenile malice might emerge. Only constant patrolling by the Lakewalker people has a chance of catching malices while they’re still young enough that the threat is moderate, but the Lakewalkers are always stretched and have more ground to cover than people to cover it, and it takes a lot of Lakewalkers to support a patroller in the field.
In recent years, the Lakewalkers have had to come to terms with settled folk—that Lakewalkers call “farmers,” although they include people who do other work than agricultural—moving into and settling land that hasn’t been entirely cleared of malices. Lakewalkers have innate abilities that farmers don’t, which are to some degree heritable, and which are necessary to their endless work. The difference in abilities is compounded by a difference in cultures and outlooks. But without integration, over time conflict will become inevitable.
In the Sharing Knife books, Bujold holds very large problems which come to the boil on time scales longer than a single human life—long, slow, systemic, and when it comes to people and cultures, complicated problems—to the forefront, while balancing that vast scale with the intimacy of two individuals, one farmer and one Lakewalker, whose problems of forging a relationship across their different cultures (and perhaps holding open the possibility that relationships like theirs don’t have to cut the Lakewalker side off from their people) are personal and immediate.
The solutions to the slow, systemic problems are the work of more than a single human life, or even generations, and will give rise to different problems. Life is change and life is growth. The personal problems that face Fawn Bluefield, farmer, and Dag Redwing Hickory Oleana, Lakewalker, are related to those larger problems. The Sharing Knife tetralogy is almost anthropological in how it uses a focus on the individual to make larger social, world-scale issues understandable. And while its narrative focus on Dag and Fawn—and their work at making a space in the world that welcomes relationships like theirs, that makes them fruitful, and gives hope for mutual understanding between separate communities—forms the structure for the events of the books, in terms of theme, the Sharing Knife always has one eye on that longer, larger horizon.
In one sense, the Sharing Knife books are intimate, measured, domestic things: part romance, part travelogue, a tiny personal story in a wide green world. (Their closest successor in terms of emotional scale is probably Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor.) But in another, its epic scale is staggeringly large: as large as climate change and colonialism, and all the other long, slow problems we know whose ongoing effects are generations in the making, and more generations in the solving. The only way to approach that kind of scale in fiction is through the tiny and the personal, I think, and here Bujold does it astoundingly well.
Liz Bourke is a cranky queer person who reads books. She holds a Ph.D in Classics from Trinity College, Dublin. Her first book, Sleeping With Monsters, a collection of reviews and criticism, was published in 2017 by Aqueduct Press. It was a finalist for the 2018 Locus Awards and was nominated for a 2018 Hugo Award in Best Related Work. Find her at her blog, or find her at her Twitter. She supports the work of the Irish Refugee Council, the Transgender Equality Network Ireland, and the Abortion Rights Campaign.
I……had some issues with the series, which carries Bujold’s wonderful characters and dialogue, but mixes it with problems that I don’t think she handles well. The biggest one comes with Barr from the 3rd and 4th books, who admits to raping a girl by using his ground to convince her to have sex with him a while back. The books center this around Barr and not around the poor woman, and while Barr is enough of a side character to make this not an absolutely impossible problem to get around, this is not the case with the series’ sequel novella “Knife Children” which is centered around the resultant daughter of that rape winding up living with Barr – and the mother basically gets no say in it and is basically cast to the side (it’s pretty awful when you think about it!)
That, as well as the less big but still very real cultural issues that come from intermarriage of two groups, which Bujold just casts aside as meaningless in the face of love, just made it impossible for me to love this series as much as I have pretty much every other series Bujold has put out.
I’m glad to see you mention The Goblin Emperor because that and this series are my go to recommendations for people who are looking for books about fundamentally kind people (see also: Digger). I’ve reread them multiple times and look forward to doing so again many times in the future
The Sharing Knife series was the last one of Bujold’s which I encountered — I found the quadrilogy for sale in a game shop whilst looking for something else entirely — but I think it’s some of her best material and I’m glad I picked it up. Not that there was any chance I wouldn’t, of course; there are two authors of whom I will purchase anything with their name on it: one is Terry Pratchett, and the other is LMB.
I enjoyed the series, and the way it was rooted in a background that echoed early 19th century America, instead of the overused neo-medieval tropes of much fantasy. Like all of her works, it contained marvelously well drawn characters.
I struggled with this series and I think it was because the first book seems like a kind of damsel in distress, older & wiser man teaches young girl what love is kind of urk. I did persist because I like LMB’s books very much, and out of the entire series I think I enjoyed the last book the most.
This series was my introduction to LMB—thanks to Alan@5, for reviewing in his column a year and a half ago. I tend to avoid the overtly popular, whether it is books or other popularity-based choices, so I had never tried a Vorkosigan at that point. All the problems others have mentioned may be valid, but I was captivated anyway.
@@@@@garik16 — I think you’re mischaracterising the text, when you say Barr admits to raping Bluebell. Not necessarily in a way that blunts your critique, but it’s pretty clear that what Barr *thinks* he’s admitting to is a seduction, and also that he’s overly flattering in his assessment of his own powers — i.e. that his attempt to subdue her will through groundwork quite likely failed, meaning that her consent was genuine.
To be clear, I’m not arguing against the idea that what Barr was attempting would have been rape. Part of the reason I find him such a compelling character is that he doesn’t understand this, yet he still comes to see that what he *does* think he did to Bluebell was deeply wrong, and he tries to take responsibility for it. I see him as a depiction of a wildly unsympathetic young man who eventually tries to do better. He’s one of the reasons I like this series so much.
#8- I think throughout the series you could argue Beguilement is like being drunk, it lowers your internal censor. The problem is it requires a longer time to wear off than alcohol, giving Beguiled people more time to do life altering stupid things. But I like the discussions of Beguilement and consent.
A lot of the series is about listening. Ground sense just lets you listen in a new way. I love Fawn and Dags relationship, because unlike their kinfolk, they listen to each other.
Personally I reread book 1 ( Fawn rescues Dag from the grave ) and book 4 ( Fawn and Dag pay it forward to the next generation) a lot. I only read book 2 ( Magic folk are stubborn) and book 3 ( across the world in 80+ leagues) occasionally to brush up on world details.
One of the things I love about these books are the little details. I could write a lengthy essay on Lakewalker names and what they hint about the past that Bujold clearly thought out at length. But, the story never stops and draws attention to them.
There are also hints about what happened on the rest of the planet. The western hemisphere seems to have been cut off from the rest of the world, and there are hints of some kind of death trap out at sea. That’s great if the Malices ever get loose. But, in the present, Farmer ships that go too far never come back.
There’s also the whole question of what will happen if and when the Lakewalkers ever destroy the last Malice. The eastern hemisphere may still have people who remember all the powers the Lakewalkers have lost or given up and may be the “gods” the Lakewalkers said abandoned them until the Malices are gone. As Barrayar could tell them, being a rediscovered civilization that has lost centuries of technology is not necessarily a good thing.
When Remo discusses what Barr did, he only mentions Barr, er, influencing Bluebell’s sex drive but not influencing her mind and thoughts. However, Barr later claims that Dag is following a double standard when he influences a clerk to officiate a wedding he’d initially refused to, implying he’d used true beguilement in the past. Still, until Bujold says aye or nay, I prefer to think Barr didn’t mentally coerce Bluebell.
I like books 3 and 4 best. We are beyond the relationship drama and into trying to fix the world.
I love the tricks Bujold puts in that you only catch on the reread. When Dag makes his new sharing knife, Fawn has him promise not to use it while she’s “above ground and breathing. “
Bujold wrote three books in a row, each featuring a different deity.
I don’t think it’s an accident that, in the next series she created, the commonest expletive is “Absent Gods!”
Oh, I love these books, and have read them all multiple times. I agree with #6 that the age difference between Dag and Fawn is a bit urky—and sometimes I wonder how the books might have been different if Fawn had been a 30-something matron instead of a teenager. But the thing I like best about the books is how Fawn is in no way special. She has no special ground ability; she has no special training; she is skilled at utterly prosaic tasks—cooking, cleaning, looking after babies—as her upbringing has conditioned her. But she’s good at those tasks. (The scene where she comes home after meeting Dag and her mother tells her to make a couple of pies for dinner—good grief! Making pies is a huge deal for me, involving a day or two of planning and scheduling, and Fawn just acts like it’s a matter of setting the table.) And those tasks are accepted as important, and her ability to do them well is valued.
I mean, she’s also smart and adventurous and brave, but there’s none of that tiresome assumption that she’s good and special because she rejects traditional domestic chores. The Lakewalker camp has very little use for them, focused as they are on fighting blights, and look how uncomfortable their lives are. No, traditional domestic work is recognized as valuable, and part of Fawn’s goodness and specialness come not despite but because of her ability to do it well.
I very much enjoyed the subversion of the idea that the heroine from the Non-Magical People has to be Specially Secretly Magical — Fawn isn’t magical, and it’s all right that she isn’t. (What she is, among other things, is a Muse — she asks questions that inspire other people to think; Dag’s affectionate nickname of ‘Spark’ for her is a lot more significant than it appears.) More: the difficulties she and Dag have to overcome are real and important ones, and not just to be lightly brushed aside by an application of Modern Thinking. It really is important that the Lakewalkers keep their bloodlines strong enough to deal with the ever-present malice threat; it really is important that they don’t divert effort from that endless war. There’s reason, and not just prejudice, behind the barriers between farmer and Lakewalker. (Not that there’s not also prejudice; we see a lot of that in book 2.) And so when Dag and Fawn do overcome those difficulties, it’s a well-earned triumph, and the reader doesn’t feel cheated.
There are issues that aren’t settled in the books; the biggest is, as a couple of posters have said, that of consent and the ability to influence people. We are told (by several characters) that Lakewalkers don’t want to be lords, don’t want to rule over other people like their ancestors (possibly) did. But how that will work in practice is much more of an open question. The ethics of beguilement comes up a few times, but it’s not really resolved as much as it is brushed under the carpet. Of course, not everything has to be resolved at once, and I keep hoping that Bujold will return to this universe…
That is one thing that I’ve wondered about – malices are an existential threat to this world, and as far as we are shown, to defeat them requires people with a strong dose of Lakewalker genes. Integrating Lakewalker and Farmer cultures may seem like a good idea in the context of Dag and Fawn and their relationship, but does it lead to disaster in a few centuries when there’s no one left who can deal with a malice?
(On the other hand, getting Lakewalkers and Farmers to trust each other and rely on each other seems important for preventing other bad outcomes – see N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth series for a culture where the magical minority is both hated and feared while also being absolutely essential.)
Ellynne @10:
I also really like the names. Bujold seems to be suggesting that the Lakewalkers once spoke a different language, or at least, many of their personal names are so old that meaning has been lost (Dag, Remo, Barr, Arkady, etc). But they also seem to be picking up Farmer naming conventions, perhaps without realizing it (e.g. Sumac).
What I like best about the books is Bujold’s extended conversation with Tolkien. “We must not become lords again. That was our fathers’ sin that near slew the world.” It isn’t just her interrogation of the rangers, magical aristocracy, and the return of the king, though. Bujold also has an interesting take on the problem of orcs, and I love that the sharing knife is as embedded in the geography and nature of the midwest as LotR is in England. Also, the river-daughter.
For all that they talk about Lords, it doesn’t seem like anyone in that part of the world has any experience with them. I don’t remember coming across even a mayor, let alone a hereditary ruler. It’s not surprising they have no concrete ideas for how to police rulers. Their only solution for rogue Lakewalkers is for other Lakewalkers to take them down, though with the shields it would be possible for Farmers to help.
Despite all the major thematic work, my biggest take-away from these books is that “oh shit” moment when they see a mudman on the road in book 4.
I’m afraid of the Lakewalker/malice end-game. The problem is two-fold – how do you know you’ve killed the last malice? If it’s not the last malice, how long until the next one comes out? They apparently come out more-or-less randomly – the chances are really good that the last few are coming Lakewalker generations apart. How do they keep the knowledge of how to identify and eliminate malices going when it’s been hundreds of years since the last one?
Can I hope for laser-guided air-launched Sharing Knives?
@sraun: I think we can depend upon Whit to be involved, if laser-guided air-launched sharing knives do happen! Between him and Fawn, we see crossbow-powered sharing knives, so they’re moving in that direction.
@10: Ellyne:
“When Remo discusses what Barr did, he only mentions Barr, er, influencing Bluebell’s sex drive but not influencing her mind and thoughts. However, Barr later claims that Dag is following a double standard when he influences a clerk to officiate a wedding he’d initially refused to, implying he’d used true beguilement in the past.”
That’d be — and is specifically named as by Barr — what happened in Book 3 when Barr tried to make Berry fire Dag. Dag absolutely hammered Barr over that at the time, but then went and did basically the same thing to the clerk, and Barr is completely in the right to call Dag on the hypocrisy there in my books. Fawn’s, too.
(Also notable: Barr couldn’t make that work on Berry either, which suggests that persuasions aren’t a strong suit of his whatever he says.)
Will Liz do more with this? Given the images of the four books, I was taken aback when the article ended. I had to make myself read these, so I was hoping for more discussions that might make me like the books better. I was ok with the last one, but never felt a desire to re-read any of them. Yet I have reread the Vorkosigan and Chalion books (and The Goblin Emperor) many times over.
I’ve read the series twice, like it a fair bit. Though I only just noticed the blue/red contrast of Bluefield and Redwing.
Yeah, the setting is like generalized Tolkien. Not one Dark Lord, but multiple dark lord seeds. Multiple ‘magic weapons’, at a cost. Rangers, down to being descended from asshole lords in the past, and wandering now, and having minor magic powers of their own with which they keep guard. (Tolkien was too vague and subtle about it, but there’s a reasonable case that the Rangers weren’t just ordinary people experienced in woodcraft.) Farmers as hobbits, I suppose. Mudmen as unproblematic ‘orcs’, harking back to one of Tolkien’s early rejected ideas for them (Morgoth making them out of earth and slime.)
And like Tolkien’s Shire, the Wide Green World is oddly apolitical, at least in formal ways; I think the most we see of farmer government is the town clerks who record things.
Age gap relationships are a thing that happens, sometimes well. Over her works, Lois has had a wide range of types: Miles and Ekaterin are about the same age, as are the couple of the Spirit Ring, or Miles and Elli (she’s probably at least slightly older, she was a mercenary when he was 17.) Aral and Cordelia were 44 and 33. Cordelia is a lot older than Jole. Dag’s a lot older than Fawn… and still might outlive her.
And of course widowers or even widows marrying someone much younger was a not uncommon thing.
Not all farmers are hobbits, but Fawn and Whit are short and have curly hair.
There are many things I love about the books, but one of those things is the communal Lakewalker society – both the way that everyone really does look out for each other, and also that everyone’s labor and contribution to the society is both necessary and valued, whether the labor is wielding the knife that kills the malice, or patrolling, or back at camp raising children, or making fancy arrow-repelling coats or whatever. Kind of a Utopian fantasy, in some respects, but a very compelling one.
ergative @13: Totally agree that one of the great things about these books is that domestic tasks (and ability to do them well) are shown as important and valued. But totally disagree about the Lakewalker camp – they absolutely value domestic tasks (spinning, making clothes, shelling peas, preserving plunkin, taking care of horses, …), it’s just that the set of chores to be done is a bit different than it is at a farmer homestead. Dag/others note multiple times that each patroller is outfitted and supported by the labor of multiple other people working back at camp.
Theak @21: For what it’s worth, I also had to make myself finish these books the first time through, really wasn’t in to them, thought #3 was incredibly boring. I don’t know how much of that was due to not being in the right mood, vs how much was because these books just work better on rereads, when you understand where the whole thing is going. But anyway, second time through I loved them, they’re now favorite comfort reads for me (and #3 is probably my favorite of the lot), despite the persistent urky-ness.
@many: Never noticed the LoTR parallels before. Thanks for pointing that out.
Just jumping in late in the game to say that I appreciated the piece – thanks as always Ms. Bourke – and the Sharing Knife books are favorites of mine that are on my regular re-read cycle. The world building is strong (as it is for all of the Bujold books) and I enjoy the slow paced relationship based on trust, respect and love between Fawn and Dag that expands to the growing circle of people around them.
I’m surprised we don’t see more books in this genre – the world weary warrior who remains great at his job but who has given up on a normal life of love and fun ends up falling head over heels for someone who gives him a reason to begin living again. Are there other books in this genre? I’d like to see them.
The conversation with Tolkien, carried on in the background, is one of the many things that make these books great. What’s the implication of long-term Ranger status, what’s the society behind them like, all that stuff. (Tolkien was aware of these issues, I’m sure, but LOTR doesn’t go into them in very much detail, even in Appendix V, ‘The Tale of Arwen and Aragorn’.)