Resist the Urge to Hug the Ehru ~ A review of "Kings of Ordovar" by Phillip Campbell

If one of these guys suggests that you cold-hammer naga, maybe decline.

The upsurge of interest in historically-charged epics sparked by the most recent attempt to bring Homer's Odyssey to the big screen irritates me. Why? Because it's a fad. And if you need proof of that, recall that the cultural obsession with ancient epics started to fade as soon as the next tedious installment in the Vir Araneus series arrived in theaters.

For me, the fascination with historically-charged epics is persistent. As anyone who reads this blog is likely aware, there's nothing I like better than discovering the heroic words and deeds of distant antiquity recounted by an ancient witness—the more obscure the better.

With that in mind, what is one to make of an obscure historical source detailing the epic rise and calamitous fall of a civilization that never existed?

If that premise sounds intriguing to you, go get yourself a copy of Phillip Campbell's superb new release, Kings of Ordovar.

It's ok to judge this book
by it's cover.

The cover art by itself should draw you in. When I first saw it, I felt that the title should be changed to Giga-Chad Dynasty from Outer Space. But this book is no mere derivative comic-booky "based on the motion picture" fantasy novel. The back-cover copy, mentions that the work was created "in the tradition of Tolkien's Simarillion," and if you've read Tolkien's exploration of the pre-LOTR history of Middle Earth, the comparison is apt. Kings of Ordovar is high fantasy which mimics the language and structures of ancient history. I found it to be more like reading the Book of Samuel or Livy or Venerable Bede than anything you might find in modern fantasy literature.

The only thing that even mildly irritated me about this book was the mere fact that it is, after all, fantasy. One of the greatest pleasures one gets from reading ancient histories is that the writer is permitting the reader a glimpse into the otherwise lost world he lived in, allowing the reader to meet the great men and women he may have known himself—like Procopius who followed Belisarius on his campaigns and witnessed awe-inspiring and even miraculous events with his own eyes. This has a way of humanizing antiquity and making it relatable. I also tend to add passages from such works to my ever-shifting, oft-forgotten mental library of amazing historical anecdotes which memorialize heroic acts to be held up for emulation, or awful deeds to used as a cautionary examples. It feels somehow wrong to do that with fantasy, even when the author (like Tolkein or Campbell) has created characters who exemplify various aspects of the human condition very accurately.

There are many lessons to be learned in Kings of Ordovar. Though the tone is not overtly didactic, the work is presented as a scholarly history in which the narrator assumes a common morality with the reader. Moral themes abound, such as: 

• Decisions warped by greed often lead to disaster;
• God's gifts must be used properly, for when they are not, they can become curses; 
• No matter how powerful you think you are, there's always someone who is more so.

Finally, upon finishing this book, the aphorism quoted by Possidius near the end of his Life of Saint Augustine came to mind: "He is not to be considered great who thinks it strange that wood and stones should fall and mortals die."

These are the kinds of ruminations that result from reading Kings of Ordovar.

But if you prefer the fourteenth installment of Spandex Man versus Goofy Villain #36 to thoughtfully written epics about complex alpha males waging wars across vast continents in armadas of sky-galleons to decide the fates of kingdoms, then this probably isn't the book for you.

My preference is for the latter, so five stars for Kings of Ordovar. Get ye a copy, read and enjoy it.

Campbell's book reminded me of several unique works that I am intimately familiar with, including books with an epic poetic flair such as Claudio Salvucci's Laviniad and Robert Kauffmann's Mask of Ollock. I also detected some faint echoes of John Mason Neale, the Oxford Movement Anglican who wrote novels in the style of historical primary sources, though usually on a patristic theme—The Daughters of Pola being a prime example. If you read Kings of Ordovar and enjoy it, you should consider checking out these other works as well.