Magical Mondays: The Ancient Language in The Inheritance Cycle

It’s been four months since the last time I talked about my favorite series and my love-hate relationship with it, so I figured it was time for another post. One thing that always bothered me about The Inheritance Cycle was its use of magic. In the series, magic is an unstable force that can have various unpredictable consequences. While this is not a problematic idea, the story doesn’t use it to its full capacity. The dragons, for instance, being magical creatures, don’t have control over their own abilities. Yet the story doesn’t use that to the characters’ detriment, so much as it turns them into deus ex machinae in order to fix problems.

However, because magic is unpredictable and therefore dangerous, a long time ago a now-supposed extinct people called the Grey Folk somehow managed to bind magic to a language. Essentially, they made it impossible to use magic without knowing the Ancient Language. Unfortunately, just like the dragons, the rules governing magic in The Inheritance Cycle tend to change depending on what the narrative needs them to be.

Magical Mondays: The Dragons of The Inheritance Cycle and Deus ex Machinae

There really are just too many things to talk about in these books, and hey, it’s been over a month since I’ve visited the series, so it’s time to talk about it again.

Throughout literature and mythology, dragons have been interpreted and portrayed many different ways. The word “dragon” can be quite broad in its definition, and depending on where you go in the world, people will always have different images and ideas that they associate with dragons. The dragons that we’re most concerned about today are European Dragons, who are typically portrayed as evil and greedy, with a few exceptions, especially in modern literature. Here in America, European Dragons are what we tend to be most used to. They are big scaly lizards with large wings. They breathe fire, kidnap virgins, steal gold, and live in caves. With the exception of being innately evil and kidnapping virgins, this is the kind of dragon that The Inheritance Cycle uses.

Although I obviously knew about dragons before The Inheritance Cycle, Paolini’s books were my first real foray into their mythology, and so I’m more familiar with his interpretation than I am with others. Additionally, despite my love for dragons, they tend to bore me, because they’re often portrayed exactly the same over and over again. Paolini’s dragons were new and unique to me at the time, so naturally I fell in love with them (though I do hear that they are ripoffs from The Dragonriders of Pern). But because I’m so under-read in this matter, it is hard to compare them to other dragons and actually say what Paolini did that makes his dragons unique and worth your time. Like all things in his books, he occasionally hints at creativity with his dragons, but ultimately their magic tends to only happen for plot purposes.

Oh, My Pop Culture Jesus: Disney’s Divine Intervention

Disney movie heroes and heroines are good people. Like really good. I mean, like, woodland creatures help them do chores, for cripes’ sake. And so it would be really out of character of them to start straight-up murdering people, even if those people happen to be the bad guys.

So how do the bad guys get dead then? Well, in a lot of Disney, movies it seems as though some sentient force of nature itself reaches out and snuffs them out. Whoever’s running these universes really has a habit of picking sides, and it’s pretty clear who they’re rooting for. Let’s look at a few (I’d warn for spoilers, but seriously, you guys you should have seen these movies already):

In Up, the bad guy Charles Muntz catches his foot on some balloon strings while trying to attack our heroes and falls to his death.

In The Incredibles, Syndrome is sucked into a plane engine by his cape.

In Beauty and the Beast, Gaston loses his balance and falls off the Beast’s high balcony.

In Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs the evil Queen is struck by lightning, falls off a cliff, and is crushed by a boulder as she runs away from Snow White’s cabin.

In Oliver and Company, Sykes’ car is hit by an oncoming train and he dies.

In Tarzan, Clayton falls from a tree and is strangled to death by hanging vines.

Ratigan from The Great Mouse Detective gets caught up in Big Ben and falls to his death.

(Dang, that’s a lot of falling to death. Crappy way to die.)

It’s interesting that, in universes where, for the most part, there are no actively acknowledged gods or God, (save Hunchback, where they talk about God and damnation a lot), that divine retribution or intervention via uncannily timed accident seems to be the go-to way to get rid of a bad guy. Is it that bad for a Disney hero/ine to get some blood on their hands? Most interesting is that this handy plot device isn’t something that’s gone away with age—it spans movies as early as Snow White to as recent as Up.

There are plenty more examples—feel free to name some in the comments.