Names are of the greatest importance in fantasy fiction, especially the kind that posits a world very different to ours and with all sorts of magical things going on. Names in other-world fantasy usually have to be minted anew — there are not a lot of fantasy characters called Tom or Bob. They’ve got to sound exotic enough to convince the reader that this world is unlike our own, and yet they’ve also got to have the right ring to them. Noble, heroic characters must sound noble and heroic, and the obverse must be true for the baddies. No use having a character called Zlagzzurgg and trying to convince us he’s a hero.
In The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien, the grandaddy of this whole genre, invented entire fantasy languages that would allow him to give his characters authentic-sounding names. But still they had to sound right to an anglophone ear. Latin may never have been spoken in Middle Earth, but the “Dark Lord” is called Sauron, giving him a vaguely reptilian resonance, as in “saurian”. Aragorn, the hero, carries in his name an echo of the old knightly part of Spain called Aragón. Gandalf, however, has a completely otherworldly yet entirely appropriate name, and (for a Hobbit, at least) Bilbo Baggins is perfect. So is Gollum: the name alone sounds like a gulp of slime.
In his best-selling novel, Eragon, author Christopher Paolini seems not to have thought through this problem with the necessary thoroughness, in my view. It’s a fantasy about a world in which dragons are ridden by special riders, and a young farmboy called Eragon (note the echo of Aragorn) gets to be a dragon-rider. This is a great surprise to him at the time, but he should perhaps have guessed that his destiny had something to do with dragons, because his name is “Dragon”, except with an E instead of a D.
The dragon in Eragon, by contrast, is called Saphira, which doesn’t sound very exotic at all — I kept thinking of “Saffy” in Absolutely Fabulous. The dragon is a blueish colour, so perhaps the association is to sapphire. The land in which all this takes place is called Alagaësia, which sounds like a medical condition. The evil king, Galbatorix, seems to have got his name straight out of an Asterix comic, minus the schoolboy pun. (One Galba was, briefly, a Roman emperor.) The Urgals sound like Orcs from the Urals.
In his defence, Paolini was not yet 20 when he published Eragon. The novel was marketed to a teen readership and did very well there before crossing over (like the Harry Potter books) to an adult audience. The second novel, Eldest, came out last year, and a third is on its way — already the whole package has been titled The Inheritance Trilogy. It is mandatory that fantasy writers produce at least trilogies, though first prize is a sequence of seven to 10 books.
At any rate, this means that Eragon the movie is the start of a new fantasy franchise, one presumably hoping to fill the gap opened by the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which raked in all that money and got all those awards. Certainly, our festive season moviegoing has felt a little flatter since the last of that three-parter wound itself up and Frodo finally got the ring in the fires of Mount Doom.
Eragon shows all the signs of being written by a teenager for a teen audience. The business about riding dragons would appear to be a veiled metaphor for the rigours of sex. The dragon is unequivocally female (voiced by Rachel Weisz), and much is made of the mystic bond between dragon and rider. It seems unfair, though, that if the rider dies she dies, whereas if she dies he’s just depressed for the rest of his life.
The remainder is fairly straightforward, with nothing to surprise anyone who has read a reasonable amount of the kind of quasi-medieval fantasy that descends in ever-larger tomes from The Lord of the Rings. As the voice of Jeremy Irons explains early on, the land of Alagaësia is under the rule of the evil Galbatorix (and even Irons, with his Shakespearean articulation, has trouble with that name). Galbatorix has annihilated the last of the dragons and dragon-riders, so he gets understandably snappy when he loses an unhatched dragon’s egg and the dragon herself subsequently pops forth in the hovel of the aforementioned farmboy.
Soon Eragon and his dragon are on the run, or on the fly, trying to get to the anti-Galbatorix resistance, the Varden. He and she are their new hope, to paraphrase Star Wars; the old messiah-type mythology comes into play. Eragon discovers he has magic powers, channelled through the dragon, and so forth. (Don’t mention The Force.) Luckily we have Irons on hand to explain as we go, as well as to test young Eragon’s sword-fighting skills in a scene not unlike those in The Karate Kid.
The plot is pretty mechanical and the dialogue unafraid of cliché, but there is a great bad guy in the form of the “shade” Durza (Robert Carlyle). John Malkovich, as Galbatorix, is thus far limited to spitting out terse instructions to his minions, but presumably his role will expand in the next movie, as will that of the mysterious Murtagh (Garrett Hedlund), whose name comes straight from Lethal Weapon. There’s a good battle to climax the movie, but things are fairly routine until then.
Edward Speelers does okay as Eragon, who is very clean and well groomed for a young peasant. This rather scrubbed vision signals that the movie as a whole lacks texture; it has the smooth look of an animated adventure, which I suppose much of it is. Saphira the dragon, too, looks rather mundane and overly cute. In terms of the story, it’s all pretty smooth as well: not much complication to hold things up or give complexity to the characters. Basically, it makes a Harry Potter movie look like War and Peace. At least the director has a promising fantasy-style name — he’s called Stefen Fangmeier.