No Substance #138: David and Leigh Eddings and The Charges of Child Abuse

A couple of years ago, I read that David and Leigh Eddings, authors of The Belgariad and The Elenium, went to jail for child abuse.

There’s an old newspaper article about it from The Black Hills Weekly in 1970 that tells you the details, but if you don’t want to follow the link, I’ll give you a quick recap. Back in the sixties, the Eddings adopted two children, a boy and girl. The allegations of child abuse concerned the boy, Scott, who was punished by his parents by being put in a cage in the basement and beaten. There wasn’t a lot of room for dissent in the case, partly because they were caught in the middle of whipping the child with a belt by the local sheriff. Unsurprisingly, the pair of them copped a plea deal for misdemeanour child abuse charge and served a year in jail.

The story wasn’t widely known about while the Eddings’ were alive. It was one of those things that came up a decade or so after they’d been dead. I remember seeing a number of responses, from people being disappointed, to saying it didn’t matter, the usual kind of response you see these days. For my part, I thought it was the kind of thing that, once you heard it, changed how you thought of their work. I got to thinking about that again after Anne Perry died, and how after, once you knew that she was a convicted murderer, it changed how you saw her work.

I read David and Leigh Eddings’ fantasy books when I was young and liked them a lot. No lie. My friend and I swapped copies back and forth and talked about the bits we liked. If you haven’t read the books, there’s no need. They’re largely uninspired, a lift from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, as popular fantasy often was back then. Terry Brooks’ Sword of Shannara and Robert Jordan’s first Wheel of Time book, The Eye of the World are some other examples. Nearly fifteen years separate those two books, and plenty of Tolkien copies, like the Eddings’ Pawn of Prophesy, came out between. I’m sure the trend continues. After all, publishers make good money from these books, and when you’re thirteen or fourteen, you don’t know that you’re being ripped off by an author when they cynically recycle another author’s work.

And, truthfully, I remember the books fondly. Honestly, I do. I wouldn’t recommend them to anyone now. There are frankly many better and more interesting books to recommend to young readers and they don’t need to relive my childhood books. But as an adult, I have fond memories. It’s not the stolen ideas that I remember about The Belgariad or any of the Eddings’ other books. What I mostly remember is the big, extended found family that grows throughout the novels. In the case of the books that concern Garion, The Belgariad, The Mallorean, and three related novels, that’s thirteen books about everyone finding a place of love and acceptance. Immortal figures like the roguish wizard Belgarath and the motherly Polgara take on orphans, wayward princesses, and other various lost figures and bind them to themselves and their quests. The other books that the Eddings’ wrote, The Elenium and The Tamuli, two trilogies focused on the knight, Sparhawk, are bound similarly. Now, I would have said before I learned of The Eddings’ charges that the reason for this was because the Eddings’ were very limited authors, and often repeated themselves in terms of characters, plot reveals, and themes.

But what if it’s not just that (because it is still, honestly, partly that), but what if there was something else at work there.

The fantasy books by David and Leigh Eddings are largely very gentle books, conservative books. They present comfortable, idyllic family scenes again and again that assure you about a certain order. Women love children, and mothers love making a home for them. The all powerful, tremble as she approaches sorceress Polgara constantly puts aside her own ambitions to raise other peoples children until, finally, she has twins of her own. The men in the books aren’t very domestic, but they know when and how to stay out of the way and they know how to go to war for their family, and how to fight to ensure that those they love are kept safe. Sure, all those people are pretty much white, and this leads to one of my other enduring memory of the books, which is the racial stereotyping, especially the unpleasant portrayal of Muslim people and a sort of stripped down, ugly Muslim culture that is full of religious fantatics who have no redeeming values whatsoever. If that sounds bad, it is, and I could write a whole essay on the racial stereotypes that were in the fantasy books I read as a kid. The Eddings would be a single paragraph in it.

But I’m not interested in that, not here. Instead, I’m interested in just how much the work of The Eddings was a confessional one, and one that once you know about their conviction, turns it partly into an exploration their guilt, and their desire to find a redemptive arc for themselves. There’s no excuse or justification for what The Eddings did. In 1970 they were charged with child abuse and went to jail. It is what it is, but like Perry, the Eddings’ served their time and that serving seems to have changed them. David Eddings began writing again while in jail, and though the fantasy novels weren’t published until well after he’d been released, there is a direct correlation to their conviction and the writing that came later. You can even argue that within the work there is an apology and an element of wish fulfilment. Their fantasy books are full of characters who overcome their flaws, create large, sprawling found families, and allow all but the most reprehensible to find not just forgiveness, but a new life as well.

It would be interesting to be able to ask The Eddings’ about this, but they’ve been dead for some time, and never engaged with this conversation outside their books (if they were aware of that engagement, which is a debate that we can have as well). Still, knowing about the conviction does change how you look at the books, and I find that interesting, if only because I loved the books when I was growing up, and like everything that you do love when you’re a child, they have an influence on you.

Lastly, you’ll see the cover I linked here is to an old edition of The Pawn of Prophecy. It’s the one I have and it has a whole different vibe now.

Ben.

(Ben Peek is the author of seven books including The Godless, Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, and Dead Americans and Other Stories. His short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Nightmare, Polyphony, and Overland, as well as various Year’s Best Books. He’s the creator of the psychogeography ‘zine The Urban Sprawl Project. He once wrote an autobiographical comic called Nowhere Near Savannah, illustrated by Anna Brown. He lives in Sydney, Australia.)