They have bodies like ours, but after several lifetimes they become abhorrent to behold, although they can disguise themselves as we can and pass for mortals.” So they’re like Tolkien’s nine pale kings.Īll of these explanations are for the benefit of the main character, Maerad, a sixteen-year-old girl who has been rescued from slavery and is starting to find out how to use her gift (and work towards her naming) with the help of Cadvan, a Bard. No one knows what happens to them afterward. The Hulls, we learn later, “do not die in the ordinary way, but with this difference from the Nameless One: they can be killed. Then began the Great Silence, when the Song was no longer heard in the wide lands of Annar.” And then, with massed armies and Black Sorcerers-those corrupt Bards that we call Hulls-he marched on the lovely citadel of Afinil, and cast down its fair towers and darkened the mere, so the moon no longer bathed there and the stars fled its lifeless face. He sought then the dominion of all on the earth and the destruction of all that rebuked him with its beauty, and he challenged the Law of the Balance, and overthrew it. He looked out on the world, and his eye was dark. For he was not of the immortals, and had not the right to deathlessness. But with the gift of death, he cast away also the knowledge of those who die, and found his heart was empty, a pain sharper than any that he had known. In this series he is called the Nameless and he has some ghoulish minions called Hulls: “the king rejected his Name, because then he could also reject death. It’s quite Tolkien-derivative, but that can be a good thing, as the first few Shannara novels by Terry Brooks demonstrated.Īs in The Lord of the Rings, the bad guy is a failed necromancer.

I first read about this series at Café Society and enjoyed the first volume very much. The Naming (also published as The Gift) is Book One of Alison Croggon’s Pellinor series.

The Naming by Alison Croggon