…they would gather in the hay barn and leap by the hour from the loft into the soft hay beneath, filling their hair with chaff and their noses with dust that smelled of summer.

Pawn of Prophecy, Chapter 1

Synopsis

The first chapter tells of the early years of Garion and his Aunt Pol, who are workers on a freeholder’s farm in Sendaria. Faldor’s farm is a good place to live and work for the sixty people who live there. The chapter sets the stage for an idyllic, cooperative farm life where Pol is a kitchen worker and Garion is her apparent nephew she is raising. The chapter also sets Sendaria is a peaceful country of farmers in a central land, and recounts their role in the historic battle of Vo Mimbre which occurred five hundred years prior. However, there are curiosities about the battle that Garion doesn’t understand and in order to try to figure it out he attempts to recreate it with one of his three friends on the farm, Rundorig, but it goes badly for them both.

Discussion

There are a few themes the I could have picked from this chapter – family, pastoral virtues, history – but the strongest of these, knowing what I do of the story to come, is innocence.

Garion is the main character and we aren’t introduced to many others despite that we are told that there are over sixty others on the farm with him and his aunt. We see his life from his infancy when he would fall asleep staring at flickering fires from a cozy corner. One clear example of innocence is from him existing as a child who is well loved and cared for. David Eddings was open that this series was based on medieval culture, generically. The expectations that children were innocents may not completely align with true medieval culture. I believe that it’s a modern concept that childhood is innocent and carefree; that children don’t have responsibilities and are shielded from certainly realities of life until later.

But Garion does live on a working farm, albeit one in a seemingly stable country with adequate resources. The means to create some safety and security appear to lay within the power of individuals to a degree in this region. This brings the question of who gets to determine innocence? To our modern mind, it’s reasonable and acceptable for Garion to be protected and kept from things that he doesn’t need to know yet by his Aunt simply because he is a child. As he grows older he begins asking questions about her life and willingness to be married, his parents and what happened to them. But because he’s a child the answers are moderated. But he also has questions about the larger world and history that he doesn’t get satisfying answers to. When he attempts to figure it out on his own, through a reenactment of the climactic fight between Brand the Rivan Warder and Kal Torak the maimed God of the Angaraks with this friend Rundorig, he discovers more questions than answers. He never gets to the part when Brand uncovered his shield in battle and the god was struck down and instead he gets hit on the head and experiences a “boiling exaltation”, sees a maimed faced instead of his friend, and attacks in a frenzy, hurting his friend and not remembering.

Garion isn’t innocent to injury and death as he lives on a working farm. But by the end of the chapter he’s only just becoming a working member with very little expectations. And it appears that Pol is the one who determines when that work begins for him, not Faldor. The farm itself seems isolated. The chapter describes the nearest village as several miles away and the farms know each other by reputation not close communication. At the end of the chapter she punishes Garion, not for hurting his friend in the reenactment but for not taking her warning about speaking Torak’s name seriously. She hit him, which she had never done before. His innocence was now turning into enforced ignorance in the name of his safety and security. We don’t find out until her book that this was deliberate.

Garion’s innocence isn’t the only aspect present in the chapter. The chapter foreshadows magic in Aunt Pol, but everyday people appear untouched or unaware of it. Aunt Pol mentioned that not only she doesn’t want to be married but has “far too many important things to attend to.” Protecting Garion’s innocence comes at a price for her. But it also seems at this point in the story, that the general population is also innocent (or ignorant) of phenomena or events around them. The story of Battle of Vo Mimbre highlights the enduring curiosity around the final fight and unexplained reason why Brand would be able to strike down a god simple because of something with his shield. While people are proud of their role in his defeat, it doesn’t affect their daily life and politics doesn’t appear to be a concern.

Personal Effect

The questions that came to me often was who gets to be innocent? Who gets that privilege? But also who gets to decide who gets to be innocent? In our modern sense, we want to protect our children and the concept of childhood innocence. But as of this writing (2026), this is taken to extremes in censorship for all groups and restrictions of autonomy. When does innocence turn into enforce ignorance? When does it stop being for someone’s good and start being because of control or fear? And it is very different for different groups of people. Those in privileged positions, by money or race for example, can shield their children from violence in a way that others can’t.

From the other perspective, when does a child get to choose these things for themselves? And to take a step back, when did we decide that childhood innocence was an inherent good? I think we can agree that children may not be capable of understanding certain concepts and information should be scaled to their comprehension. I think we can also agree that policies like child labor is not a good practice in any form. However, there is a significant difference between innocence and ignorance and I wonder if that is brought into the conversation. I also think that responsibility is also a factor. What happens to a child’s growth, connections with others, and their perception of the world if there is no accountability and responsibilities?

Beyond childhood, who also gets to decide what should be shared or not. We are in an age of information disregulation. Misinformation, disinformation and malinformation are recently coined terms to describe the misuse of information to manipulate individuals and populations. There are issues of power and control, under the guide of freedom of information and autonomy. Professionally, I’m in the weeds of that fight, urging for critical thinking and open information for all. But that comes with a price. It appears that the commercialization of information is a stronger force than critical engagement.

What this means for me is that I do need to remember that I do sit from a place of privilege in the information environment. I need to remember that I have access to things that others do not and that the information systems are designed against the people and communities right now.

Blessings

In keeping with the practice started by Vanessa Zoltan in her podcast, I would like to offer these at the end of the entries. I would also like to keep her practice of identifying women for each one.

For this one, the first one, I would like to offer it to Leigh Eddings. She was the wife of David Eddings and was his longtime collaborator and coauthor, but wasn’t acknowledged until much later in the series (almost the end). This is for her and all the other invisible women writer/collaborators of published authors.