Dungeons & Dragons: Reading “The Crystal Shard” by R.A. Salvatore (Icewind Dale 1)

The Crystal Shard by R.A. Salvatore. TSR, 1988. Forgotten Realms / Legend of Drizzt / Icewind Dale 1.

TSR cover (1988, later printing); art by Larry Elmore; courtesy of ISFDB.

This essay is part of Dungeons & Dragons: A Reading Series.

Table of Contents
Salvatore, TSR, and the Birth of Drizzt
Reading The Crystal Shard
Parting Thoughts

Salvatore, TSR, and the Birth of Drizzt

Next to Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Dragons of Autumn Twilight (1984), which essentially launched TSR’s efforts to become a serious publisher of fantasy fiction that tied into the major storyworlds (or campaign settings) of the publisher’s flagship product, Dungeons & Dragons, R.A. Salvatore’s The Crystal Shard is probably the best known and most significant D&D novel. And that was exactly what TSR was looking for when fiction editor Mary Kirchoff discovered the 28 year old financial analyst from Massachusetts in the TSR slush pile.

As described in Ben Rigg’s Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons (83–90), Kirchoff had been directed by Book Department head Jean Black in early 1987 to find the next breakout writer who could propel TSR fiction into bestseller status, while also tying in to the upcoming Forgotten Realms campaign setting. The novel Salvatore had submitted and which got Kirchoff’s attention was Echoes of the Fourth Magic—about a fantasy world set in a postapocalyptic future a la Terry Brooks’s The Sword of Shannara (1977), which was later published by Roc (New American Library) in 1990—but Kirchoff wanted something that could be set in Faerûn, and a submarine turning up on the Sword Coast just wasn’t it. Of course, the Forgotten Realms Campaign Set that described the Realms hadn’t been released yet. So Salvatore had to learn about the storyworld on the phone, directly from Kirchoff. He was then sent an advance copy of Douglas Niles’s Darkwalker on Moonshae, the first Realms novel, which was released a month before the box set. Kirchoff asked him to pitch a novel and he offered The Tyrant of Icewind Dale, a story about a northern barbarian named Wulfgar and his adventures on the tundra.

In July 1987, Salvatore was told he had a contract, but his novel needed to be finished by October. And although he’d pitched a novel that used Niles’s characters, he had to write something completely separate. TSR had encountered some problems with the Dragonlance books that they wanted to avoid with the Forgotten Realms:

The Dragonlance saga was about a central group of heroes, and whenever novels strayed from them, sales suffered. The Forgotten Realms, though, was a gigantic world. Authors could claim pieces of the geography and develop them with their own characters and stories. The company could then watch which authors’ series did better and double down on those. (Riggs 88)

A calculated business move and one that would have the effect of making the Realms a highly diversified storyworld. But with Niles’s characters cut from his book, Salvatore needed a sidekick for his barbarian hero. As the story Salvatore tells goes, he came up with the most famous D&D character on the spot: “Off the top of my head, I have no idea how or why, […] I said, ‘Drizzt Do’Urden of Menzoberranzan’” (89). The story is sometimes told with different details, as in Dragon #188 (Dec 1992), where he recalls simply saying “Drizzt Do’Urden” (80), or the foreword to the 1998 omnibus of the Dark Elf trilogy, where he claims he blurted out “Drizzt Do’Urden, of D’aermon N’achezbaeron, Ninth House of Menzoberranzan.” The story is a bit hard to believe, especially the later telling, but it highlights the serendipitous nature of Salvatore’s publishing success, which owed everything to a well-chosen sidekick who eventually took center stage. Salvatore turned in The Crystal Shard (it’s unclear when the name changed) in mid-September, but Kirchoff immediately realized that Wulfgar was significantly less interesting than the drow ranger “sidekick” and she asked Salvatore to “give me more Drizzt” in the revision, as well as to add at least one female character, which he did (not that Catti-brie does much of anything in her three or four scenes) (89).

The Crystal Shard was released in January 1988, less than a year after he’d sent Echoes of the Fourth Magic to TSR, less than six months after he’d been given the green light to write the novel, and just three and half months after finishing the first draft. And it was a hit. A sequel followed, Streams of Silver (1989), and then another, The Halfling’s Gem (1990), completing the Icewind Dale trilogy. As Riggs reports, “The first two volumes sold over 1.5 million copies combined worldwide, and the concluding volume […] hit the New York Times list of paperback bestsellers […] in the twelfth slot” (90). Salvatore published a second trilogy, the Dark Elf trilogy—which served as a prequel to The Crystal Shard by providing the background for why Drizzt left the Underdark and foreswore the ways of the drow—in 1990–1991 and in 1992 he launched a third series of four books detailing the adventures of Drizzt and company after The Halfling’s Gem with The Legacy. The Legacy was Savlatore’s his first hardcover release and reached number 9 on the NYT hardcover bestseller list. By the end of 1992, within five years of his debut, Salvatore had published twelve novels and was an international bestseller. And while he has published plenty of novels that weren’t about Drizzt, the dark elf “sidekick’ remains the highlight of Salvatore’s career, with each new novel in the Legend of Drizzt meta-series typically landing on the bestseller list—even after almost 40 books.

And it all started with The Crystal Shard, a mass-market paperback from a publisher that took a chance on an unknown writer, introduced the novelty of a “good drow,” and enticed readers with its wintry cover painted by D&D’s premiere artist at the time, Larry Elmore, which featured the trio of the gruff dwarf Bruenor, the thick-thewed blonde barbarian Wulfgar, and the enigmatic, violet-skinned drow ranger Drizzt.

Reading The Crystal Shard

The back cover of The Crystal Shard promises a wild adventure that is simultaneously epic (in that it’s about a huge, evil army of “monsters” and an ancient magical artifact of extreme power) and parochial (in that it’s about four dudes saving a collection of villages), a perfect balance of extremities for a novel tied to a fantasy TRPG like D&D:

Akar Kessel, a weak-willed apprentice mage sets in motion events leading to the rediscovery of the magical device, the crystal shard. But is it merely an inanimate device…or is it capable of directing the defeat of Ten-Towns?

Or have the barbarians already arranged for that themselves? Their brutal attack on the villages of Ten-Towns seals their fate, and that of the young barbarian Wulfgar. Left for dead, Wulfgar is rescued by the dwarf, Bruenor, in exchange for five years of service…and friendship. With the help of the dark elf, Drizzt, Bruenor reshapes Wulfgar into a warrior with both brawn and brains.

But is Wulfgar strong enough to reunite the barbarian tribes? Can an unorthodox dwarf and renegade dark elf persuade the people of Ten-Towns to put aside their petty differences in time to stave off the forces of the crystal shard?

The resulting novel is essentially that, and a whole lot more, with a subplot involving an ancient demon, another about an ancient dragon, yet another featuring a cabal of conniving wizards plotting murder, and a background mystery (leading to a later novel) about a stolen magical ruby, not to mention Salvatore spends time providing a great deal of background information on the recent history of each village of the Ten-Towns, the cultural practices of the tundra barbarians, the political economic of trade in knucklehead trout ivory, and explorations of the social divisions among orcs, goblins, giants, and ogres. Salvatore is nothing if not an exuberant maximalist when it comes to detail and worldbuilding. And, to my surprise, returning to this novel after more than 20 years, it all works astoundingly well… and is all the more impressive since the novel was drafted, revised, and sent to the printers in less than six months.

As I described in my prefatory essay to the Dungeons & Dragons reading series, I first discovered D&D, the Forgotten Realms, and Salvatore all at once, when a friend lent me Homeland, the first novel in Salvatore’s second trilogy, which told the origins of Drizzt and his time in the drow city of Menzoberranzan. It was by far the coolest thing I had ever read in my short little life and I was hooked on Drizzt. So when I read The Crystal Shard—albeit published first, it is chronologically the fourth book in the story of Drizzt—after devouring Homeland (1990), Exile (1990), and Sojourn (1991), I was more than a little disappointed. After the previous 900+ pages of deep lore about drow and the Underdark (Belwar! The massacre of the myconids!), and having followed the deeply investing social, psychological, and physical journey of Drizzt, suddenly he was a side character in The Crystal Shard and this novel was asking me to invest a lot of time and energy into caring about… the fucking human barbarian? Named Wulfgar?! No thanks. I quite disliked the whole Icewind Dale trilogy but my excitement was rekindled in the third series, Legacy of the Drow, with its first novel, The Legacy.

So for 20 years Icewind Dale and especially The Crystal Shard were something of a sour memory to me, even if I looked back with fond nostalgia (and very little critical re-examination) on Salvatore’s Legend of Drizzt novels as a whole. Of course, I knew that in my obsessive zeal to read and write about D&D novels as forms of both fantasy fiction and franchise fiction, eventually I’d need to reread Salvatore’s work. And I was particularly galvanized by a lengthy Twitter thread Cameron Kunzelman wrote in 2021 about his own reread of The Crystal Shard and in which he concludes “It kicks ass” and proceeds over the course of 20 tweets to outline “why it works so well as a fantasy novel.” I kept that thread saved in my notes file for the past half-decade, occasionally revisiting it as a helpful reminder. What Kunzelman unknowingly did for me was provide further fodder for my argument with this series that, yeah, D&D novels might actually have some interesting things to say. And, at their best, they just might kick ass.

The Crystal Shard is the story of how an apprentice mage, Akar Kessell, comes across a magical artifact of tremendous power—Crenshinibon, the evil sentient crystal shard, forged by a cabal of liches in the eldest days of the world, capable of absorbing the sun’s energy to perform incredible magics, and lost somewhere in the Spine of the World mountains that hug Icewind Dale to the south, cutting it off from the rest of the world—and is manipulated by the artifact into doing its will. Kessell uses the power of Crenshinibon to forge an army from the disparate tribes of orcs, goblin, giants, ogres, and trolls that dwell in the mountains, and he eventually descends upon the villages of Ten-Towns to proclaim himself the Tyrant of Icewind Dale. But he is thwarted by the hardy northern villagers’ resolve, by the young barbarian Wulfgar who unites the tundra tribes, by the dark elf Drizzt who knows how to banish Kessell’s demon helper Errtu (who wants the shard for himself), by the dwarf lord Bruenor who wants safety for his people, and by the self-motivated halfling Regis with a magical ruby pendant and a penchant for winding up the hero.

The Crystal Shard is split into three “books” (Tolkien’s influence is all over this novel), each with a distinct focus and narrative structure—so distinct, really, that they could each be excerpted as pretty decent standalone novellas. If The Crystal Shard was meant to be the story of Wulfgar the barbarian uniting his tribes, Salvatore has a funny way of showing it, since Wulfgar is hardly present in the first book, “Ten-Towns,” and his name isn’t even mentioned until the second book, “Wulfgar.” This is a bold and fascinating choice. You might think it’s because Salvatore rewrote the front third of the novel to “give me more Drizzt,” but Drizzt shares equal space with the mischievous halfling Regis (quite literally the thief Tolkien’s dwarves took Bilbo to be), the gruff dwarf Bruenor, and the sniveling wannabe mage Kessell. Each is an outcast come to Icewind Dale to be lost in the “unspoken kinship of fellow rogues” (20), each fleeing something in search of identity, recognition, and meaning. Drizzt turned his back on the cruel, violent, murderous drow; Bruenor and his dwarves are refugees from the destruction of their ancestral home, Mithril Hall, centuries before; Regis escaped servitude to the vile Pasha Pook in Calimport. But Kessell, he’s a different story: he is a talentless hack, an insecure, cruel, pathetic man with no skill in magic despite years of study. He killed his mentor at the behest of wiser wizards, who saw an opportunity to dispatch a rival by manipulating Kessell’s desire for power. But they betrayed him and abandoned him in the snowy mountains, where he chanced upon Crenshinibon.

Most of the first book is spent in back story and character study, and revolves around the good guys’ efforts to unite the fiercely independent villages known collectively as Ten-Towns to defeat an invasion of tundra barbarians. Salvatore weaves in a great many references to Beowulf in detailing the barbarians, who are your typical proteinmaxxing bearded dudes with North Germanic-sounding names like Beorg and Heafstaag, but Salvatore adds an element I found quite charming: they competitively sing to show off their might and bravery in challenge to other tribes. Wulfgar is here, hidden among the barbarians as the nameless standard bearer for the Tribe of the Elk. And when the big battle comes and the barbarians are routed by the efforts of Bruenor, Drizzt, and Regis (with the aid of his persuasive magical ruby) to unite the villages, the unnamed barbarian youth has a run-in on the battlefield with Bruenor, who knocks him cold. But Bruenor’s a kind-hearted guy—after all, he adopted the rarely seen human Catti-brie as his daughter—so he indentures Wulfgar to his service in the dwarf-mines for a period of five years as recompense for the harm he and his people brought to Ten-Towns.

What this first book emphasizes is that The Crystal Shard isn’t really a novel about any one person. It’s not about a single hero or even a hero and his sidekick, but it’s about this group of people whose stories of being outcast—and how they respond to those hardships—drive the events of the plot and resolve in ways that teach readers, as Kunzelman suggests, about “competing modes of social organization.” Put simply, it’s a novel about what we owe to other people when other people is all we have. This is emphasized by the descriptions of the harsh winter environment of Icewind Dale, by the repeated references throughout to the “kinship of fellow rogues,” tolerance, and friendship, and ultimately by the moral logic of the narrative, which bends toward the obvious conclusion that survival in the face of any odds can only come from friendship, loyalty, and trust. Time and again the narrative circles back to each character’s outsider status, especially Drizzt’s, since he is feared and hated for the reputation of the drow, and no matter how much good he does for Ten-Towns, he is still ostracized—yet he still chooses to help.

Things move at a much more rapid clip in the second book, “Wulfgar,” and the third book, “Cryshal-Tirith,” in large part because Salvatore uses the ninety pages of the first book as a prologue to set up all the domino pieces of his narrative, and what follows for the remainder of the book is almost nonstop sequences of action and war interrupted by brief respites when characters sit, think, talk, and grow closer. Or, in Kessell’s case, act like a grotesque sexpest while plotting mass murder. Book II takes its title seriously and is probably the heart of what Salvatore initially envisioned, since it is very much a coming-of-age story for Wulfgar… except that it starts at the end of his process of learning and personal growth, toward the end of his five years of indentured service to Bruenor. We learn retroactively about the emotions of shame and loss he processed, the guilt and anger he felt, and how he came to love and honor Bruenor, to understand that the dwarf leader was showing him a path toward dignity and self-worth not based on hurting others. Oh, and we learn how he gets really fucking ripped from working in the mines and at the blacksmith forge. Like, really fucking ripped.

Bruenor gets an incredible chapter wherein he makes a masterpiece warhammer to gift to his barbarian slave-son (it’s very touching, if complicated by the whole slavery thing, and the extended description of the secret dwarven ritual gives us a glimpse at Salvatore’s inventiveness as a fantasy writer). With his new magical warhammer in hand, Wulfgar spends his final days of indenture training with Drizzt so he can learn how to fight beyond the hard-swinging rages of his people. Meanwhile Kessell has spent five years building his—or, really, Crenshinibon’s—army and has begun his invasion by sending a scouting party of giants (of all species to go scouting!) into Icewind Dale. More than half of the second book is devoted to Drizzt, Wulfgar, and the dwarves’ skirmishes and battles with those giants, their discovery of Kessell’s impending invasion, and deciding that they must once again re-unite Ten-Towns. The book ends with Wulfgar declaring himself a free man and heading off to fulfill an oath to his father: to kill the white dragon Ingeloakastimizilian (yes, I did spell that correctly, from memory, the first time I typed it). (As an aside, the first edition of the novel features a printer error that places the title page of book III several chapters too early.)

Salvatore uses book II to set up the coming resolution of the novel’s major conflicts, pushing pieces into place like a veteran wargamer. A key theme of “Wulfgar” is the tension between something like national or cultural character and the individual’s own character: their sense of themselves in the world as distinct from the culture around them. Salvatore suggests that we have to decide, at some point, whether we’ll accept the values and practices thrust upon us, or make a change. It’s an ideologically loaded proposition, since it’s clear in Salvatore’s novel that some cultures’ and fantasy races’ practices and beliefs should be rejected because they are either fundamentally evil, in the case of the drow, or because they lead to unequal or unjust modes of social organization, like the barbarians’ belief that might makes right. The culmination of Wulfgar’s “education” at the end of his years of indenture is his mentorship by a drow who chose to leave his people and renounce their evil ways. Wulfgar’s is an education in developing the “incredible character” and “indisputable character” he sees in Drizzt and Bruenor (133). And Drizzt makes clear that his final, “most important” lesson is: “A king is a man strong of character and conviction who leads by example and truly cares for the suffering of his people […] Not a brute who rules simply because he is the strongest” (133).

Salvatore’s theme of character goes step further and is literalized for the D&D player who might be reading the novel in terms of play and the TRPG ruleset—that is, for a reader who might, understandably, look on D&D novels as ways of thinking about how to make sense of the messy complexity that is the TRPG’s rules in order to turn them into story, narrative, and experience. Book II makes it pretty obvious that The Crystal Shard is partly a novel about how to make, but most importantly how to play, a good character in D&D. Put another way, I think this is a novel about how to be a “good” D&D player. To that end, Salvatore repeatedly invokes the word “character” itself in his description of the characters readers should take as exemplars and he makes clear that one’s use of power—the awesome power afforded to players’s characters within the storyworld when they cast a spell, use a magical item, or swing the hammer with the might of a tundra barbarian—should be toward the benefit of those without power.

And while Salvatore subscribes to the simplified moral calculus of D&D’s alignment system, which balances qualities of lawfulness vs. chaos on an axis of good vs. evil, as well as the TRPG’s long-critiqued rules about the inherent moral nature of given fantasy races (like the drow or orcs), his novel also provides a socially conscious reason for understanding the choices that separate good from evil. Salvatore locates those choices in the individual’s exercise of power with relation to the social world. Drizzt is therefore “good” not only because he rebuked the drow’s cruelty, their lust for killing and torture, but also because he risks his life protecting the people of Ten-Towns, despite their continued rejection of him—a rejection Salvatore describes in explicitly racial terms: they “prejudge him by the color of his skin and the reputation of his kin” (83). Wulfgar learns not only how to be good but also that goodness should be lawful and socially productive. Despite his seven-foot stature, his magical warhammer, and his thick thews, he learns to reject the social role of the “brute who rules simply because he is the strongest,” and proceeds to use his strength to (not unproblematically) change the culture that rewards such brutality. This ethos of character and play is also reflected in the novel’s cultivation of togetherness, camaraderie, and friendship. Salvatore seems to suggest that a good D&D party is one that gets along, despite differences.

Salvatore also gives us an instructive example of a “bad” character: Akar Kessell. From the beginning, he is nothing but grotesque and pathetic; “weak-willed” is the first descriptor of him on the back cover. Yet he is the main villain, a greater threat even than the thousands of “monsters” he has assembled or the mighty demon lord Errtu. Kessell is the principle antagonist because he is the inverse of Drizzt and Wulfgar: he finds—rather than cultivates or earns—power and, because of his will to use power for self-aggrandizement, because of his greed and pettiness, the crystal shard is able to assert its will over him, at the same time allowing Kessell to use its power to further its chaotic evil ends. Salvatore goes to great lengths to emphasize the specific kind of cretinous Kessell is. He is cowardly, quick to anger, furious when his wants are not heeded, and violent. Notably, he keeps a “harem” of naked women whose minds he has broken, rendering them into living sex dolls he abuses and rapes at his pleasure (the novel’s language is much tamer). Of course, the harem—both the idea and the name—is a particularly titillating detail, repeated again and again in the novel while also being a common enough feature of 1980s fantasy fiction. But far from normalizing the idea that a player could indulge such (fucked up) fantasies in the world of D&D, Salvatore uses the harem as one of the clearest examples of Kessell’s character, as the perfect (if problematically gendered) expression of the choices he makes with the power he has.

It’s hard not to read Kessell as the caricature of a certain kind of masculinity, a certain social position that was heavily associated with TRPGs, sf and fantasy fandom, and nerd culture more generally in the 1980s and 1990s. Kessell is the bullied kid who becomes a school shooter, not yet of Columbine infamy but already imagined in Stephen King’s Rage (1977, published under the Bachman pseudonym). Kessel is the pimply, skinny, unathletic teenager whose parents feared he would get hooked on weed and D&D, summon demons, and sacrifice babies and virgins. (Salvatore even makes the latter reference explicit when another mage, very much like Kessell, summons a demon beyond his skill to control and is killed, unleashing Errtu onto the material plane.) The stereotypes and fears about unhegemonic masculinities circulating in the hard-bodied 1980s are the caricatures that ground and give shape to Kessell’s evilness in the story, reflecting a mirror back at the very people who might like a D&D novel or play TRPGs. With the The Crystal Shard, Salvatore warns “don’t be an Akar Kessel,” either in real life or in the game. Because anyone who has played D&D has probably had the misfortune of playing with an Akar Kessell who wants to counteract their sense of disenfranchisement by enacting their power fantasies with the roll of the dice.

Book III, “Cryshal-Tirith,” drives these lessons home as each character goes his separate way to enact a part of the larger plan to defeat Kessell’s invasion, which has sacked half of Ten-Towns and besieged the capital city of Bryn Shander. Wulfgar kills a dragon, using the great deed to gain the right to challenge the brutal barbarian king Heafstaag, who has aligned the tribes with Kessell’s “monster” forces. Wulfgar’s victory is surprisingly violent—he crushes Heafstaag’s skull with his bare hands—and allows him to unite the tribes to fight alongside Ten-Towns. Bruenor and his dwarves tunnel under the field of battle and prepare a night-time ambush. Regis goes to Kessell as the representative of Ten-Towns to try his magical ruby against the wizard. And Drizzt fights and banishes the demon Errtu. They all converge, with perfect timing (not unlike the final conflict in Tolkien’s The Return of the King), on the field of battle and win the day. In the end, Kessell’s hubris, his will to domination and power, undoes him and he is crushed in an avalanche while his army of orcs, goblins, and ogres turns against one another and, in the face of a unified front of humans and dwarves, flees back to its mountain hideouts. The novel ends with Wulfgar’s barbarians—enriched by the dragon’s hoard he won by slaying Ingeloakastimizilian—settling in Ten-Towns to help rebuild and live a “better life” in the comforts of civilization. And Salvatore plants the seeds of a sequel in the epilogue, with Drizzt, Wulfgar, Bruenor, and Regis setting off on a journey to find Bruenor’s lost homeland, Mithril Hall.

Salvatore is doing so much in The Crystal Shard and doing it at such breakneck speed (both narratively and in the material act of writing). He reveals a world so filled with stuff that one can’t help but respond to it all with an equal number of questions. And by referencing the denseness of Salvatore’s worldbuilding as “stuff” I don’t mean to suggest, after David Letzler and his study of mega-novels, that what Salvatore has done is pack The Crystal Shard with meaningless cruft. Rather, I think this novel is an excitingly eclectic collection of ideas and concepts. And in the mind of an imaginative fantasy reader and/or D&D player, who can index everything in this novel to a larger experience of D&D and the Forgotten Realms specifically, all of this matters a great deal. Rereading it, I found myself still totally fascinated by Salvatore’s narrative and worldbuilding choices and strategies—and perhaps more so now, because I see the way his novel relates to and informs larger conversations about the relationship between American culture, literary production, and fantasy fiction.

To return to Kunzelman’s epic Twitter thread, he argues that The Crystal Shard ultimately stages a conflict between competing modes of social organization, where evil is defined by its efforts at domination and good by its efforts at collaboration (which I linked above to notions of character and play). For Kunzelman, this is a deeply ideologically individualist project and perhaps dangerously so, because the novel “works really well as an engaging ideological machine (and all of this reads so breezingly) precisely because every step of the process of becoming a ‘good’ character is a choice. There is this kind of step-by-step pleasure of seeing how everything is rationalized morally.” I certainly don’t disagree that goodness in this novel is framed as a choice, but I disagree ultimately that the project is individualist, or at least individualist to any problematic degree, given that the narrative trajectory of The Crystal Shard is toward the recognition that cooperation across differences—and especially across the differences that signal a selfish individualism, such as the villages’ unwillingness to unite on account of longstanding social and political disagreements and their desire to outcompete one another economically—is the only path toward survival. And not just bare survival, but a better, more meaningful living. Salvatore stages Wulfgar’s process of becoming good through individual choices as the first step every person has to take in recognizing their role in and value to the larger social system.

At the same time, The Crystal Shard makes clear that some ways of life are indeed better than others. The novel ends, for example, with Wulfgar “civilizing” the barbarians into the luxuries of settled life in Ten-Towns. Partly, this ending for the barbarians rhymes with the idea that the novel is fundamentally against forms of social organization predicated on dominance, and that by virtue of moving into Ten-Towns the barbarians will enter a “better” social world organized around mercantilism and a vague notion of representative democracy. Yet Ten-Towns is not a wholly equal or just world, only a materially richer one and one less prone to the violence of a single powerful ruler (a form of rule Wulfgar rejects by leaving his people on Bruenor’s quest for Mithril Hall), since the novel makes clear that the social world of Ten-Towns politically favors the villages with the most economic power. But the barbarians are the edge case in a larger structural concern the novel has—and which it inherits from the D&D rule system—about the nature of evil.

While Kessell is a stand in for how evil operates at the individual level, in terms of the choices we make—and Kunzelman is not wrong to point out that Salvatore is focused on how individual choices orient us toward good or evil, though I disagree that the presence of individual choices are necessarily problematic—, more concerning is Salvatore’s adoption of the notion that some fantasy races are inherently evil and that, despite being clearly intelligent and humanoid, they are “monsters”: nameless, faceless non-people who can be slaughtered ad nauseum for the sake of the narrative. Of course, this treatment of enemies in fantasy is nothing new to The Crystal Shard. It’s written into D&D itself; it draws on earlier fantasy novels’ orientation to “bad guys,” and not just Tolkien’s orcs in The Lord of the Rings but also sword and sorcery fiction (hell, even E.R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros [1922] treats the Demons’ enemies, all humans, this way!); and it is a common enough trope in fantasy fiction that it has become the subject of a productive body of scholarship, notably Ebony Elizabeth Thomas’s book on the “dark other,” Robert Tally’s book on orcs in Tolkien, and Christopher LeCluyse’s book on race and monstrosity in D&D (published the day I’m writing this!). And much has been made of the drow—the specter of evil haunting The Crystal Shard and Drizzt—but I’m going to bracket that conversation until I reach Homeland and Sojourn, which deal with the drow in great detail, and point readers in the meantime to the excellent work of Steven Holmes and Maria K. Alberto.

Salvatore’s treatment of the “monsters” in The Crystal Shard is noteworthy not because it’s unusual in the annals of fantasy fiction, but because it seems at odds with the ethos of the novel. As with Tolkien, who gives us a few scenes from the orcs’ perspectives, and which understandable sparked interest in the ontological, moral, and even theological status of orcs, Salvatore makes clear in the few instances we spend with orcs or goblins or giants that they are sentient (if not very smart) people; they have individual identities, belong to cultures, have social hierarchy, and hold beliefs about the differences between one another’s “races.” Kessell’s army does not fall apart and turn on itself without the “monsters” being people with distinct motivations, fears, enmities, and desires. But they are also presented as an unintelligent collective, a “black tide” or “black mass” (227), and even rendered almost as animals—for example, when Bruenor stews a slain giant’s brains in its own skull as a post-battle meal (184). It’s meant to read as funny, like the dwarf’s inexplicable Scottish accent, but it comes across as cruel and gruesome given the confused status of the so-called “monsters” in this novel.

All of this reads quite strange in a novel that goes to great lengths to make clear that one way to turn the enemy into a friend (or at least into not-an-enemy) is by “personalizing” the people we treat as lesser than us. This is what Bruenor and Drizzt do for Wulfgar, and Salvatore uses the language of “personalize” to name the process by which the faceless other becomes worthy of dignity and respect. But not so the “monsters,” who are rendered into non-persons, unable to be personalized, by Salvatore’s insistent and often awkward use of the pronoun “it” to refer to every giant, orc, goblin, ogre, and demon the heroes fight—even the ones with names (although one captured orc does gets referred to as “him” a few times, but only in dialogue). Salvatore’s orcs, goblins, giants, etc. remain the quintessential “dark other” of fantasy fiction, lazily but firmly trapped in the ontological netherspace between person and monster, between being an enemy with an identity and a nameless thing in a faceless horde.

Now that I have the tools to notice and question these things, I’m particularly curious to see how other authors treat “evil races” in their novels and whether Salvatore adjusts his way of thinking about orcs and goblins, etc. in later novels, especially as he increasingly confronted the Drow Question and its obvious racial implications.

Parting Thoughts

The Crystal Shard is by no means a perfect novel, nor is it necessarily a great one. But Kunzelman was right. The Crystal Shard kicks ass.

It’s an absolute blast, a huge surprise to return to after two decades and discover that not only do I like it way more now than I did in the early 2000s, but I think it’s a pretty good fantasy novel made all the better because of its critical engagement with D&D and with ideologies of play and narrative implicitly staged by the TRPG. The novel does lean heavily into action sequences, which I glossed over in my discussion above because I find them now—as a thirty-four year old with arthritis who can no longer physically jump around in the forest pretending that a stick is a sword, like I used to—just a tad bit boring. But Salvatore is an astoundingly good visual writer who excels at clearly conveying the play-by-play of each movement in the combat, helping readers, for example, visualize exactly what it would look like if a drow with two scimitars fought a balor demon alongside a magical black panther. That’s a rare technical and literary talent, though one not exactly prized by the literary mainstream and rarely remarked on in fantasy criticism, where the narrativization of physical action is typically understood to be critically and literarily uninteresting. Salvatore’s writing might be a good way into thinking about action sequences as more than just textual flavor, as integral to a certain experience of popular fiction, as deeply indebted to the D&D novel’s transmedial relationship to D&D itself, and almost certainly part of the ideological work of the text.

The Crystal Shard is tangible and detailed, and the narrative arcs emotionally engrossing, all while being eminently readable. It’s not surprising that this first novel, written in just a few months, proved such a success or that Salvatore was on the NYT bestseller list just a few years later. With his debut, Salvatore reaches well beyond “here’s a cool adventure” to use the fantasy novel form to think reflexively about D&D and the ethos of play, even with all the baggage. I’m glad to have returned to Icewind Dale and looking forward to the next adventure in Streams of Silver.

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