Dungeons & Dragons: Reading “The Halfling’s Gem” by R.A. Salvatore (Icewind Dale 3)

The Halfling’s Gem by R.A. Salvatore. TSR, 1990. Forgotten Realms / Legend of Drizzt / Icewind Dale 3.

TSR cover (1990, later printing); art by Jeff Easley; courtesy of Amazon.

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

R.A. Salvatore’s first novel, The Crystal Shard (1988), was a profound surprise: a weird, fun, charming novel that had little interest in being a typical fantasy novel, but unabashedly delivered something that was parts of a whole, a bit wonky when put together, but refreshingly so and deeply invested in its characters as they ran through a compelling narrative about why people do evil things. His second novel, Streams of Silver (1989), was a worse book trying to be a typical fantasy novel, but ultimately ringing hollow with its goofy antagonist and turn away from character interiority. Having had to do a quick, extensive rewrite of The Crystal Shard, Streams of Silver felt like a novel in which Salvatore began and ended with the clear intention to give readers a straightforward quest adventure, but in doing so he overlooked what made its predecessor so compelling. The Halfling’s Gem, his third novel and the final in the Icewind Dale trilogy, splits the difference, delivering a compelling and smartly paced adventure quest with high stakes that also manages to explore its characters in detail and put a satisfying bow on several story arcs.

The Halfling’s Gem feels like Salvatore settling into his groove as a writer. And that makes sense, since he had only begun to write professionally some two years before The Halfling’s Gem was completed (he began working on The Fourth Magic in 1982, but his first sale was to TSR when he was contracted to write The Crystal Shard in July 1987 on the basis of a title and a short pitch, and had to complete the novel by October). Given the timing, with at most six months to write each of the novels in the Icewind Dale trilogy, it’s astounding that Salvatore managed to put out a novel that, while not an incredible literary feat, is certainly a solid and memorable fantasy adventure with unusually probing character work that feels like it was written by someone who is a master of the popular fiction craft. It’s really in The Halfling’s Gem that Salvatore’s characters—Drizzt, Bruenor, Catti-brie, Regis, and even Entreri—start to feel like something more than a D&D archetype (I leave Wulfgar off that list because he never feels like anything but the quintessential He-Man barbarian of the north). As an aside, I think we can all agree that the original cover painting for The Halfling’s Gem by Jeff Easley might very well win the award for worst TSR cover art.

Before getting into The Halfling’s Gem, a little should be said of the state of Forgotten Realms in 1990 as the storyworld for D&D franchise novels and as a campaign setting. I think it’s worth putting this in context because in just the few years between the publication of The Crystal Shard, the second novel set in the Realms after Douglas Niles’s Darkwalker on Moonshae (1987), and The Halfling’s Gem, a lot had already developed to make Forgotten Realms a major locus of D&D storytelling and play, pitting it as a strong rival to the Dragonlance campaign setting and novels begun in 1984. It’s worth keeping in mind the relationship between D&D novels and the development of campaign settings in large part because they inform one another’s development. The Crystal Shard, for example, fleshed out the details of the far north of Faerûn and the Sword Coast. Icewind Dale didn’t even appear as a term in the original Forgotten Realms Campaign Set (1987) that launched the Realms. The 1988 supplement The Savage Frontier by Jennell Jaquays (writing at the time under her deadname Paul Jaquays), which detailed the far north across which Streams of Silver would eventually traverse, retroactively incorporated the details of Icewind Dale, Ten Towns, and the events and characters of Salvatore’s first novel into the canon history of the Realms. And in The Halfling’s Gem, Salvatore clearly drew extensively on both the 1987 box set but also the 1988 Empires of the Sands supplement, which outlined the history and culture of the southern region of Calimshan, where the final half of the novel takes place—though he clearly put his own inflection on the rather thin descriptions offered by both sourcebooks.

On the novels side of the Forgotten Realms, when The Halfling’s Gem hit bookstores in January 1990, there were 11 Realms novels published across seven series, and one of those, the Avatar trilogy (1989), described a traumatic, world-shaking event in the history of the Realms: the Time of Troubles, whereby the gods of the Realms were made mortal, many died, and only some reclaimed their godhoods, while other mortals became new gods. Such a series showed TSR’s commitment to changing the storyworld and campaign settings in sometimes radical ways, and yet the effects of such stories took quite a while to trickle through the Forgotten Realms sourcebooks or make their way as storyworld facts into other Realms novels. The Halfling’s Gem, for example, makes no mention of the chaos of the Time of Troubles. Indeed, aside from a few scant and passing references to deities like Mielikki, Tempus, and Moradin, all described in the 1987 Realms campaign box set, religion is hardly a concern in the Icewind Dale trilogy (Drizzt makes some mention of his devotion to Mielikki in Streams of Silver but not in the other two novels). But what’s notable about the novels up to 1990 is that each series takes place in a slightly different part of the Realms, with minor overlaps, allowing authors to elaborate the sparse facts of the sourcebooks, showcasing for potential players how to make story and narrative from what little details TSR offered.

And The Halfling’s Gem does a lot to elaborate the Realms, as Drizzt and his friends eventually traverse all the way from Mithril Hall and Longsaddle, in the north, several thousand miles south to Waterdeep and then by sea to the desert kingdom of Calimshan, where they spend time in the cities of Memnon and Calimport and cross the Calim desert. It’s a grand, massive adventure easily four times the length of the one undertaken in Streams of Silver and along the way the friends rob a banshee’s treasure, battle a horde of duergar, take flight in a flaming chariot, spar with pirates on the high seas, haggle with conniving merchants, fend off desert bandits, get lost in a sewer maze filled with wererats, travel the planes to Tarterus and back, defeat an army of demodands, and topple the thieves guild of Calimport to save Regis. If that weren’t enough, in the final few pages of the novel they retake Mithril Hall and establish a new dwarven kingdom under the rule of King Bruenor Battlehammer. The Halfling’s Gem is the very definition of “action packed.” And through all of this action Drizzt undergoes a crisis of self that carries over from Streams of Silver and leaves him doubting if he’ll ever be accepted as a drow living in the surface world. Salvatore also weaves in a bit of romance—a never-fully-realized love triangle between Catti-brie, Wulfgar, and Drizzt—that is surprisingly sweet and prototypically wholesome, since D&D novels tend toward prudishness except when vaguely, derogatorily referencing sex workers.

The novel is divided again into three “books”—“Halfway to Everywhere,” “Allies,” and “Desert Empires”—and, as with the previous novels, the division owes more to the idea of dividing a book into “books,” a formal break mainstream genre fantasy borrowed from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, than it does to anything like actual narrative structure. The breaks serve no purpose and the second “book,” perhaps tongue in cheek, in a reference to their similar structure, shares the same name of the second “book” in Streams of Silver. Indeed, as I noted before, Streams of Silver and The Halfling’s Gem are more like a duology than parts of a trilogy, since the fundamental concern of both novels is the villain Artemis Entreri’s efforts to capture the halfling Regis, which he achieves at the end of Streams of Silver, and return him to Pasha Pook, head of the Calimport thieves guild, trailed by Regis’s friends. And both novels are thematically about the difference between Entreri and Drizzt, the ethical views driving each, and the “racism” (the novels’ own word) Drizzt faces in his travels across the Realms. In this context, The Crystal Shard is more like a prologue that introduces Salvatore’s characters to establish their skills, personalities, and backgrounds, but ultimately has little relevance to the story that develops in Streams of Silver and The Halfling’s Gem.

The first part of The Halfling’s Gem, “Halfway to Everywhere,” picks up hours after the friends’ escape from the duergar-controlled Mithril Hall, where Bruenor died defeating the shadow dragon Shimmergloom in the chasm of Garumn’s Gorge. They have returned to the “homely house” of the Harpells, but Drizzt and Wulfgar are immediately on their way south to pursue Entreri and his captive Regis. Catti-brie stays behind to await the arrival of Bruenor’s kin from Icewind Dale and a dwarf army from Citadel Feldbar, who will help retake the Hall in the coming spring. (As an aside, I only recently noticed that the original printings I have of the trilogy used the spelling “Mithril” but later reprints, as well as Forgotten Realms sourcebooks, use “Mithral,” likely to avoid copyright infringement claims from the Tolkien Estate; but I’ll use what’s printed on the page!) The first part also gives us brief glimpses at Entreri and Regis, on the road and on board a ship from Waterdeep. Drizzt and Wulfgar’s adventure is the primary focus, though, as they struggle to catch up to Entreri. First they visit a Harpell cousin to get some magic horseshoes to speed their journey and there they get an optional side quest to steal a magical mask from a nearby banshee, since the mask can change one’s appearance and Drizzt is unlikely to find acceptance, as a drow, in the major cities of the Sword Coast. The first part also reveals that Bruenor survived the plummet on Shimmergloom’s back; it was obvious this would happen, but the reveal itself, and how Bruenor survived, was a pleasant surprise—and one I had forgotten after all these years.

The action in book one is slow to build, but in a novel whose second half is almost nonstop action sequences, this is a good thing. The first third gives everyone room to breathe and, moving as slowly as it does in comparison to the break-neck speed of what follows, it allows Salvatore to correct the greatest flaw of Streams of Silver by letting us sit with these characters, get inside their heads, and understand what is driving them. Salvatore does a particularly good job in this first part with Bruenor, Drizzt, and, I hate to say it, Entreri. Where Entreri was presented as the goofy embodiment of Cool Bad Guy Who Wears Leather in Streams of Silver, he emerges in The Halfling’s Gem as a more complex, contemplative figure: vulnerable, ambitious, anxious, overly confident to a fault, a person with a past that we get a few intriguing glimpses of (“the human street fighter who had built his shadowy empire one ally at a time,” 199) and who has friendships and alliances in Calimport, the place he calls his home.

While Salvatore gives us a more rounded Entreri, now an actually compelling villain, he also plants seeds of self-doubt in Drizzt. The mask Drizzt steals from the banshee Agatha allows him to transform into a light-skinned elf, to “pass” freely on the surface world without others judging and fearing him for the color of his skin. But it also proves a challenge for Drizzt, a material and social reminder of what his identity, his heritage, his skin color keep from him. Wearing the mask threatens to confirm that he cannot be accepted for who he is, will never be seen as more than a drow—and, because of the moral logic of “race” in D&D, being a drow means he will be perceived by just about everyone as inherently evil, a cruel and vicious monster (it’s by this same racial logic that Bruenor repeatedly refers to the duergar as “gray scum,” for by virtue of being duergar they are ontologically evil). Drizzt faces this struggle of identity—literalized by the mask and reflected in his companions’ negative reactions to the mask, their desire to see him embrace who he is and to be embraced in kind for the good he does in the world—throughout the book and he says, of wearing the mask, “Of all the challenges I have faced, this is perhaps the most trying,” placing it above surviving in the cruel world of Menzoberranzan or fighting the demon Errtu or facing his equal in arms, Entreri (49).

The second part of The Halfling’s Gem, “Allies,” alternates between, on the one hand, near-continuous action as Drizzt and friends battle pirates and desert bandits on their journey to Calimport, and on the other hand the quiet, ominous plotting of Entreri, who also does some minor torturing of Regis, cutting off a finger when Regis attempts to slow Entreri down. The middle section of the novel brings together the disparate friends—Drizzt and Wulfgar sailing the Sword Coast with Captain Deudermont of the Sea Sprite; Bruenor, just escaped from Mithril Hall with the aid of Lady Alustriel of Silverymoon; and Catti-brie in Longsaddle—in their quest to save Regis. It is about the friends uniting as allies against their common foes (pirates and Entreri) but also about them gaining new allies, in Deudermont and Alustriel, and sussing out who is not an ally—namely, Sali Dalib, the merchant of Memnon. And it’s about Entreri’s allies, who are shown to be many and powerful: the wizard Oberon in Baldur’s Gate, the wizard LaValle in Calimport, and, of course, Pasha Pook. But Pook, too, has his allies, like the pirate lord Pinochet and especially Rassiter the wererat and his wererat clan.

Despite everything thrown against them, Drizzt and friends reunite—Bruenor and Catti-brie join them by flying a flaming chariot summoned by Alustriel all the way from Longsaddle—in the middle of the sea, in the midst of a battle with three pirate ships sent by Pook to protect his interests. And tensions, of course, arise among allies and enemies in the thieves guild of Calimport, where Entreri finds his earlier position unsettled by Rassiter and the wererats. The tail end of “Allies” sees Drizzt, et al.’s arrival in Calimshan at the port city of Memnon, from which they cross the Calim Desert and fight bandits sent after them by the unscrupulous camel thief Sali Dalib (a battle during which Wulfgar picks up and throws his camel as a weapon before killing the creature with his warhammer simply because it annoys him).

Calimshan, the friends’ final destination, is basically Forgotten Realms’s Arabia-in-miniature—a concept that was later repeated with the inclusion of the land of Zakhara, from the 1992 Al-Qadim campaign setting, into the Realms—and is elaborated in the Empires of the Sands (1988) sourcebook, where it is described as magnificently rich, heavily populated (Calimport is said to be home to more than two million people), and loosely governed by city states who profess allegiance to the Pasha of Calimport, a figure who holds no real power (and who should not be confused with the thieves guild leader, Pasha Pook, despite the similar title styling). Calimshan, like the Egypt-inspired Mulhorand, has a history dating back thousands of years and is described as one of the oldest continuously settled regions of the realms. And in Salvatore’s description, Calimshan is an explicitly exoticized realm of moral degradation that draws clearly from negative, orientalized depictions of the Arab world in films like Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), where Arabs are a group of teeming savages ready to kill the hero at a moment’s notice. Salvatore’s description of Memnon is worth quoting in full:

Of all the places the companions had visited, of all the lands they had walked through and fought through, none had seemed as foreign to them as Memnon in the kingdom of Calmishan. Even Drizzt, who had come from the strange world of the drow elves, stared in amazement as he made his way through the city’s open lanes and marketplaces. Strange music, shrill and mournful—as often resembling wails of pain as harmony—surrounded them and carried them on.

People flocked everywhere. Most wore sand-colored robes, but others were brightly dressed and all had some sort of head covering: a turban or a veiled hat. The friend could not guess at the population of the city, which seemed to go on forever, and doubted that anyone had ever bothered to count. But Drizzt and his companions could envision that if all the people of the cities along the northern stretches of the Sword Coast, Waterdeep included, gathered in one vast refugee camp, it would resemble Memnon.

A strange combination of odors wafted through Memnon’s hot air: that of a sewer that ran through a perfume market, mixed with the pungent sweat and malodorous breath of the ever-pressing crowd. Shacks were thrown up randomly, it seemed, giving Memnon no apparent design or structure. Streets were any way that was not blocked by homes, though the four friends had all come to the conclusion that the streets themselves served as homes for many people.

At the center of all the bustle were the merchants. They lined every lane, selling weapons, foodstuffs, exotic pipe weeds—even slaves—shamelessly displaying their goods in whatever manner would attract a crowd. On one corner, potential buyers test-fired a crossbow by shooting down a boxed-in range, complete with live slave targets. On another, a woman showing more skin than clothing—and that being no more than translucent veils—twisted and writhed in a synchronous dance with a gigantic snake, wrapping herself within the huge reptilian coils and then slipping teasingly back out again. […]

“Never have I so longed for home,” the huge barbarian [Wulfgar] sighed, truly overwhelmed.

“It is another adventure, nothing more,” Drizzt reminded him. “Nowhere might you learn more than in a land unlike your own.”

“True enough,” said Catti-brie. “But by me eyes, these folk be making decadence into society.”

“They live by different rules,” Drizzt replied. “They would, perhaps, be equally offended by the ways of the North.”

The others had no response to that, and Bruenor, never surprised but always amazed by eccentric human ways, just wagged his red beard. (172–173)

And, when they arrive in Calimport, an even bigger city, in the final third of the novel, Salvatore describes it briefly as follows:

The aura that distinguished Calimport as home to so very many Calishites came across as foul to the strangers from the North. Truly, Drizzt, Wulfgar, Bruenor, and Catti-brie were weary of the Calim Desert when their five-day trek came to an end, but looking down on the city of Calimport made them want to turn around and take to the sands once again.

It was wretched Memnon on a grander scale, with the divisions of wealth so blatantly obvious that Calimport cried out as ultimately perverted to the four friends. Elaborate houses, monuments to excess and hinting at wealth beyond imagination, dotted the cityscape. Yet, right beside those palaces loomed lane after lane of decrepit shanties of crumbling clay or ragged skins. The friends couldn’t guess how many people roamed the place—certainly more than Waterdeep and Memnon combined!—and they knew at once that in Calimport, as in Memnon, no one had ever bothered to count. (202)

There is a lot going on in these two descriptions. Calimshan, here, embodies the orientalist imaginary of so much popular genre fantasy, which inherits a whole tradition of Arabian Nights-inspired orientalist fantasies dating back hundreds of years, and which reifies a specific set of ideas, perspectives, symbols, and images about otherness and the exotic—and explicitly moralizes them. Of course, Calimshan always stemmed from this orientalist imaginary in fantasy fiction, though in the original descriptions from the Forgotten Realms sourcebooks cited above the depiction was fact-based and had little of the moralizing present in Salvatore’s version. It was, simply, offered as a place to have adventures set in a world drawn from a long genealogy of Western ideas about the Middle East and northern Africa. Early descriptions of Calimshan were tame compared to the Forgotten Realms’ other, more notorious, and more obviously and problematically racialized regions, such as the East Asian-inspired Kara-Tur, pulled into the Realms from the Oriental Adventures sourcebooks, and Maztica, their version of Mesoamerica, complete with an exploration plot featuring conquistadors and detailed in the Maztica trilogy of novels by Douglas Niles (1990–1991). But prior to The Halfling’s Gem, Calimshan was a relatively innocent attempt to include something MENA-like in the Realms.

What’s striking about Salvatore’s description of Calimshan is just how moralized the language is, drawing on clearly racialized and negative symbolism circulating in discourses about a once decadent, now failed, “third world” Middle East: “one vast refugee camp,” smelling like a “sewer,” “pungent sweat,” “malodorous breath of the ever-pressing crowd,” “shacks” built haphazardly and “randomly,” “no apparent design or structure,” “the streets themselves served as homes for many people,” greedy merchants “shamelessly displaying their goods,” selling slaves, using “live slaves” as crossbow targets, and scantily clad women dancing against the “huge reptilian coils” of a “gigantic snake.” The Calishites “mak[e] decadence into society.” To the friends, “Hordes of people begging and starving was not their idea of greatness” (203). And, despite his claims that they should be tolerant and understand that different people “live by different rules,” Drizzt nonetheless compares Calimport to his homeland: “Truly there were similarities, and death was no less common in Menzoberranzan, but Calimport somehow seemed fouler than the city of the drow” (203). To be sure, none of the northern cities are described either to this extent or with such moralized or racialized language. Waterdeep and Baldur’s Gate are, if anything, places of awe and order.

Though Salvatore tries to suggest, through Drizzt, that the friends should practice cultural relativism, it’s clear from Drizzt’s internal monologue about Calimshan and from the novel’s own subjective language, which describes Calimshan through the disgusted eyes of the novel’s protagonists, that Calimshan is meant to be, indeed, a “foul” place. There are some hints that this has less to do with anything inherent to the Calishite people, since Salvatore makes clear that it is the exploitative merchants and the ostentatious display of unimaginable wealth that truly makes Calimshan foul. The shanties, the poverty, the death rampant enough to rival Menzoberranzan, the teeming hordes, the smells—all of this, Salvatore seems to suggest, is because of the staggering wealth inequalities that structure Calimshan society. And the murderous merchant Sali Dalib, who sells stolen camels to the friends and betrays them to bandits (and talks in the egregiously racist caricature of a brown guy clearly included for comedic relief), is meant to exemplify—along with Pasha Pook—what is wrong with the concentration of wealth in the hands of the corrupt and immoral. But the language, the setting, the ideas are all explicitly racialized and the novel cannot seem to help but (maybe unconsciously?) lump the orientalized culture of Calimshan in with its moralization of wealth inequality. Given that The Halfling’s Gem is so invested in the social and personal consequences of Drizzt’s racialization, it’s interesting that Salvatore really stumbles in his approach to the “exotic” realm of Calimshan. But a little more on that, and the liberal imagination of race and tolerance, later.

The third and final part of The Halfling’s Gem, “Desert Empires,” ends the novel with more than a hundred pages of pure, non-stop action as Drizzt and friends fight their way into and through the thieves guild, get briefly sent to the evil plane of Tarterus, and fight their way back to the Material Plane to finally defeat Pasha Pook and rescue Regis. It’s not worth summarizing all the battles and stratagems, but suffice to say that Drizzt and friends defeat a horde of wererats, a hydra, a sundew, and dozens of demodands on Tarterus. Drizzt also faces off one on one with Entreri—a battle Entreri orchestrated in the first place by kidnapping Regis instead of just taking the magical ruby back to Pook, as he and Drizzt initially agreed in Streams of Silver. This novel wouldn’t exist without Entreri’s desire for a confrontation with the yang to his yin: Entreri is obsessed with Drizzt, the drow who is seemingly as skilled a bladesman as he, but who has emotions and friends and an ethical code. These things confound Entreri, like Javert unable to grasp that Jean Valjean could be good despite having stolen a single loaf of bread nineteen years ago. But Drizzt has no interest in the conflict, especially once he realizes that it is his friends and his moral code, his belief in justice and goodness, that make him the greater swordsman and the better person. And, unsurprisingly, Drizzt defeats Entreri, who escapes like a rat into the night.

In the end, surprisingly, Regis doesn’t need rescuing. Entreri brought the means of his escape with them: the magical onyx figurine that summons Drizzt’s panther companion, Guenhwyvar. Entreri stole it from Drizzt during their battle in Mithril Hall and gave it to his friend, the wizard LaValle, who gifted it in turn to his master, Pook, to add to the collection of exotic cats he uses to torture his enemies. But Guenhwyvar is loyal to Drizzt and his friends and when Pook orders the cat to kill Regis, the panther instead whisks Regis to the Astral Plane. As Drizzt and company fight to escape Tarterus through the portal of the magical Taros Hoop held in the thieves guild, Regis brings Guenhwyvar and a host of other astral cats back to the Material Plane to cleanse the guild of wererats and kill Pasha Pook. In the escape from Tarterus, Catti-brie nearly dies but is saved by Drizzt, much to Wulfgar’s chagrin, who feels his honor has been called into question and so curses the drow as a “traitor.” But, with all their enemies dispatched and Regis now bedecked in the gaudiest, gem-studded robe possible, lording it over the Calimport thieves guild as its new pasha, the friends make up and set sail homeward with their new ally Captain Deudermont. The novel ends with Bruenor in possession of Mithril Hall, Wulfgar and Catti-brie planning a wedding, Regis returned from Calimport after being ousted as guild leader, and Drizzt ready to go on more adventures.

The Halfling’s Gem is an incredibly fast-paced novel and demonstrates Salvatore’s mastery, even at this early stage in his career, at planning out and devising interesting action set pieces that involve more than just an encounter with a bandit group or orc tribe. Like a good DM, he draws from the great range offered in the Monster Manual and other supplements and creates compelling combat scenarios that make sense (within the context of D&D, that is). Salvatore is also the kind of D&D writer you can imagine has character sheets drawn up for each character, who knows their feats and spells, whose stories feel like they could take place in a campaign of mid-to-high-level PCs. I was sometimes astounded, though, just how much the companions fight, how OP they all are (each of them has magical artifacts of incredible power), and the level of magical aid they receive—not just Alustriel summoning a fire chariot to whisk Bruenor and Catti-brie thousands of miles in a day, but also the convenient magical mask stolen from Agatha that allows Drizzt to change his appearance, Drizzt’s “figurine of wondrous power,” and the halfling’s gem that started it all. Of course, hundreds of pages of action could become boring, no matter how well-written or well-plotted they are, or, as is Salvatore’s wont, how outlandish and comedic they can sometimes be. But the novel isn’t all action all the time.

As in The Crystal Shard, Salvatore takes the time in The Halfling’s Gem to give his characters room to breathe, think, and reflect—to be people, not just weapon-wielding tanks mowing down unbelievable numbers of enemies on little rest and with no health potions or clerics to heal them. And because it occasionally slows down, The Halfling’s Gem draws out its themes more fully than Streams of Silver. The novel is about friendship and the ties that bind us, that sense of community, responsibility, and belonging that sends everyone trekking thousands of miles in search of Regis, not knowing if he’ll be alive at the end of the road. Bruenor, for example, puts aside retaking Mithril Hall in order to rebuild his “family,” and he goes after Drizzt and Wulfgar because it is the right thing, because it’s what he owes Regis after years of friendship and companionship. At the same time, The Halfling’s Gem leans heavily (for Salvatore) into romance. Of course, there was a budding flirtation between Catti-brie and Wulfgar in The Crystal Shard and Streams of Silver, and that is present to much greater extent here, where suddenly the two twenty-somethings are lovey dovey, without us ever having seen their relationship develop romantically. But Salvatore also throws a curve ball: Drizzt clearly loves Catti-brie, deeply and romantically, but he understands that he missed his window (of course, he would have had to make a move on her when she was a teenager, but Salvatore seems to gloss over that…).

But perhaps the most significant theme Salvatore develops in The Halfling’s Gem and which also nicely resolves the full arc of the otherwise haphazard Icewind Dale trilogy, is that of Drizzt’s identity, his sense of self, and his feelings of belonging (or not) in the surface world. I discussed Salvatore’s theming of race, the drow, Drizzt’s questions of identity, and the limits of liberal tolerance in my essay on Streams of Silver, and Salvatore covers essentially the same thematic ground in The Halfling’s Gem but with the added difference that Drizzt is given the opportunity to “pass” as a non-drow elf and to understand the texture of social reality, of tacit acceptance, he has been missing on account of the color of his skin. And Salvatore is very clear that we are talking about a difference signalled exclusively by skin color, which he often refers to as “black,” and that the experience Drizzt has in the surface world is one of “racism” (this word was used on the back cover of Streams of Silver, for example, but the novels themselves use the term “prejudice”).

This explicit framing of the drow as a racial category—and a racial category that incurs prejudice, which includes not just social exclusion but also threats of physical violence—is what Steven Holmes refers to as “negative estrangement,” building on writing by Viktor Shklovsky (on art and estrangement) and Helen Young (on race and whiteness in popular fantasy fiction). For Holmes, negative estrangement “is a literary practice of presenting the familiar in unfamiliar ways. In negative estrangement, artists estrange subjects with the intention of creating negative sentiments toward that estranged subject. Weaving together elements of common, familiar stereotypes, the stereotypes seem unfamiliar when presented as a new race, people, species, or monster” (121). While the drow were initially created by Gary Gygax as a wholly and ontologically evil race, itself a major problem endemic not just to fantasy fiction but to sff more generally, Salvatore’s decision to make a “good” drow meant that, naturally, in a world where drow are only evil, everyone else who isn’t evil would fear the drow. What Salvatore had to ask himself, then, was what it would be like to be the one good drow who turned his back on his heritage and their evil, and was a champion for good.

And Salvatore—a Boston liberal from an Italian American family, and possessing at least some sensitivity to the history of racial injustice and violence in the US (no doubt the result of having lived through the Boston busing crisis)—took Drizzt’s positionality as a black-skinned elf to be a necessarily racialized one, since his skin (and white hair) would be the thing marking him as different to other elves, as visibly “evil.” So Drizzt became a stand-in for discourses of racial belonging and tolerance in a world where, despite his goodness, he could expect others would believe that all drow are evil. Of course, if the drow are meant to be read as akin to a racial group, then we have to ask what it means for the dark-skinned elves to be the evil ones? And, from there, it’s only a small logical step to asking about orcs, goblins, duergar, or even wererats—after all, Regis makes clear that Guenhwyvar and the other astral cats killed only the wererats, not the thieves guild members who were “just” human, despite wererats being humans with a lycanthropy disease (and, from suggestions in the text, many did not willingly become lycanthropes!). All of these narrative and storyworld choices are deeply ideological and reflect both the underlying whiteness of fantasy authors and their (and the culture at large’s) assumptions about audience, history, and moral associations between skin color, monstrosity, and race.

Any story Salvatore tells about race, using Drizzt, is necessarily in conversation with all of the complications above. And, as Holmes points out in his essay, this is something Salvatore and the current D&D publisher Wizards of the Coast have been increasingly sensitive to, with WotC even going so far as to rewrite the rules to take moral alignment away from playable races, so that the drow, orcs, etc. are no longer uniformly evil. But Drizzt’s story in The Halfling’s Gem, while complicated by the larger contexts of the drow in D&D and what it means that they are evil, is a surprisingly sensitive attempt to recreate—for a presumably mostly (but by no means exclusively) white young male readership—the experience of prejudice and exclusion through the negative estrangement created by Drizzt’s being a good drow in a world that hates and fears all drow.

Streams of Silver had Drizzt come up against the limits of liberal tolerance in a place like Silverymoon, but in The Halfling’s Gem he has to fight the internal battle of whether to use Agatha’s magical mask to “pass” or to be himself. Through conversations with Wulfgar, Bruenor, and especially Catti-brie, and after experiencing acceptance from the Sea Sprite crew after they see his mask slip during battle and realize he’s a drow, Drizzt ultimately chooses to be himself and he gives the mask away. But this journey of self-acceptance is not without its problems. After all, it’s somewhat unclear what Drizzt is accepting about himself. Is it that he has finally accepted that the question of his belonging, and whether he will be tolerated, will always follow him no matter where he goes? If that’s the case, Drizzt already knew this in the first novel and this feels like backtracking, even if it’s written like personal growth. Or is it something else, a subtle shift in how he holds himself, such that people are more likely to see him as a good drow and therefore not dangerous? I truthfully don’t know, but Salvatore writes it convincingly—and only in really sitting with this and asking what Drizzt is accepting, after thinking about the book for several days, do I find myself sort of perplexed. The lesson would seem to be: people will always be prejudiced against Drizzt, so he might as well get used to that and live his life confident in who he is. I think that’s what Salvatore means, which is an almost realpolitik, “deal with it” response to racism. It says “your friends will know your value, so it’s OK if everyone else doesn’t.”

At the same time, it’s clear that Salvatore sees race—insofar as Drizzt is racialized—as a social problem, and he goes to great lengths to show how prejudice operates, but The Halfling’s Gem also clarifies that race is something that marks the racialized person’s own experience of selfhood, that they personally have to deal with, to “overcome.” And, indeed, Drizzt only gains acceptance from the crew of the Sea Sprite because he helped them defeat the pirates. What if he hadn’t, what if his mask had slipped day one? Then again, this is a world in which it is a fact, even supported by Drizzt himself, that the drow are evil, so Salvatore inherits a storyworld and, by virtue of writing a “good” drow, a narrative situation in which Drizzt will always have to prove himself one of the “good ones.” What results, ultimately, from negative estrangement is the ability to see and read and learn about racialization, how it operates, and how it might psychically, socially, and materially affect those racialized. That’s not nothing, but damn is it not without significant problems, since negative estrangement can also come across as not being fully aware of the realities of race, racism, and white supremacy in our world.

The Halfling’s Gem, whatever its problems (and there are clearly several!), is a rousing end to the Icewind Dale trilogy—to this series of novels that quite literally made fantasy history, that became probably the best-known D&D novels, that launched the career of a multi-bestselling author, and that left us with a messy legacy of questions about race, morality, and the drow that are, almost forty years later, still productive. These novels are by turns fun, funny, and reflective. They are surprisingly good at thinking about what it means to play D&D and how to tell good, compelling stories with the tools provided by D&D sourcebooks. They helped flesh out the Forgotten Realms, for better and worse, and they attempted to tackle big questions about belonging, race, prejudice, tolerance, personal growth, friendship, “found family,” and why we choose to do good (or evil). I was pleasantly surprised, after twenty-something years, that they are still creating new fans to this day and were capable of rekindling this reader’s youthful interest in the Forgotten Realms, even if I now bring a much more critical approach that means I can never fully recapture what it was like to read these books, to feel myself in this world, among these characters, all those years ago.

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