The Best Pulp Hero in Our World
More than 1,000 or so words on Drizzt Do'Urden
“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.”
-Raymond Chandler
There are 39 books in The Legend of Drizzt, novel series by writer RA Salvatore, though he only appears in 35 of them. I have read 37 of those 39, and of those 37, I have read 30 of them at least twice.
To be clear, I have much more loosely read/re-read books from the latter half of the series than the first half, and we will get to why, but in the the 29 years I’ve been reading these books, I have spent a great deal of time in their pages, or thinking about them.
The thing is, despite all the time and reading/re-reading, I don’t think about these books the way I think about The Hobbit & Lord of the Rings, or The Prydain Chronicles, which are foundational texts for me, or the works of Joe Abercrombie, whose work I happen to absolutely adore and feel as though it was written for me…
And I think that’s both a result of the Dungeons and Dragons of it all, and because of the prose.
But I keep coming back to these books, and I keep buying the new ones, because like countless other mouth breathing dorks, I love Drizzt Do’Urden.
Born in an underground city ruled by a theocratic matriarchy that worships a spider demon goddess of chaos, Drizzt escaped his homeland, journeyed to the surface world, and became one of the greatest heroes his world had ever seen. His existence provided that his people were evil by nurture, not by nature, and he started life as a supporting character for a big, strong, blonde barbarian named Wulfgar…
But the people, and the author’s sense of what was working in his story, quickly propelled him into becoming the main character. After the first trilogy he appeared in, the author wrote his origin story, The Dark Elf Trilogy, an emotionally dense series full of elegant world building, exciting fights, and moments of unflinching cruelty that ground the narrative and emotional stakes for the hero as he fights to survive and find himself.
In other words, it was the perfect shit for me to read when I was in 8th grade.
Drizzt was, in his origin story trilogy, everything encapsulated in Chandler’s quite about his noir detectives… except for the fact Drizzt thinks about and talk about the nature of good all the time.
It’s the the thing that makes him truly special as a fantasy hero, and what makes him unique as a pulp hero; his voluminous page counts are devoted to sweeping, chaotic, high fantasy battles (that are occasionally hard to follow, and are also joyously, delightfully over-written), and and truly considered navel gazing about gods, monsters, violence, identity, and love.
Every single Drizzt book is better than it has any right to be, and you might think that 39 books in that wouldn’t be the case, but at 39 books in, you’d also expect that by now Salvatore would just be going through the motions.
He isn’t, and as the world of Dungeons and Dragons gets weirder and weirder, he’s just getting more space and more opportunity to tell more ambitious stories within that space.
Oh, did I forget to mention that Drizzt and all his books take places within the Forgotten Realms, a campaign setting for Dungeons and Dragons? I know I alluded to it earlier, but yes, these are specifically Dungeons and Dragons books.
Long story short, TSR, the original owners of DnD started publishing novels in the 80s with the Dragonlance Chronicles which were incredibly popular (I lovingly call then White Trash Lord of the Rings), and following their success, and the interests of the then CEO of TSR (after Gary Gygax, co-creator of DnD was fired from his own company), a deal was made with, I want to say Ballentine Books, to start pumping out paperbacks set in DnD’s various words.
So yes, these books were, and are, intellectual property expanding, solidly pulp high fantasy adventure.
And that is why they will always be better than they have any right to be.
Which is a sentiment that comes from the idea that what a thing is determines its artistic and intellectual qualities, which is a fraught sentiment at best, but stick with me here.
If I said, “These books are about a dark elf ranger who fights with two scimitars and is the best swordsman in the world, and he has a giant magic panther friend, and he’s the one good dark elf who escaped all the other bad dark elves, and now he fights demons, and pirates, and all his friends died, then got brought back to life again, and now he’s also a martial arts monk, and he has a daughter with his red headed hot resurrected wizard wife who used to be a warrior and…”
You see what I mean about being better than they have any right to be?
The thing about all his friends, including his wife, being killed and coming back is true by the way. Being attached to a brand with its own corporate directives, timeline, and need for brand cohesion, events in the many Drizzt books have had to reflect those things, be they changes in the rules via changes in editions, to time jumps in the overall narrative and continuity… and that’s another example of how these books overachieve in their emotional complexity and characterization.
But as ownership of the Dungeons and Dragons property changed hands to Wizards of the Coast, and Wizards was in turn bought by Hasbro, the importance of the DnD novel line as a whole greatly diminished, all but ending entirely, save for Drizzt, and while these books have stayed bound to brand continuity, the reigns on Salvatore and what he can and does write about have seemed to loosen in some regards.
The books have gotten darker, the human cost and cruelty has gotten sharper, and and through it all, even as he often takes a back seat to others, Drizzt has remained not just the best man in his old world below the ground, but the best man in his world.
The character has ever been noble and kind hearted, but that kindness has grown, and when faced with survivors of tragedy and unspeakable harm, he is gentle and patient.
Drizzt loses, a lot.
Not in one on one fights, in those he generally wins, but while he wins those battles he loses the wars much more than you would think he would.
But in typical navel gazing heroic fashion, he is winning another war, because past the fight scenes and the journal entries, the one thing you can always count on of this pulp hero is that Drizzt Do’Urden will always do the right thing.
About Drizzt and Me: I started LARPing in May of 1995, when I was in 7th grade, and that brought me to DnD. Before that, I had played Magic cards, and had a few DnD books, but didn’t really know how to play etc. In December of 1995 I finally sat down and read Lord of the Rings and when I finished those books, I needed more.
Durning Spring break of 96, when I was in 8th grade, my grandma (step-mom’s mom) took me and my sister to a big book and record store in Tacoma, and I grabbed the Dark Elf Trilogy as well as Sparkle and Fade by Everclear (and the score to the Highlander movies) which means that might have been one of the most consequential shopping trips of my life.
Drizzt was like three of my favorite sword fighting heroes rolled into one: Aragorn, Leonardo the Ninja Turtle, and Duncan MacLeod from the Highlander TV series, and he was as obsessed with trying to be good as I was when I was that age.
I devoured the first three books, which were the second trilogy in the series, read the first one, and then moved on the the third trilogy, which was just wrapping up. Through high school I read the books as they came out, then stopped paying attention, for a while, then stopped reading them altogether after reading 2 books in the trilogy that was coming out in the early 00s.
Drizzt was like two of my favorite sword fighting heroes rolled into one: Leonardo the Ninja Turtle, and Duncan MacLeod fom the Highlander TV series, and he was as obsessed with trying to be good as I was when I was that age.
Then, in 2015/2016 I had this idea to re-read them again to see how they changed and lined up with the different ruled editions of DnD, and I was going to write about it for my old blog… which obviously didn’t happen.
But I did re-read all of the ones I had read minus the Dark Elf Trilogy which I’d already read 3 or 4 times, and minus the Wulfgar stand alone book, and when I got to the point where I’d stopped, I just kept going.
And just as DnD had gotten weird with its 4th edition, so too did the books, and that was where there was a time jump, and where all of Drizzt’s friends had to die, and he got new friends.
At least until 5th edition, where Salvator got to bring back the old gang.
I read those books while in the throes of a pretty deep depression and alread read them incredibly fast, reading one a week for, I don’t know, 30 weeks, with a few breaks to read other stuff in between, and I realized I didn’t really remember much of them, so last fall I went back to that stopping point trilogy and started re-reading from there. I re-read 14 of them in a row, skipped re-reading the last 6 before the most recent trilogy which finished this year, then read that one.
I don’t think I’d ever have to read or re-read another Drizzt book, not in the way I will always have to go back to Prydain or Middle Earth, and I don’t feel inspired by these books the way I’m inspired by Abercrombie, but I love them and I respect the shit out of Salvatore for what he does.
Also, my grandma who bought me those books also made me a LARPing cloak like the one Drizzt wears, not on the covers of any of his books, but on one of the rule books.
This one, right down here, and it was the coolest piece of costuming I had.
