I found this a while back and thought I’d save it for the actual season.  I’m not normally a fan of blinking Christmas lights, but if you can use them this well, go for it.  (The music’s not bad either.)

It’s Christmas Eve, so rather than write one of my long-winded screeds, I’ll settle for some short notes tonight.

In case anyone who comes here hasn’t checked out the St. Rose web site yet, I should mention that we’re having a Midnight Mass tonight, in addition to the regular Mass times of 8:00am and 11:00am tomorrow.  There will be Christmas carols before Mass at 11:30 tonight.  I don’t know if the organ repairs are finished yet; but with or without it, I’m sure the choir will be singing tonight.

Read more »

Jason wrote a very good article on being fat and losing weight, so that brings up something I’ve been meaning to talk about for a while.

I’m continuing to low-carb, but I haven’t been very strict about it lately.  I haven’t had any more carb pig-outs like I wrote about the other day, but it’s remarkably easy for too many carbs to slip into your diet when you aren’t careful.  Some low-carb cheesecake here, some breaded fried chicken there, some sweet potatoes over here on the side, and suddenly I’m often close to double my daily limit of 30 grams of carbohydrate a day—even though I’m sticking to foods that can be okay on a low-carb diet if the portions are small enough and you count everything.  Not surprisingly, my weight loss has stalled. Read more »

Buculae sunt bestiae versutae. — Cows are wily beasts.

Yesterday as we were leaving the farm, we found a cow out on the road.  A heifer Jersey calf, really, about a year old, that goes by the name of China.  (About twice the height of the babies in the picture.)  I got out in the howling cold wind in my lightweight going-to-visit jacket and single layer of jeans, and started driving her toward the driveway.  She did not want to go.  But I’ll match my stubbornness against an animal’s any day.  We zigzagged back and forth, off the road into the ditch on one side, then off into a field on the other side, until I had her about three-quarters of the way there.

Young Jersey Calves

Then she made her move.  She took a few steps toward the ditch on the left, then when my guard was down, she bolted to my right.  I sprinted that way in a desperate attempt to cut her off, and got about three steps before I went face-down on the ice.  While I checked myself for broken parts and brushed the mud off my clothes (yes, I found mud somehow, on a ten-degree day), she wandered back the way we came.

Then I wised up and had Angel get out and help me, and we drove her the direction she wanted to go in the first place, toward the gate at the uphill end of the field.  (Animals always seem to prefer being driven uphill; I don’t know why.)  Maybe she used up all her moves shedding me the first time, because she went right along without any trouble this time.

Once all the excitement was over and we were walking back to the truck, I realized my right thumb was hurting.  I took off my glove and saw it was bleeding a little, but it was also jammed pretty good.  It ached and started swelling the rest of the night while we were out visiting, but I was more annoyed with the mud I couldn’t get off my shirt.

Today, it doesn’t just ache a little; it hurts to touch anything with it.  There’s no bruise (I never bruise, at least not close enough to the surface to see it), but it’s swollen and I can’t bend it.  I guess I’m lucky it’s the one digit you don’t use to type, or I’d be having a hard time at the keyboard.  Thumbs are one of those things you take for granted; it’s hard to turn a doorknob or pull a plate out of the cupboard with just your fingers.  I’ll pack some ice on it tonight, and hope it relaxes some by tomorrow.  It doesn’t keep me from typing, but the ache is distracting; I keep wanting to mess with it and loosen it up somehow.

This lesson starts with some concepts that will be new to anyone whose only language is English, then gets into the words and grammar.

New Concepts

Declensions

As mentioned in the introduction, Latin changes the endings of words to determine their meaning in a sentence. For nouns and adjectives, we call this “declension.” There are five declensions, but we will only look at the first one for now. Each Latin noun or adjective belongs to one of the five declensions, and that declension determines the endings we put on that word to mean different things. When we “decline” a noun, we show it with all its possible endings.

Case

A noun’s case determines its purpose in a sentence: subject, object, possessive, etc. There are five main cases and two rarer ones. Some cases have several uses, but here are the basic ones:

Photo by Joe Geranio

Nominative

Used for the subject of a sentence: The dog bit the mailman.

Genitive

Shows possession: The boy’s dog bit the mailman.

Dative

Expresses an indirect object of the action: The boy gave a treat to the dog.

Accusative

Limits the action in some way, often by showing the target of the action: The dog bit the mailman.

Ablative

Expresses separation, location, and many other meanings that English usually handles with a preposition: The dog chased the mailman from the yard. The dog bit the mailman on Tuesday.

Vocative

Used to directly address someone: “Boy, get that dog on a leash!” The vocative case usually has the same ending as the nominative case, so we don’t usually show it when we decline a noun.

Locative

Expresses location. The locative case is a bit of an artifact from earlier languages, so it only applies to certain words like domus (home) and names of cities and places. We’ll deal with the locative in chapter 60 or so.

Gender

In English, we don’t consider words to have gender except for a few things like ships. In Latin, every noun has a gender, and there are three: masculine, feminine, and neuter. Except for when they refer to people, these don’t necessarily have anything to do with the thing being named. For example, the word for island (insula) is feminine, bridge (pons) is masculine, and river (flumen) is neuter. The gender of each noun simply has to be memorized along with the word itself, although there are some hints we’ll find along the way.

The First Declension

Nouns of the first declension can be recognized by the ae ending in the genitive singular case. To decline a first declension noun, drop the ae from the genitive form to get the stem, and add the first declension endings to that stem. Declining the word puella (girl) looks like this:

(After a while, it will become second nature to picture nouns in this 5×2 form.) As you can see, the first declension endings are:

In all first declension words, the vocative is the same as the nominative.

Two or more endings may sometimes be identical, like -is in the dative and ablative plural. When translating from Latin, the context will determine which is being used.

To decline another first declension word like aqua (water), we again remove the -ae from the genitive form, aquae, and add the same endings:

For a word with a stem ending in a vowel, like Italia (Italy), the rule remains the same:

All first declension nouns will be declined this way.

Syntax

Uses of the Nominative Case

Subject

The most common use of the nominative is as the subject of a verb: The girl is walking. Puella ambulat.

Predicate Nominative

In correct English, we say, “It is I,” not, “It is me.” Latin is the same way. When a noun is used with a linking verb like “to be” to define the subject, that noun is in the nominative case:

The girl is a poet. Puella est (is) poeta.

Vocabulary

New nouns to learn will always be given in the format below: the nominative form, the genitive, the gender, and the meaning(s). When the genitive is obvious from the nominative, just the ending may be shown. Nouns are shown this way in Latin dictionaries, so you can tell from the genitive which declension they belong to.

The last two words are verbs, which we’ll learn about later. For now, just memorize them so you can form some basic sentences.

agricola, -ae, m. farmer
aqua, -ae, f., water
femina, -ae, f., woman
fortuna, -ae, f., fortune, chance
Gallia, Galliae, f., Gaul (France)
insula, -ae, f., island
Italia, -ae, f., Italy
lingua, linguae, f., language
littera, -ae, f., letter (of the alphabet); in the plural, a letter or letters you would mail
Maria, Mariae, f., Mary
memoria, -ae, f., memory
natura, -ae, f., nature
poeta, -ae, m., poet
provincia, provinciae, f., province
puella, -ae, f., girl
silva, -ae, f., forest
vita, -ae, f., life

est, is, there is
sunt, are, there are

Word Study

Latin has no articles, (a, an, and the), so leave them out when translating to Latin, and put them in where they make sense in context when translating to English.

Most first declension nouns are feminine in gender, except where they refer to male professions, like agricola (farmer) and poeta (poet). (That’s one of those hints I mentioned earlier.) (Yes, in Roman times, poets were all men.)

Drill

a. Practice by declining each vocabulary noun in all five cases and singular and plural, like puella and aqua above.

b. For each word in the vocabulary, try to think of an English word that derives from it. For example: agricola, agriculture. These connections make it much easier to memorize words.

Exercises

(Put your answers in the comments if you’d like me to check them.)

a. Give the case, number (singular or plural), and meaning for each of the following. For some, there will be more than one possible answer. Example: insulas: accusative, plural, islands.

1. naturis
2. Gallia
3. poetae
4. memoriam
5. linguas
6. silvarum
7. insulae
8. Poetae sunt agricolae.
9. Sunt litterae.
10. Maria est femina.

b. Translate:

1. memory (accusative)
2. O girls! (vocative)
3. for the women
4. the poets’
5. of life
6. province (nominative and accusative)
7. for Mary
8. There is a forest.
9. Gaul is a province.
10. The women are farmers.

Congratulations! You’ve finished lesson 1. Acta est fabula, plaudite! (The play is over, applaud!) Next time: verbs, so we can start making real sentences.

This isn’t actually a lesson; that’s why I numbered it zero, so lesson #1 will be the first real one. I thought instead of jumping right into vocabulary and grammar, I’d kick this series off by explaining why I’m doing this and why anyone should care.

Why Learn Latin Anyway?

Learning Latin Improves Your English

English is such a simple language that you can muddle along, writing and speaking it fairly well without really understanding how it works. As long as you get the words in the right order, people will usually know what you’re talking about. Not so with Latin. Since Latin changes the endings of words to indicate their relationship in the sentence, you can’t learn it without knowing how those relationships work. You’ll have to understand subjects and objects, active and passive, transitive and intransitive, or you’ll get nowhere. In turn, all that will help you speak and write better English.

At least 60% of English words descend from Latin, especially the hard ones. In a very general sense, the short words (house, cow, walking) tend to come from Anglo-Saxon/Germanic languages, while the longer ones (domicile, bovine, ambulatory) come from Latin. As you learn Latin, you’ll recognize those English words in Latin ones, and strengthen your comprehension of them in both languages.

Classic Literature

I don’t suppose many Latin students go on to read a lot of Cicero or Ovid outside the classroom in the original language. But if you want to, you’ll be able to. There are always nuances of meaning that don’t survive translation. Even if you read them in English, knowing the language behind the translation can help you understand the context.

Other Languages

All languages have things in common, so learning a second language makes the third one easier, which makes the fourth even easier yet, and so on. But Latin really stands out in this regard, because its “inflections” (changing the word endings for different parts of speech) help prepare you for other languages that work the same way, like German or Russian.

The Romance languages—called that because of their connection to Rome—like French, Spanish, and Italian, get 90% or more of their words from Latin. Having a base of Latin helps with learning those languages even more than it does with English.

History

While learning Latin, you’ll be exposed to some of the most important people and events in history, since many of the surviving texts from Roman times are historical records, like Caesar’s Commentarii de Bello Gallico (Commentaries about the Gallic Wars).

Latin has been the official language of the Catholic Church almost since the beginning. All important Church documents are still written in Latin and then translated into other languages. This way the language provides a certain amount of continuity through the centuries, since Latin is a “dead” language and the meanings of its words don’t change. If you want to study what the Popes have said over the years, or what the first complete Bibles were like, you can go to the source with Latin.

The Latin Mass

If you’re Catholic, you don’t have to understand a word of Latin to assist at the Latin Mass and have it be completely valid and meaningful for you. If you go a while, you’ll start to recognize some of the regular prayers anyway: Agnus Dei: Lamb of God; Dominus vobiscum: The Lord be with you; Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus: it’s time to kneel again. But understanding more of the prayers may help you feel more involved.

General Thinking Ability

Latin is very orderly. When you translate a sentence, almost every word has an ending that tells you its purpose in that sentence. Translating is partly like building a bridge and partly like detective work, as you move back and forth from the part you’ve figured out to the part you haven’t, building your translated text one word at a time, with each piece providing context for the next. That kind of mental discipline is useful in any field inside the classroom or out of it.

Why Are You Doing This?

I took Latin for four years in high school, and like most students, I forgot it soon after I graduated. (And I liked Latin; subjects I didn’t like were forgotten daily. Burn down the schools!!!—sorry, getting off the topic there…) I recently found my First Year Latin textbook and thought I’d re-teach myself. Serendipitously, this was just a couple months before I discovered the Latin Mass was coming to Quincy.

I breezed through the first 15 or 20 chapters, plowed through the next 10 or 15, and trudged through chapters 35-45. At first I was doing a chapter each night in about 30 minutes, but by the time I stopped each one was taking a few hours spread out over a week, and I realized it wasn’t sinking it very well anymore, and I needed to back up and regroup. This book has 75 chapters, and I don’t recall whether we used it all four years or moved on to another book. I do recall reading some Ovid and Caesar that aren’t in here, so there was probably another book. This one should provide a good grounding in the language, though.

There are some Latin tutorials and lessons online already, of course, but I haven’t been terribly impressed with them. Some seem to move too fast, some too slow, and some try to dumb it down too much. Like the modern use of “whole language” in English classes instead of phonics, they seem to hope you’ll absorb the language by osmosis from a lot of examples. Latin doesn’t really work that way; the structure (grammar) is too integral to understanding it. I intend to focus these lessons on the structure, which may make them seem hard at first, but should pay off in the long run.

I’m also hoping this gives me something useful for my web site beyond my usual blathering about whatever comes to mind. If this becomes a useful resource, it will allow me the time to develop other useful things here. I may put this into e-book form at some point too, but it’ll always be freely available in per-lesson form here. I’m also considering doing real-life classes or tutoring, if there’s an interest in that locally.

So I’m Convinced; Now What?

The next lesson will dive into words and inflections, so I won’t get into that here. Just a few notes:

• It’s easier to learn a language (or almost anything) if you can discuss it with someone else. Please feel free to ask questions or discuss the lessons in the comments boxes. I always welcome comments, but in this case they can help everyone who’s following along.
• I’m more qualified to teach Latin than my high school calculus and computer teachers were to teach those courses, but I’m no expert. I’m bound to make mistakes, so don’t be afraid to point them out. Also, sentences can sometimes be translated in different ways, so feel free to offer better translations than mine any time. People who already know some Latin are certainly welcome to jump in and help us out.
• I’ll be following much of the format of First Year Latin, but I’ll make up my own exercises so I don’t violate their copyright. That means you won’t need the book to participate in these lessons, but if you want it for your own use, that link is to a revision very close to mine. (My exact revision from 1975 is unavailable at Amazon.)
• Each lesson will explain a few new things and provide some exercises, from short phrases to longer passages to translate. I may give the answers to each lesson’s exercises in a separate post on a later day; I’m still figuring out some of those details. I expect to post at least one lesson each week, and produce at least a hundred of them. If you’re still with me after all that, we should both be pretty solid in the language by then.
• This textbook and my previous studies were all in what is called “Classical Latin,” the language written by educated Romans during the time of the Empire. Now that I’m going to Latin Mass, my interest has shifted somewhat toward “Ecclesiastical (or Church) Latin.” Fortunately, there aren’t great differences between the two except for pronunciation, and the Church Latin comes closer to what seems like natural pronunciation to us. I’ll try to mix vocabulary and texts from both sources, so if you’re particularly interested in either Classical or Church Latin, I hope you’ll find this useful.
• Speaking of pronunciation, I’m going to try making some audio clips to go with the lessons, if I can figure out how to record audio and make it sound decent.

I think that about wraps up this introduction. Next time: first declension (noun endings), genders, and a few other basics to get us started.

By the way, if you want to subscribe to these lessons via RSS but you don’t want to read all my other random stuff, click this link. That will subscribe you to this category only. You can do with that any category or tag on my blog, simply by adding “feed” to the end of the URL that you see after you select a category or tag.

Some blog housekeeping…

I accidentally broke some of my older St. Rose images when I was reorganizing my site the other day. Oops. Sorry to anyone who tried to look at those recently. They’re fixed now.

Anyone want to learn Latin? I started relearning it this summer with my textbook from high school. The first 20-25 chapters went down easy, about one each night. By chapter 45, I was dragging pretty hard and starting to feel like I wasn’t really retaining it very well, so I decided I ought to back up and go through several chapters again.

I’ve also thought about offering to teach it, since teaching something is a great way to learn it better, and learning a language is a lot easier if you can recite words and phrases with other people. I don’t know if there would be any interest in that locally, so first I’m going to write Latin lessons here on my blog for anyone who’s interested. Then if I end up doing the tutoring thing, I’ll have those ready to use.

Looking at my stats on Google Analytics, I noticed it said my most popular search term has been “safari mahjong strategy.” Not just a little more popular, but supposedly sending me seven times more traffic than any other search term. That didn’t really match up with the other numbers I’m seeing, so I looked closer and discovered that all those hits were me! Apparently, at some point I searched for that at Google and clicked on my site from there, and ever since then it’s been crediting that search every time I view one of my own posts. Traffic stats are tricky.

Speaking of traffic, mine has declined gradually ever since about Thanksgiving, but it rose again this week, so that was nice to see. I know my main problem here is that I’m too much of a jack of all trades and master of none. I’ve got about 90 posts, but no more than ten on any one topic that a person might care about. Oh well, it’ll get there eventually. The new St. Rose site is already getting almost as much traffic as I get here, after only a couple weeks in existence. It’s just not fair.

I’m posting this through the Postie plugin for Wordpress, which lets me send posts by e-mail. I hope it works well, because that’s much more convenient. The editor in Wordpress is pretty good, but I’m much faster with XEmacs, since I’ve been using it for e-mail for at least ten years. I can write posts up ahead of time in plain text files if I want, cut and paste easily from other files, and I don’t have to worry about losing them to browser crashes or anything like that.

That’s enough for tonight; time to go outside and play with my dog in the snow.

I suppose we all have things we never say or do, either because they sound stupid to us, or we can’t imagine following up on them. Here are some of mine, just for fun.

“Boo-yah,” “Oo-rah,” or anything of the sort.

I never served in the military, so I’m probably not allowed to say these anyway, but I can’t imagine wanting to. When I see guys shouting these, the phrase that usually comes to mind is, “trying too hard.” Maybe it doesn’t seem that way to the guys in the club. I’m really not into shouting out excited catch-phrases anyway, which brings me to:

Chest-bumping or butt-slapping.

I’m so glad my basketball-playing days were 20 years ago, when the extent of physical contact during a manly celebration was the high-five.  (Or if you were really excited, maybe both hands for a high-ten.) The first time an athlete decided to slap his teammate on the rear, didn’t the other guy stop everything and ask him what the heck he was doing? And the chest-bump: at least two of them had to arrange that one the first time, or someone would have gotten hurt. My pool league teammates like to fist-bump, which isn’t too bad, although I’m not sure why that’s cooler than a high-five.

“Houston, we have a problem.”

Is it just me, or do we all have phrases that are like nails on a chalkboard when we hear them? I’m getting a rash just typing this one. I don’t know why, but when Apollo 13 came out and people started using this to refer to everything from a bad grade on a report card to the toilet getting plugged, it drove me nuts. I hope I never hear it again, and I’ll certainly never say it.

“What happens in XYZ stays in XYZ.”

This is another one in the “makes me wince” category. I may never go to Vegas for this reason. Again, I don’t know why it grates on me so much, but when someone says this, I just want to punch him. So far, I’ve been able to resist.

“Where are the really big rides?”

For those who don’t know, I don’t do rides. No, not even Ferris wheels. Any sort of heights makes me dizzy, and being in a moving vehicle where I can’t at least see the controls doesn’t thrill me either. I could probably handle a merry-go-round, but I haven’t tried since I was a kid, so I can’t really say for sure. The last time I accidentally wound up on a ride—because it was almost stationary and only used vision and slight movements to give the illusion of flying, so I let people talk me into it—I lasted about two seconds before I shut my eyes and kept them closed until it was over. At least I didn’t puke.

“I’m tired of staying home so much.”

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a total hermit. When I lived and worked in an apartment in Barry, I’d start to miss human contact after 3-4 days at home by myself, so I’d go get groceries or something. But for the most part, I don’t feel the need to get out much. Everyday life and other people’s plans usually get me out in society plenty often for my tastes.

“I’ve got nothing against XYZ people, but…”

Every time I hear this I know there’s something offensive coming, so I get away from the person if I can. I can’t imagine saying it. Might as well announce that you’re about to have bad gas.

“There’s nothing to do here, let’s go to Neighboring Big City.”

I’ve been hearing this all my life. No matter where I’ve lived, in towns with populations from 200 to 500,000, people always think their hometown is backwards and boring and Some Bigger Place is so much more fun and sophisticated. Well, it’s just not true. Sure, there are a few things St. Louis has that Quincy doesn’t, like pro sports teams or ethnic restaurants other than Mexican and Asian. They also have more crime, a higher cost of living, and lots of people saying, “This town is so boring, I wish I lived in New York.” Most people, wherever they live, go to work, go home, take classes, go to movies, order pizza, meet friends at bars—all things you can do in any town with more than a few thousand people. Most of the rest is just seeing the grass as greener over there. No thanks, I’ll stay in my small town; there’s plenty to do if you look around.

(This is the third in a series of posts called Why the Latin Mass? I’ve been asked by several people why I like the Latin Mass—why people will drive a hundred miles to get to one, or spend a lot of time and money bringing it to their area. I’m trying to answer that from my perspective in this series.)

I grew up on rock and roll. It’s not my parents’ fault; they listened to country at home, and not a lot of that. But I picked up 80s rock and pop from friends: AC/DC, Reo Speedwagon, J. Geils Band, Foreigner, Pat Benetar, Rick Springfield, Toto, and yes, Michael Jackson. (Hey, 10 million other people bought Thriller too; we didn’t know what a freak he was then.) My favorite then was Billy Joel—the Angry Young Man version who did Captain Jack and Glass Houses, not the happy version that was married to Christie Brinkley or the morose version she divorced. Later, when I lived in range of a classic rock station for a while, I caught on to the Eagles, Clapton, BTO, and the like.

All that left me with a definite expectation that music would have a strong drumbeat, and usually a melody carried by electric guitar. Popular music tells you plainly when to tap your foot. There’s nothing subtle about it, but it’s catchy. Now that I’m older and trying to expand my cultural horizons, I try to appreciate classical music and chant, but it’s hard to. It doesn’t give me that obvious beat, and soon my mind is wandering off. The only time I really seem to appreciate classical music is in an auditorium, listening to an orchestra play live.

And the one time I definitely enjoy chanting and “church music” is when I’m in church, fortunately enough. There it just fits. Like most Catholics my age, I grew up with Masses where people played guitar, shook tambourines, and probably even whipped out a kazoo or two that I’ve blocked from memory. Those things all have their place elsewhere, but there’s something special about organ music and chanting in church. I’ve been told that the reason the organ was always allowed at Mass was because it “breathes” through the pipes, so it’s similar to a human voice. I don’t know if that’s the real reason, but whatever the reason, the result works. A choir backed by a real organ makes a sound that is unquestionably “churchy,” that you can’t mistake for an Arlo Guthrie concert.

I don’t know enough about chant and terms like “polyphonic” to appreciate it on any deeper level than that. Most of the time I attend Low Mass, which doesn’t have any music, and that’s fine by me too. Either have the real thing, or don’t have music at all, and I’ll be happy. Just keep those tambourines away!

The Giant glanced up at the chill sky, then looked at Covenant’s gaunt face. His cavernous eyes glinted sharply, as if he understood what Covenant had been through. As gently as he had spoken to Lena, he asked, “Do you now believe in the Land?”

“I’m the Unbeliever. I don’t change.”

“Do you not?”

“I am going to”–Covenant’s shoulders hunched–”exterminate Lord Foul the bloody Despiser. Isn’t that enough for you?”

“Oh, it is enough for me,” Foamfollower said with sudden vehemence. “I require nothing more. But it does not suffice for you. What do you believe–what is your faith?”

“I don’t know.”

Foamfollower looked away again at the weather. His heavy brows hid his eyes, but his smile seemed sad, almost hopeless. “Therefore I am afraid.”

Rating:

Through these first three books, Covenant keeps trying to find the answer to Lord Foul and to his own relationship with the Land. Refusing to believe or get involved didn’t work in the first one; and deceit and bargains failed in the second; so this time around, he tries hate. As you might expect, that doesn’t go so well either. Eventually he finds an answer that works, for him.

At the same time, Mhoram is finding his own answer as he realizes the Lords’ Oath of Peace is just as damaging in its own way as the violent destruction it was created to prevent. Just as Covenant has to find the balance between wild magic and impotence, Mhoram has to find the sweet spot between passion and restraint, to battle an even greater army than the people of the Land faced in the last book. Mhoram nearly steals the show in this book, as the Land’s tremendous need pushes him to feats he never thought possible.

And Foamfollower is back! After disappearing for a while, he’s back here, and he’s not the smiling optimist he was in the first book. He’s carrying a load of guilt for the terrible things he’s seen and done, and may need redemption as badly as Covenant does. He again becomes Covenant’s best friend in the Land, and is there to make the difference in Covenant’s final battle with Despite.

There are so many good stories here that I can’t get into without spoiling it. The Bloodguard react to their failure in the only way they know how. Triock, even though he hates Covenant, helps bring him to the Land when he realizes the white gold is the Land’s only hope. The Ranyhyn are still keeping their pact with Covenant, even though it’s slowly killing them. The jheherrin are one of my favorite parts of the book: creatures discarded as the waste of Foul’s failed experiments over the years, they live in fear of him; but they find the strength in themselves to help redeem Covenant and Foamfollower.

This book wraps up all the threads from the first two very well; and, for me at least, it makes all the bleakness and setbacks and wrongs that went before worth it. In the end, Covenant is still a leper and evil still exists, but he’s learned to deal with it without self-hatred and has found a sort of peace.

It may seem from my descriptions and quotes that these books are nothing but anguish and talking, so I’ll wrap up this review with a piece of an action scene from this book (one that would look great on screen). The next review will be the first book of the Second Chronicles, which I think is even better.

With all his strength, [Mhoram] leveled a blast of Lords-fire at the Raver’s leering skull.

Satansfist knocked the attack down as if it were negligible; disdainfully, he slapped Mhoram’s blue out of the air with his Stone and returned a bolt so full of cold emerald force that it scorched the atmosphere as it moved.

Mhoram sensed its power, knew that it would slay him if it struck. But Drinny dodged with a fleet, fluid motion which belied the wrenching change of his momentum. The bolt missed, crashed instead into the creatures pursuing the High Lord, killed them all.

That gave Mhoram the instant he needed. He corrected Drinny’s aim, cocked his staff over his shoulder. Before samadhi could unleash another blast, the High Lord was upon him.

Using all Drinny’s speed, all the strength of his body, all the violated passion of his love for the Land, Mhoram swung. His staff caught Satansfist squarely across the forehead.

The concussion ripped Mhoram from his seat like a dry leaf in the wind. His staff shattered at the blow, exploded into splinters, and he hit the ground amid a brief light rain of wood slivers. He was stunned. He rolled helplessly a few feet over the frozen earth, could not stop himself, could not regain his breath. His mind went blank for an instant, then began to ache as his body ached. His hands and arms were numb, paralyzed by the force which had burned through them.

You’ll have to read the books to see how it turns out.