Author: R.A. Salvatore
Published: May 1991
It’s been four trilogy-ending books in a row — that’s a lot of conclusions! This last one is the final book of the Dark Elf trilogy, which means we’re in for more confused morals about racism courtesy of Drizzt Do’Urden.
This time around, Drizzt leaves the Underdark and tries to adapt to the surface world. He experiences winter for the first time, learns about nature, gets chased over half of northern Faerûn by some rangers, tries and fails to find acceptance in human society, and finally ends up settling in Icewind Dale to set up the events of the first trilogy. There’s a lot of promise in this “fish out of water” premise, but does Sojourn do a good job of delivering on it to cap off this prequel trilogy?
Hah… no. It definitely deserved better than this.
Plot
Unfortunately, it’s a hot mess when held up against the comparatively well-crafted plots of the previous two books. This book’s central problem is that it feels like a series of disconnected episodes rather than a coherent story. There are five very distinct sections — the village of Maldobar, Dove’s pursuit, living with Montolio, road trip, and finally Icewind Dale — which share practically no characters between them, happen in different places, and don’t really interact with each other except inasmuch as each episode has to set up the events of the next. They don’t even feel like pieces of the same book; Salvatore could have made this a collection of short stories rather than a novel and it wouldn’t have changed much. And save for Drizzt himself they don’t share any plot, characters, or setting with either Homeland or Exile, so Sojourn doesn’t really feel like part of the same trilogy.
As a result, the pacing is all over the place. Each section has its own little introduction, rising tension, and then climax, so you never feel like the story is building up to something good. It culminates (if that word applies here) in a big battle against orcs in Mooshie’s Grove at around the 70% mark of the book, and everything after that point feels like an extended and somewhat pointless denouement. Now that I think about it, this book really would have worked better as a collection of short stories, because at least then I wouldn’t have had these unfulfilled novel-based expectations about plot and pacing.
Characters
Drizzt is less insufferable here than he’s been in the past. He’s in a completely new place which he’s trying to learn the rules of, so he’s less self-confident here than in his previous appearances. He’s occasionally outmatched by his opponents — in particular, Dove’s rangers posed a serious challenge and probably could have successfully hunted down and killed our protagonist if they hadn’t changed their minds about him. And the social problem of finding a place where he’ll be accepted isn’t something he can solve by stabbing things. Best of all, this book avoids the usual Drizzt cliché of “all good people instinctively like him and all bad people act racist to him.” There are a number of decent people who initially assume that he’s evil, then gradually warm up to him as a result of his actions. The end result is that acceptance doesn’t feel like a cheap and easily-won victory here, as it has been in every previous Drizzt book.
The weakest part of this book by far, unfortunately, is the villains. There’s a rotating stable of bad guys who hang around for part of the book, then get offed — the narrative equivalent of wandering monsters. It starts with the barghests, a couple of irredeemably evil and murderous fiends who coincidentally happen to be hanging around the spot where Drizzt emerges. Since they’re from another plane, they have no ties to the setting or to the other characters in it, and their brand of evil is too cartoonish and over the top to take seriously. Drizzt kills them off about a quarter of the way through the book and they vanish from the plot. Later, an orc warlord and his winter wolf ally show up for another quarter-book or so, receive even less characterization than the barghests did, then get their asses decisively kicked and are never mentioned again. And then there’s an extended bit with a dragon which was just goofy as hell and felt like unnecessary padding for the weak plot structure.
The only constant villain throughout the entire book is Roddy McGristle, a murderous hillbilly bounty hunter who comes into conflict with Drizzt early on. It’s a well-established truism in fiction that a good way to generate interesting conflict is to make your villains the dark mirror of your heroes, the opposite of who they are and what they stand for. So from that point of view, a closed-minded, vengeful, unprincipled dickhead makes a kind of sense as an antithesis to Drizzt. But something about him just doesn’t work for me. We don’t get a lot of detail about him, character-wise, except that he’s greedy and vengeful. He’s got no backstory and not much characterization that doesn’t relate to hunting Drizzt. His determination to kill Drizzt — a project which spans about seven hundred miles and several years of his life — seems all out of proportion to the injury which began their feud. And after all that, Bruenor disposes of him effortlessly in an anticlimactic fashion at the end, long after he’s started to feel like a vestigial appendage to an already overlong plot.
Montolio, Drizzt’s ranger mentor who teaches him about the surface world, feels particularly bizarre to me. On the surface, he seems like a very positive character: sensitive, empathetic, moral, and a big fan of killing bad things to make the world safe for nature and good people. But there are a number of things about him that just don’t work. I’ll go into more detail about some of that later, but one big problem with him character-wise is the whole faux-blindness angle. Several years ago he went completely blind, yet he still lives alone in the wilderness and can get around, shoot arrows, fight with swords, and even bungee-jump (seriously!) just as well or better than a sighted person. At no point in the book is he ever hindered by being blind. There’s no supernatural explanation offered for this; he doesn’t have Daredevil-style super senses or some sort of empathic connection to his environment. (He can have conversations with animals, which helps a bit but doesn’t fully explain things.) It’s just sort of handwaved as “he’s just that good.” This book wouldn’t be different in plot or tone if he were normally sighted, and it would make his character a bit less hilariously unbelievable.
More generally, I’d propose the following rule for writers: If you’re going to give a character a disability, make it mean something. Being blind doesn’t have to mean that a character is useless, but it should mean that they face challenges that sighted people don’t. Saying “he’s blind” here has all the narrative impact of saying “he’s got purple skin” — it’s a bit of flavour that makes him unique but has no mechanical impact on his character, so it feels like lazy storytelling. [1]
There’s one particularly interesting character here whom I just have to call out: Fret, the camp gay dwarf who accompanies the rangers on Drizzt’s trail. He’s fastidious, fashion-minded, fussy, and fabulous — but all in a manner that’s just understated enough to not trigger the censors at TSR. I think it’s the first hint of the concept of alternative sexuality in the Realms novels, even though it’s encoded in a way that kids and teenagers probably wouldn’t pick up on. And it’s good to see that, despite his fussiness and constant complaining, he’s still a brave and unambiguously heroic character. It furthers the book’s theme of exceptions to racial stereotypes, since he’s about as un-butch a dwarf as you can get.
Themes
Once again, the theme is racism. Drizzt’s search for acceptance is frequently foiled by people making assumptions about him based solely on his race, which, as I’ve discussed in an earlier review, is not a great metaphor for real-world racism. The same objections I had there apply here: when you’re the lone good member of a race of deceitful murderers who worship a demon goddess and only come to the surface to slaughter indiscriminately, it’s actually pretty reasonable that people don’t accept you with open arms.
More problematically, Salvatore still ignores the serious ramifications for the setting of his “people shouldn’t be judged on the basis of their race” theme. We see some exceptions to racial stereotypes like Drizzt and Fret, but we also see the standard Dungeons & Dragons attitude to the cannon-fodder races, like orcs and goblins, that exist solely as villains for adventurers to fight. The last thing people want in their tabletop gaming experience is moral ambiguity about whether it’s okay to have an awesome battle with monsters, so orcs, goblins, etc. are usually treated as invariably and inevitably evil to justify simulating the combat. But if it’s a major plot point for your story that drow aren’t necessarily evil, why should we assume that orcs are?
Not only does nobody ever question whether or not it’s okay to judge orcs on the basis of their race, but they’re also gleefully sadistic about it in a very unheroic manner. Montolio, in particular, gets several lines that in any other context would make him sound like a dangerous psychopath who needs to be locked up for society’s good:
“Nothing in all the world sounds sweeter than a blade opening an orc’s belly!”
Jesus, dude! Yet this guy is ostensibly a hero, and he goes on to kill dozens of orcs without ever wondering whether, like Drizzt, they might not have been irredeemable. And then there’s this jaw-dropping bit:
“How can we know [if a race is evil]?” Drizzt pressed.
“Just watch the children,” Montolio answered. He went on to explain the not so subtle differences between children of the goodly races and children of the evil races. Drizzt heard him, but distantly, needing no clarification. Always it seemed to come down to the children. […] And back in Menzoberranzan, what seemed like only a day ago and a thousand years ago at the same time, Drizzt’s father had expressed similar beliefs. “Are all drow children evil?” Zaknafein had wondered, and through all of his beleaguered life, Zaknafein had been haunted by the screams of dying children, drow nobles caught in the fire between warring families.
So let’s get this straight: Montolio expounds some sort of weird racist justification about how it’s okay to kill orcs because their children are born evil. Drizzt hears this, thinks about the exact counterexample to Montolio’s viewpoint — because Drizzt’s own existence proves that not all children of evil races are evil — but never notices the opposition between these two concepts. It’s frustrating to watch characters miss the point so completely.
Montolio feels like a much more sinister character to me now as an adult than he did when I was a teenager — the personification of the ugly questions about racism that the Drizzt books keep raising but then never addressing.
Writing
It’s merely okay. Some of the diction feels really odd, like his frequent use of verbs like “knocked” and “bashed” to describe the impacts of arrows and sword blades. And of course the ridiculously overwrought emo stuff which has graced every Salvatore novel so far is still in evidence. There’s less of it this time around, but it’s even more poorly written:
The harshness of the world brings great remorse, but mercifully it is a passing lament and certainly not one to carry into battle.
I cannot, therefore, look forward in despair, but rather with higher hopes for all in mind and with the determination that I might help to reach those heights.
The hell? This is just… word salad. I get what he’s trying to say, but it’s phrased so awkwardly that it feels like it wasn’t written by a native English speaker. I wish he’d have people just express their emotions in a natural-feeling way instead of trying to make it sound so Masterpiece Theatre.
The only character moment that worked well for me was Bruenor’s speech to Drizzt at the end, where he uses eating dog meat as an analogy (and unspoken apology) for how he realized that judging Drizzt by his race was wrong. Apart from making me genuinely laugh out loud, it worked for me on an emotional level because Bruenor is the only character here who won’t drop florid soliloquies at the drop of a hat. He’s terrible at expressing his emotions, so he does it through this rambling monologue that edges around the real subject. The end result is that it feels a lot more real and honest than the theatrical purple prose which everyone else spews to express their thoughts.
There’s an awful lot of exposition of what happened in the previous two books. Some of it is worked naturally into the narrative, but other times it just feels like an out-of-place interruption. Having read three other trilogy endcap books recently, I’m starting to think that less is more when it comes to that sort of exposition. If your readers like your book, they’ll be intrigued by the backstory and go seek out the previous ones; if they don’t, they’re not going to care about your recap anyhow.
There are a bunch of strange inconsistencies and little mistakes throughout the book. For instance, Drizzt’s drow boots are destroyed by sunlight at the very beginning of the novel, but then the rangers track him by his bootprints later. Apparently the spray from a mountain-fed waterfall makes you warmer in the winter, which is a neat trick. And gnolls are repeatedly referred to incorrectly as goblinoids, although that’s a fairly nerdy nitpick.
Conclusion
Grade: C–
It’s not a painful slog, but it’s still a mess. The pacing is very odd, the writing still isn’t great, and the characters and their motivations aren’t as well-handled as in the previous two books in this trilogy. Ultimately, it’s a much more forgettable book than the other two, which is a damn shame given the potential of the whole “Drizzt adapts to the surface world” concept.
Footnotes
[1] My breaking point came when we found out that Montolio has an “extensive” library in his fort. He’s a blind man living alone in the wilderness. So apparently he decided “Well, I’m going to go live as a hermit now. Guess I’d better haul a hundred pounds of books that neither I nor anyone else can read along to the place where I plan to die!” There’s just no way that can make sense from a story standpoint… but Salvatore needed some way to explain how Drizzt learned Common and surface-world customs, so he got a library regardless.
“Sojourn” wasn’t the worst TSR novel, but, being basically ‘We Have to get Drizzt to the Surface Somehow’ the novel, it was pretty lackluster.
And though I overlooked it as a teen, seeing the hypocrisy of people “knowing” Drizzt is good (because he’s Drizzt) and “knowing” orcs are evil (because they’re orcs) makes me cringe now.
To Salvatore’s credit, he’s tried to make up for it since then. The pacifism themes in In Sylvan Shadows, the nice goblin in his Realms of Valor short story, and the “let’s talk to the goblins” bit in The Legacy all suggest that he had a lot of people pointing the hypocrisy out to him after Sojourn came out.
This might be as good a place as any to get the thoughts of our esteemed host and anyone else who wants to weigh in on it. I’d rather not post on Reddit, YouTube or any of the D&D message boards out there because of the poopstorm I realize it might cause. I realize that this might be a controversial topic, and if our esteemed host feels the need to remove it I apologize in advance and 100% totally, completely understand.
With all that in mind, I”ve found myself increasingly bothered by the claims of ‘colonialism’ in D&D, namely the whole idea that you “go out into the wilderness, kill the natives and take their stuff” supposedly being a parallel to real-world imperialism and colonialism as was done by the European empires. In this analogy, orcs (and I use that term as a catch-all to include goblins, ogres and other monsters the early game materials pegged as ‘humanoids’) are compared to the peoples that’ve suffered the effects of colonialism.
The problem I have, though, is that this argument completely ignores one critical fact. Namely, the orcs usually got their stuff by attacking humans, demihumans (to use the term for dwarves, elves and other non-human races from the Players’ Handbooks of D&D’s first three editions) first, killing them and taking their stuff. Not to mention the orcs often have no problem killing and eating human, elven, etc. people in an inversion of the whole “what do you do with orc kids” question. Not to mention they’re more than happy to fight and kill for the glory of whatever BBEG’s empire the story or game is focused on.
As it stands, from everything I’ve seen, orcs are the colonizers, not the colonized.
That’s something I think is missing in a lot of discussions on this subject, and it’s one reason I don’t find the whole ‘decolonizing your game’ argument to be all that persuasive. To tie it into the literary criticism element of this blog, I’ll admit that I mostly use orcs as antagonistic “Mooks” in my Greyhawk stories and am not particularly interested in depicting them otherwise. Our esteemed host has talked about the value from a game standpoint of Mooks, and I find there’s a similar value in written fiction.
As for why the vast majority of orcs are like this, I’d go back to what our esteemed host and I discussed regarding “Vision” from Realms Of Infamy-namely, that the orcs’ creator gods actively encourage if not demand this. Dissidents usually don’t live long enough to convince anyone else. The lore even allows for this as far back as 2E with the god Meriadar. He accepts worshippers from orcs and other ‘humanoid’ races that’ve turned their backs on their creators’ malicious ideas.
These are just some thoughts that’ve been stewing in my head for quite a while now. Any responses from our esteemed host or anyone else would be most welcome.
No, I won’t remove the post — I think it’s an important topic to discuss, as long as the discussion remains civil. My take on the topic of colonization narratives and monstrous humanoids in D&D is that the worldbuilding makes all the difference. There are many reasons why two groups of people might come into armed conflict with each other. It’s the responsibility of the setting creator, module writer, and/or DM to give you interesting reasons for those conflicts instead of just saying “There are bad orcs over there, go kill them.” If you show the reasons why the conflict is happening, and they’re more complex than just “Beat on the bad guys” or “Clear the hex and make it safe for civilization,” then you can make something that doesn’t feel colonial.
Off the top of my head, here are some suggestions for ways to make these conflicts feel less racist and/or colonialist:
These are all things that D&D has historically not done a great job of, but there’s lots of room to do better.
Thank you for your response. I have a (probably unfounded) fear of being condemned and accused of supporting racism or genocide if I were to bring this topic up on another forum, but I feel comfortable discussing it here.
In fairness, I think D&D actually has done some of the things you suggested, specifically putting the humans on the defensive and non-genocidal ways to end a conflict. The early module Keep On The Borderlands implied that adventurers like the players were the ones helping to keep the humanoid monsters from overrunning the common people. The final goal of the Dragonlance module series (which the Weis and Hickman Chronicles novels were based on) was to decapitate the Dragonarmies’ leadership by preventing Takhisis from returning to Krynn, rather than killing every last draconian, hobgoblin and ogre serving her. The “save the overmatched lands of good by destroying the evil forces’ leader so they’ll collapse into infighting” plot is also a pretty common one.
What do you think of efforts to show the monsters as having a culture that specifically ‘coded’ as not being based on a racialized one? In British fantasy, the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks and the related Warhammer series (with some overlap, as they both shared some authors), the orcs are specifically given green skin and their speech sounds more like a Cockney accent than anything else, making them come across as being based on English working-class hooligans than anything else.
rather than killing every last draconian, hobgoblin and ogre serving her.
Interestingly, with the draconians (but not with any of the other races of Krynn), there’s at least an approach to the sort of lore framework which worked for Tolkien orcs (and was abandoned by every later conception of orcs in a way that made killing them with extreme prejudice seem like a less-than-heroic thing to be doing). Tolkien orcs were fundamentally abhorrant, in that they were a pretty much direct expression of Morgoth’s power of corruption, which basically made the idea that orcs are incapable of peaceful coexistience and need a good killing have at least some moral justification. Draconians were basically similar: they were a fundamentally corrupt creation, and despite the fact that they were intelligent they are, by nature, driven to behave immorally. They’re one of the few humanoid races in the various D&D settings which there’s a good lore reason to slap an immutable “evil” alignment tag on.
They’ve done some of the things I suggested, sure, but I don’t think they’ve ever done the most important one: giving the monsters a culture that’s more than “we squat in caves waiting for heroes to show up.” They’re almost always depicted as savage, backwards, and without redeeming value, save for the odd exceptional individual like the goblin from Salvatore’s “Dark Mirror”.
For a contemporary example, look at the most recently released piece of Forgotten Realms media: the video game Baldur’s Gate 3, which came out just a couple of months ago. In Act I there’s a big goblin camp that you spend a lot of time at. They’re squatting in a ruined temple, a complete shithole that they haven’t tried to fix up much, and their sole form of entertainment seems to be tormenting other creatures for sport (Halsin, Volo, Barcus, owlbear cub, etc.). There’s no indication that the goblins have any form of culture beyond “do what our masters tell us to do,” and wiping them out is treated as a heroic act.
I get that the game needs antagonists, but there are ways to do antagonists that present fewer ethical issues. Supernaturally evil creatures like undead and devils or unthinking creatures like golems make easy targets. Evil groups within a race are fair game — I can slay all the human Banite and Bhaalist cultists in Act III without a qualm, but that doesn’t imply that all humans are evil and that I’m justified in wiping out the whole population of every human village I come across. But presenting an entire race of sentient free-willed humanoids as irredeemable and morally okay to wipe out is a much creepier thing. I can’t remember a single sympathetically portrayed goblin in the entire game. And this is typical of how D&D has worked for the past fifty years. Things haven’t gotten much better over time.
The Cockney thing is a really interesting form of classism that’s ubiquitous in all fantasy media: books, games, movies, etc. The higher-up bad guys will invariably have an upper-class British accent, and the mooks will always have a Cockney or similar working-class British accent. (And gods forbid that you ever put anyone in a piece of fantasy media with any kind of North American accent!) You can see it in the orcs from The Lord of the Rings (both books and movies), in The Crystal Shard‘s verbeegs, the Cockney goblins in Baldur’s Gate 3, and so on. Absolutely everywhere. Classism is maybe less obviously bad than racism, but I still wish that trope would go away.
I’ve thought a lot about this topic, as I want to be an inclusive DM but I also appreciate the value of having a morally acceptable class of enemies that aren’t constructs or undead. I hope the following thoughts prove useful in explaining my reasoning and at least spur interesting conversation!
In D&D, pretty much all hostile enemies fall into roughly three categories of motivations.
A. It’s a construct. It is incapable of free will and being anything other than what it is, no matter how intelligent it is. Dumb undead and golems are always in this group, and depending on the setting, smart undead, fiends, celestials, etc. also qualify.
B. It’s an animal. It attacks because it’s hungry or angry, it runs away if it’s scared. There are no more complex motives driving its behavior.
C. It’s capable of complex free will. It has reasons for its behavior and is capable of choosing otherwise. Any creature capable of decision making beyond purely survival goals qualifies.
Orcs, as written by Tolkien, are firmly group A. They are always manufacturing weapons and preparing for war, for Sauron to lead them into combat. They are utterly incapable of doing anything else, even when isolated from Sauron’s influence for thousands of years. Yes, they can talk and squabble, but they are unable to interact with any other species in any manner besides a genocidal war of annihilation, unless directly controlled by Sauron to do otherwise. As a result, there aren’t really moral quandaries about killing orcs in Tolkien’s works from an in-universe perspective. An elvish sword of human slaying is an extremely morally questionable weapon, but an elvish sword of orc slaying is just a very efficient tool. (Yes, there are racist aspects of Tolkien’s portrayal of orcs, but I’ll come back to that in a moment).
The problem with group A monsters is that, in almost all cases, they need an origin. Someone or something created them. Outside of Tolkien’s works, however, Sauron isn’t a good explanation for orcs’ existence. You can either have your very own legally-distinct-I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-Sauron, or reclassify orcs. Group B is out because orcs are clearly organized, speak, and make things, which leaves group C, and boy howdy are there problems with making orcs group C!
Group C opponents have motives for their actions; they are driven by whatever variables they choose as important. As such, if they are truly group C, it is possible for there to be non-hostile members of their species. If that’s true, then you cannot kill them on grounds of species alone without committing a racist/genocidal act. If some goblins would rather farm than fight and you killed those goblins solely because they were goblins, that’s not a morally acceptable action!
One of the litmus tests I use for determining whether a monster is group A, B, or C is how would an honest, good person feel if they ambushed and killed the monster in an unprovoked first strike while the monster was as innocent and unthreatening as possible. You clobbered a single zombie stuck in a hole? Great, that’s one less zombie to worry about. You ambushed a bear while it slept? You must be an accomplished hunter. You shot an unarmed human not wearing any kind of uniform while it was fishing for its supper? Not so great.
The problem is that D&D changed orcs from group A monsters to group C monsters without changing any of the fundamental assumptions that are necessary for orcs to truly be group C monsters. In D&D, even though orcs farm, fish, trade, and sometimes have loving relationships with humans that produce offspring, they are still considered shoot-on-sight by most “good” factions; a policy that can only be described as racist or genocidal. It makes sense for group A monsters to be shot on sight, they can never be anything other than the threats their creators made them to be, but orcs CAN choose to be different. Thus, killing them because of their species alone cannot be good.
This mostly dry philosophical issue is made 1000 times bloodier and messier when you remember that Tolkien described orcs as being not-European individuals in appearance, wielding not-European inspired weaponry. Assuming Tolkien was completely innocent in this case (which I’m doing only for the sake of this argument, stay on topic everyone), the issue arises when the D&D writers realize they need something to fill the Sauron-shaped hole in the orcs’ lives, something to provide a solid cultural footing for the kind of motives group C creatures require. Following Tolkien’s descriptions, we suddenly have tribal orcs wielding scimitars and have top knots who listen to shamans, drawing from every mangled, racist trope about non-European cultures.
When we tell our ostensibly heroic protagonists to go kill those evil orcs who live over there, those orcs who happen to have a culture that is badly-mangled-but-still-recognizably-ethnic, and tell the heroes to not worry about it because “they’re just orcs, go kill them already”, well. It leaves a real bad taste in my mouth.
Sorry, this post is super late at night and hopefully not too rambling. I can post how I’ve resolved this issue in my own games if anyone is interested!
Yeah, I have to admit that even as a kid I kind of blinked at so many orcs wielding scimitars and having shamans and witch doctors instead of wizards and priests. That’s one of the elements of 1st Edition AD&D I didn’t care to add to my own fiction. That’s why in my own fiction (I write D&D fanfic novels instead of playing with other people) I typically refer to my humanoid Mooks as wielding broadswords rather than scimitars and I avoid using the terms shamans or witch doctors. In game terms, those might be classes in their own right that player races could choose, but I don’t use those terms in my writing.
But like I said above, I think the whole “players are just going in, killing monsters and taking their stuff in a parallel to colonialism” argument really misses a critical element-namely that the monsters probably got all that stuff by killing people who never did anything to them and taking their stuff in the first place.
European history is also full of examples of orc-like invasions long before modern imperialism became a thing too, ranging from the Vikings invading France and Britain to groups like the Goths sacking Rome, not to mention the Mongol invasions. Some historians think Harold Godwinson lost the Battle of Hastings because his troops were tired from having to fight off a large Norwegian invasion and then rush to meet Willian the Conqueror’s rival army. In Macbeth, the title character made a name for himself leading Scotland’s defense against an invasion from Norway. I’d be shocked if that didn’t have an impact on the kind of stories told by later generations, including those of the modern day that influenced D&D when European-descended peoples came to the Americas.
Hence my view that orcs are the colonizers, not the colonized. I see them just as much parallels to the Vikings and Goths as they ever were to anybody from Africa or the original peoples of the Americas.