The Eye of the World
The launch of the genre's bestselling post-Tolkien saga (ninety-plus million copies): for the 1990s, this was what 'epic fantasy' meant, and Amazon's 2021 series renewed the franchise for another generation.
Book Entry · Fantasy
The Diamond Throne
by David Eddings · 1989 · The Elenium, book 1
What is The Diamond Throne about?
Sparhawk, Pandion Knight and Queen's Champion, comes home from a decade's exile to find his queen Ehlana poisoned and preserved alive in a block of crystal that buys twelve months — and the church politics that arranged it angling for her throne. The cure requires the Bhelliom, a sapphire rose with a god's power and opinions, lost for five centuries. Eddings reruns his formula with a grown man at the centre: Sparhawk is forty-ish, broken-nosed, irritable and in love, and the company around him swaps the Belgariad's family banter for soldiers' gallows humour. Many readers quietly prefer it.
Why it matters
The Elenium demonstrated the Eddings machine ran just as well with older protagonists and darker church politics — and its weary knight-errant prefigured a generation of middle-aged fantasy leads.
Where does it sit in the series?
The knight Sparhawk, a poisoned queen and a god-stone wanted by everyone: the Eddings formula with older joints and sharper armour.
In the Guide from The Elenium:
- The Diamond Throne (1989)
Read next
In Dark Service
The opening of the Far-Called trilogy and Hunt's move to Gollancz: his shift from gaslamp whimsy toward darker, continent-spanning epic, demonstrating the post-Jackelian range.
Magician
One of the bestselling fantasy debuts of its decade and a permanent fixture of starter lists; it launched the thirty-volume Riftwar Cycle and demonstrated the gaming-table-to-bookshop pipeline a generation early.