Memory defines dragons and Elderlings, but humans need less of it
When last we left our intrepid band of misfits, they had finally arrived at the lost city of Kelsingra. The dragons have needed to put aside their ideas of what makes a traditional dragon in order to recover the core of what draconic characteristics remain to them. No more can they rely on dignity and inherited memory if they want to fly. They must work, human-like, to develop abilities that once came effortlessly to them as their birthright. Like humans, what they become is a function of what they, as individuals, put into it, not what their ancestors, as dragons, have bequeathed them in inherited memories.
But if the first two books follow the dragons’ journeys to learn human skills and develop a more cooperative, human-like society, City of Dragons allows humans the opposite opportunity. Kelsingra is an intact Elderling city, and one key component of such cities is the heavy use of memory stone to save or record the thoughts and experiences of the inhabitants. Some of this is useful: it’s nice to know how to work the hot baths and lighting. But a lot more than functional infrastructure is recorded in these memory pillars, and not all those recordings are safe for humans to experience. Those former lives are glamourous and addictive, and too much indulgence can overwhelm a person’s identity, leaving them more like a ghost of the original bearer of the memory than their own person. Such is the case of Rapskal, whose own identity of a cheerful, dopey, optimistic, childlike teenager becomes entirely erased and replaced by an arrogant, martial Elderling whose memories ensnare him beyond his ability—or conscious desire—to resist.
For dragons, these ancestral memories form a core part of their identities, Without them, they are less draconic than they should be. But for humans, these ancestral memories are a threat to their own individual identities. It is not an accident that it is only Elderlings—those humans who have been changed by close association with dragons—are the ones who indulge in memory stone. This component of Elderling magic is not arbitrary. It is a reflection of dragons’ tendency to make their Elderlings like them. We see this tendency on the small scale with Sintara and Thymara. Sintara transforms Thymara into an Elderling with wings, but the wings are purely decorative, an expression of art rather than function. Sintara claims that this was the intention the entire time, but surely it’s no accident that Thymara’s wings remain purely decorative as long as Sintara herself is earthbound. One of Rapskal’s last acts as his own identity is encouraging Thymara to try to fly anyway. She has wings. Wings are for flying. He got Heeby to fly, and he is confident that he can do the same for Thymara.
So, as with decorative or functional wings, so it is with memory: dragons remake Elderlings in their image, and a core part of what they are is stored and shared ancestral memories. And this fundamental artificiality of what Elderlings are—where “artificial” means both not natural, and also a work of artifice, of intentional art—does dampen, somewhat, the glory of Elderlings that we’ve been taught to revere as something lost and wonderful throughout this entire series. Even the images of Kelsingra at its former height cannot be properly mourned as a vanished heritage, because there are hints that, even when the Elderlings and dragons were at their grandest, Kelsingra was still a city of memories. It was never full of bustling magic, alive and magnificent. It was always half-populated by ghosts; its wonders were always just a veneer of lives laid over memories of other lives. The apparent richness came from the layering, not reality.
It’s tempting to make a simple dichotomy here: with dragons, losing ancestral memories and being forced to develop individual identities human-like is a catastrophic loss. With humans, gaining ancestral memories at the expense of individual identity is equally bad. And certainly, watching Rapskal’s gentle dopiness become overwritten by an alien, long-dead personality feels like a similar loss. It is a loss. But Hobb would never let something as simple as good-for-dragons-but-bad-for-humans structure her plot. The loss for the dragons tempers their arrogance, and forces their partnership with humans into something slightly more equitable than it had been previously. In parallel, gaining those memories allows Rapskal and Thymara to access the skills that came with those memories. To jump ahead into the last book for just a moment, Rapskal’s acquired ability to lead military attack is useful in an encounter with Chalced (sooner or later, there is always war with Chalced), and Thymara’s acquired memory of Kelsingra’s infrastructure maintenance allows her to restore the well of Skill that is so vital for the dragons’ well-being. In moderation, then, the cross-pollination of humans and dragons can build greatness.
I will still always mourn, however, the realization that the Elderlings themselves relied on a palimpsest of ghosts.
Reference: Hobb, Robin. City of Dragons [Harper Voyager, 2012].
CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative, and on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social
