Epic fantasy books have a reputation for being very long, and the newest entry in Tad Williams’ Last King of Osten Ard trilogy may top them all.
Epic fantasy books tends to be on the long side. I don’t have to tell that to anyone who’s ever cracked George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, or Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time, or even J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which has a pretty modest wordcount by comparison. The point of epic fantasy is to be…well, epic, which results in a lot of book series that double as doorstop collections.
"Word Count of popular Fantasy and Science Fiction Series from Fantasy"
As you can see in the graph above, The Wheel of Time and Raymond E. Feist’s The Riftwar Cycle take the top honors when it comes to the longest series, but what about the longest individual epic fantasy book?
According to Deborah Beale, the wife of fantasy author Tad Williams, it may be Williams’ newest book The Navigator’s Children, the third book in his Last King of Osten Ard trilogy. Williams has just completed a draft of The Navigator’s Children, and it’s apparently even longer than his 1993 novel To Green Angel Tower, which ran a staggering 520,000 words in length, 60,000 words longer than the entirety of The Lord of the Rings, according to The Wertzone.
And guess what, good people, #TheNavigatorsChildren in first draft is bigger than #ToGreenAngelTower & is currently being prodigiously cut, as it needs to be... God bless my loverly motor-mouth man @tadwilliams whose ADHD is his superpower https://t.co/0Ewr1OtenH
— Deborah Beale (@MrsTad) September 15, 2020
Granted, the new book will be “prodigiously cut,” so the word count may drop below its current binding-busting amount, but we’ll still raise a glass while we can.
The Last King of Osten Ard trilogy is a follow-up to Williams’ Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy, which ran from 1988 to 1993. The first two books, The Witchwood Crown and Empire of Grass, deal with the Norn elves stirring to reclaim their ancestral lands, which are now ruled by mortals.
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