The Dragonbone Chair

The Dragonbone Chair Review

The Dragonbone Chair is the first volume of Tad Williams’s Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy, published in 1988 — before George R.R. Martin began A Game of Thrones, which Williams’s series influenced profoundly. In retrospect, it is possible to read much of what distinguishes Martin’s approach from Tolkien’s as a development of what Williams was doing here: the commitment to psychological realism, the willingness to let characters be genuinely unremarkable, the interest in the gap between the legendary past and the mundane present.

An Ordinary Boy in an Epic

Simon is a kitchen boy in the great castle Hayholt, the seat of the aging High King Prester John. He is not chosen, not special, not gifted — he is bumbling, distracted, more interested in avoiding his chores than in learning anything, and his entry into the larger story is entirely accidental. Williams was making a deliberate argument against the Tolkien tradition of hidden kings and destined heroes: what would it actually look like if an ordinary person were swept into an epic? What would they be like, and how would they behave?

The answer, in the first book, is: not particularly well, and not particularly heroically. Simon runs, hides, makes mistakes, is frightened, and is rescued more often than he rescues anyone. This is not a failure of the novel but its achievement — the normative quality of Simon’s responses to extraordinary circumstances is what makes the eventual development of his character feel earned rather than given.

The World of Osten Ard

The world of Osten Ard is built with extraordinary patience. Williams is interested in the history of his world — the ancient, elf-like Sithi who ruled the land before mankind, the founding of the kingdom, the generations of kings before Prester John — and the first book establishes enough of this background that the later volumes can draw on it with the confidence of a writer who knows more than he has told. The central engine of the larger trilogy is a quest for three swords of power — Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn — as the realm fractures into civil war following Prester John’s death, and the dead Storm King Ineluki, an ancient Sithi spirit, reaches back into the world to claim it. But Williams is in no hurry to get there. The first volume is largely concerned with establishing place, history, and character, trusting that immersion will pay deeper dividends than incident.

The Series That Reshaped Epic Fantasy

The significance of The Dragonbone Chair is hard to overstate for anyone who cares about the genre’s evolution. Memory, Sorrow and Thorn was a nationwide bestseller and, more importantly, a watershed: George R. R. Martin has repeatedly credited Williams’s trilogy as a direct inspiration for A Song of Ice and Fire, saying it showed him that epic fantasy could be mature, morally complex, and intelligent rather than a parade of Tolkien imitations. The fingerprints are everywhere in the fantasy that followed — the willingness to subvert the chosen-one formula, the grounding of magic and prophecy in real political consequence, the patient, history-soaked world-building. Williams returned to Osten Ard decades later with the sequel trilogy The Last King of Osten Ard, a testament to the world’s enduring richness.

The Cast Around Simon

Part of what makes the slow build rewarding is the company Simon keeps. He is taken under the wing of Doctor Morgenes, the castle’s eccentric scholar and a member of the secretive League of the Scroll, whose teaching — and whose fate — sets Simon on his path. On the road he falls in with Binabik, a wry, diminutive troll from the northern mountains who travels with a great grey wolf named Qantaqa and becomes the trilogy’s most beloved character. Looming over the kingdom is the political tragedy of two brothers: the grasping new High King Elias, increasingly in thrall to the sinister, crimson-robed priest Pryrates, and his thoughtful, one-handed younger brother Prince Josua “Lackhand,” around whom resistance gathers. Williams populates Osten Ard with the kind of fully realised secondary figures — scholars, princes, trolls, and Sithi — who make the world feel genuinely inhabited rather than merely sketched, and it is their accumulating histories that give the later volumes their weight.

Strengths, Weaknesses, and Verdict

The honest caveat is pacing. Williams is interested in immersion, not momentum, and The Dragonbone Chair unfolds slowly — its first half in particular is a deliberate, almost leisurely accumulation of detail, and the volume functions in many ways as an extended prologue to a story that only fully ignites across the next two books. Readers raised on faster, plottier fantasy may find the opening a test of patience. But that patience is the point: by refusing to make Simon special and refusing to rush his world, Williams earns an emotional and thematic depth that quicker books never reach. For readers willing to settle in, it is one of the foundational texts of modern epic fantasy — a book whose influence you will recognise in nearly everything the genre has done since.

Decades on, it remains both a rewarding read in its own right and an essential piece of the genre’s history — the missing link between Tolkien’s mythic grandeur and the grittier, character-driven epics that now dominate the shelves.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — A patient, intelligent, hugely influential epic — the quiet cornerstone on which much of modern fantasy, A Song of Ice and Fire included, was built.

Reading Guides

• Where to Start with Tad Williams
• Best Fantasy Books of All Time
• Best Epic Fantasy Series