I first read this book from the school library. No preconceptions. Loved it. Went looking for it and found it again about 10 years later, re-read it loved it just as much if not a little bit more. It has a lovely bittersweet quality that I've always enjoyed in fantasy books wear the characters act beyond themselves. ( )

I picked this one up as ex libris from the Brown County Library, a first US edition, no less! If memory serves, I was interested in it initially because it had a reference to blacksmithing in the title. As I am a hobby blacksmith, I thought it might offer a diversion. Well, it did. In fairly quick succession, I grabbed the next two books in the series; The Forge in the Forest and The Hammer of the Sun. Now, I gather that three more have been written. I suppose it is time to go shopping again. This is a well-written book with a Tolkinian flavor, so to speak, perhaps mixed with Conan the Barbarian and a little Game of Thrones. The fact that I am going to actively seek out the three newest additions in this series says as much as needs to be said about this book and the series it spawned. ( )

I really liked this first book in the trilogy, great set up and world building... shame about the deus ex machina tone the rest of the trilogy took ( )

it has been many years since I read such a first-class heroic fantasy. I missed it when it came out in the 80s -perhaps because I was in Korea in 87-88--only discovered it now because Cakebread and Walton put out a game based on it. it clears only something to Tolkien (the Dead Marshes, the duergar) , perhaps also LeGuin (the Ekwash are a little like her sea-raiders in Earthsea, only nastier --seagoing cannibalistic Mongols.) even a name (Nordenay) from Barringer --likely due to the writer's Yorkshire connections. Logically there are some inconsistencies -- fairskinned people living for centuries in a southern California cliate have ever tanned, for one thing. But the sweep of the story carries it long. Alv, an orphaned thrall, grows up harshly treated in a northern town --it is sacked by the Ekwash, and he is bought from them by Mastersmkith Mylio , a highly skilled but coldly amoral man whose magic broke the town's defenses. He recognizes lAlv has inherted the magical smith skills of the old northern people now interbred with the equivalent of Amerinds who fled the Ekwash from the equivalent of Asia) . The smith takes him to his (Orthanc-like) castle in the far north near the encroaching ice --which has an evil mind, or minds, of its own --and trains him in smithmagic. Alv's first apprentice piece is a gold armring he gives to Kara, a girl in the service of powerful evil lady Louhi (name from Finnish legend) who seems to rank higher in he service of the ice than the mastersmith. His next is a tarnhelm for the smith; his third a Damascus-steel sword woven with commanding magic.That he completes himself (contrary to the smith's order ) -- the smith's journeyman, whom, he tricked into helping his research into the smith's books, is destroyed by the smith's magic. Alv himself escapes, seems to have lost his powers, but regains them working as a smith in the marshes that separate the north from he rich cities of the south. He gains a sword from a dead man I the marshes and joins corsairs who counterraid the Ekwash raiders, led by the Aragorn-like Kermorvan. ( )

When it comes to fantasy, there's Tolkien, and there are the rest. This series is the very best of the rest in my opinion; there's nothing 'generic-fantasy' about it.

Set in an interglacial period in our own Earth's history, this is the story of the struggles of a group of friends as they try to defeat the powers of the Ice. There's the same haunting sense of the weight of history, the same glimpses of things half-seen, half-known that I found in Tolkien; plus a carefully worked out system of magic that's completely convincing. Moreover MSR has done his research on palaeoenvironments, and it shows - right down to the trees and flowers. I loved the description of the black grouse and their courtship dance. Half a sentence but he's got them down to a T!

I've got two sets of this series and a book on Wayland the Smith I bought for background reading. To sum up: it's one of my desert island books. ( )