(August 2026 marks 50 years since the release of Patricia A. McKillip’s The Riddle-Master of Hed, the first book in her Riddle-Master trilogy. this essay was originally written for a celebratory zine that has, alas, fallen through. I’ve opted to keep the zinier all-lowercase formatting.)
die philosophen haben die welt nur verschieden interpretirt; es kommt aber darauf an, sie zu verändern.
[philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways; the point, however, is to change it.]*
this is the crux of the riddle-master trilogy: the gap between theory and praxis, dramatized in the gap between the orderly, systematized riddle-mastery that morgon of hed studies at the college in caithnard and the chaotic, “wild,” deadly “game” of riddles in which he finds himself embroiled outside its walls.
this is, it seems to me, the animating impulse — or one of the animating impulses — behind most, perhaps all of mckillip’s fiction. her protagonists confront the sense of stasis identified by mark fisher with what he called “capitalist realism” — the imposed sense that we are in “a situation in which nothing can happen” — and break it open, bringing themselves and their worlds instead to a situation where “suddenly anything is possible again.”
this is not to say that either mckillip or morgon of hed are unconcerned with theory. on the contrary, it is theory — the rules and strictures of riddlery that he learned at caithnard; “you used to open riddles like nuts” — that guide morgon along every step of his journey.
“answer the unanswered riddle. so i do.”
what mckillip points us towards, however, is what happens when theory encounters the world of praxis, one where the histories that morgon studied at the college are not confined to ancient books and riddle-narratives, or even to the memory of wraiths, caught out of time, but rather inescapably alive and continuing. as walter benjamin so evocatively characterized it in his “über den begriff der geschichte,” history is not “eine kette von begebenheiten” (a chain of events), moving inexorably forward, link by link, but rather “eine einzige katastrophe, die unablässig trümmer auf trümmer häuft und sie [uns] vor die füße schleudert” (a singular catastrophe that continuously piles ruins upon ruins and flings them before [our] feet).
rereading the riddle-master trilogy in the 2020s i am reminded that mckillip — born in 1948, two years before my father — was only six when brown v. board of education ordered an end to the segregation of public schools. the voting rights act of 1965 was only just over a decade old when the riddle-master of hed was published. the last segregated school for black students in canada, in lincolnville, nova scotia, only closed in 1983. the last canadian residential school, in rankin inlet, now nunavut, closed in 1997; the history of residential schools as part of an ongoing practice of genocide remains contested in canadian politics nearly thirty years later. history does not end; however much we might wish that it were sealed away in the college library, it is only ever in the tomb of the earth-masters’ children, where it waits, deadly if we try to ignore it.
sol of isig is illuminating here:
“who was sol of isig and why did he die?”
morgon turned his face away. “sol was the son of danan isig. he was pursued through the mines of isig mountain one day by traders who wanted to steal from him a priceless jewel. he came to the stone door at the bottom of isig, beyond which lay dread and sorrow older even than isig. he could not bring himself to open that door, which no man had ever opened, for fear of what might lie in the darkness beyond it. so his enemies found him in his indecision, and there he died.”
“and the stricture?”
“turn forward into the unknown, rather than backward toward death.”
the riddle morgon learns is easy, its stricture perhaps the most fantasy cliché of any of the riddles in the trilogy (for all that it is probably good advice). it places sol himself and the locked door he died at safely in the past. but it is, as morgon realizes, a lie: sol of isig did not die because he was afraid of the unknown, but because someone was afraid for him to make the unknown known. to link the riddles posed by the earth-masters’ children in their deathly peace under isig mountain to the present: to bring them, properly speaking, into history, understood as constant change — not a series of discrete, self-contained riddles but an ongoing catastrophe, one in which (unlike benjamin’s “angel of history”) we can intervene.
morgon of hed affirms that the only way to resolve the contradictions of history is to go out and make new history. to push for answers, to prod situations such that underlying tensions and contradictions — historical or interpersonal; concealed, denied, or hidden, or else obvious and undeniable — come to a head, forcing a resolution in which we can participate. morgon has, to be sure, magical abilities that most of us(?) do not. none of us is capable, individually, of unleashing the devastation that ravages wind plain (but mckillip is right to remind us that mass transformation almost always entails destruction, sometimes even of those we love). and yet — where i cannot imagine going to mordor to destroy the one ring, i can imagine this. to interrogate the world (danan isig: “i could not desire anything less for [isig] than that it yields always, unsparingly, the truth of itself”) and refuse to take “no” or “that’s just how it is” or “there’s nothing i/we/you can do about it” for an answer.
tolkien, for all his “ordinary” heroes, makes transformation incomprehensible, unreachable — his “eucatastrophe” is beyond us; it comes from god, even if god may act through human, or hobbit, hands. mckillip puts transformation within our grasp. not easy (in fact often incredibly difficult and costly), but thinkable. and she has offered us a set of principles that we might take up to change it: to answer the unanswered riddle. to give what others require of us for their lives. to — after lyra — never let strangers build walls around us.
to turn forward into the unknown, rather than backward toward death.
another world is possible.
* karl marx, “thesen über feuerbach,” thesis 11. all translations are my own.
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