Looking Back on The Inheritance Cycle by Christopher Paolini as an Adult

A familiar world of Elves, Dwarves, Dragons, and magic

Credit: John Jude Palencar/Christopher Paolini

Spoilers for the first book in the series.

You might think it’s strange that, despite being obsessed with Christopher Paolini’s Eragon as a kid, I never finished reading the series. I mean, I read the book again and again. I watched, loved, and owned the film adaptation on DVD (a movie that currently sits at a rating of 1.8 on Letterboxd…). I even adored the video game based on the movie for the GameBoy Advance.

I loved this world, and I loved this story. I can recall my excitement for the release of the third book in the series, Brisingr, in 2008. The story was finally concluding! It was going to be epic! It… wait, there’s another book coming?

See, back in the day, The Inheritance Cycle was called The Inheritance Trilogy. My old copies of the first two books in the series still call it that. However, between the release of books two and three, Paolini—in the manner of many fantasy authors—judged that an extra novel was needed to tell the complete story. While more entries in a beloved series might seem like a great thing, to me, it was not.

I read Brisingr with the same level of intensity that I read the final Harry Potter book, and when it ended how it did, I was left angry and disappointed. I hadn’t known there was going to be another book—I had been told this was a trilogy! Feeling like the author had broken a sacred promise, I turned from the series for good, ignoring the final book when it came out in 2011 and not looking back.

But here we are. In 2023, twelve years after the ‘Cycle’ ended, Paolini released a new spin-off book, Murtagh, and after receiving it as a gift from a childhood friend who had also been an Eragon-enjoyer, I decided that it was finally time to finish off this series that I had left dangling for over half my life.

It’s important to acknowledge as I look back on the series, which I have now finally completed, that these books are primarily aimed at older kids/young adults. Given the kinds of books that I enjoy now, The Inheritance Cycle was never going to appeal to me in quite the same way it did before.

It’s also important to note that Paolini began writing this series when he was only a teenager himself. It was a particular kind of luck and circumstance that lead to him being able to reach such success with Eragon at a young age. I won’t hold it against him, but these two factors are hard to overlook as an adult starting the series from the beginning again.

Era-Gone

Credit: John Jude Palencar/Christopher Paolini

Eragon, and the later books, are very basic in their style and structure. There’s nothing wrong with this—it’s certainly the preferred way to present a story to a younger audience. The real problem for me comes in how the titular Eragon is characterised and developed. There’s obviously no need to get too complex in a story like this, but Eragon feels hollow in a way that other successful young adult protagonists do not.

I chalk this up to the author’s youth. Indeed, the later books do attempt to add some more depth to the character by complicating his relationships with those around him, but still, when you boil him down, Eragon is a pretty blank state. Even Harry Potter has more personality. Obviously, this makes it very easy for younger audiences to ‘imprint’ themselves on the character, but as an adult, Eragon comes across as pretty vacuous.

His emotions are very unrefined. He has extremely strong feelings for people he just met and a very black-and-white view of the world that isn’t challenged much. He’s unrelentingly heroic in thought and deed, which is very one-note. He also doesn’t act like much of a teenager, except for his unrequited love for the elf Arya, which never wavers, and never makes sense.

Arya, at least, possesses a certain level of dimensionality—she has complicated feelings about her fellow elves and her place in their society—but she doesn’t resonate emotionally with the reader. It really does seem like she’s only there to give Eragon something to think about outside of the main events of the plot. Ultimately that's the point of any B-story, but their relationship dynamic is so uninteresting that it really drags down the pace of the narrative.

Eragon’s cousin, Roran, is given his own P.O.V. chapters from the second book onwards. Roran’s arc is consistently more interesting than Eragon’s from a character level. His quests are personal—rescuing loved ones, defending his home, ensuring the survival of his followers at all costs—as opposed to Eragon’s adventures, which frequently place in him in the midst of political turmoil that he has no personal stake in.

Eragon’s overarching goal—to take down the evil king Galbatorix—is frustratingly abstract, as Galbatorix himself doesn’t even make an appearance until the fourth and final book. But because the individual novels still need climaxes, Eragon is instead frequently pitted against the dark and brooding Murtagh and his red dragon Thorn.

Eragon’s relationship with Murtagh is, thankfully, quite personal, which adds some flair to the sequences they share later on in the series. He’s also a far more interesting character than Eragon, and despite my mixed feelings on The Inheritance Cycle as a whole, I’m quite looking forward to reading his own dedicated story in Murtagh.

Here Be Dragons

Credit: John Jude Palencar/Christopher Paolini

But this is a series about dragons, so let’s talk about them. The main element of the story that hooked me both as a kid and as an adult is, naturally, Eragon’s blue dragon, Saphira. Eragon adapting to the dragon’s existence in the early sections of Eragon are probably the best bits of the whole book, if not the series.

It probably had something to do with my love for Pokémon and wishing they were real (my kingdom for a Mudkip to be my friend), but this is the reason why I kept coming back to the book as a kid. Getting to ride a fire-breathing dragon and communicating with it via telepathy is just an irresistible premise for a child, but even now I found the relationship between Eragon and Saphira to be unique and tenderly written.

Paolini really captures what it would be like to ride a dragon, too. From lavish descriptions of bird’s-eye views to temperature gradients and wind changes, the writing frequently finds opportunities to languish in this otherworldly yet desirable experience.

Not only that, but the worldbuilding and lore surrounding the rise and fall of dragons in the land of Alagaësia is really quite captivating. Dragons in this world possess gem-like souls, are powered by magic, can grow to immense sizes, existed in their own society, fought in wars, and are just generally cool.

Paolini also created a really interesting setting for the series, and I honestly enjoyed learning about its history. I sometimes wished the backstory was the main story, but it was still nice to buoyed by a narrative with a really solid foundation, even when I found my interest in the primary storylines drifting.

I would also be remiss if I didn’t point out the impact of the character of Brom, who acts as the archetypical mentor character for most of the first book before his untimely death. ‘Death of the Mentor’ is a pretty common story beat for Hero’s Journey narratives like this one, so veteran readers won’t be too surprised when it happens, but I really like how Brom’s legacy and impact on Eragon persist throughout the rest of the series.

Brom’s death always feels surprising—and sometimes a little frustrating. He’s a mysterious, interesting character and it always feels like he’s gone too soon.

I can’t blame Paolini for killing him off so relatively early in the story—and I like how we continue to learn about his character post-death—but the problem is that none of Eragon’s later mentors, superiors, or higher authorities are ever as interesting as Brom was.

Nasuada—leader of the group rebelling against Galbatorix and to whom Eragon pledges fealty—is compelling at times in her own right (especially during the final book in the series), but she just doesn’t possess Brom’s gravitas and history.

End of the Cycle

Credit: John Jude Palencar/Christopher Paolini

The biggest question I had going into this series as an adult is ‘Would this be worth it?’

I can’t say I had a consistently great time with the books, but being able to view even the more boring sections(such as the extensive training sequences in Eldest) through a lens of nostalgia helped. They’re easy reads—perhaps too easy at times—so I was able to burn through them, which helped with the muddy pacing.

Really though, it was Inheritance, the final book in the core series and the only one that I hadn’t read, that would determine whether the series as a whole was satisfactory.

It was fine.

I can’t say I was particularly moved by the story—Eragon is just too one-dimensional to carry a strong, emotional arc—but I liked how the story explored some of Alagaësia’s secrets, left some other mysteries purposefully unresolved, and tied up the primary conflicts and story arcs. Paolini is a competent writer, and I’m looking forward to reading what he does next with this world.

According to Paolini, Murtagh opens the door to more stories in Alagaësia (my thoughts on it as soon as I give my mind a break from dragons!). Honestly, the thought of revisiting this world through the lens of a more mature Eragon—or a different character altogether—with a more compelling plot or structure is exciting.

I guess that’s my main problem with The Inheritance Cycle—as it stands, these books just weren’t written with an adult fantasy reader in mind. They’re just not deep enough for me to really sink my teeth into. And that’s totally okay. I’ll always think of the series fondly for the power it had over me as a child, and I have tremendous respect for Paolini for writing these incredibly thick novels, and marketing and selling them successfully at such a young age.

I wish I’d finished the series as a kid. I would’ve gotten so much more out of it then. Ultimately though, I’m glad I got around to it. I feel invigorated for the future of this story-world, and if nothing else, it was fun to read about dragons—the coolest creatures to ever not exist.

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