The inspiration behind the book
THE QUEEN OF THE TEARLING
By
Erika Johansen
One morning in 2007, I woke up from a dream I could barely remember. The only image that
really stuck was that of a group of people in ships going over a horizon, and the distinct idea that they had
no idea what they would find on the other side. Fall of 2007 was a good time for me; I was in my second
year of law school and felt that I was doing all right there. I had no idea that the financial collapse was
less than a year away. The spirit in which I began this book was therefore one of extreme idealism. I
wanted to write a book about a kingdom that was dying for leadership, and what would happen once that
leadership came along.
Most of the role models in my life have come from fiction, rather than the real world, and when I
began this book, I was conscious of feeling that so many of the female protagonists in contemporary
mainstream fiction were either stunningly beautiful or almost obsessively invested in their romantic lives,
or both. Most young women I know do not consider themselves to be stunningly beautiful – on the
contrary, many grapple with issues surrounding their appearance, and I believe that for most women,
focusing almost exclusively on romantic and sexual relationships is not a formula for long term
fulfillment in life. While this setup makes for good escapist reading – an important thing – I don’t think
such protagonists ultimately give most women anyone to look towards for inspiration.
I wanted to create a heroine who has all the problems of a normal young woman, but who also has
her priorities straight. Kelsea worries about being plain and overweight in a society that values beauty;
she also has a serious crush on an older and unreachable man. But while Kelsea feels these things keenly,
neither of them ever takes the front seat, because she has more important problems to worry about –
problems that impact lives beyond her own – and she simply doesn’t have time to dwell on her own
romantic life. Whether Kelsea works as a heroine is for the reader to judge, but I’m at least confident that
her priorities are in order.
In 2008, as the economy collapsed and the world got a bit darker, the book began to darken as
well. By 2009, when my class was preparing to graduate and take the bar exam, law firms had more or
less stopped hiring new lawyers. Even if we passed the bar, there were not going to be nearly enough jobs,
and many of us were carrying crushing student debt. And so, almost by osmosis, the problems of the
Tearling became much more unpleasant than I had originally conceived them, much more rooted in
entrenched human greed and an endemic disregard for the misery of others. It was also around this time
that I began thinking of the book not as a discrete story, but as only the beginning of a larger one. The
Tearling’s problems were simply too complex to resolve in a single book, and I also suspected that a
heroine as morally good as Kelsea simply couldn’t remain that way for long, not in such a nasty world.
She would have to undergo a dark journey of the soul, just like the rest of us, and to do it justice would
take far more than four hundred pages.
At that point, I also began to think more deeply about the Crossing itself. Originally, it was really
a plot device: a tiny sliver of humanity had left its old home to make a new life in an unknown land. I
chose this route because I really wanted to set the book in the future, rather than in the medieval past, and
because I was so enraptured, still, with my dream image of the ships crossing the horizon. But the more I
thought about it, the more interested I became in the conditions that would have pushed a group of people
to cast off on a ship into an uncertain future. Was it possible that the world of the pre-Crossing past could
have been even worse than that of the present-day Tearling? The more I thought about it, the more I
thought it was not only possible, but likely, and I began looking for a way to tell the story of William Tear
and his utopians, what they fled from and how their dreams of a clean slate could have gone so wrong.
Essentially, I decided, the Crossing would come after the problems we currently face (poverty, greed,
intolerance, lack of education, erosion of privacy) had been allowed to compound and fester in an
increasingly technology-dependent world. And so I took my own stab at writing about America’s
dystopian future.
A Conversation with Erika Johansen, author of
THE QUEEN OF THE TEARLING
Q.: Can you talk about the main characters in THE QUEEN OF THE TEARLING – who they are,
which ones are your favorites, and how you reveal them to the readers?
As a reader, I prefer to imagine the physical appearance of my characters, rather than be told, and this
preference transfers to my writing. So for most of my characters, the physical description is sparse at best,
limited only to what I feel the reader needs to know in order to follow along. I’m also committed to only
revealing characters a piece at a time as it impacts the plot, so many of the characters’ motivations and
origins remain ambiguous throughout the first book. My main characters are Kelsea, a Queen in training,
but also an ordinary young woman who has to do the right thing in a difficult time. She’s guarded by
Mace, a warrior who’s the Captain of her Guard. The Red Queen, ruler of the neighboring kingdom, who
at first glance appears to be a nasty piece of work, but is, in fact, not the master of her own destiny. Javel,
a guard on the Keep Gate, gets caught up in a plot that he wants no part of. My personal favorite
character, Father Tyler, is a priest who slowly begins to realize that his church is rotten to the core.
Q.: How did you come up with the character of your heroine Kelsea Raleigh Glynn? A Queen in
training who seems ordinary on the surface but holds great power inside her?
I generally find protagonists much less interesting when they’re extraordinary people to begin with.
Ordinary people thrust into extraordinary situations are far more interesting to me. Therefore, I wrote
about a fairly ordinary girl who’s been placed in a situation she never asked for. (For more on Kelsea, see
my attached “Behind the Book” essay)
Q.: The setting of THE QUEEN OF THE TEARLING feels like a kingdom in Medieval England
even though it takes place in the future. What kind of research did you do in order to get the
details? The way people dress? The weapons they use? How they fight with each other? The way
they make their money/sustain their way of life?
I didn’t research these topics. I felt that humanity would revert to agrarian society, certainly, and be forced
to work with the materials at hand (wood, metal, stone, wool, etc.). But I also thought such a society in
the future would be fundamentally different because humanity already had discovered electricity, created
the printing press, used advanced weaponry. Although these things no longer exist for them, the
knowledge that they once did would change everything. I’m sure my conception of this world’s clothing,
weapons and organization was governed heavily by several novels and fantasy movies, but I also thought
it would be a mistake to make it too authentically medieval, because that’s not what the Tearling is.
Rather, I tried to imagine what humanity would look like if relatively modern people were abruptly
thrown back into the seventeenth century. Whether it works is up to the reader.
Q.: Describe the hierarchy of the new society. Who is the Queen’s Guard, the Caden, the priests,
the Mort hawks, and the landowners, those working the land? Where do women and children
stand in the hierarchy? What is the Keep? The Arvath?
The Queen’s Guard, as the name suggests, guards the ruler of the Tearling. The Caden is a club of
assassins. Anyone with a sword is basically more powerful than those who don’t have one. Outside of the
ruling family, women have largely been relegated to traditional roles (mothers, wives, prostitutes). Those
who work the land are entirely subservient to those who own the land. The Keep is the dwelling place of
the royal family. The Arvath is the Tearling’s version of the Vatican.
Q.: How did the people completely lose their knowledge of technology? From medicine, to
engineering, to electricity, to combustion and transportation, to telecommunications, and the
Internet?
The Tearling was begun with a strong bias against technology. The settlers didn’t bring any with them.
They haven’t lost the knowledge of what humanity used to possess, but they also have a longtime, almost
superstitious fear of trying to recover it. (Readers can be assured that as they read the series, they will find
out more about what happened to society before the Crossing).
Q.: In the book you talk about books as being extremely rare in the Tearling. Can you discuss how
books and other writing started to disappear?
Books began to disappear before the Crossing. Barty and Carlin brought up Kelsea in the Tearling woods
until she turned nineteen, the age of a Queen, and she had use of Carlin’s books in the house. Here is an
excerpt from THE QUEEN OF THE TEARLING (© Copyright HarperCollins Publishers – please do
not reprint without permission):
Kelsea turned away and found herself staring at her mother’s bookshelves again. They bothered her
more every moment. Bookshelves weren’t meant to be empty. “Is there a library in the city?”
“A what?”
“A library. A public library.”
Mace looked up at her, incredulous. “Books?”
“Books.”
“Lady,” Mace said, in the slow, patient tones one would use with a young child, “there hasn’t been a
working printing press in this kingdom since the Landing era.”
“I know,” Kelsea snapped. “That’s not what I asked. I asked if there was a library.”
“Books are hard to come by, Lady. A curiosity at best. Who would have enough books for a library?”
“Nobles. Surely some of them still have some hoarded books.”
Mace shrugged. “Never heard of such a thing. But even if they did, they wouldn’t open them to the
public.”
“Why not?”
“Lady, try to take away even the most resilient weed in a nobleman’s garden, and watch him scream
trespass. I’m sure most of them don’t read any books they might have, but all the same, they would never
give them away.”
. . . ..
How had Carlin acquired all of her books? Paper books had been at a premium long before the
Crossing; the transition to electronic books had decimated the publishing industry, and in the last two
decades before the Crossing, many printed books had been destroyed altogether. According to Carlin,
William Tear had only allowed his utopians to bring ten books apiece. Two thousand people with ten
books each made twenty thousand books, and at least two thousand now stood on Carlin’s shelves. Kelsea
had spent her entire life with Carlin’s library at her fingertips, taking it for granted, never understanding
that it was invaluable in a world without books. Vandals might find the cottage, or even children
searching for firewood. That was what had happened to most of the books that originally came over in the
British-American Crossing: the desperate had burned them for fuel or warmth. Kelsea had always thought
of Carlin’s library as a set piece, unified and immovable, but it wasn’t. Books could be moved.”
Q.: Magic, especially black magic, plays a very big role in the novel. The Tear Sapphire necklaces
that Kelsea Glynn wears, that the Red Queen wants to get her hands on, bring to mind the Ring in
the Lord of the Rings. Talk about the role magic plays in the books.
I’m not interested in magic for magic’s sake; thus the lack of magical creatures running around these
books. I’m also usually more annoyed than charmed by rule-driven magic, in which the rules of and
limitations on magic’s use become integral to the plot (J.K. Rowling is the lone exception for me). Rather,
I’m interested in magic (such as Tolkien’s archetypal ring) that is powered by and works on the user.
Magical jewels are certainly a fantasy trope by now, but I wanted to try to use them in a different way
here. Kelsea cannot control her jewels, and doesn’t really even understand her jewels, but they are doing
something to her. I was interested, but not fascinated, when a character put on Tolkien’s ring and became
invisible. Fascination came when someone tried to let go of the ring and couldn’t. The little tricks one can
do with magic are far less interesting to me than its darker effects.
Q.: What writers and books had the biggest influence on your writing of THE QUEEN OF THE
TEARLING?
Frank Herbert’s Dune is the big one. It’s science fiction, not fantasy, but at its base, Dune is the tale of a
young scion who must recover his fallen house, and it has always been one of my favorite books. THE
QUEEN OF THE TEARLING is nowhere near as good as Dune, but I tried in my own way to perform
some of the same tricks.
I also kept The Mists of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley, in mind. I wanted to write a fantasy book in
which action and magic, while present, were subordinated to politics and interpersonal dynamics. I was
also determined to write a strong female protagonist. Bradley accomplished both of these tricks to a
marvel; those who like THE QUEEN OF THE TEARLING should really go back and give The Mists of
Avalon a look.
Terry Brooks’s The Elf Queen of Shannara. I enjoyed all of Brooks’s first seven Shannara books, but this
one, about a tough but young and uncertain girl who must undertake a quest and prove herself worthy to
be a queen, is my favorite. Brooks’s fantasy is always stuffed to the brim with magic and interesting
creatures, but he also routinely forces his protagonists to take difficult personal journeys, and Wren
Elessedil’s journey is one of the best.
Last but not least: Stephen King’s The Eyes of the Dragon. Stephen King is my favorite author, and in my
opinion, his lone stab at pure fantasy is also one of his finest books. Here we have a kingdom that, like the
Tearling, has fallen under the sway of corruption from within. One of King’s great gifts is to make the
reader feel that everything is at stake; in The Eyes of the Dragon, the entire kingdom may rise or fall
based on a single act. The plotting is fantastic.
Q.: Can you give readers a little bit of a teaser of what will happen in book two and three of the
series?
In Book 2, the reader will watch Mortmesne invade the Tearling, and see Kelsea’s situation grow bleaker
by the day as the Mort draw closer to the city. The reader will also see events that led up to the Crossing,
and why humanity took such a desperate gamble. In Book 3, by contrast, the reader will get to see what
happened after the Crossing: how the Tearling was formed and how it degenerated. Meanwhile, Kelsea
and the Red Queen will form an uneasy alliance against a greater adversary.