The Wizard Knight was published by Tor Books in two volumes — The Knight (January 2004) and The Wizard (November 2004) — and it represents Wolfe’s most direct engagement with fantasy as a genre. Where The Book of the New Sun used the conventions of science fiction, The Wizard Knight uses the conventions of Arthurian romance and Norse mythology — but Wolfe transforms them with the same intellectual rigor he brought to his earlier work.
The narrator is an American boy (whose real name we never learn) who is transported to Mythgarthr — a world modeled on Norse cosmology, organized into seven levels from Muspel (the highest, realm of the Most High God) to the cold realm below all others. In Mythgarthr, the boy is transformed physically into a powerful adult knight named Sir Able of the High Heart, but he retains the mind and emotions of a child. The disjunction between his appearance (a mighty warrior whom everyone treats with respect and fear) and his reality (a confused boy trying to understand the rules of a world he doesn’t belong to) is the source of both comedy and pathos.
The narrative takes the form of a letter written by Able to his brother back in America, and like all Wolfe narrators, Able is not entirely reliable. He omits crucial events, presents his motivations in the best possible light, and occasionally reveals — through inadvertent details — a less heroic picture than the one he intends.
The cosmological structure is Wolfe’s most elaborate: each of the seven worlds has its own inhabitants, its own laws, and its own relationship to the worlds above and below. The theology is Christian — the Most High God of the highest level is clearly the Christian God — but filtered through Norse and Celtic mythology in ways that enrich rather than diminish either tradition.
Collecting The Wizard Knight
First editions (Tor Books, New York, 2004): Two volumes, cloth bindings with dust jackets.
Market values:
- Both volumes, first editions in jackets: $40–$120
- Signed copies: $80–$200