The Two Codices of David Eddings
He built a farm boy's rise to godhood into one of the defining fantasy epics of the 1980s, and filled his books with found families who forgave each other everything. He also spent a year in jail for the physical abuse of his own adopted children — a fact his readers would not learn until a decade after he died.
David Eddings spent the first half of his life failing at almost everything he tried, and the second half succeeding at the one thing he'd assumed would never pay the bills. In between sat a year in a South Dakota jail for crimes against his own children — crimes his readers would not learn about until a decade after his death, when a handful of digitized newspaper archives surfaced a story two small-town papers had covered in 1970 and the wider world had simply never noticed. This is the full record: the career, the craft, and the conviction, in the order they actually happened rather than the order his publicity preferred.
OriginsSpokane, Reed College, and a Wandering Start
David Carroll Eddings was born July 7, 1931, in Spokane, Washington, and raised in Snohomish, near the Puget Sound, the son of George Wayne Eddings and Theone Berge Eddings. He showed an early aptitude for performance and language, winning a statewide oratorical contest and taking lead roles in his high school's drama productions before enrolling at Everett Junior College, where by his own account he maintained a 4.0 grade average and, in his words, "tore that junior college up."
A scholarship carried him to Reed College in Portland, where he began as a theater major before switching to English after a semester, needing a part-time job that left no time for rehearsals. He wrote his senior thesis as a novel, How Lonely Are the Dead, under the guidance of professor Lloyd Reynolds, after novelist Walter Van Tilburg Clark encouraged him to expand a short story into something longer. Eddings earned his B.A. in 1954, was drafted into the US Army immediately after, and served in Germany before his 1956 discharge. He returned to graduate school at the University of Washington, completing an M.A. in 1961 with another novel-in-progress, Man Running, submitted as his thesis.
The jobs that followed were the ordinary jobs of a man not yet sure writing would pay: purchaser and buyer work at Boeing, where he met Judith Leigh Schall, whom he married in 1962; and eventually a teaching position as an assistant professor of English and communications at Black Hills State College in Spearfish, South Dakota. It was there, through most of the 1960s, that the defining and darkest chapter of his private life unfolded.
The Concealed RecordBlack Hills State — Adoption, and What Happened in the Basement
David and Leigh Eddings adopted a son, Scott David, in 1966, when the boy was two months old, and a daughter between 1966 and 1969. In December 1969, utility workers at the Eddings' Spearfish home discovered the boy locked in a basement cage, dressed only in an undershirt, in a room investigators later found equipped with wall restraints and no lighting. The child showed signs of repeated physical abuse, including a swollen and disabled hand.
David and Leigh Eddings were arrested in January 1970 and, after separate trials, each pleaded guilty to multiple counts of child abuse. Both were sentenced to a year in jail. The case was extensively covered by South Dakota newspapers, television, and radio at the time — the Black Hills Weekly and Queen City Mail both ran detailed contemporaneous coverage of the trial — but because Eddings was, in his own biographer's words, "an obscure academic" at the time, the story did not travel beyond the region and was never connected to the author he would later become.
The couple lost custody of both children permanently; their appeal to regain it was denied later in 1970. David did not return to academic life after his release. Both children survived into adulthood; one of them has spoken publicly, decades later, about living with the aftermath.
The facts are not in serious dispute — they are drawn from contemporaneous court reporting, corroborated independently by multiple biographers and later journalistic investigations, rather than from allegation or rumor. What is worth noting is the asymmetry of what happened next: a man who would go on to sell tens of millions of books managed, for the rest of his life, never to have this history connected to his public name.
Turning PointHigh Hunt — A Novel Drafted in a Jail Cell
According to Eddings' own later account, he completed the first draft of his first published novel while serving his sentence, finishing it in March 1971. High Hunt, a contemporary story of four young men on a deer hunting trip exploring themes of manhood and coming of age, was published by G.P. Putnam's Sons and received modestly positive reviews. After a short period in Denver, David and Leigh relocated to Spokane, where he worked in a grocery store to make ends meet while writing in his spare time.
The years that followed were lean ones creatively. Eddings drafted several more contemporary novels and adventure stories — including one about mountain climbing that he later burned, dismissing it as "a piece of tripe so bad it even bored me" — without finding a publisher for any of them. One manuscript from this period, a novel called The Losers about God and the Devil recast as two ordinary men, would not see print until 1992, two decades after it was written and long after Eddings' fantasy career had made him a bestseller.
The pivot that changed everything came almost by accident. Browsing a bookstore, Eddings noticed a copy of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings in its 78th printing and, by his own account, muttered "Is this old turkey still floating around?" — genuinely surprised at its enduring commercial life. He had already been teaching Tolkien in his university survey courses years earlier. One morning, he doodled a fantasy map before work; over the following year, he expanded it into roughly 250 pages of invented kingdoms, races, gods, and history — the foundation of what became the world of Aloria.
BreakthroughThe Belgariad — An Accidental Map Becomes an Empire
Eddings initially conceived his fantasy project as a trilogy, in direct imitation of Tolkien's three-volume structure. His editor, the influential Lester del Rey, told him bluntly that booksellers would balk at 600-page single volumes and pushed for a five-book structure instead. Eddings resisted at first, but having already signed the contract — and with del Rey's promise of advances for five books rather than three — he agreed.
published in April
fantasy debut was published
succession through 1984
Pawn of Prophecy, Queen of Sorcery, Magician's Gambit, Castle of Wizardry, and Enchanters' End Game follow Garion, a farm boy who discovers he is bound up in a seven-thousand-year prophecy involving gods, sorcerers, and a stolen orb of power. The series became an entry point for a generation of readers into epic fantasy, prized for its accessibility, brisk pace, and witty, bantering dialogue between an ensemble cast built explicitly around found-family dynamics.
The commercial success let Eddings finally quit day jobs entirely and write full time — a milestone that arrived, notably, when he was already fifty years old, after roughly two decades of largely unpublished and unrewarded writing.
The Later CareerThe Malloreon, the Elenium, the Tamuli, and the Dreamers
Success bred sequels and parallel universes, all built on the same architecture of prophecy, found family, and banter that had defined the Belgariad.
- The Malloreon (1987–1991) A direct five-book sequel to the Belgariad, following Garion years later as a new threat, Zandramas, emerges from an obscured prophecy. Guardians of the West through The Seeress of Kell.
- The Elenium (1989–1991) A new world entirely, centered on the Pandion Knight Sparhawk. The Diamond Throne, The Ruby Knight, and The Sapphire Rose introduced political intrigue and knightly orders alongside the familiar sorcery.
- The Tamuli (1992–1994) A direct sequel trilogy to the Elenium — Domes of Fire, The Shining Ones, The Hidden City — sending Sparhawk into a foreign empire riddled with corruption.
- Prequels (1995, 1997–1998) Belgarath the Sorcerer and Polgara the Sorceress expanded the Belgariad's mythology; The Rivan Codex compiled the background notes and worldbuilding material behind both series — a title Eddings himself chose, likening it to The Silmarillion's relationship to The Lord of the Rings.
- The Dreamers (2003–2006) Eddings' final series, The Elder Gods through The Younger Gods, shifted focus to immortal gods and dream-based mechanics as protagonists, exploring a war against an insectoid enemy called the Vlagh, in a world called Dhrall.
By this stage in his career, Leigh Eddings' name appeared as credited co-author, an acknowledgment David insisted on as recognition for a creative partnership he said had been present, uncredited, since the beginning — she contributed substantially to plotting, dialogue, and especially the development of female characters. Across his career, Eddings published 27 novels; in the 1990s, nearly every new release reached the top of bestseller lists, with each typically selling around 100,000 hardback copies in the UK alone according to his publisher.
"I'm never going to be in danger of getting a Nobel Prize for literature. I'm a storyteller, not a prophet."
— David Eddings, on his own success
ReckoningLegacy and Reckoning — What Surfaced After 2009
David and Leigh eventually settled in Carson City, Nevada, in a home David owned from 1988 until his death. Leigh suffered a debilitating stroke in 1999; David cared for her personally, with his mother-in-law's help, through her decline until her death in February 2007. He was, by his family's account, already showing signs of dementia by then, and died of natural causes in his Carson City home on June 2, 2009, at age 77 — two years almost to the day after Leigh.
His estate reflected the scale of his commercial success: $18 million to Reed College, his alma mater, and $10 million to National Jewish Health in Denver for pediatric asthma research — at the time the largest single gift in that institution's history. His papers, including an unfinished final manuscript his brother described as an unusual departure from his typical style, went to Reed College as well. According to family members who later spoke to biographers, materials referencing his adopted children and prison time had been carefully excluded from the collection of personal papers he donated.
The child abuse conviction did not become widely known within the fantasy community until roughly a decade after Eddings' death, when readers and researchers cross-referencing digitized South Dakota newspaper archives connected the 1970 case to the famous author. Because the story had never been reported outside the region at the time, and because Eddings had by then been dead for years, there was no scandal in the conventional sense — no press cycle, no publisher statement, no public reckoning during his lifetime. The revelation instead arrived gradually, through blog posts, fan forums, and eventually a corrected Wikipedia entry, prompting retrospective essays asking how — or whether — the discovery should change the way readers engage with found-family narratives that, in hindsight, read differently once the author's own history is known.
SignatureThe Two Codices — A Public Timeline and a Private Record
Eddings gave his own compendium of invented history the name The Rivan Codex — a sealed record of the world behind his fiction, published only once the public story was complete enough to bear it. It is a fitting structure to borrow for his own biography: one column is the record his readers knew during his lifetime, and the other is the record that stayed sealed until after his death.
Laid side by side, the two records don't just run in parallel — they explain each other. The jail term is the reason Eddings, a disgraced small-town academic with nowhere left to teach, ended up grocery-bagging and writing in his spare time in the first place. The private record isn't a footnote to the public one. It is the hinge the public one turned on.
Reading Him NowWhat This Means for Eddings' Work Today
The commercial legacy is not in question. The Belgariad remains, for many readers, the book that introduced them to fantasy as a genre, and Eddings' body of work — 27 novels across six series — sold in numbers few fantasy authors of any era have matched.
The biographical legacy is now inseparable from that commercial one. Critics and longtime readers alike have noted, since the conviction became public, that Eddings' fiction is saturated with found families who forgive nearly anyone anything, with child characters who are magically protected and never truly harmed, and with redemption arcs extended even to deeply flawed characters — patterns that read very differently once his own history is known. None of this retroactively explains or excuses the 1970 conviction; it simply means the books can no longer be read the way they were read before 2009.
What remains unresolved is a question with no clean answer: whether decades of apparently ordinary, functional life — a stable marriage, a productive creative partnership, no further criminal record — constitutes evidence of genuine change, or whether it simply reflects how completely the couple succeeded in leaving their record behind them. The books' been read by tens of millions of people who never had the chance to ask.
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