"The name of the wind" is a novel written by the American author Patrick Rotfus

Chapter 1: A Place for Demons.” And it begins and ends with “times being what they were.” This is in a much closer more normal multiple third person point of view, with an almost folksy tone to it.

It starts with five men gathered in The Waystone Inn on Felling Night, and old Cob is telling a story about Taborlin the Great, a story with half a ton of naming magic. Taborlin the Great knew the names of all things, and that got him out of trouble. One of the things it got him away from were the Chandrian—and here they are, right up front, practically on the first page. Blue flame—and everybody knows that means the Chandrian, even the smith’s apprentice who’s from Rannish, thirty miles away. That’s our first mention of them, in a fairytale, common knowledge, Chandrian, blue flame, hunting Taborlin.

It’s interesting that it’s a story about Taborlin that introduces us to magic and the Chandrian, not a Kvothe story to ease us in or anything like that. A fairytale, just the kind of story Kvothe finds when he goes looking for anything on the Chandrian.

The innkeeper—still nameless—brings stew and bread. I can’t imagine why John Scalzi has a problem with this, but then stew is one of the staple foods of my culture. What Diana Wynne Jones complained about in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland wasn’t the existence of stew in fantasy but the way people eat it around the campfire, when in fact it takes hours to cook. But they’re in an inn, they’ve had hours, and goodness knows it’s a cheap and filling way of feeding people. Scalzi might think it’s a terrible cliche when I eat it as well. (Last summer when I was in Britain the weather was awful, and I ate stew twice, in an inn and in a castle—if you’re ever in Castell Coch, near Cardiff, order the stew. It may be a cliche, but it tastes great. You can have apple pie for dessert, unless that’s a cliche, too.)

Taborlin’s amulet sounds like a university guilder—or possibly a gram. We won’t learn a thing about them for ages, but it’s nice to recognise what it is.

The Chandrian’s attack is physical—a knife—and what they do to the camp is also physical, and at the farm, and Cinder is running a bandit camp. I hadn’t thought of this before, but while they are inherently magical and cause fires to burn blue and wood and iron to rot, the harm and destruction they cause is invariably physical—done with weapons and fire rather than magic. Even Lanre, I think.

Taborlin had got the amulet from a tinker—and this is the first introduction of tinkers and the way they reward people. I’m going to be taking notice of tinkers when we see them because I think they’re significant.

A tinker’s debt is always paid,

once for any simple trade,

twice for freely given aid,

thrice for any insult made.

That’s Kote’s version of the proverb—and this is where the text names him Kote. (We know from much later that it means “disaster”—from the phrase Kivrin says: “expect disaster every seven years.”) Well spotted Goewin and Susan!

The men start arguing about the nature of the Chandrian. Cob implies that they’re demons, and Jake says they are the first six people to refuse Tehlu’s aid, and Cob says nobody knows what they are, men or demons or spirits, which about sums it all up, really, though I think Fae is also a possibility.

“Where do they come from? Where do they go, after they’ve done their bloody deeds?”

Wouldn’t we all like to know! Rothfuss is being very clever here, layering in this information.

The men start arguing about demons when Carter comes in with a dead scrael—which they think is a dead demon. They’re surprised by this because demons belong in stories.

Certainly there were demons in the world. But they were like Tehlu’s angels. They were like heroes and kings. They belonged in stories. They belonged out there. ... Your childhood friend didn’t stomp one to death on the road to Baedn-bryt. It was ridiculous.

This is the first time we get the contrast between stories and the real world. And they don’t know it

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