The Witchwood Crown

Returning to Osten Ard

Tad Williams’s The Witchwood Crown, published in 2017, is the first volume of The Last King of Osten Ard, his long-awaited return to the world of Memory, Sorrow and Thorn — the trilogy that, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, helped reshape modern epic fantasy and inspired writers from George R. R. Martin onward. Returning to a beloved world decades after the original story is a perilous undertaking, freighted with readers’ nostalgia and high expectations, and Williams approaches it with characteristic care. The Witchwood Crown is a rich, patient, deeply textured book that reunites the readers of the original trilogy with characters they love, now grown old, while introducing a new generation and rebuilding the vast world of Osten Ard for a new epic. It is also, characteristically for Williams, very slow to build — a quality that is both the book’s method and its chief demand on the reader.

The novel is set roughly thirty years after the events of To Green Angel Tower. Simon — the kitchen boy who became a hero and then a king — and Miriamele now rule the High Ward as aging monarchs, their long peace settling into the ordinary troubles of governance, succession, and growing old. But the peace is fragile. In the frozen north, the immortal, malevolent Norns — defeated but not destroyed in the original trilogy — are stirring again under their ancient queen, and a new threat begins to gather. Around the aging king and queen, a large cast of new characters comes of age: their troubled grandson and heir, various nobles and commoners, figures whose stories will drive the epic forward. Williams braids these threads slowly, laying the groundwork for a multi-volume saga.

Heroes Grown Old

The most affecting and distinctive quality of The Witchwood Crown is its treatment of aging. Williams does something rare and poignant: he takes the young heroes of his original trilogy and shows them genuinely old — Simon and Miriamele weighed down by decades, by the loss of a child, by the compromises and disappointments of long rule, by the gulf that has opened between them and the next generation. This is not the usual fantasy of eternal heroism; it is a clear-eyed, often moving portrait of what happens after the quest, of heroes who won their war and then had to live the rest of their lives. For readers who knew Simon as a boy, seeing him as a tired, decent, aging king carries real emotional weight, and Williams handles it with tenderness and honesty. The theme of the fragility of hard-won peace, of how the victories of one generation must be defended anew by the next, gives the book a melancholy depth.

Rich World-Building, Deliberate Pace

Williams’s great strength has always been the depth and texture of his world-building, and The Witchwood Crown delivers it in abundance. Osten Ard is rendered with enormous care — its history, cultures, religions, geography, and the non-human peoples (the Sithi, the Norns, the trolls) who give it its mythic dimension. For readers who love immersive, fully realized secondary worlds, this richness is the central pleasure, and Williams rebuilds and expands his world with evident love. The novel layers detail upon detail, deepening the reader’s sense of a vast, living place with a long history.

The cost of this richness, as it has always been with Williams, is pace. The Witchwood Crown is very slow to build. As the opening volume of a long series, it is largely concerned with setting pieces in motion — establishing the new characters, re-establishing the world, planting the seeds of conflicts that will not bear fruit for volumes. Readers expecting a propulsive narrative will find instead a patient, deliberate accumulation, a long first movement in a much larger symphony. This is consistent with Williams’s method — the original trilogy was famously slow-building before its devastating payoff — and readers who trust the process will find the groundwork rewarding. But it asks for patience, and newcomers in particular may find the opening a slow climb.

For the Faithful, and the Patient

A practical note: while The Witchwood Crown can technically be read without having read Memory, Sorrow and Thorn, it strongly rewards — arguably requires — familiarity with the original trilogy. Its emotional power depends on knowing Simon and Miriamele as they were young; its world and history assume the earlier books; its callbacks and continuities are written for returning readers. Newcomers would be far better served by starting with The Dragonbone Chair. This is a sequel series, written for an established and patient audience.

For that audience, though, The Witchwood Crown is a welcome and rewarding return. It honors the original trilogy while building something new, treats its aging heroes with poignancy and respect, and rebuilds the rich world of Osten Ard with characteristic depth. It is the slow, careful beginning of a major epic, and readers who loved the original and who appreciate patient, deeply built traditional fantasy will find much to savor here, and much to anticipate.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 4.1/5 — A rich, patient return to Osten Ard a generation after Memory, Sorrow and Thorn. Williams reunites aging heroes with real poignancy and rebuilds his world with characteristic depth — and characteristic slowness. Demanding and dependent on the original trilogy, but rewarding for the faithful.

For the foundational trilogy, see The Dragonbone Chair, Stone of Farewell, and To Green Angel Tower.