Could Brandon Sanderson Have Saved the Nephites?

Nicholas J. Frederick

It is not uncommon when reading works of fiction by authors who have roots within the Latter-day Saint tradition to perform something akin to a source-critical critique of their works, interrogating their texts in order to reveal latent connections with the Latter-day Saint faith. The assumption behind this inquiry is, of course, the belief that the tradition holds such a fervent grip upon its author’s imagination that anything they produce will contain traces of their religious heritage. The work of Orson Scott Card is perhaps the most well-known instance of an LDS fiction author whose faith undergirds much of what he writes.¹ His Alvin Maker series is clearly based upon the life of Joseph Smith. One of the volumes in that series, Red Prophet, makes allusions to Lehi’s dream of the tree of life and the anti-Nephi-Lehis. And Card’s Homecoming series appropriates much of the Book of Mormon’s narrative for its own. Likewise, similar questions have been asked of best-selling young adult author Stephenie Meyer, who in 2005 published Twilight, a book whose star-crossed lovers Bella and Edward seemed to owe more of its inspiration to the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer than it did to Ammon the Lamanite Slayer. Yet Meyer’s Mormon background, however, did not go unnoticed, especially as the book became a series of books which became a series of movies.²

The last few years have seen the rise to stardom of another writer of fantasy with Latter-day Saint roots, namely Brandon Sanderson. Born in Nebraska and educated at Brigham Young University, Sanderson, like Meyer, also published his first book, Elantris, in 2005. Success did not come as quickly for Sanderson as it did for Meyer, although it would come. Sanderson published his first series of books, the Mistborn trilogy, between 2006–2009, and it was here that Sanderson received his first big break. Harriet McDougal, the widow of fantasy author Robert Jordan, read Mistborn and selected Sanderson to finish Jordan’s popular The Wheel of Time series, which he did in three lengthy volumes. In 2009, Sanderson published his most important book to this point, The Way of Kings, the first in a projected ten-volume series called The Stormlight Archive.³ The Way of Kings debuted at #7 on the New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller list, and the rest, as they say, is history. At present, Sanderson easily stands next to Joe Abercrombie, Robin Hobb, N. K. Jemison, and George R. R. Martin as a premier writer of fantasy over the recent decades.

As with his Latter-day Saint fantasy peers, Sanderson has been asked just how much his Latter-day Saint background has seeped, intentionally or not, into his fiction. Sanderson is famous for how much he interacts with his fans, and at his “Q and A’s” it is not uncommon to hear questions such as this one from a booksigning at BYU in 2018: “I was wondering, how often are gospel principles life imitating art or intentionally put into place?” Sanderson’s response on this particular occasion was to say “It’s rare that it’s intentional,” but that “[o]nce in a while it is.”⁴ I have to admit that I wondered if I had struck upon a couple of those intentional parallels when I first read the Mistborn trilogy, with its emphasis that only texts written on metal could be trusted to not have been tampered with, or with its central duel between the opposing forces of preservation and ruin. Had Sanderson intentionally incorporated 1 Nephi 13 and 2 Nephi 2 into his world-building? When I somewhat excitedly brought up these possible parallels with Sanderson at the 2021 Dragonsteel convention, he shook his head and said that any such connections were “unintentional.” But I had one more possibility in mind. I asked him as a follow-up question: “What about the parallels between King Benjamin and The Way of Kings?” “That one,” he enthusiastically responded, “was intentional.”

This answer gave me a fair amount of satisfaction and became the genesis of this paper. The presence of Latter-day Saint ideas in Card’s novels has received a fair amount of attention. Meyer’s novels have received less scholarly critique but more popular attention. (Simply google “Twilight” and “Mormonism” and you’ll find plenty of afternoon reading.) But to my knowledge, Sanderson’s books, and their connections with the Book of Mormon remain unstudied from this perspective. This paper will proceed on two fronts. First I will explore the ways in which I see King Benjamin being integrated into the narrative of The Way of Kings. Second, I will explore how this awareness may impact how we read the Book of Mormon.

The Way of Kings centers around the three primary characters—Kaladin, an imprisoned soldier; Shallan, a bright young woman looking for guidance; and Dalinar, a fearsome warrior and brother of the current king of Alethkar. Dalinar’s brother, just prior to his death, had begun to read a book called The Way of Kings. Written 5,000 years prior to the events of the book, it is the oldest extant text on the planet of Roshar. The Way of Kings was ostensibly the narrative of an ancient king named Nohadon who was striving to understand how a king can act in an honorable and fair manner: What are his duties? How can he gain the respect and love of his subjects? In order to ponder these questions, Nohadon set out on a long journey, which is described in The Way of Kings. Included in this travel account are parables of wisdom Nohadon learns as he encounters different situations along the way. Dalinar, upon the death of his brother, begins to read the book as well and becomes so influenced by Nohadon’s words that he begins to implement changes to those under his command.

Although the name Nohadon more closely resembles that of King Benjamin’s rough contemporary, the wicked king Noah, it appears that Sanderson originally chose a name that more closely matched Benjamin. In an earlier draft of The Way of Kings, called The Way of Kings Prime, the name “Nohadon” never appears; rather, the author of the in-text The Way of Kings is only called “Bajerden.” In Sanderson’s finished text, Dalinar remarks that Nohadon “is his holy name. Others call him Bajerden, though we’re not certain whether that was actually his real name or not.”⁵ Nohadon (or Bajerden) came to power at a time when the kingdom in his land had experienced a great desolation, killing nine out of ten of the people. Subsequent events led him to consider first abdicating and then uniting together people through force, a move that fails. Nohadon succeeds when he opts for a method of unity through peace. Likewise, Benjamin’s lasting achievement was furthering/solidifying the unification (initiated by his father Mosiah I) of the Nephites and Mulekites, two peoples with a common Israelite heritage but who had taken different paths. Benjamin’s solution is also (presumably) one of peace, unifying the Nephites and Mulekites under a common name and identity, children of Christ. This is not to say that Benjamin didn’t resort at one time to more aggressive solutions. The last few lines of the Words of Mormon hint at a much deeper contention than the opening chapters of the book of Mosiah relay, and while the book of Mosiah implies a harmonious unity between Mulekite and Nephites, there are clear indications in the text of Mosiah, Alma, and Helaman that the Mulekite-Nephite tension never adequately finds resolution.

As we look at the lines from the in-text The Way of Kings cited in the novel, we can see a deeper engagement with the figure of king Benjamin. Consider this parable, the one that gives Sanderson’s book its primary theme of “journey before destination:”

This abolishment of demarcation between beggar and king brings to mind, of course, one of king Benjamin’s most famous statements as he rhetorically asks of his audience “Are we not all beggars?” (Mos. 4:19). By placing ourselves in the shoes of those who have little in terms of food or money, do we not come to realize what it is to be a disciple, to have as little control over our salvation as a beggar does to her next meal? “Do we not,” Benjamin asks, “all depend upon the same being?” (Mos. 4:19). Does the one who recognizes his own inability to provide for himself hold an advantage over the one who still believes they can find their way alone, that they possess what they need?

In a second parable, Nohadon reveals how he came to understand his role and responsibility as monarch:

To be a king, Nohadon realizes, is to be entrusted with significant obligation and accountability. When women and men give you their loyalty, they place their life, their being, in your hands. Benjamin hints at a similar understanding as he reminds his people that

Benjamin’s conscience is clear, presumably, because he has proved worthy of the loyalty the Nephites and Mulekites have placed in him. He sought to make their lives easier, rather than his own. Nohadon has learned that a monarch who lacks sympathy and compassion is a bonfire who will burn the city, and all who live within, to the ground. The same is true for those who lack the steady hand of a responsible ruler.

One of the things that fascinates me about the connection between Nohadon and Benjamin is that it reveals to me just how much we don’t know about the latter. For example, when and how did Benjamin come to understand the lessons that inform his message from the tower? How did he come to see that kings are beggars, and that loyalty demands reciprocity? How did he come to know that reigning as a fellow-servant rather than as a selfish monarch was the way to build up a people? The Book of Mormon, unfortunately, preserves almost nothing of Benjamin’s youth and early years as king. His magnificent speech spoken from atop a tower in Mosiah 2–5 reveals to us his destination but leaves us to guess at the journey. Don Bradley’s admirable work has done some work to fill in this gap, but too much remains unknown.⁸

In a way, knowingly or unknowingly, Sanderson has also served to fill that lacuna of information, revealing to us that a king who reigns as Benjamin does is not born that man, rather he becomes that man. In one of the more striking scenes in Sanderson’s book, Dalinar has a vision of Nohadon not as the accomplished king, not as the famed author of The Way of Kings, but as an uncertain young ruler, one who has just come to realize that “our own natures destroy us” and is considering abdicating his throne on the heels of a devastating loss. “He was so young,” Dalinar observes, with “such insecurity, such torment, in him.” The young Nohadon scoffs at Dalinar’s suggestion that he should write a book and instead claims to be leaning toward enforcing unity among the local rulers with his sword. Dalinar is obviously alarmed at Nohadon’s aggressive choice but finds assurance in the man he knows Nohadon would become: “This man would become a great philosopher; he would teach peace and reverence for others, and would not force men to do as he wished. He would guide them to acting with honor.”⁹ The brief passages preserved in the Words of Mormon hint at a similar trajectory for Benjamin, a man who in his youth did “raise the sword of Laban” against the Lamanites and did bring peace to Zarahemla through “much sharpness” (Words of Mormon 1:14, 17).

While I find Sanderson’s attempt to offer a hypothetical glimpse into the origins of the Book of Mormon’s greatest king noteworthy, I’m also intrigued by what Sanderson may be saying about the course of the Nephites themselves. The title of this paper, as I’m sure many will recognize, is an allusion to Carol Lynn Pearson’s seminal 1996 Sunstone essay where she speculated as to whether or not the Nephites could have been preserved if they would have adopted the more feminist (or at least less-misogynistic) leanings of their Lamanite enemies.¹⁰ If the Nephite husbands had loved their wives, if the Nephite parents had loved their children, as the Lamanites did theirs, would we be talking about a Nephite remnant today? Pearson’s hypothetical exercise was a fascinating one, one that I found myself re-engaging as I read The Way of Kings. The answer to the question of “Could Brandon Sanderson have saved the Nephites” is, on one level, obviously “Yes!” Anyone who can raise over 40 million dollars in a Kickstarter campaign for four books that didn’t even have titles yet could certainly find a way to keep a nation of Jewish refugees from destroying themselves. But on a more serious note, I would suggest that Sanderson’s book, like Pearson’s article, is playing its own little game of “what if.” All historians play this game to some extent, identifying the key turning points in the drama of history and then asking what would life be like today if one decision had been made differently.

For the Book of Mormon, that key “what if” moment occurs during the reign of Mosiah II, a king who like the young Nohadon is considering abdicating his throne and who like Dalinar begins to read a book treating kingship.¹¹ The story is well-known. Decades after Zeniff leads a small exodus from Zarahemla, his grandson Limhi sends out a group of scouts to locate Zarahemla. Unfortunately, Limhi’s scouts miss Zarahemla and end up in a “wilderness” where they discover the remains of a great nation, the Jaredites, who had been destroyed. Among the Jaredite ruins, the scouts find a Jaredite record of “twenty-four gold plates,” which they return to Limhi. To his great disappointment, he is unable to read the language on the plates but is assured by Ammon that the king of Zarahemla, Mosiah II, a seer, will be able to.¹² Mosiah II translates the plates successfully and reveals to the people the fate of the Jaredites, which “did cause the people of Mosiah to mourn exceedingly” (Mos. 28:18).

This reading of the Jaredite record coincides with a sensitive political issue. Mosiah II is ready to yield his throne, but not one of his four sons will accept it. Aaron, his oldest son and rightful heir, along with the other three sons, all desire to undertake a mission to the Lamanites in hopes of converting them to Christ. After much thought and prayer, Mosiah II accepts their request and is now faced with the question of whom to name as his successor. However, instead of choosing someone to be king he instead decides to dismantle the kingship and institute a system of higher and lower judges. Mosiah II’s explicit reason is this:

Daniel L. Belnap has argued that these two events—the translation of the Jaredite plates and the dismantling of the kingship—should be viewed as related. As the book of Ether will reveal, the Jaredite nation was crippled by a number of unrighteous kings, such as Riplakish who was wicked enough that the people overthrew him. As Belnap observes, “Such past violence over kingship may have provided grounding for Mosiah’s fears, namely that conflict could erupt if his sons returned and sought the throne they believed was rightfully theirs.”¹³ If this is the case, then Mosiah II’s decision to dismantle the kingship was due in large part to the poor examples of kings he found in the Jaredite record.¹⁴ As Mosiah II goes on to say, “For behold I say unto you, the sins of many people have been caused by the iniquities of their kings; therefore their iniquities are answered upon the heads of their kings,” (Mos. 29:31). Furthermore, Mosiah II seems to hint at a fundamental unfairness that exists in a land ruled by a righteous king:

These two factors—the role of wicked kings in the destruction of the Jaredites and the burden placed upon righteous kings—leads Mosiah II to revamp the government in a way that will have drastic consequences for the Nephites.

Unfortunately, one of the consequences (at least for the Nephites) of Mosiah II’s decision was that it allowed the Mulekite tension, which had likely been bubbling underneath the surface for some time, to erupt in a series of revolts. The Mulekites appear to have been content being part of the Nephite political order as long as a king was in place, even if that king wasn’t Mulekite. But once the position of king was removed, they resort again and again to violence as a way of re-institutionalizing it. Within only a few years, the execution of Nehor provided a pretense for Amlici to start a civil war against Alma in an attempt to reinstitute the monarchy (presumably with the goal of placing a Mulekite in charge). A few years later, Amalickiah gained the backing of many of the lower judges in his attempt to recruit the Lamanites and overthrow the current Nephite political order (Alma 46:4). Such a result was likely the aim of the king-men who drove Pahoran out of Zarahemla for a brief time as well as the aim of the Mulekite Coriantumr whose forces conquered Zarahemla and murdered the chief judge Pacumeni. Finally, and most devastatingly, the book of Helaman narrated the rise of the Gadianton robbers who, largely through corrupting the order of judges, brought to pass what Mormon called “the overthrow, yea, almost the entire destruction of the people of Nephi” (Hel. 2:13).

This brings us to our moment of “what if.” What if Limhi’s scouts had found a copy of The Way of Kings rather than the Jaredite record? Would its parables have inspired Mosiah II to make different choices, faced with the examples of a Nohadon rather than a Riplakish? I want to explore this through two additional parables. In the first parable, the question of the relationship between king and subjects is entertained:

As with Mosiah II, the conclusion Nohadon reaches is that the weight of righteous rule is a heavy one. The king, especially a virtuous and honorable one, bears the weight of responsibility, a burden that Nohadon suggests can be eased if others are willing to assume the load. Nohadon sees a certain value in the “poor shirtless wretch” and the king trading places and coming to a deeper understanding and sympathy for the plight of the other. But notice that Nohadon doesn’t argue that a king should abdicate or vacate his throne in favor of a different form of government. A well-run government is one maintained by a righteous monarch where the subjects are willing to bear part of the weight. Mosiah II’s decision to eliminate the monarch in favor of a system of judges does spread the weight, but it eliminates the figure who balances the scales.

Now for the second:

This second parable concerns the removal of one stone from the bottom of a pile of rocks, a pile that appeared “precarious” but was actually “quite solid.” Exerting pressure from front and back did little to disturb this pile. But once a simple stone was removed from the bottom of the pile, the entire pile collapsed. For the entirety of the book of Mosiah, the pile of stones has been the Nephite nation. On the surface level, the Nephites have seemed like a united group, the division between Mulekite and Nephite a thing of the past. But upon closer reading, the unity promoted by Mormon never seems to have actually been obtained. The decision to leave Zarahemla and establish a presence in the land of Lehi may well have been the result of Mulekite discontent. Ammon is, after all, a descendant of the ancient Mulekite king Zarahemla. Upon the arrival of the parties of Limhi and Alma, Mosiah II calls a meeting in which the people “gathered together in two bodies”—presumably Nephite and Mulekite (Mos. 25:4). And as we have seen, beginning in the book of Alma the Mulekite-Nephite tension boils over resulting in political and religious strife. While the Nephites get the majority of the attention in the book of Mosiah, they are a nation built upon the Mulekites—it is a Mulekite city in which they live, a city in which they are outnumbered by the Mulekites (Mos. 25:2). The Mulekite people are, in a way, the stone at the bottom of the pile that on the surface seems rather insignificant but, once removed, can cause the system to collapse. Mosiah II can be critiqued, fairly I believe, for not fully understanding the scope of the Mulekite dissatisfaction with Nephite government and not foreseeing that his dismantling of the kingship and the instillation of a system of judges, while done with good intentions, nonetheless would play a critical role in the dissolution of the Nephite order. Was this the final straw that caused them to rise up and revolt? Could Mosiah II have accomplished his aims in revising the government in a way that kept the Mulekites appeased? Was appeasement even a possibility?

So to return to the original question posed by this paper: Could Brandon Sanderson have saved the Nephites? If the Nephites had found The Way of Kings, with its positive, almost idealistic approach to monarchy, rather than the Jaredite record, with its largely negative portrayal of monarchy, would the Nephites have endured a different fate? The answer, as it is with most of these “what if” scenarios, is possibly. Not every king is going to be a Benjamin or a Nohadon, placing the needs of his or her people above their own. For every Limhi, there is often a Noah. Who’s to say that if Aaron had accepted the kingship that his son wouldn’t have been another Riplakish and destroyed the Nephites through selfish means? Narratively, of course, the key to the Nephite success during the Nephite wars in the latter-third of Alma is the role played by the sons of the Lamanites converted by the sons of Mosiah. If that mission is aborted, perhaps the Nephites nation is destroyed before we even reach the book of Helaman. And speaking of the book of Helaman, that book suggests the information on secret combinations became publicized in spite of Alma the Younger’s attempts to keep them secret, which means that, regardless of the type of government the Nephites chose, secret combinations may have inevitably led to their downfall anyway.

Sanderson’s book ends, rather shockingly, with Dalinar rejecting the path laid out in The Way of Kings and choosing to be true to his own, more bellicose nature:

Much of what I told you, I learned from The Way of Kings. But I didn’t understand something. Nohadon wrote the book at the end of his life, after creating order—after forcing the kingdoms to unite, after rebuilding lands that had fallen in the Desolation. The book was written to embody an idea. It was given to people who already had momentum in doing what is right. That was my mistake. Before any of this can work, our people need to have a minimum level of honor and dignity.¹⁷

And perhaps this is one of Sanderson’s messages (at least thus far in the series), that the king doesn’t make the man, the man makes the king. Nohadon’s words force Dalinar to consider who he is and who he can most effectively become. Perhaps Benjamin played a similar role in the life of Mosiah II and is as responsible for his political decisions as Nohadon is for Dalinar’s. And that’s why I appreciate Sanderson’s take on King Benjamin. By showing us a young Benjamin in the form of the youthful, uncertain Nohadon, Sanderson reminds us that the Benjamin we meet in the book of Mosiah is a man who has reached the end of his journey and found his destination, but he was not always that man. As Nohadon writes at the end of The Way of Kings:

Here Sanderson gives me a greater appreciation for king Benjamin, granting me insight into a man who stands as the ideal of what the Nephites could have become. Could Brandon Sanderson have saved the Nephites? Perhaps. The primary ethos of Sanderson’s Stormlight series has consistently been that good things happen to good people. His characters—Kaladin, Shallan, Dalinar—strive for that ideal and find success. The Nephites had this same guiding principle as early as 1 Nephi 2 but ultimately disregarded it and got their just deserts. Maintaining a Nephite monarchy may have prolonged their destruction, or it may have brought it about even sooner. The Nephite journey always felt like a tenuous one, and perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised when they finally reach their destination.

And reach it they do, for while Nohadon may be the younger incarnation of King Benjamin, the Book of Mormon is not The Way of Kings. The Nephites do not find a record that might have solidified in their minds a positive view of kingship; rather, they find the Jaredite record with its indictment of monarchy and its trappings. For a book that presents itself as a morality tale, a text that earnestly pleads with latter-day Christians to not repeat the mistake of their predecessors, a better analogue would be Cormac McCarthy’s stark post-apocalyptic tale The Road, wherein a father and son wander almost helplessly through a world crumbling and void of hope. In a touching scene near the end of McCarthy’s book, the unnamed father, near death, urges his unnamed son to continue conversing with him through prayer, but reminds him that the journey ahead will be his to navigate alone. Did Mormon and Moroni engage in a similar conversation as they looked over a field littered with dead comrades? I like to think so. Adam Miller has argued that one of the primary purposes of the book of Mormon itself is that it forces its readers to ask themselves what discipleship looks like as the world around them comes to an end.¹⁹ The tragedy of the Book of Mormon is that the moment the world may have come to an end for the Nephites was the day a group of Nephites searching for Zarahemla instead found a book. This is Aristotle’s hamartia in its purest sense—not a fatal flaw, but a simple mistake, following one river instead of another, turning left instead of right, that leads to a devastating reversal of fortune. To quote another pop culture icon, the Jaredite record is “why” the Nephites “can’t have nice things.” And perhaps this is an additional insight gained through reading the Book of Mormon through a Sandersonian lens, that in the rush to reach our destination we must remember that every step along the journey has meaning, every day the potential to change our course in ways we won’t recognize until the destination has been reached. It is, indeed, the journey that shapes us.

Nicholas J. Frederick is an associate professor of Ancient Scripture at Brigham Young University where he teaches courses on the New Testament and the Book of Mormon. His research centers around the intertextuality of the Bible and Mormon scripture. Much of his childhood was spent living in the fantasy worlds of Lloyd Alexander, Susan Cooper, and C.S. Lewis, a journey that continues today in the Cosmere of Brandon Sanderson. He lives in Spanish Fork with his wife Julie and four children—Miranda, Samuel, Kassandra and MJ.

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Book of Mormon Studies Association Symposium in 2022; and Life, the Universe, and Everything in 2023.

1. This theme is richly explored by Christopher C. Smith, “Sacred Sci-Fi: Orson Scott Card as Mormon Mythmaker,” Sunstone, March 2011, 52-59.
2. See, for example, Lev Grossman, “The Next J. K. Rowling?” Time, May 5, 2008, 49-51; John Granger, “Mormon Vampires in the Garden of Eden, Touchstone, Nov/Dec. 2009; and Maxine Hanks, “Do Mormon Moms Dream of Monstrous Gods?”, Sunstone, Dec. 2009, 26-30.
3. Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings (New York: Tor, 2009).
4. See https://wob.coppermind.net/events/6-bands-of-mourning-release-party/#e278
5. Sanderson, The Way of Kings, 817.
6. Sanderson, The Way of Kings, 816-817.
7. Sanderson, The Way of Kings, 368-369.
8. Don Bradley, The Lost 116 Pages: Reconstructing the Book of Mormon’s Missing Stories (Salt Lake City, UT: Greg Kofford Books, 2019), 279-284.
9. Sanderson, The Way of Kings, 851-853.
10. Carol Lynn Pearson, “Could Feminism Have Saved the Nephites,” Sunstone, March 1996, 32-40.
11. For more on the potential fallout from Mosiah II’s decisions, see Jennifer Ball, “Mulekites and Monarchy: An Explanation of Political Difficulties Under Nephite Judges,” unpublished paper in my possession.
12. This story is told in Mosiah 8:5-11 and Mosiah 21:25-27. There may be something of a nod to this particular story in The Way of Kings as well. In Sanderson’s book, several important texts are written in Dawnchant, a language that remains indecipherable until Dalinar reveals the key to its translation during one of his visions. Notably the role of translator shifts from the Nephite King Mosiah II to the Alethkarian Queen Navani, Dalinar’s sister-in-law and future wife.
13. Daniel L. Belnap, “They are of Ancient Date,” in Illuminating the Jaredite Record, ed. Daniel L. Belnap (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, 2020), 7.
14. As Brant Gardner notes, “The move to judges should be seen as a response to the succession crisis, not to an ideological denouncing of the principle. What he explicates is the danger inherent in a monarchy if you have the wrong kind of king,” (Brant Gardner, Traditions of the Fathers: The Book of Mormon as History [Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2015], 243).
15. Sanderson, The Way of Kings, 241.
16. Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance (New York: Tor, 2014).
17. Sanderson, The Way of Kings, 961. Subsequent installments in The Stormlight Archives see Dalinar retreating from this position and finding a more nuanced approach.
18. Sanderson, The Way of Kings, 818.
19. See Adam S. Miller, Mormon: A Brief Theological Introduction (Provo, UT: Maxwell Institute, 2020), 28-33.