About this site
These annotation pages are maintained and edited by Eli Bishop, who wrote about three quarters of the text. Other contributors are listed on the contributors page and are identified in the text by their initials.
This site, of course, does not contain the full text of Riddley Walker itself—which is copyrighted by Russell Hoban—but only excerpts as needed for context and commentary.
The index section was inspired by Some Other World, an extremely thorough and entertaining index compiled by Tom Murphy's literature class for the Tim O'Brien novel The Things They Carried.
If you also like reading obsessive annotations of other books (including Hoban's Turtle Diary), you may like Nitbar.
The software is MediaWiki with various customizations.
The entire contents of this site are copyrighted by the respective authors or, where not otherwise indicated, by Eli Bishop.
Changes worth mentioning
This is a summary that leaves out many copyedits and link updates; it's mainly just for people who might wonder if they've missed any content since last time. For a full list of every edit that was made in the last 90 days, you can view the recent changes report.
Feb. 2026: Updated contributors to reflect the passing of SLK among other things; note on ☰ trigram from GW in 43:3; GW's book in bibliography (and reorganized list of books); Huisman essay and AE blog post in links; notes on Huisman's errors in 28:12 and 125:15 (thanks to Sanem Erdem for bringing up the question of Shorsday); general fixing of stale links; added this change list to About page
Sept. 2025: Erlkönig note by ZG in 4:18; updated Harts Ease with better explanation of the Beowulf theory and a link to an argument against it
Apr. 2024: R.D. Mullen essay in links
July 2022: More about red thread in 67:31
Dec. 2021: Updated links to reflect the passing of Alida Allison
Nov. 2021: More editions and translations in editions; Jess Zimmerman note/link in Widders Bel
Aug. 2017: Fidget Wonkham-Strong in 47:13
July 2014: What Does It Do and How Does It Work? in 8:19
Nov. 2013: Penguin 2010 edition, audiobook, e-book, stage adptations, and Enig Marcheur in editions; Cloud Atlas in bibliography
2013: Reimplemented the site using MediaWiki; edit history is harder to follow before this
Dec. 2011: Updated home page to reflect the passing of Russell Hoban
2010: Moved the whole thing into errorbar.net from my old website "Graphesthesia"
2005-2007: About half a dozen updates per year, but slowing down
2004: Many new notes by contributors from the Kraken mailing list, especially BJB who provided all the map images and other material from her curriculum
2002: Added chapter annotations and index; got some feedback from RH
Dec. 2001: First draft of the site, with semi-random glossary and subject entries; there's a brief explanation of how it came about in this 2025 panel discussion