I think you and I encountered them around the same time and the same age, because the titles you list sound familiar to me even though I remember bugger-all about the plots. And I think we stopped around the same point, too.
I seem to have the strongest memories of Mossflower, Mattimeo, and Outcast. I remember liking Mariel—it was all high seas and swashbuckling and our heroine renaming herself Storm Gullwhacker, which I still think is a pretty great epithet for a mouse, also I believe at one point there was a fight with a lobster. I retain almost nothing of Martin the Warrior or The Bellmaker.
I can't decide if morbid curiosity is enough to lure me into taking another look at the early ones.
The more I think about Mattimeo, the more it resembles an H. Rider Haggard novel with a lot of mice in. In addition to the abovementioned subterranean kingdom, there's a pine forest inhabited by some unknown species of small animal that paint themselves for camouflage with green and black vegetable dyes and prey on travelers, whom they catch with nooses and pierce with wooden lances and hang their bones from the branches as trophies. (I realize now that this scared me in the same way as the line from the ballad "Anathea": there among the green pines standing / you will find your brother hanging.) They don't speak any known language and they're afraid of fire. Seriously, what was this book?
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I seem to have the strongest memories of Mossflower, Mattimeo, and Outcast. I remember liking Mariel—it was all high seas and swashbuckling and our heroine renaming herself Storm Gullwhacker, which I still think is a pretty great epithet for a mouse, also I believe at one point there was a fight with a lobster. I retain almost nothing of Martin the Warrior or The Bellmaker.
I can't decide if morbid curiosity is enough to lure me into taking another look at the early ones.
The more I think about Mattimeo, the more it resembles an H. Rider Haggard novel with a lot of mice in. In addition to the abovementioned subterranean kingdom, there's a pine forest inhabited by some unknown species of small animal that paint themselves for camouflage with green and black vegetable dyes and prey on travelers, whom they catch with nooses and pierce with wooden lances and hang their bones from the branches as trophies. (I realize now that this scared me in the same way as the line from the ballad "Anathea": there among the green pines standing / you will find your brother hanging.) They don't speak any known language and they're afraid of fire. Seriously, what was this book?