Character from The Kingkiller Chronicle by Patrick Rothfuss
The youngest Chancellor in University history, driven mad by Naming and returned from madness with something stranger than sanity — a master who teaches by breaking the world open.
Elodin does not teach so much as dismantle. He throws students off the roof of the Crockery to see if they can find the name of the wind on the way down. He assigns impossible tasks, speaks in riddles that are not riddles, and appears genuinely delighted when his students are terrified. This is not cruelty — it is the methodology of a man who understands that Naming cannot be learned through study, only through the annihilation of the rational mind's stranglehold on perception. He was once locked in Haven, the University's asylum, after his mastery of Naming cracked something fundamental in his understanding of reality. He escaped by calling the name of stone and walking through a wall. His relationship with sanity remains a matter of scholarly debate. He speaks in non-sequiturs that turn out, hours later, to be the most important thing anyone said all day. He sees something in Kvothe — the same fire that burned him — and his teaching oscillates between encouragement and warning.
Young for a master, with an unruly shock of dark hair and eyes that carry a peculiar, feverish intensity. Lean and restless, he moves with the distracted energy of a man listening to a conversation no one else can hear. His robes are perpetually rumpled, his feet sometimes bare. He looks less like a professor than like someone who wandered into the University and forgot to leave.
Also known as: Elodin, Master Elodin