Magicians of Xanth - Humfrey

Humfrey

The seventeenth king of Xanth

Served as king pro-tem during Trent's reign.

The Magician of Information, Good Magician Humfrey is a withered, old, gnome of a man with five and a half wives. His talent is purportedly to know the answer to every question. In actuality, his talent is to know where to find the answer to every question. As such, he uses various forms of divination to discover the actual answers.

Humfrey's castle (the original Castle Zombie) is enchanted so he can alter it at a moment's notice, as well as the three challenges that any visitors must solve in order to enter the castle and ask Humfrey their questions. The challenges are always arranged so his visitors can prove their worthiness of taking up his valuable time to ask a question.

Good Magician Humfrey is instrumental in every Xanth book, but serves as a main character in The Source of Magic. During the NextWave Invasion of Night Mare, he serves as the fourth King of the chain. In Dragon on a Pedastal, he is accidentally exposed to water from the Fountain of Youth, which results in his being turned into a baby. He resumes his preferred age of about a hundred years old in Golem in the Gears, and goes missing (along with his current wife and their son) in the following book, Vale of the Vole. He is searched for by Dolph in Heaven Cent, and then by Ivy in Man from Mundania, in which his whereabouts are discovered by Ivy and Grey Murphy. At his direction, Grey moves into his castle and serves as Magician of Information in his place.

He finally returns to Xanth proper in Question Quest when Lacuna travels to Hell and learns his history, thus enabling him to leave Hell for good and arrange for all five and a half of his wives to leave on a temporary basis. The novel also reveals that Humfrey knows about the existence of the characters in Anthony's other books, e.g., Stile being the Blue Adept or Zane being Thanatos in On a Pale Horse. Since his return from Hell, Humfrey has resumed his duties as Magician of Information.

In Heaven Cent, it is implied that Humfrey's actual magical talent may be no more than that of locating other magic that may be of use to him. Though probably not magical talents, he does have extreme curiosity and a (usually) very good memory, which through the course of his life led him to become a master of information, as he recounted in Question Quest. Further, he recounted that he had believed that his native magical talents were not magician-class, and that he attended Demon University and gained a degree in magic, so that he could deserve the Magician appellation by which he had already become known.

For more on Humfrey, see Family of Humfrey of Xanth.