osprey_archer | Entries tagged with arthuriana

In the days of yore, I read Cherith Baldry’s Exiled from Camelot, a novel about Sir, Kay, Cherith Baldry’s woobie blorbo hyper-competent seneschal whose organizational skills are tragically unappreciated by EVERYONE but most of all Arthur because the meatheads at Camelot only care about prowess at arms.

Recently,

troisoiseaux discovered that Cherith Baldry has also released a set of short stories about Kay: The Last Knight of Camelot. “PLEASE GIVE IT TO ME” I wailed, and

troisoiseaux kindly sent it onwards, with a few annotations beside particularly eyebrow-raising passages.

I have added more annotations, including the command “Drink!” every time Baldry describes Kay’s “hawk face.” You would get very sloshed if you read the whole book in one go.

Reading Exiled from Camelot was like eating an incredibly rich slice of chocolate cake, with layers of cake and ganache and chocolate frosting and chocolate shavings on top. Does it have any nutritional value? No. Do you reach a point where you’re starting to get a stomachache and regret all your choices? Yes. Is it nonetheless an amazing experience that you do not regret in the least? Also yes.

I was therefore hoping that Cherith Baldry’s short story collection The Last Knight of Camelot: The Chronicles of Sir Kay would similarly be a box of rich and decadent bonbons, and I’m not saying it’s not a box of bonbons, but they’re all more or less the same bonbon, except for the few stories that are trying to be normal short stories rather than another iteration of “Kay’s hawk’s face quivered as he suppressed tears after the other knights are once again Mean to him.”

(I think Baldry is aiming for “iron woobie,” but unfortunately catapulted past it to “marshmallow on the verge of a nervous breakdown.”)

In particular, Arthur is often Mean to Kay, which is a crushing tragedy because Kay loves Arthur so so so so so much. Romantically, you ask? Well, it’s not quite clear. On the one hand they were raised as brothers - not even foster brothers! they thought they were blood brothers! - which gives the whole thing an incestuous flavor; but then Arthuriana has never shied away from a spot of incest, and how ELSE am I supposed to read it when Kay says things like ”Lord of my heart, my mind, my life. All that I'll ever be. All I'll ever want.”

He had never revealed so much before. Arthur leant towards him; there was love in his face, and wonder and compassion too, and Kay knew, his knowledge piercing like an arrow into his inmost spirit, that his love, this single-minded devotion that could fill his life and be poured out and yet never exhausted, was not returned. Arthur loved him, but not like that.

Although this could also be the kind of “not loving him like that” where you would die for your liege lord but your liege lord is not going to die for you, because that’s just how feudalism works. Your liege lord is supposed to be the sun at the center of your world, and you are but a lowly planet to him. Get with the program, Kay.

Anyway, the realization that Arthur Does Not Love Kay the Way Kay Loves Him makes Kay into the cross, short-tempered knight of legend, unpopular at court because of his sharp tongue, and therefore constantly accused of cowardice and falling short of the knightly code of honor by the other knights. Nonetheless, he has a heart of gold and never did anything wrong in his life.

The stories were mostly written for different magazines and anthologies over the years, and spread out like that they probably worked fine, but taken en masse there is simply a certain saminess about them. Not quite as enjoyable as Exiled from Camelot but worth reading if you simply want to wallow in the woobiness for a while.

And now I am sending the book on to

skygiants! Please leave word if you would also like a crack at it, as we are passing this all over DW before it lands back with

troisoiseaux, who wishes to revel in the annotations.

When I began Joan Aiken’s Wolves of Willoughby Chase books, I did not realize that the Aikenverse (as

littlerhymes and I have taken to calling it) would expand to include BONKERS ARTHURIANA, but honestly I should not have been surprised. Aiken is an “everything and the kitchen sink” kind of writer, and Arthuriana is an integral part of every Anglophone writers’ kitchen sink.

So. At the beginning of this book, Dido is on a ship home to London, where she is mostly under the direction of the steward Mr. Holystone. Mr. Holystone spent ten years studying at the University of Salamanca and therefore speaks 500 languages (a slight exaggeration) and then went to butler school and is now tasked with giving Dido the rudiments of an education.

But in the middle of the Atlantic, the ship suddenly changes course! A carrier pigeon has arrived with the message that they have been summoned by the queen of New Cumbria.

What is New Cumbria, you ask? WELL. Back in the fifth century, when the Saxons overran Britain, a group of Romano-Celts sailed away to the west. They landed in South America and founded the kingdoms of New Cumbria, Lyonnesse, and Hy Brasil.

Because of this ancestral link to Great Britain, the queen of New Cumbria can summon a British naval captain to help her with her latest problem, which is… okay this is technically a spoiler, but it’s also the title of the book… someone has stolen her lake!

( More spoilers )

This summary leaves so much out. I didn’t even mention the captain obsessed with flying machines, or the part where a princess rides a big cat, or the bit where Dido almost gets sacrificed, or… Oh, well, just so much else. WHAT a book. Every single chapter is a roller coaster ride.

The young reader works in mysterious ways. Even though I loved Susan Cooper’s The Boggart and King of Shadows, and even though we had a box set of The Dark Is Rising for my entire childhood—and even though I first started my Newbery project when I was eleven, and the fourth book won a Newbery Award!—I didn’t read The Dark Is Rising quintet until after college.

Now

littlerhymes and I are rereading it together, starting of course with Over Sea, Under Stone. My recollection is that this book has a very different feel from the rest of the series—not that the rest of the series is all of a piece, either; I’ve always found that interesting about it, that the books should feel so different from each other, it really feels like it just grew.

This one has that very distinctive mid-twentieth century British children’s adventure story feel, like Arthur Ransome, only with some magic coming at the end. Simon, Jane, and Barney are on holiday in Cornwall, staying in a big old house that their parents have rented. They decide to play explorers, and in the process of exploring they stumble upon a strange old map, covered with writing in a language they don’t recognize…

Fortunately their Great Uncle Merry is an Indiana Jones type, a professor who is always dashing about the globe finding treasure, and translating the strange script on the map is a mere bagatelle for him. And it turns out that the map leads to the Holy Grail, which Great Uncle Merry has been looking for himself. But so have his enemies (enemies of the Grail itself), who have been following Great Uncle Merry in hopes that he’ll lead them to it, and now that the children have found the map, Great Uncle Merry takes it upon himself to try to lead these enemies astray so the children will have a free hand to search…

It’s often a difficulty in children’s adventure stories to get the adults out of the way so the children can take a central part in the action, and this particular excuse in Over Sea, Under Stone has always seemed a bit thin to me. Of course it ends up with the children in great danger.

In general I feel this book, indeed the whole series, is best read not for the plot (which often doesn’t make a lot of sense) but for the atmosphere: the fascinating old house with its nautical theme, the Cornish coast in the moonlight, the children clambering around the headland on the seaweed-clogged rocks at the lowest tide of the year; the search through the cave for the Grail, with only a box of damp matches and a soggy candle to light the way.

Greetings from Boston! I have been visiting

skygiants and

genarti and talking about books and watching A Spy Among Friends (someone clearly read Ben MacIntyre's A Spy Among Friends and was like, love it, but wouldn't it be better if Nicholas Elliot and Kim Philby were like at least a little bit in love) and doing far less sightseeing than I had intended. Sometimes one simply gets a bit tired and needs a rest!

However, the little sight-seeing I've done has been top-tier: I went on a tour of Trinity Church, which is the one with the Burne-Jones window, although as it turns out the Burne-Jones part of it is a very small square in the middle of a riot of William Morris vines, which has an interestingly pagan effect. It's an absolutely gorgeous church, stained glass windows in at least six wildly different styles, one of which enraged the congregation, and no, it was not the William Morris vines; it was the up-to-date French stained glass window with perspective?? Whoever heard of a stained glass window with perspective! Stained glass is supposed to look flat my friends!!

But they loved the vines, and they also loved John LaFarge's stained glass windows, which were a totally new technique to stained glass, using sheets of colored glass layered over each other so that the windows look like captured fragments of sky. "Like a Tiffany window?" you say. Exactly like a Tiffany window! LaFarge shared his technique with Tiffany, who rode it to fame and glory. Ain't that always the way?

And also

genarti and I went on a tour of the Boston Public Library, with all its beautiful murals. My favorite was the Galahad cycle, which features Galahad all in red (an unusual symbolic choice but an excellent pictorial one) bopping along on his adventures: seeing the grail, battling knights, falling in love with Blanchefleur, taking the grail to the king of something or other who decides to reward Galahad by sending him to heaven directly! "But Blanchefleur?" we cried piteously, and the guide assured as that as Blanchefleur is a pure maiden (a white flower, stainless) she will surely reunite with Galahad in heaven someday... "It's a happy story!" IS IT THOUGH.

It is an interestingly Edwardian twist on the Galahad stories I'm familiar with, though. And I do love the way that Arthurian legends morph: a never-ending mirror of whatever society they find themselves in.

***

Also of course there has been some reading! First, a book from a different library visit, to the New York Public Library - the classic main building, with the lions Patience and Fortitude, which is really more of a museum than an active library now, although there are still reading rooms where people can research with an appointment, and yes I did think a little bit about seeing if I could read one of my 1930s Newbery books there next time I’m in NYC...

Also, when you buy a book from the NYPL gift shop, they stamp it with the NYPL lion stamp. “Will you stamp my blank book too?” I asked shyly, for I had also bought a blank book with a cover patterned after the Hunt-Lenox Globe (one of the library’s treasures; also one of the only maps in the world to actually contain the words “Here be dragons,” in Latin of course), and the clerk kindly did so.

"But which book did you buy?" you demand. It's Stéphane Garnier’s How to Think Like a Cat, which is basically a self-help book about being more like your cat: living in the moment, realizing that you are just fine just as you are, letting go of artificial productivity goals in favor of sitting in the grass stalking a mouse for six hours if that’s what you want to do, etc. It's cute!

The other book is Audrey Erskine Lindop's The Singer Not the Song, a.k.a. The Bandit and the Priest, which sounds like the nickname you would give a book when you want to emphasize how gay it is, but is also, in fact, an official alternate title. I've been on the hunt for this book ever since I read

skygiants' amazing review, and I regret to inform you that finishing it has simply put me on another hunt, this time for the sequel, even though the sequel can't possibly live up to the sheer intensity of the priest's battle to save the bandit's soul, which the bandit resists to his utmost because he can't stand the Catholic church, while being unable to quell his admiration of the priest as a human being. If only the priest had given his whole heart and soul to a cause less stupid!

It's very intense! I did however often find myself on the side of the people who tactfully suggested that perhaps Father Keogh ought to put the souls of the rest of his parishioners at least on the level with the soul of Malo the Bandit. Yes yes, no soul is beyond redemption and it would be nice to save Malo, but is it worth endangering every other soul in town?

I’ve finished Book IV of Le Morte d’Arthur, and I’m putting this project on indefinite hiatus because I’m simply not enjoying it very much. I can see why this book has spawned so many feminist revisionings because wow, WOW, Malory simply had so many issues with women! So many!

In this book, Arthur’s sister Morgan (whom he apparently trusts above all others? We see no evidence of this) takes a lover, Accolan. She steals Excalibur from Arthur and gives the sword to Accolan and then arranges for Arthur and Accolan to duel in another one of those patented “Haha both of us are wearing strange armor so we have no idea who we are dueling! I’m sure I’m not secretly dueling my liege lord or anything…” maneuvers.

Why, you ask? Well, why not, I guess. Honestly one should not apply modern plot logic to Malory.

One should also not expect the different stories crammed into one book to have any relation to each other, as directly following the defeat of Accolan, we segue into an unrelated story about how Sir Gawaine Is the Worst. In this tale, Gawaine meets Pelleas, a noble knight who is madly in love with Dame Ettard. Dame Ettard just wants him to go away, and keeps sending her knights to drive him from the country. Gawaine suggests that he should go try to win Ettard over for Pelleas, which he intends to accomplish by pretending that he killed Pelleas.

Pelleas thinks this is a splendid plan. Awkwardly, however, when Ettard hears Gawaine has finally rid her of that man who has been annoying her for months, she falls for Gawaine instead. Gawaine instantly betrays Pelleas and takes Ettard as his lady!

Pelleas finds Gawaine and Ettard together in a pavilion. He nearly kills them for betraying him! (Actually Ettard has not betrayed him, given that she NEVER LOVED HIM AT ALL, but the narrative insists on treating her as if she has been a faithless lover. She OWED it to him to love him when he’s such a great knight.) However, because Pelleas is a true and honorable knight UNLIKE THAT RAT GAWAINE, and true and honorable knights don’t slay sleeping foes, instead Pelleas lays a naked sword across their necks.

Then the Lady of the Lake falls in love with Pelleas, makes Ettard also fall magically in love with Pelleas to punish her for not being in love with Pelleas earlier, and Ettard dies of grief. Gawaine goes and wins some tournaments.

There are seventeen more books of this and some of them have eighty-odd chapters. Perhaps someday I will give it another go but for now I just can’t take anymore.

Bopping along in Le Morte d’Arthur! In book 3, we have Arthur and Guenever’s wedding… which is instantly interrupted when a hart is chased through the hall by a brachet, who is chased by a lady, who is kidnapped by a knight!

So Arthur pauses his wedding feast to send out three knights to follow three quests: the quest of the hart, the quest of the brachet, and the quest of the lady who has been kidnapped by a knight. The rest of the book is more or less about these quests, because Malory is basically not interested in women and couldn’t care less a) how Guenever feels about marrying Arthur, b) how Sir Tor’s mother the milkmaid feels about being raped by King Pellinore all those years ago (“half by force he had my maidenhead,” she notes, and everyone’s just like mmm yes that explains why your oldest son is so knightly…blood always tells), or c) why a lady might scream when kidnapped by some random knight. “When she was gone the king was glad, for she made such a noise,” Malory notes.

(By the way, the lady turns out to be Nimue, the new Lady of the Lake, as Balin beheaded the original Lady of the Lake in book 2. By the end of book 3, Nimue has imprisoned Merlin in a tree, because he just will not stop pestering her to have sex with him.)

I can see why this book spawned so many feminist retellings. There is simply a LOT to be picked over here.

The other continuing theme is Malory’s hateboner for Gawain, who kicks off the book yearning to murder King Pellinore in a blood feud, never mind the fact that it will ruin King Arthur’s wedding feast. (His brother Gaheris restrains him by pouting that if Gawain kills Pellinore now, before Gaheris is knighted, Gaheris won’t get to help!) On the quest of the hart, he cruelly refuses to grant a knight mercy after a knight yields to him, then accidentally cuts off a lady’s head when she dives in front of her lord to protect him with her body. Then he takes the beheaded lady back to Camelot and everyone scolds him for being the worst knight ever and Guenever tasks him to be the knight assigned to look after ladies forever more.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

At long last Literary Letters has wrapped up The Lightning Conductor! I started this book with great enthusiasm, and Molly’s voice remains enchanting throughout, but unfortunately as the book goes along we get more and more letters from her suitor, a gentleman who has disguised himself as a chauffeur in order to get close to her, who is not half as charming. Plus, on this thin wisp of a mistaken-identity plot the authors hang an awful lot of sightseeing, and unfortunately it’s quite difficult to write about sight-seeing in an interesting way and they just don’t have the knack.

I quite enjoyed Mary Stolz’s The Bully of Barkham Street, which overlaps with the events in A Dog on Barkham Street, only this time telling the story from the part of view of Martin Hastings, the bully who terrorized Edward Frost in A Dog on Barkham Street.

The book does an excellent job making Martin feel like a real three-dimensional person, an inveterate daydreamer with poor temper control, without excusing his actions. One particularly nice touch is that Martin tends to feel that everyone is picking on him, which is SUCH a characteristic child attitude, and perhaps even more so a characteristic attitude for a kid who lashes out at other kids to make himself feel better.

Like the other books in the Rosemary Sutcliff’s Arthurian trilogy, The Road to Camlann is a straightforward, classic retelling, featuring slyly evil Mordred, brave and noble Lancelot, Gawain driven mad by grief. (Sutcliff, who likes Gawain more than Malory does, lays a lot of emphasis on his repeated head wounds as an excuse for his obsession with vengeance.) But it has a propulsive forward motion that I felt the other books lacked, as if Sutcliff got to the tragedy of Camelot and felt that here, in this tale of epic tragedy and OT3s, was something she could really get her teeth into.

(Although Sutcliff loves a tragedy and an OT3, I think this is perhaps her only book where these two themes are intimately connected. The Shining Company has an OT3 and an epic tragedy, but narratively these two things are unrelated, whereas here you have epic tragedy because OT3.)

What I’m Reading Now

In David Copperfield, that rat Steerforth seduced little Em’ly on the eve of her marriage, and they’ve run away together! I KNEW IT. (Admittedly Dickens foreshadowed it hard, but NONETHELESS.) That rat Steerforth, he’s probably going to abandon her in some foreign port, where her uncle (who has set off to search the world for her) will find her just in time for her to breathe her last and perhaps bequeath her newborn child onto him.

In cheerier news, David is engaged to Dora Spenlow! But his aunt has lost all her money, thus placing the engagement in jeopardy. Will Agnes figure out a way for David to make enough money to get married after all? PROBABLY.

Meanwhile, in D. K. Broster’s The Yellow Poppy, the duc and duchesse AT LONG LAST have met, at dusk, among the standing stones near the sea, and the duchesse was so overcome that she fainted.

What I Plan to Read Next

The 2023 Newbery awards have been announced! I’m excited to read Christina Soontornvat’s The Last Mapmaker, and curious about Lisa Yee’s Maizy Chen’s Last Chance. I’ve read some of Yee’s earlier books and they never struck me as awards material, but perhaps her latest has leveled up.

I was warned that Nancy Springer books tend to be a lot, and now that I’ve read I Am Mordred and I Am Morgan le Fay I can say BOY ARE THEY EVER.

Mordred is a classic emo Mordred book (thought still not as emo as The Winter Prince, but then what could be?). Mordred HATES Arthur because Arthur tried to drown him as a baby (side note: did Merlin urge Arthur to drown the May Babies specifically because that would make the prophecy come true? A classic case of an attempt to avoid a prophecy bringing about its fulfillment…) but also LOVES Arthur because Arthur is so earnest and noble and kind.

( Spoilers )

I Am Morgan Le Fay meanwhile goes HARD on how hard it is to be a woman in medieval times. To be honest I feel that my consciousness has been Uplifted about How Hard It Was To Be a Woman in Ye Olden Days, and henceforth I don’t need to read anymore of it. At any rate I found it a bit of a slog.

Notes on Arthurian characterization choices: Springer goes for Evil Gawain (not uncommon) and the much rarer Evil Gareth (spelled Garet, perhaps to distinguish him from all the good Gareths out there), possibly because she’s dispensed with Gaheris and Agrivaine but still needs someone to be Gawain’s partner in crime in killing King Pellinore (they tie him to a tree and torture him to death! Good God), and also their own mother Morgause.

Morgause, meanwhile, is a meek and mousy woman, and it’s strongly implied that Morgan manipulated her and Arthur into producing Mordred. That’s a characterization choice, I guess! Hadn’t realized how attached I had grown to girlboss Morgause until I met the least girlboss Morgause of all time.

Book II of Le Morte d'Arthur deals with the adventures of Balin, an oft-neglected knight in modern adaptations (not sure I've seen him in ANY modern adaptations actually), possibly because he dies so early that most of the other knights haven't even shown up yet. What's the point of writing Arthuriana if you can't write about Gawain and Lancelot, am I right?

However, as it turns out, Balin's tale answers some Arthurian questions I had never thought to ask, chief among them "Who struck the Dolorous Stroke and why?" (The Dolorous Stroke is the stroke that created the Fisher King's unhealing wound and laid waste to his country, until, as Malory helpfully tells us - Malory does not foreshadow so much as tell you exactly what's going to happen - Galahad put it all right.)

Who struck the Dolorous Stroke? Balin! Why? WELL, that's a long story.

Balin was chasing the invisible serial killer knight Garlon, and Garlon went to the castle of his brother King Pellam, and in that castle Garlon dropped his invisibility so he could attend a feast, so Balin ALSO went to the feast, and when the attendants were all "You can't wear your sword into the feast" Balin was like "But it's the custom of my country to wear one's sword at all times!" so they let him wear the sword and then he slew Garlon with it.

Then King Pellam and Balin fought, and Balin's sword broke (swords and spears and shields just break ALL THE TIME in Malory), so Balin snatched up a spear that happened to be lying around, WHICH UNFORTUNATELY was the spear that the centurion drove into Jesus's side, so when Balin smote King Pellam with it he smote not only Pellam but all the countryside around (which also accidentally killed Balin's own damosel, who never did get a name). Oops. Then he has to ride away through this blasted landscape and it's EXTREMELY awkward.

In general Balin comes across as a hotheaded asshole frat boy. (He also slays the Lady in the Lake, in front of Arthur, because he has zero self-control. This leads to his banishment and kicks off his adventures) I suspect that this is another reason he doesn't get a lot of play in modern adaptations. Not that modern adapters object to assholes, but Balin is an asshole with the emotional depth of a puddle. Mildly sad his damosel died! Really doesn't feel bad at all about blighting the countryside! Nothing in his characterization suggests the kind of tortured psychological convolutions that a modern novelist can excavate from, say, a Lancelot.

Next up: we meet Guenever!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I have completed my trip through Mary Stewart’s oeuvre with Thunder on the Right! Probably not the book I would have chosen to end on; it’s one of her earlier books and, as the characters themselves note, rather melodramatic: ( spoilers )

However, I know that I’ll be revisiting some of Stewart’s books, so this is not really the end of the journey at all. I own A Walk in Wolf Wood, and someday I WILL find a copy of Ludo and the Star Horse.

What I’m Reading Now

Onward in David Copperfield! David has run away to his Aunt Betsey Trotwood, who has taken him in, and when David’s evil stepfather Mr. Murdstone came to collect David, she soundly rated him for the way that he treated David and David’s poor dear dead mother both. YES AUNT TROTWOOD GO GO GO.

What I Plan to Read Next

Nancy Springer’s I Am Morgan La Fay and I Am Mordred. Judging by the cover of I Am Morgan La Fay these are going to be Arthuriana by way of 90s emo and I’m fascinated to see how this mash-up works.

Aided and abetted by Malory Club (

skygiants,

genarti, and

rymenhild; if anyone else wishes to join the Discord that could probably be arranged), I have begun to read Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur! As the vast tome is conveniently chopped into many books, I thought I would post about it as we finish each book.

(If you want to be au courant with these posts but don’t wish to join a discord, we are reading roughly two chapters a night.)

The pacing is breathtaking. In the first four chapters, we speedrun Uther’s war against the Duke of Tintagel to steal his wife the beauteous Ygraine (who already has three grown-up daughters who get married off in an aside at the end of a chapter), the birth of Uther and Ygraine’s son Arthur who is spirited away by Merlin, and the death of Uther.

Then we skip Arthur’s childhood directly to the incident where he pulls the sword from the stone, thus becoming king of Britain, not without a good deal of grumbling from the other kings of Britain, who make him draw the sword over and over again, until the common people declare “ENOUGH!”... and then many of the kings band together to fight Arthur, and most of the rest of book one is taken up with those battles, with occasional side quests like “And then Pellinore stole Arthur’s horse to chase the Questing Beast.”

At this point I’m familiar with most of these stories from retellings, which makes it extra fascinating to trace the threads that they drew on and how they changed those stories: Mary Stewart and T. H. White both vastly expanded Arthur’s childhood, while summarizing or even skipping over the later battles. (In a sense the battle scenes are the place where White comes closest to Malory, actually: there’s the same litany of “this happened and then this happened and then this happened,” except in Malory the things that happen are individual knights smiting and in White it’s the movement of battle formations.)

It’s also interesting to see which parts have not been drawn on. For instance! Sir Lucas the Butler! Never heard of him before.

I amused myself by envisioning Carson the Butler from Downton Abbey rushing onto the battlefield with a saucepan, but in fact medieval butlers were clearly persons of noble heritage and high social standing: Lucas the Butler is a full-blown knight who fights in battle alongside Sir Kay, both of them smiting people left and right.

I am glad that I’m reading this book alongside other people, because I would struggle with it if I were trying to tackle it on my own. It’s not so much the language (I’m reading the version of Gutenberg with modernized spellings) as the fact that is simply an entirely different reading experience than a modern novel. Lots of telling, very little showing, and not much interest in the characters’ interiority, which of course is what makes Malory such catnip for modern retellings: he drew the outlines and left all the modern novelists’ favorite parts out, to be colored in however the modern novelist desires.

As part of my general Arthurian deep-dive, I’ve begun a reread of Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant comic, which I first devoured in high school (often with squeals of rage about the gender politics, which never stopped me from going on to the next book). The comic was originally published on Sundays only, as a full-page, full-color visual extravaganza, featuring busty women, shirtless men, brightly colored pennants flapping in the breeze, stunning action scenes, scantily clad priestesses standing outside stone circles, Prince Valiant homoerotically wrestling with Sir Gawain, etc. etc.

Foster is a master class in how to pack a ton of action into a small space. Almost every single newspaper page moves the story forward precipitously, although occasionally Foster pauses for, say, a spread where the payoff is our first glorious glimpse of the topless towers of Camelot, a breath-taking storybook castle.

However, for the most part the story moves on at a gallop. In volume 1, 1937-1938 (two years of Sunday strips; about 100 pages, therefore), Prince Valiant’s father, a Viking king, is driven from his homeland by a foul usurper! The family settles in the English fens, and Val spends his childhood battling prehistoric monsters and giant turtles in the wetlands. (Foster got his start with a Tarzan comic strip and the number of giant deadly animals in these early comic strips reflects this).

Once grown, Val sets off for Camelot, tames a wild horse, falls in with Sir Gawain, and over the course of a couple adventures (battling foul knights, etc.) becomes Sir Gawain’s squire. Sir Gawain is kidnapped! Val saves him! Then Val falls in love with the fair Ilene, only to discover that Ilene has been previously betrothed to a Prince Arn, and Val and Arn are in the act of fighting to the death for her hand when it transpires that Ilene has been KIDNAPPED. At once Val and Arn team up, but after doughty rescue attempts, the kidnapper’s ship is wrecked and the fair Ilene is drowned!!

(Later on Val names his firstborn son Arn. It occurs to me only now that perhaps these things are related.)

In high school I loathed the Ilene storyline: it never even occurred to these two dorks that perhaps they should let the girl choose? I might have stopped reading, except that my dad only had an incomplete set of the comic, and the very next volume in our collection featured Aleta, Queen of the Misty Isles, whom Val has kidnapped for vengeance -

(The storyline picked up after the kidnapping and I can’t wait to see how this plays out, because as far as I can tell he just walked into the throne room and carried her off! Right in front of her guards! Was she winking and nodding, all, “Let this barbarian kidnap me, I like his moxie”?)

Anyway, vengeance. Val and Aleta ride CHAINED TOGETHER through TRACKLESS DESSERTS! At one point Val FAINTS OFF HIS HORSE and Aleta bathes his fevered brow and then goes to a nearby traders’ camp to dance for their supper. One of the traders likes her a bit too much, but Aleta carries a dagger in her garter and is perfectly capable of dispatching a lesser bad guy on her own! (You can see why this was more to my taste than Ilene who doesn’t even try to swim to Val’s ship during the ship chase.)

Aside from Aleta’s kidnapping, I am VERY excited to learn the conclusion of Taloon’s story once I get that far. The conclusion of Taloon’s story will be that she marries the guy marked as her love interest because this is how all subplots conclude in Prince Valiant, but NONETHELESS.

Generally speaking, courtly love makes me roll my eyes, so I’m not a big fan of Tristan and Iseult. However, Rosemary Sutcliff’s Tristan & Iseult is so beautifully told that she actually won me over. In particular, it really worked for me that she got rid of the traditional love potion: here, Tristan and Iseult fall in love off their own bat, and try to resist it because they both love King Mark (“King Mark is a good guy actually!” is also not the standard characterization, but it’s very Sutcliff), but their feelings are too strong for them, and honestly I found that more sympathetic than the usual special pleading of “King Mark sucks and ALSO magic made them do it.”

However, even Rosemary Sutcliff couldn’t make me forgive Tristan for marrying a different Iseult, Iseult of the White Hands, while still in love with Iseult of Cornwall. (Yes, yes, Iseult of Cornwall is also married, but she had no choice in the matter, whereas Tristan could have easily said no!) The fact that he had been sundered from his own true love is no excuse to make another woman miserable!

Spiteful though it was, I have every sympathy for Iseult of the White Hand’s decision to tell the wounded Tristan that the sails on Iseult of Cornwall’s ship were black (meaning that she hadn’t come to nurse his wounds). Tristan forced Iseult of the White Hands to live for years in the miserable certainty that her husband whom she loved didn’t love her, so it’s only poetic justice that he should die in the miserable certainty that the woman he loved didn’t love him. I hope Iseult of the White Hands remarried and danced on Tristan’s grave at the wedding.

***

Speaking of Arthurian legends I struggle with, I also read Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Light Beyond the Forest: The Quest for the Holy Grail, and oh my. This is the second book of Sutcliff’s Arthurian Trilogy, in which she retells Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur largely without putting her own stamp on it, so there is really nothing to dilute the pure Galahad and his Grail Quest of it all.

(The one thing Sutcliff just can’t stand is the bit where Bors refuses to fight his brother Lionel, who wants to kill him, and sits back priggishly and watches while Lionel kills a hermit and a knight who are trying to stop Lionel from killing Bors. In her telling, Lionel whacks Bors on the head, which leaves Bors too dazed to do anything but stare in horror as Lionel murders the hermit and the knight.)

The problem with Galahad is that whoever created him loved him with the unholy love of a fanfic writer whose OC is better at everything than every single character in the original story. Galahad is the son of Lancelot, but a WAY better knight than Lancelot, and about half of the narrative focuses on showing that Lancelot is No Longer the Best Knight in the World and also scolding him for having been proud of being the best knight in the world. The original Grail knight Percival is reduced to Galahad’s adoring follower (Sutcliff loves an adoring follower, so Percival comes across well, but it is a demotion from his earlier role), whereas Gawain is portrayed as a brutish man unworthy even to attempt the Grail quest.

Also there’s a subplot where Percival’s sister gives all her blood to cure a leper lady, and dies beautifully, and then it turns out the leper lady had been bleeding maidens to death left and right until she found one pure enough to cure her. WHY. I’m sure the answer is “medieval Christianity.” But nonetheless WHY. WHY. WHY IS THIS EVEN HAPPENING.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I wish I had read Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Sword and the Circle: King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table right when I began my swan-dive into Arthuriana, because this is a solid, straightforward retelling of most famous pre-Grail Arthurian legends, set in the traditional quasi-medieval setting with the usual budget of magic and the customary characterization. (Although I think she’s channeling White’s Lancelot. Unless he’s traditionally ugly in pre-Once and Future King sources?) Better late than never, however. Looking forward to the Grail book.

Back on my writing prompt post,

rachelmanija requested Biggles fic (this post is a treasure trove, btw, also including a Kay ficlet and uhhhhhh four Mordred fics God help us all), so of course I had to read a Biggles book for RESEARCH. Thus, Biggles Takes Charge, which actually features no Biggles at all till the halfway mark! Algy has driven to an isolated country lodge in the Sologne to return the key to a hunting lodge, which unfortunately he never got to use as it was given to him by a friend right before World War II… only when he arrives at the lodge he finds himself smack in the middle of a Ruritanian romance, with missing heirs, hidden jewels, revolutionary assassins, and our friend Erich von Stalhein, in a slightly awkward transition from his World War II Gestapo morph back into Biggles’ beloved nemesis.

And finally, I read Sujata Massey’s The Widows of Malabar Hill, which perhaps spent just a little too long on my TBR before I got around to it. I enjoyed the Bombay in the 1920s setting, but the prose was just a bit too clunky for me to want to continue the series. It’s too bad, because the covers are so stylish.

What I’m Reading Now

In A Christmas Carol, we have neatly wrapped up the Ghost of Christmas Past, with a scene which assures us that Scrooge’s former fiancee Belle did indeed find love with a man who doesn’t have a bank book for a heart! HOORAY FOR BELLE. (I always worried about this in The Muppet Christmas Carol.) Onward to the Ghost of Christmas Present!

I’m so impressed by Dickens’ pacing in this story, which is all the more noticeable in this short daily excerpt format: every single excerpt has propelled the story forward, but the cracking pace of the plot leaves plenty of room for word play and brief but incisive character sketches. (It’s so characteristic that Scrooge’s reaction to learning that the Ghost of Christmas Present has eighteen hundred odd brothers is “A tremendous family to provide for” - updated in the Muppet Christmas Carol to “Think of the grocery bills.”)

In The Lightning Conductor, Molly and her beau-who-is-pretending-to-be-her-chauffeur have reached the south of France!

littlerhymes and I are both concerned that “pretending to be your beloved’s chauffeur” is not, perhaps, a strong foundation for a long-term relationship, but doubtless when Molly discovers that her surprisingly insightful and well-informed chauffeur is in fact an English lord simply acting the part of chauffeur in order to be near her, she will consider the whole situation very droll.

No news from Whale-Whenever-They-Feel-Like-It.

What I Plan to Read Next

littlerhymes, a brutal enabler of my Mordred obsession, has sent me Nancy Springer’s I Am Mordred, with Biggles of the Camel Squadron and Christine Pullein-Thompson’s Phantom Horse Comes Home for company!

littlerhymes and I have finished Mary Stewart's The Wicked Day! To my surprise, this was my favorite book of the quartet, because I got deeply invested in Mordred the lonely watchful child who would rather die than hurt Arthur, and also has to ride herd on all his horrible Orkney half-brothers.

(Side note about the Orkney boys: Gareth is, as usual, the sweetheart of the gang. Indeed, Stewart notes that as long as he stayed on Orkney, where he was his mother's pet, he was "in danger of effeminacy" - which is perhaps why he escapes the toxic masculinity that destroys the rest of them. Usually Gawain is the second-best Orkney boy, but here he's just as vengeful and hotheaded as Gaheris and Agrivaine. Sometimes you see a decent Gaheris, but no one in the entire world of Arthurian adaptations seems to like Agrivaine.)

Unfortunately, the book falls apart in the third section, I think because Stewart also got invested in Mordred, Basically a Good Kid Which Is Impressive Considering His Life. Her heart is not in Mordred's destruction of Camelot, but unfortunately she's written herself in a corner where she has to write it, as in the Merlin trilogy she firmly established a) Merlin's prophecy that Mordred would destroy Arthur, and b) Merlin's infallibility as a prophet.

She tries to soften the blow: Mordred's final confrontation with Arthur takes place as a result of a series of misunderstandings. Mordred is Arthur's heir, so when he hears that Arthur is dead he naturally takes over the kingdom, but Arthur is not dead, and when he comes back to England a storm forces him to land on Saxon ground... which leads to a battle with the Saxons, with whom Mordred unfortunately just made an alliance... which ends with Mordred and Arthur facing off in battle.

And then they have a final parlay, which Stewart doesn't show us (they died right after! no one knows what they said! YOU COULD TELL US ANYWAY), and reach an agreement... and then an adder bites a knight and the knight draws his sword to kill it and the soldiers take that as a sign for battle to begin and THAT IS THAT.

In the afterword she notes that the only historical information we have about Mordred is that he died at Camlann with Arthur, in a context where he might just as easily have been fighting on Arthur's side as against him, and she might have followed that route if she hadn't locked herself with all those prophecies. I think the book would have been stronger for it if she had - or else if she had Mordred betray Arthur at least a little. It feels too easy, too much letting the characters off the hook, for it to all be just a misunderstanding.

***

Also I am 99% convinced that Elizabeth Wein read this book to absolute shreds when she was young, because her Medraut so feels like a darkfic version of Stewart's (in particular, an expansion of the scene where Morgause kisses Mordred, when he is not yet aware that he's her son but she definitely knows. How did you expect that to pan out, Morgause! Did you assume he would never know!), and also a fix-it where Medraut doesn't cause the fall of Camelot after all - although Camelot still falls.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I wasn’t particularly invested in the characters or the plot in Phyllis Ann Karr’s At Amberleaf Fair, which would usually be a death knell for a story, but in this case I grew so absorbed by the worldbuilding that it pulled me through the book. What IS this world where the way to propose is to offer a marriage toy, where wizards often give banquets by transforming simple foods like potatoes into costly delicacies, where people use kinship terms as courtesy titles? “Tell me more!” I begged. “PLEASE give me some infodumps!”

Karr did not hear my plea for infodumps, but apparently the ebook has an afterword which gives a bit more detail about the worldbuilding. (Genuinely considering buying the ebook just to read the afterword.) Apparently, the afterword also mentions that the book is stealth Ruddigore fanfic, although in that way where you start with a canon and then put your story in a completely different setting, and change some of the characterization, and add a self-insert for your favorite character to fall in love with, and somehow by the end no one but yourself can see the Ruddigore at all.

I also read Courtney Milan’s The Suffragette Scandal. I read the rest of the Brothers Sinister series seven years ago, and unfortunately the delay before reading the last book was a mistake. I’ve forgotten most of the characters from the earlier books and also am just not in the same headspace where I originally found the series so delightful. It’s fine! It just didn’t grab my heart like the others.

What I’m Reading Now

Whale Weekly has begun! I didn’t realize that we were beginning our Moby-Dick journey so early! …and I have the sinking feeling that I’m going to find Melville just as insufferable now as I did in high school, but I will give it a few weeks before I make any decisions about whether I truly WANT to spent the next three years of my life revisiting Moby-Dick.

In other news,

littlerhymes and I have been reading The Wicked Day, and I’ve been having Mordred feelings YET AGAIN, just like when I read The Winter Prince and The Idylls of the Queen… Oh, God, have I become a Mordred stan? I don’t want to be a Mordred stan. And yet HERE I AM, unable to break free, just like poor Mordred who doesn’t want to be the doom of Camelot and yet that is his FATE.

What I Plan to Read Next

As you may have noticed I am really on a roll with these Newbery Honor books, and I intend to keep going as long as the inspiration is upon me.

I’m leaving for my trip to Massachusetts tomorrow! So I’m posting my Wednesday Reading Meme today to sweep the decks clean before I go.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

littlerhymes and I finished Mary Stewart’s The Last Enchantment, the final book of the original Merlin trilogy, although Stewart went ahead and published a fourth book a few years later. The Last Enchantment nonetheless feels like a conclusion - I’d be certainly very surprised if Merlin narrates the next book - for it takes us through the end of Merlin’s story, and indeed beyond the usual end: he’s buried alive in his crystal cave, as is his usual end, but here he’s rescued and at the end of the book is living in retirement, an old man tired yet content, frequently visited by the king.

We were particularly interested in the book’s ambiguous treatment of Nimue. Is she truly in love with Merlin? Pretending to love him to steal his power? Not stealing his power at all, but learning all his skills so she can take up his mantel as Arthur’s sorcerer, just as Merlin bade her?

Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road, the third book in the Regeneration trilogy, alternates between Billy Prior, who is headed back to the front now that he’s been released from Craiglockhart, and his counselor Rivers, who spends most of the book ill to the point of delirium, recollecting his fieldwork among the headhunters of Melanesia. The colonial rulers of Melanesia had forbidden headhunting, and because their entire culture had been organized around the headhunt, they were basically pining away in despair.

Rivers doesn’t draw a direct parallel, but there’s clearly a meditation here about war as a bearer of cultural meaning - whose cultural meaning is perhaps divorced from anything that a reasonable person might consider a “war aim.” The point of the headhunt is the headhunt. It’s not meant to win territory or settle a point of politics by other means or Defeat Autocracy; the point is to take heads. We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.

( Spoilers )

Nghi Vo’s When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain is a sequel to The Empress of Salt and Fortune, also featuring a cleric who travels the countryside collecting knowledge/stories, also very concerned with how stories change depending who tell them. In this case, Chih is telling the story of a human-tiger romance to a trio of tigers who may eat them… or might leave Chih alive to go home and correct the record with what the tigers consider the real version, although they are grumpily aware that Chih will probably just put it down as a competing version, equal in weight with the clearly incorrect human story!

Finally, there’s a new Baby-Sitters Club graphic novel out! Jessi’s Secret Language is one that I read as a kid (in general I read all the Very Special Episode books about disabilities), and it was fun to revisit it now, especially because I’ve actually seen a production of Coppelia, the ballet that Jessi stars in. In fact, I think my desire to see that ballet stems from this book! (Almost all my other ballet feelings come from Princess Tutu. Someday I WILL see Swan Lake and Giselle.)

What I’m Reading Now

In Dracula, Dracula has end-run our heroes! They have now split up to chase him, one team by land and one by waterway… Will they be able to kill him before he reaches his castle stronghold??

What I Plan to Read Next

To my distress, I have discovered that I weeded Jane Langton’s The Diamond in the Window from my collection! So I’ll only be taking The Fledgling and the recently-acquired The Astonishing Stereoscope to Massachusetts with me.

Obviously the main writing news this month is that I published A Garter as a Lesser Gift! Still tossing around the idea of a Lancelot/Guinevere/Arthur World War II OT3… My latest thought is “What if Gwen works for the SOE and she helps get Lancelot out of France after his plane goes down?” Further thought, what if she works for the SOE Sorceress Division, coworkers include Morgan La Fay and Nimue? Might have to do a bit of research on the SOE, but then again Arthurian SOE may have the same extremely loose relationship to fact as Arthurian RAF.

Anyway, as a result of trauma and also Fate Gwen and Lancelot fall into each other’s arms after this, cheating angst (I’m afraid with this particular OT3 cheating angst is inevitable), BUT eventually they figure it out, in part because the cheating angst is 100% in Gwen and especially Lancelot’s heads? Art is fine with it. Art is fine with everything. Art loves them both so much and just wants them to be happy and if they want him to bow out so they can go live in a cottage in the Cotswolds–

Gwen and Lancelot: NO! We love you! We would die without you!

However this perhaps needs more time to marinate and in the meantime you will be SHOCKED to hear that I’m at it again with Sleeping Beauty, now tentatively entitled The Sleeping Soldier, now also enriched with chapters in Russell POV, which I like to imagine will make the book work but who even knows anymore? Faith is not the absence of doubt, but the will to keep on trying despite very good reasons to doubt…

At long last! The moment you've all been waiting for! A Garter as a Lesser Gift is now available! (There WILL also be a paperback, whenever Amazon deigns to release said paperback to the public. We shall see!)

Usually I try to post a sample before the book is actually published, but this time I did NOT, so you get it today instead! Here is chapter 1, A Garter as a Lesser Gift, "What if the Knights of the Round Table were airmen in the RAF in World War II and that asshole green knight showed up?"

Chapter 1

The night after Lancelot went down over France, the squadron went to the Green Dragon to get drunk. Even young Percy went with them, although he did not drink, but nursed a ginger beer as he watched Gawain and Kay pretend to play at chess. Ironsides sat a little way off, at the edge of the group as he always was with any group, downing drink after drink without so much as a twitch in his set face.

Their squadron leader, Art, sat in the corner with his pint. Like a clockwork figure he lifted it to his lips from time to time, but he did not drink, only sat with his face white and drawn.

Lots of airmen died that way. So they had lost Tristram just last month. But they had all loved Lancelot, and they were heavy with rage and grief.

Kay sat at the chessboard with his head on one hand and his bishop in the other. At the bar Ironsides called, “Another,” and his voice seemed to wake Kay from a dream. He set down the bishop in a place he would not have chosen if he had been thinking about it.

Gawain with a negligent swoop of his knight took the bishop off the board. “I wasn’t done,” Kay protested.

“You took your hand off your bishop,” Gawain said.

“I was thinking!” Kay was growing red.

“Well, think faster next time,” Gawain advised. Kay knocked over the board, and Gawain surged to his feet, and Kay reared up and they glared at each other, spoiling for the fight that would relieve their feelings without the shame of tears.

The door flew open. Dead leaves skittered in before the wind.

They all swung toward the door, even Art, heads lifting, eyes widening with hope. But their cries of greeting died on their lips, for it was not Lancelot.

In the doorway stood a massive man, so large that he seemed to shoulder aside the door jambs as he pushed his way into the pub. All in green he was: a long green overcoat, and green trousers tucked into green boots, and a green bowler hat all on top. With so much green about him even his skin seemed tinged green; but his lips were red, and his teeth flashed white as he called, “A flagon of ale, mistress!”

( Read more )

I know I've linked T. H. White's character notes on Lancelot before, but

littlerhymes just sent me a version which included not just White's numbered list but also some extra thoughts he appended, not least of which is a sub-list of People Lancelot Is Like... which includes T. H. White himself. There it is! He just came out and said it! Glad to see the self-awareness, buddy.

On the other hand, at the end T. H. White muses about what Lancelot considered his big flaw, his fundamental lack. "On first inspection one would be inclined to link it up with no 17 ["Homosexual? Can a person be ambi-sexual - bisexual or whatever?"], but I don’t understand about bisexuality, so can’t write about it," White wrote... then proceeded to write Lancelot as a classic disaster bi. Absolutely flawless depiction of a completely catastrophic bisexual. No notes!

***

I've finished revisions on A Garter as a Lesser Gift, and have been contemplating (due largely to the enthusiastic boosterism of

skygiants, who is already responsible for the fact that the Gawain retelling has become a reality) a companion Art/Lancelot/Gwen story. If this comes to pass there will ABSOLUTELY be a scene where Lancelot asks plaintively, "Can a person be ambi-sexual - bisexual or whatever?" Probably of Gwen, possibly while they're in bed together.

My hesitation about this project arises from the fact that I couldn't lift the plot wholesale as I did from "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." There are Lancelot and Guenever stories that don't immediately end in the fall of Camelot, but the basic structure seems to be Guenever is ACCUSED and then Lancelot has to CHAMPION HER because Arthur as king cannot... I don't know, maybe if I switched it around and Lancelot was ACCUSED and Guenever has to CHAMPION HIM, in a less literal sense as people were not doing trial by combat in World War II.

Or I could just plot something myself, but at some point doesn't it stop being an Arthurian retelling and become an OT3 with some Arthurian names attached for decorative purposes? Also, let's be real, part of the point of a retelling is that I don't have to plot the story myself.

I have been thinking that I should, perhaps, give this esoteric thing called "outlining" a try. I have worried in the past that this would constrain my spontaneity (insert tragic musings about smudging a butterfly's wing and destroying one's literary gifts), but there was really a lot to be said for knowing the exact outlines of the story in A Garter as a Lesser Gift, and just having to color it in. Does anyone have an outlining process they particularly like?

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A Certain Slant of Light

otherwise known as Jin's journal

Entries tagged with arthuriana

Book Review: The Last Knight of Camelot

Book Review: The Stolen Lake

Book Review: Over Sea, Under Stone

Greetings from Boston!

Le Morte d’Arthur, Book IV

Le Morte d’Arthur, book III

Wednesday Reading Meme

Book Review: I Am Mordred and I Am Morgan Le Fay

Le Morte d’Arthur, Book II

Wednesday Reading Meme

Le Morte d’Arthur, Book I

Prince Valiant

Rosemary Sutcliff’s Arthuriana

Wednesday Reading Meme

Book Review: The Wicked Day

Wednesday Reading Meme

Wednesday Reading Meme (on Monday)

October Writing and November Plans

A Garter as a Lesser Gift

Lancelot

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June 2025

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