I dreamed I had some kind of magic

[sovay]

I have not yet read Rebecca Stott's Dark Earth (2022), but the mention of a female smith in a frame of Arthuriana made me think of Jane Yolen's "Evian Steel," which I have to hand at the moment in her collection Merlin's Booke (1986). Of course I re-read the entire collection to get to it and in the process was struck by a line in "Dream Reader" wherein Merlin's second sight is explained as an inheritance from his mother, more political and more perilous than her woman's dreams bounded by love and domesticity; it is a lie in Yolen, but the truth in Mary Stewart's The Crystal Cave (1970), in consequence of which I have just begun on The Hollow Hills (1973). I can remember reading these books for the first time; they were not my first Arthuriana—I can't even remember what was—but they mapped themselves so firmly to the inside of my head that I still have to remember sometimes that whatever shifting mosaic is called the Matter of Britain does not always feature the son of Aurelius Ambrosius or the sword of Macsen Wledig. Post-Roman Britain as a kind of post-apocalyptic landscape follows naturally on the notion of the Dark Ages, but it interests me that it seems to feature as sfnally in Stott as in Stewart and Sutcliff, even in Tanith Lee, cf. "Draco, Draco" (1984): "But since the Eagles flew, there are kingdoms everywhere, chiefs, war-leaders, Roman knights, and every tide brings an invasion up some beach. Under it all, too, you can feel the earth, the actual ground, which had been measured and ruled with fine roads, the land which had been subdued but never tamed, beginning to quicken. Like the shadows that come with the blowing out of a lamp." Perhaps she too grew up on The Lantern Bearers (1959). The other day I met a kid who told me that he loves science fiction, but is bored with history. I told him that history is often taught boringly, as a laundry list of dates rather than any kind of structure, the scaffolding of how we got here. (Isn't the house you were born in the most interesting house in the world for you?) I did not tell him, because it really wasn't what he was saying, that the idea of a future slashed entirely free of the past frightens rather than appeals to me because I don't associate it with visionaries and reinvention, it reminds me of control and denial and fantasies intended to overwrite fact, how little time it takes to build on falsehood like foundation sacrifice. Because I haven't read the book, I don't know if Stott's Arthuriana figures river-decaying Londinium itself as the tower that will not stand, but if not, then I hope someone's does. It sounds like a job for M. John Harrison or Iain Sinclair. I just write about fisher kings. Yolen closes her book of changes on the myth of Merlin with a familiar image which in the last quarter of the twentieth century is less clear-cut in its prophecy than the failing cressets of Roman civilization, besides which it is healthy to be skeptical of narratives that claim that darkness flooded in when empire moved out: "Light . . . I saw light. And darkness coming on." And we light candles for memory and keep writing about times that no one remembers except the dead, which is all of them, eventually, and I hope I am not returning to these stories now because they are about shoring fragments, even when the dream always splinters in the end.

Comments

[sovay]

I'm not totally sure of my first Arthuriana -- mostly general pop culture osmosis, I think, and Disney's The Sword and the Stone somewhere along the line.

I know it wasn't Disney in my case because I disliked the film for the book's sake, but otherwise I have genuinely no idea. It could have been something out of the library I no longer remember. It's even conceivable it was Malory, since we had a book of him in the house illustrated by Arthur Rackham and then two different retellings by Sir James Knowles and Howard Pyle, the latter of whom definitely furnished my first images of Robin Hood. I remember other authors more vividly, but it's not like I have a chronological record. I can nail down Jane Yolen's "Merlin and the Dragons" (1991) only because it has a broadcast date—I haven't seen it since it aired as an episode of Long Ago and Far Away. Excuse me while I lose half an hour.

a book of Celtic tales that had things like Arthur and his knights all charging out hunting after a giant boar with a magic comb on his back, nary a love triangle in sight

Twrch Trwyth! Where did I read about him? I also have no idea. I got Culhwch and Olwen themselves from Lloyd Alexander, though.

Merlin son of Aurelius Ambrosius is the standard I judge all Merlins by, even today, which is a difficulty given that most Merlins are not in any way attempting to be him or even in the same mood-genre as him.

Elizabeth E. Wein is the closest in mood of Arthuriana I have encountered and she doesn't even include Merlin, so.

The other important thing to me about The Crystal Cave, actually, is its author's note, which marks the first time I can remember a writer discussing the register of language they chose, especially in a historical work—the conceit that the novel's English is really fifth-century Latin or Welsh, the conscious use of anachronism where efforts at authenticity might be more jarring or just not as much fun; other authors may have addressed the subject sooner, but she was the one I found talking about it first.

I read The Hollow Hills, but liked it less well because it had more incest and court politics, and then as the love triangle and general doom of Camelot hove into view in, as I recall, the start of The Last Enchantment, I closed the book and went back to reread The Crystal Cave again.

I wrote about the trilogy a little when Mary Stewart died and basically stand by that assessment, although the quasi-parenting angle in The Hollow Hills looks different now that I am old enough to have children in my life who could be but are not children of my body. It is difficult for me to evaluate The Last Enchantment because it was always my least favorite and I don't re-read it often. It's not like a Mary Renault's Funeral Games TPK, but it is both the closest retelling and the most depressing part of the story and there's just not much to do about that.

I've been meaning to reread the whole trilogy, and finish it this time, now that I'm an adult with at least slightly more patience with doomed love triangles rather than a teenager who really just wanted an entire trilogy of the first book, because I'm curious about how it all plays out.

I check out of the love triangle every time. Every time. I am not sure I have read a single version that makes it compelling to me in its own right as opposed to part of the machinery of the fall of Camelot. I understand now that there are far greater problems with The Mists of Avalon, but I will nonetheless never forgive it for solving the love triangle with poly and then re-breaking it because MZB couldn't work the tragedy without it. I think this showed a lack of imagination.

It all made later encounters with Arthuriana that owed more to Malory and White difficult, however, since I kept wanting them to be stories they emphatically were not: all numinousness and boars out of ancient legend, if you please, said younger I.

Well, I still think you were right. (I'm pretty sure this was the rationale for Robert Holdstock's entire oeuvre.)

And horrible and wonderful and layered and a weight under everything!

Reserve that last phrase for future employment! I appreciate the data point.

Here's hoping the epiphany will come for this kid as well.

Of course! He's in college and I told him frankly that it might just be his teachers.