And autumn is his bridle

[sovay]

"So all through that winter he came to me. And he came at night. I was never alone in my chamber, but he came through doors and windows and walls, and lay with me. I never saw him again, but heard his voice and felt his body. Then, in the summer, when I was heavy with child, he left me . . . They will tell you how my father beat me and shut me up, and how when the child was born he would not give him a name fit for a Christian prince, but, because he was born in September, named him for the sky-god, the wanderer, who has no house but the woven air. But I called him Merlin always, because on the day of his birth a wild falcon flew in through the window and perched above the bed, and looked at me with my lover's eyes."
—Mary Stewart, The Crystal Cave (1970)

Comments

[sovay]

It is one of those outstanding visual memories of my childhood, this battered library first edition of The Crystal Cave waiting for me on my desk with no fanfare or explanation. It is the first "Arthurian literature" that I ever read.

You had an awesome grandfather.

It is the first "Arthurian literature" that I ever read.

If my first wasn't Over Sea, Under Stone, then it was Peter Dickinson's Merlin Dreams, which I encountered in elementary school, or Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon, which I read when I was twelve and staying for a week with my aunt in San Francisco. (I don't think I read Parke Godwin's Firelord or Jane Yolen's Merlin's Booke until high school.) But The Crystal Cave was the one that really stuck.

you can kind of see where it led me.

And I personally am very glad it did!

And I can STILL recite the epigraph poem from memory!

Okay. You are also awesome.

[ewein2412]

You had an awesome grandfather.

I did, I did.