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The flower who married my brother the traitor
This post brought to you by Heather Dale's "Mordred's Lullaby," to which ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gaudior and weirdquark introduced me on Sunday. As a piece of Arthuriana, I am ambivalent about it, as it depends on an interpretation of Morgause that is closer to Elizabeth E. Wein than Thomas Malory; on the other hand, The Winter Prince is one of the premier retellings in the field, and it's a fantastic piece of music. I may look up the rest of the CD. It also reminded me that I have been meaning to write about Phyllis Ann Karr's The Idylls of the Queen (1982), which I was re-reading a few weeks ago and which retains the distinction of being the only Arthurian murder mystery I've ever read. There may be others, as there may be other versions which place Sir Kay front and center, but I haven't run across them yet: and in any case, I somewhat doubt their protagonists are as fucked in the head as this one. Spoilers for Le Morte d'Arthur?
To be fair, it's less that Kay is such a fucked-up protagonist as that I have read very few murder mysteries whose detectives are such unreliable narrators. (I'll take recommendations.) The opening sentences signal both what genre we are in and the close eye we are going to have to keep on our narrative:
When Patrise put his head down on the table beside me and started groaning and twitching, my first thought was: and they call me the churl of this court.
Defensive, much?
Then the bloating became obvious—at least to me; I was sitting beside him. He hunched up with a half-choked cry and collapsed, his face still on the table, and suddenly I guessed that the dark stuff dribbling out of his mouth was not wine.
"Gouvernail," I said.
I suppose, since I did not shout or use sarcasm, the old squire failed to hear the exact tone of my voice.
And thus we are introduced to Sir Kay, who will guide us through a fifth century that only ever existed in the pages of chivalric romances, as a seemingly straightforward procedural rapidly complicates into a cross-section of knightly feuds and intricate bloodlines, from the Fisher Kings of Carbonek to the intrigues of Morgan le Fay to the five sons of Morgawse of Orkney. His intelligence and his competence are never in doubt; we have ample proof of his efficiency as seneschal, running a tight ship at Camelot as little as he is loved for it, and while his investigations into the murder of Sir Patrise are rarely inspired, as he himself concedes, Kay is not slow on the uptake, but a man who now gathers his facts carefully before making accusations, having more than once been on the wrong end of his own thin skin—the text is peppered with his quarrels and old fights, most of which he has lost. He's Arthur's right-hand man after Lancelot and Gawaine, the reliable foster-brother who rarely presumes on the privilege, but whose loyalty is unquestionable. He's also a fount of sarcasm, sharp-tongued and short-tempered, with enough chips on his shoulder to furnish the home fires for a year; he has a long-suffering relationship with his fellows of the Round Table, not so privately regarding most of them as glorious idiots more concerned with the appearance of honor than the actuality, and his name has become a byword for boorish behavior. See the epigraph to the novel, taken from Malory as are all the chapter headings: "I, Kay, that thou knawes, / That owte of tyme bostus and blawus . . ." In fact, we hear him boast of himself less often than he remarks caustically on the braggadocio of other knights, but years of putting his mouth before his money have left him with a reputation that still nettles him. "The world knows your tongue, Sir Kay . . . And the world knows your insults are meaningless, since you can speak nothing else." It's a judgment that cuts both ways. Certainly this Kay prefers honesty over politesse, to the point of rudeness; however unflattering, his assessments of his fellow knights' failings are often correct. But he is not the one truthspeaker in a world of fencing courtesy, much as he would like to believe so. There are two subjects on which Kay is not rational, and unfortunately they are intertwined with one another: Sir Lancelot and Dame Guenevere.
Dame Lore was wrong. I am not jealous of Lancelot. You can only feel jealousy toward someone for whom you have some kind of respect or affection. Jealousy is what I feel towards Gawaine. What I feel towards Lancelot is something only the demons in Hell can have a name for, something that should probably frighten me about my eternal salvation, if Lancelot did not deserve every breath of it.
The catalogue of slights Kay holds against Lancelot is nearly endless, surfacing again and again throughout the novel; it almost inspires the reader to put together some new triads. What underlies them is less directly expressed, albeit in danger of becoming as open a secret as Lancelot and Guenevere's adultery: that ever since her marriage to Arthur, Kay has loved his brother's queen past chivalry, past honor, past reason, all unspoken, and it has been seething in him for years that when finally the "most gracious [lady] in the land" took a lover, it was not Kay the churl she broke her vows for.
Command me, madame, I thought. Give me the word, and I'll cleave Mador's lying tongue into his breastbone, skull, helmet, and all. Let me save you again as I saved you on Humber bank, before any of us had heard of your French cock-a-dandy.
"Kay," she said, "find me Sir Lancelot."
And since the novel turns on Sir Mador de la Porte's accusation of Guenevere as the murderer of his cousin Patrise, and the mysteriously missing Lancelot as the only knight eligible to prove her innocent on the field of battle—while the evidence of Kay's eyes is unlikely to play the reader false, his interpretation is constantly thrown open to suspicion. We have the chance to observe for ourselves characters like Mordred, whose sardonic wit has curdled into a reckless spite he is hoping will get him killed before he can bring about his father's fated downfall, or Morgan le Fay, whose degree of treachery or goodwill remains a smiling cipher despite the aid she lends Kay, or minor figures like Nimue's husband Pelleas, whom Kay scorns as a romantic twit, but the Lady of the Lake loves deeply, but Lancelot himself never makes an appearance onstage. His exploits remain at divers second hands, where they might belong to either the flaunting hypocrite of Kay's jealousy or the flower of chivalry that the court is counting on. After a while, the reader begins to wonder if even Kay's thumbnail sketches can be relied on: what old humiliations or frustrations shade his views on Sir Gareth, or Merlin, or the Holy Grail? And then he says something both pragmatic and accurate, or unexpectedly backs down from biting someone's head off ("I will boast to my great-grandchildren of receiving an apology from Sir Kay"), and becomes as unstable to the reader as his own text. That's Phyllis Ann Karr's own virtue, not Malory's or Chrétien de Troyes', and the primary reason that against all expectations, The Idylls of the Queen has become one of my favorite Arthurian retellings, right up there with The Crystal Cave or The Winter Prince; which is not bad for a paperback I pulled on impulse off the shelves of The Book Rack because its author had written the lead story in Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword and Sorceress. I hope that would amuse her good Seneschal.
(And they call Kay the braggart of the Round Table.)
gaudior and weirdquark introduced me on Sunday. As a piece of Arthuriana, I am ambivalent about it, as it depends on an interpretation of Morgause that is closer to Elizabeth E. Wein than Thomas Malory; on the other hand, The Winter Prince is one of the premier retellings in the field, and it's a fantastic piece of music. I may look up the rest of the CD. It also reminded me that I have been meaning to write about Phyllis Ann Karr's The Idylls of the Queen (1982), which I was re-reading a few weeks ago and which retains the distinction of being the only Arthurian murder mystery I've ever read. There may be others, as there may be other versions which place Sir Kay front and center, but I haven't run across them yet: and in any case, I somewhat doubt their protagonists are as fucked in the head as this one. Spoilers for Le Morte d'Arthur?To be fair, it's less that Kay is such a fucked-up protagonist as that I have read very few murder mysteries whose detectives are such unreliable narrators. (I'll take recommendations.) The opening sentences signal both what genre we are in and the close eye we are going to have to keep on our narrative:
When Patrise put his head down on the table beside me and started groaning and twitching, my first thought was: and they call me the churl of this court.
Defensive, much?
Then the bloating became obvious—at least to me; I was sitting beside him. He hunched up with a half-choked cry and collapsed, his face still on the table, and suddenly I guessed that the dark stuff dribbling out of his mouth was not wine.
"Gouvernail," I said.
I suppose, since I did not shout or use sarcasm, the old squire failed to hear the exact tone of my voice.
And thus we are introduced to Sir Kay, who will guide us through a fifth century that only ever existed in the pages of chivalric romances, as a seemingly straightforward procedural rapidly complicates into a cross-section of knightly feuds and intricate bloodlines, from the Fisher Kings of Carbonek to the intrigues of Morgan le Fay to the five sons of Morgawse of Orkney. His intelligence and his competence are never in doubt; we have ample proof of his efficiency as seneschal, running a tight ship at Camelot as little as he is loved for it, and while his investigations into the murder of Sir Patrise are rarely inspired, as he himself concedes, Kay is not slow on the uptake, but a man who now gathers his facts carefully before making accusations, having more than once been on the wrong end of his own thin skin—the text is peppered with his quarrels and old fights, most of which he has lost. He's Arthur's right-hand man after Lancelot and Gawaine, the reliable foster-brother who rarely presumes on the privilege, but whose loyalty is unquestionable. He's also a fount of sarcasm, sharp-tongued and short-tempered, with enough chips on his shoulder to furnish the home fires for a year; he has a long-suffering relationship with his fellows of the Round Table, not so privately regarding most of them as glorious idiots more concerned with the appearance of honor than the actuality, and his name has become a byword for boorish behavior. See the epigraph to the novel, taken from Malory as are all the chapter headings: "I, Kay, that thou knawes, / That owte of tyme bostus and blawus . . ." In fact, we hear him boast of himself less often than he remarks caustically on the braggadocio of other knights, but years of putting his mouth before his money have left him with a reputation that still nettles him. "The world knows your tongue, Sir Kay . . . And the world knows your insults are meaningless, since you can speak nothing else." It's a judgment that cuts both ways. Certainly this Kay prefers honesty over politesse, to the point of rudeness; however unflattering, his assessments of his fellow knights' failings are often correct. But he is not the one truthspeaker in a world of fencing courtesy, much as he would like to believe so. There are two subjects on which Kay is not rational, and unfortunately they are intertwined with one another: Sir Lancelot and Dame Guenevere.
Dame Lore was wrong. I am not jealous of Lancelot. You can only feel jealousy toward someone for whom you have some kind of respect or affection. Jealousy is what I feel towards Gawaine. What I feel towards Lancelot is something only the demons in Hell can have a name for, something that should probably frighten me about my eternal salvation, if Lancelot did not deserve every breath of it.
The catalogue of slights Kay holds against Lancelot is nearly endless, surfacing again and again throughout the novel; it almost inspires the reader to put together some new triads. What underlies them is less directly expressed, albeit in danger of becoming as open a secret as Lancelot and Guenevere's adultery: that ever since her marriage to Arthur, Kay has loved his brother's queen past chivalry, past honor, past reason, all unspoken, and it has been seething in him for years that when finally the "most gracious [lady] in the land" took a lover, it was not Kay the churl she broke her vows for.
Command me, madame, I thought. Give me the word, and I'll cleave Mador's lying tongue into his breastbone, skull, helmet, and all. Let me save you again as I saved you on Humber bank, before any of us had heard of your French cock-a-dandy.
"Kay," she said, "find me Sir Lancelot."
And since the novel turns on Sir Mador de la Porte's accusation of Guenevere as the murderer of his cousin Patrise, and the mysteriously missing Lancelot as the only knight eligible to prove her innocent on the field of battle—while the evidence of Kay's eyes is unlikely to play the reader false, his interpretation is constantly thrown open to suspicion. We have the chance to observe for ourselves characters like Mordred, whose sardonic wit has curdled into a reckless spite he is hoping will get him killed before he can bring about his father's fated downfall, or Morgan le Fay, whose degree of treachery or goodwill remains a smiling cipher despite the aid she lends Kay, or minor figures like Nimue's husband Pelleas, whom Kay scorns as a romantic twit, but the Lady of the Lake loves deeply, but Lancelot himself never makes an appearance onstage. His exploits remain at divers second hands, where they might belong to either the flaunting hypocrite of Kay's jealousy or the flower of chivalry that the court is counting on. After a while, the reader begins to wonder if even Kay's thumbnail sketches can be relied on: what old humiliations or frustrations shade his views on Sir Gareth, or Merlin, or the Holy Grail? And then he says something both pragmatic and accurate, or unexpectedly backs down from biting someone's head off ("I will boast to my great-grandchildren of receiving an apology from Sir Kay"), and becomes as unstable to the reader as his own text. That's Phyllis Ann Karr's own virtue, not Malory's or Chrétien de Troyes', and the primary reason that against all expectations, The Idylls of the Queen has become one of my favorite Arthurian retellings, right up there with The Crystal Cave or The Winter Prince; which is not bad for a paperback I pulled on impulse off the shelves of The Book Rack because its author had written the lead story in Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword and Sorceress. I hope that would amuse her good Seneschal.
(And they call Kay the braggart of the Round Table.)
no subject
I am very glad you've found a copy: and it's not awful.
What other awesomeness did you discover?
Marion Zimmer Bradley makes me growly, as does Stephen Lawhead.
I have never read Stephen Lawhead. I file The Mists of Avalon with Parke Godwin's Firelord (1980) and Beloved Exile (1984), useful as early exposure to the polyphony of legend; I have no desire to re-read either any time soon. Oddly, I like Godwin's Robin Hood retelling, Sherwood (1991).
I've always loved T.H. White just because I grew up with it.
I should give The Once and Future King another try—I bounced when I read it first in middle school. In many ways The Sword in the Stone is not Arthuriana at all, but I am incredibly fond of it. I also read it at a very young age.
One of my favorite things to read, actually, is Arthurian short fiction. I like to see what authors choose to focus on, and how they distill their chosen part of the legend to what absolutely has to be there.
I assume you have read Jane Yolen's Merlin's Booke (1986)? It's fascinating because it is not a consistent story-cycle; she takes a different approach to each stage of the legend, so that its component stories and poems are always contradicting one another, not unlike a real-life epic tradition. She has since expanded some of them into novels, like The Dragon's Boy (1990) and Sword of the Rightful King (2004), but I prefer the short forms.
I'm currently in the middle of Jack Whyte.
Of whom I know nothing at all. Thoughts?
I think her version of the legend certainly comes much more into its own, and is much less derivative than it seems from any single piece of music.
I shall definitely look up the CD, then. Neat!
By the way, I've started the book, and I'm enchanted.
Yay!