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Bright as iron, swift as arrow, strong as oak. I am the land
Yesterday I woke up to the news that Robert Holdstock had died. He was not one of my formative writers, but one I resonated with: I discovered him in college, the summer I was unofficially teaching Latin at Belmont Hill and walked home past the same tiny used book store every day; they had the U.S. paperbacks of Mythago Wood (1984) and Lavondyss (1988) and their covers of masks and granite outcroppings must have caught my eye, because I kept picking them up, reading stray lines of prologue and weighing their weirdness, unsure whether they would be as wild and rough-barked as I was hoping or merely another iteration of crystally Celtic twilight. They were not the latter. My memory tells me that the school year had started by the time I finally brought Mythago Wood home and that I read Lavondyss by falling snow, but perhaps I associate the books so strongly with their presiding seasons that the story has changed inside my head. He wrote one of the three truest autumns I know. I am not pleased there will be no more in his timeless, blood-bronzed, shape-changing forests.
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I like that it became an archetypal text for the handling of the mythos of England. That was very appropriate.