I wish you cozy time by a fireplace today, book in hand, as the snow falls. You might consider settling in with The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman, a retelling of the legend of King Arthur that received rave reviews when it came out last year. I’ve been immersed in it myself the last few weeks.

Here is Grossman’s historical note on his novel:

The very first appearance of King Arthur anywhere in literature is probably a passing mention in Y Gododdin, a Welsh poem that may (the dating is hazy) have been written as early as the late sixth century. Y Gododdin is a collection of elegies for fallen warriors, and it describes one of them as follows (the excellent translation is by Gillian Clarke):

Blazing ahead of the finest army,
he gave horses from his winter herd.
He fed ravens on the fortress wall
though he was no Arthur.

The poet didn’t have to say which Arthur he was talking about. Everybody already knew.

Since then Arthur’s story has been told and retold for 1,400 years, and it’s never been told quite the same way twice. Every age and every teller leaves their traces on the story, and as it passes from one hand to the next it evolves and changes and flows like water. By the time Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote Historia Regum Britanniae in the twelfth century, already half a millennium or so after Y Gododdin, Arthur had been promoted from mighty warrior to king. Geoffrey was the first to supply King Arthur with a royal wizard named Merlin and also a traitorous nephew—not yet son—named Mordred. A couple of decades later the Norman poet Wace added the Round Table; the French poet Chrétien de Troyes added the Holy Grail and the adulterous love affair of Guinevere and Lancelot; and so on. Arthur didn’t spring to life fully formed, he was deposited in layers, slowly, over centuries, like the geological strata of a landscape. It’s one of the things that makes him so rich and compelling. It also makes him, from a historical point of view, a complete mess.

If there was an actual historical Arthur (a debate I have no business being anywhere near), the consensus seems to be that he would have lived in Britain in the late fifth and early sixth centuries, after the departure of the Romans and before the Anglo-Saxons completed their takeover. He would have been a Romanized Briton, meaning an indigenous Celt who’d retained some of the ways of the Roman colonizers. He would have won fame as a general, fighting off the encroaching Saxons.

But the Arthur of our collective popular imagination comes primarily from versions of the story written a thousand years after that, in the high medieval period, by authors who weren’t much interested in historical rigor. A historically accurate sixth-century Briton wouldn’t have fought in plate armor, because there wasn’t any in Britain at that time. He wouldn’t have lived in England, because England didn’t exist yet (England is named after the Angles, one of those Germanic tribes Arthur was fighting so hard to keep out). Likewise he wouldn’t have competed in tournaments or lived in a castle, and if he did it definitely wouldn’t have been Camelot, which was also made up by Chrétien de Troyes in the twelfth century. He couldn’t have known Sir Palomides, because Palomides is a Muslim, and Muhammad wasn’t born till around the year 570. This Arthur—the Arthur of Malory and Tennyson, of T. H. White’s The Once and Future King and the musical Camelot—is a loose mash-up of a thousand-odd years of British history.

There are amazing writers—Mary Stewart, Bernard Cornwell, Nicola Griffith—who have stripped away that high medieval gloss and taken Arthur back to his sixth-century roots, with proper period armor and weaponry and culture and geopolitics. Then there’s the other kind of writers, who want to have it all, the Dark Ages king and the pretty high medieval trappings, Camelot and all the rest of it, who pick and choose what they like from history and sweep the messy bits under the rug. I’m that other kind of writer, and The Bright Sword is that kind of book. It’s full of a lot of authentic historical detail but also a lot of anachronisms and contradictions.

I stick to the facts wherever possible. Sixth-century Britain really was a chaotic place where all sorts of tribes and kingdoms and peoples and cultures were jostling and grinding against one another in an unmappable scramble. It was a postcolonial place, still reeling from the aftershocks of occupation and littered with literal and metaphorical Roman ruins. But in other ways I’ve tinkered with or ignored the historical record. Not only have I kept Sir Palomides, I’ve given him a backstory that starts in Baghdad, even though Baghdad wasn’t founded till 762, more than two centuries after the historical Arthur would’ve died. The knights, or most of them, fight in high medieval armor with high medieval weapons. The place names are a salad of Roman and Brythonic and even Anglo-Saxon; the archbishop of Canterbury should really be the archbishop of Durovernum, or of Cair Ceint, but it doesn’t have the same ring. I’ve also included a reference to blueberries, which—I know, I know—are a New World berry that would’ve been unknown in Europe in Arthur’s time. This is a tribute to my late father, who thought it was funny to pronounce the name Bleoberys that way. Don’t @ me.

It’s messy, but the messiness is, I would argue, an authentic part of the Arthurian tradition. It’s always been there—I don’t imagine Malory or Tennyson sweated much over their world-building either. The Bright Sword is a dream of medieval Britain, where disparate elements from different periods mingle and fuse in ways they never did in the real world, and that dreaminess, that woven texture, has always been characteristic of Arthur’s world. His ability to pick up bright shiny bits and pieces along the way as he goes cantering through history is one of the secrets of his eternal youth. He’s always transforming, but somehow we always recognize him for who he is. Nations come and go, and centuries, and traditions, and kings, and writers, but King Arthur always returns.

All photos from Finland, December 2024

Categorized in:

Fiction

Tagged in:

,