Arthurian Fantasy, 1980-1989: An analytical and bibliographical survey. By John J. Doherty

Abstract

This paper examines the development of the Arthurian Legend in fantasy literature during the 1980s. It opens with a definition of the terms used throughout the paper, including a general definition of fantasy literature and the Arthurian Legend. It also includes a brief survey of Arthurian Fantasy from 1938 to 1979, in part to show the practicality of the definition of Arthurian Fantasy, in part to establish the context in which to look at the 1980s. It then discusses the works of Marion Zimmer Bradley, Gillian Bradshaw and Parke Godwin, and examines the influence of Mary Stewart on these works.
The next part looks at the works of Stephen Lawhead and Guy Gavriel Kay, contending that these novels are the first to introduce the concept of High Fantasy. This segues into the section looking at David Gemmell, a seminal fantasist who has breathed new life into the Arthurian tale by emulating the best of Stewart and the other authors examined. The paper finally looks at some short stories of the decade and wraps up with a conclusion that examines the decade and discusses the potential of the 1990s as the decade in which fantasy literature "comes of age." Also, included is an appendix providing bibliographic detail for 59 Arthurian Fantasy works.

I. Fantasy and the Arthurian Legend

Before looking at the Arthurian Fantasy of the eighties I must first define my terms: namely, Fantasy and the Arthurian Legend, which together will give an approximate, though general, idea of what is meant by the phrase Arthurian Fantasy. I will also look briefly at the Arthurian Fantasy from 1938 to 1979 in an attempt to show that, while the eighties has been the decade in which Arthurian Fantasy could be seen to have become a sub-genre of fantasy in its own right, it is still deeply indebted to these past forty years.

Fantasy

In order to define what fantasy literature is, one must first separate it from its sibling, science fiction (SF). As Richard L. Purtill notes, this can be difficult to achieve, and leads to a grand generalisation that "dies away in a flurry of qualifications" before the subject is "tactfully changed." [1] Purtill, however, makes a distinction in philosophic terms: science fiction, he says, is very happy with the Insulated View, which states that our minds are insulated from other minds and from matter apart from our body; fantasy, on the other hand, is more comfortable with the Primitive View, that our thoughts, desires or wishes can affect other minds or the material universe without direct intervention of our bodies. Where these two cross over, in the genre of Science Fantasy, is the Animistic View, stating that there exist non-material minds or spirits that can affect matter and embodied minds directly. [2]
What Purtill is saying echoes Tymn et al when they define fantasy and distinguish it from SF by the presence of the non-rational; events occur, creatures appear, places exist that could not "according to rational standards or scientific explanations." [3] It is these scientific explanations that form the major cut-off between SF and fantasy. In SF what we may view as non-rational phenomena are explained using " rational standards" that constitute the science of the Universe the story occupies. Put another way, SF involves a suspension of disbelief on the reader's part: the scientific explanations can be compatible with our science, but in some cases, such as time travel, the reader must be able to recognise that this, which is impossible by present standards, could be possible in the future, just as the internal combustion engine would have seemed impossible three hundred years ago. Fantasy, on the other hand, does not give any such scientific explanation that would fit in with the science that we know or could know. Thus C.J. Cherryh's 1982 contribution to contemporary Arthurian Literature, Port Eternity (PE), would be described as SF because the central concept of her novel, that of the "made people," or genetically engineered servants, is part of the rational science of the novel's universe:
my beginning was in a way different than birth. . .you spend a lot of time doing repeat work and a lot of time exercising and a lot of time under deepteach or just blanked. (PE, 6)
Space ships, an alien enemy and a strange knot in time called the Between, also contribute to making the novel hard-core SF.
Port Eternity is interesting to note here because it is the only piece of Arthurian Literature that has been able to adapt to SF. It is the story of a private space craft marooned in the Between and attacked by aliens. The crew of "made people" assume characters from Tennyson's Idylls of the King, playing out an Arthurian fantasy created by their owner, only to have it shattered when they are stranded. The Arthurian characters programmed into the made people gradually take over as the fantasy becomes a horrible reality. Cherryh's talent as an author is to portray the effects of stress on personality. Here she has given her characters artificial personalities from a work of literature, and the situation forces what is unreal to assume reality. It is a complex novel that can be confusing at times--mainly when the author loses sight of her theme and objective--but it works very well as SF and is one of the most original Arthurian works of recent times.
The SF element means that this novel must be excluded from this study of Arthurian Fantasy. If the same story had been written as fantasy it would never have worked--the space ship, the Between and the "made people" comprise a rational explanation that would destroy fantasy, by the definition given above. Patricia Keneally, in her Keltiad series, has tried to do just this, but her works fall into the crossover genre of Science Fantasy where magic and science, the rational and the non-rational, coexist in an uneasy alliance.
With fantasy thus defined as the presence of that which is non-rational even in terms of the story itself, it can now be noted that it has two main divisions, which may be called High Fantasy and Low Fantasy. The former is set on a secondary world where the non-rational is explained by using the natural laws of this new world; whereas the latter takes place on this, the primary, world, where the author tends to reduce the elements of magic and the supernatural because she has to limit herself to the natural order already well established for this world.
Most Arthurian Fantasies tend to be of the second genre, as they are set in the world of Dark Age Britain. In some, the fantastic is toned down so much that they become almost historical novels. Parke Godwin's Beloved Exile (1983), the second of an Arthurian series, which tells the story of how Guinevere attempts to hold Arthur's kingdom together after his death, would be excluded from this study because it is more of an historical novel than a fantasy. Its only claim to being fantasy is that the first novel of the series has many fantastic elements, but, as shall be seen later, these die with the main character.
Until recently there has been little Arthurian High Fantasy, but contemporary fantasists (as writers of fantasy have been named by the critics and academics who study the genre) such as Guy Gavriel Kay and David Gemmell have taken characters from the legend and put them on other worlds. Previously such attempts usually involved the names of the characters only, never the characters themselves. Kay and Gemmell have proven that it can be done, and more authors have tried to follow suit, among them Welwyn Wilton Kats (The Third Magic, 1988).
There are numerous sub-genres within these two genres. One, science fantasy, has already been noted. Andre Norton's Merlin's Mirror (1975), in which the author explains the powers of Merlin and Nimue as being the products of extra-terrestrial intelligence, belongs to this sub-genre, so cannot be included as Arthurian fantasy. Myth and faery tales are sub-genres in which retellings, and modern adaptations of old tales can be found along with traditional tales of the variety told by the Brothers Grimm. Gothic fantasy, a hybrid between the Gothic horror genre and fantasy is another sub-genre, as is adventure fantasy, sometimes called "sword and sorcery". Contemporary fantasists such as David Eddings and Stephen Donaldson have produced stories that combine all of these sub-genres, with the possible exception of science fantasy. Their works have become highly popular and are influential with both new and old authors.
Fantasy, therefore, is a tale in which the non-rational is present, usually as magic, set on this or another world. It is a combination of some or all of various sub-genres, and is highly adaptable to various others. With fantasy defined, I now must look at the more difficult task of defining what is meant by the Arthurian Legend.

The Arthurian Legend

The Arthurian Legend can truly be described as a living legend; at least a millennium old and it is flourishing, undergoing a revival that is without precedent in its long and varied history. Beverly Taylor and Elizabeth Brewer speak of the Arthurian legend as having been virtually rediscovered in the last century, and record about one hundred and forty pieces in their bibliography for the century. [4] Some recent writers have attempted to explain why there should be such a popular fascination with the reworkings of so familiar a story. Taylor and Brewer, for example, say that each age which has told and retold the stories use them to "express its own attitudes, ideals and anxieties" and Richard Barber comments that much of the enchantment of Arthur as hero has "stemmed from his ability to shift his shape in accordance with the mood of the age." [5] C.S. Lewis noted this ability, and in the light of this compared the legend to a cathedral that has taken many centuries and many builders to create:
I am thinking of a great cathedral, where Saxon, Norman, Gothic, Renaissance, and Georgian elements all co-exist, and all grow together into something strange and admirable which none of its successive builders intended or foresaw. [6]
All three agree that the legend is far from dead, and is, indeed, growing stronger.
In an overall view of the "cathedral" as we have it today, one can see a number of things about the legend immediately: it focuses on King Arthur, a noble and heroic person about whom are gathered the greatest of knights and ladies; who has had a mysterious beginning and an even more mysterious ending; whose childhood mentor and foremost adviser in the early days of his reign is the enchanter Merlin; and who has a sister, son, wife and friend who all betray him in some fashion, leading to his eventual downfall at a great battle, the last of many he has fought during his life. Quests are also common, especially for the Grail, which (if it appears) is always the supreme quest.
This is a very superficial glance at the cathedral of the legend. To try to define the limits of what one means by Arthurian Legend one must look at it in greater detail, for, as T.S. Eliot noted, literature is permanently altered by each great literary work:
The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. [7]
One thousand years of changing attitudes, ideals and anxieties, of shifting shape to fit the mood of the age, have left their mark on the legend:
One has only to sample a representative portion of it in Malory's book or to compare his account of the Grail quest with that of Wolfram von Eschenbach in order to realise that consistency, harmony, fixity are not its outstanding qualities. [8]
The foundations are lost beneath the great body that one thousand years have built up. Merriman, in summarising the mythic origins of the legend and the early Welsh matter such as the Gododdin or The Spoils of Annwfn, notes those characters and motifs that can be said to exist prior to the eleventh century: Gawain, Guenevere, Cei and Bedwyr; the wounded Grail King, the pagan warriors who are traditionally Arthur's enemies, the mortal wounding of the king by his nephew, and the tradition of his survival. [9] The first to build on these foundations, and the first of the two major influences on other Arthurian authors, was Geoffrey of Monmouth. It was he who, according to William of Newburgh (1198), "disguised under the honourable name of history, thanks to his Latinity, the fables about Arthur which he took from the ancient fictions of the Britons and increased out of his own head." [10]
Geoffrey's Historia regum Britanniae (c.1135) is, as its title proclaims, an account of the kings of Britain, from the legendary Brutus, descended from Aeneas of Troy, to Cadwalader. His section on King Arthur is the longest, filling more than a fifth of the book. Parry and Caldwell comment on the popularity of this section, and say that Geoffrey intended it to be so. That Geoffrey presented his work as fact may account in part for this, though the legend was widely known and popular at the time Geoffrey wrote.
The Arthurian section in the Historia starts at book vi, chapter 17 with the discovery of the boy Merlin, who is the first really otherworldly element in the book, which could be Geoffrey's way of warning the reader that his story is entering its most important phase. Arthur, however, is not mentioned until the end of viii 19, when Geoffrey tells of his conception, brought about as the result of Merlin's magic. Even though the tales of Merlin, Vortigern and the sons of Constantine, Aurelius and Uther Pendragon, come prior to this, Arthur's conception is the traditional start of the legend.
Arthur succeeds Uther when he is fifteen, and he fights twelve battles with the Saxon invaders to free Britain, in which he is aided by King Hoel of Brittany. He then marries Guinevere and sets about establishing his Empire by effortlessly conquering most of Northern Europe. When the Roman Emperor demands tribute, Arthur and his vassal kings and knights decide to fight him instead, and they depart for Gaul leaving the kingdom in the hands of Modred. When the Roman army finally meets Arthur and the Britons, there is a great battle that Arthur wins. As he prepares to march to Rome to receive the Imperial crown Arthur hears that Modred has usurped his throne, has spread a rumour that he is dead, and has announced his intention of marrying Guinevere. He returns home, attacks Modred at Camlann in Cornwall, killing him, but being wounded himself. Before being taken to Avalon so his wounds can heal, Arthur passes his kingdom on to Constantine.
Almost all the elements of the later versions of the legend are in Geoffrey's Arthur story. This was the framework that would be built upon by the writers who inherited the tale. His aim has been thought to be to glorify the Britons of old, while subtly attacking the Anglo-Saxons who gained control of the land from them. He also seems to be promoting the Norman claims, showing how Britain once held continental lands.
He incorporates most of the legendary matter and motifs, although not those about the Grail and the Grail King. The Grail does not appear until Chretien de Troyes's Le Conte del Graal (c.1191), and it is Robert de Boron in his Joseph d'Arimathie (c.1191-1202) who first specifies that the Grail is the cup of the Last Supper and a vessel containing Christ's blood. Two other major elements that are normally associated with the legend are also notably absent from Geoffrey's Arthur: the Round Table and Lancelot. The plenary court at Caerleon (ix,12) could be an early version of the Arthurian Round Table, and the role of Hoel would become that of Lancelot.
Beate Schmolke-Hasselmann traces the evolution of the Round Table in the legend, and says that it first appeared in Wace's Roman de Brut (1155), though, as she concludes, not in the form that it now has: a democratic device where no knight, not even the king, has precedence over his fellows. [11] Lancelot appears in the third quarter of the twelfth century, in Chretien's Le Chevalier de la Charrete. The emergence of the Romance, and of courtly love, gave Lancelot a prominent role in the tales that followed from Chretien, when the Arthurian stories began to concentrate on these attitudes and ideals. When the legend was Christianised, and the Grail became a part of it, Lancelot's love for Guinevere led to his downfall, and, subsequently, to Arthur's death. With the Vulgate Cycle (c.1215-1235) the two characters became inseparable from the legend, and the tragedy of the love triangle, adapted from the early matter to include Lancelot and courtly love, took on its final form.
The second of the major influences on Arthurian authors was Sir Thomas Malory, whose Le Morte Darthur was completed in 1470. [12] Of Malory's works Eugene Vinaver commented:
With great consistency...he endeavoured to break up the complex structure of his sources and replace their slowly unfolding canvas of recurrent themes by a series of self-contained stories.[13]
Le Morte Darthur is comprehensive and authoritative collection of Arthurian sources. The story, therefore, follows that of Geoffrey's Arthur, but uses the Romance stories quite extensively, adding in those elements that Geoffrey, in Lewis's phrase, neither intended or foresaw. It is Malory's Arthur that Merriman refers to as "the essential Arthurian story," for it combines all the elements from the Welsh matter as adapted by Geoffrey, through the Romances and the stories from the rest of the Continent. [14]
Malory's story begins with Merlin magically transforming Uther so the king can enter Tintagel and beget Arthur. Elements such as the Sword in the Stone, which first appeared in Robert de Boron's Merlin (c. 1200), the Round Table, the Grail quest and the adultery of Lancelot and Guinevere are all present. Malory also adds the story of Tristram and Iseult, a tale more Romantic in its tone than any of the others he tells, and which prefigures the tragedy to come. Malory differs from Geoffrey's tale in one other significant way, when he follows his Romance sources concerning the Arthur-Mordred affair.
In Geoffrey, Modred is Arthur's nephew, but not his son. It is the Vulgate Mort Artu (c.1215-35) that makes Mordred, as he is renamed, both nephew and son: the incestuous offspring of the king and his half-sister Morgause. This incest motif, however, does not appeal to Malory. He gives the events surrounding Mordred's conception the briefest of tellings, and seems to largely ignore him until the plot against Lancelot and Guinevere brings the character to the fore. Malory is more concerned with the adultery motif between Lancelot and Guinevere, although his devoting the middle third of his book to the Tristram-Iseult-Mark love triangle lessens the impact of the Lancelot-and-Guinevere adultery, and more or less buries the incest motif by barely treating it at all. The fact that it is there, however, and that it has an enormous potential for tragedy, meant that this would become a major part of the legend, and that it would, through the years, gain greater prominence.
Geoffrey of Monmouth, therefore, created the framework of the Arthurian legend, which was adapted by the Romance writers and embellished upon. Sir Thomas Malory took these stories, with all the elements popularised by the Romance writers, adapted them into what is now the definitive Arthurian tale. This briefest of looks at the legend as developed by the two most influential of its builders shows the truth of Loomis's statement that "consistency, harmony, fixity" are not attributes of the legend. How, then, for the purposes of this study, can limits be drawn on this Protean legend?
The story can essentially be limited to those elements that have already been mentioned. However, in the 1980-89 period, when more than forty-five separate Arthurian tales, in nearly sixty volumes, appeared in the fantasy genre, it would be practical to draw more detailed limits. Important though some texts may be, they have to be discarded as Cherryh's Port Eternity and other non-fantasy novels were. A reasonable criterion to begin with would be to exclude all texts that did not have a character or characters from the legend.
This automatically excludes texts such as Anthony Burgess's Any Old Iron (1989), which revolves around a search for Arthur's sword Excalibur; or the Keltiad series by Patricia Kennealy, consisting of The Copper Crown (1984) and The Throne of Scone (1986), which only has Arthur as an historical figure in a space-faring future, who had fought the space battle of Camlann and then disappeared. [15] Parke Godwin's The Last Rainbow (1985), although ostensibly the third part of an Arthurian cycle, would also be excluded, as the story is about St. Patrick's mission to convert the Irish. In it Patrick meets briefly with Ambrosius Aurelianus, only a minor, though important, character in the legend. Beloved Exile, the second in this series, has already been excluded for other reasons.
Thus the criterion becomes more precise: the character must be a major one from the definitive tales of the legend. The Eighties has seen the emergence of quite a few tales concerning Dark Age Britain, and a few Arthurian characters appear now and again. These are best left out because they make no sizable contribution to Arthurian fantasy, to which they only marginally belong.
Therefore Anne Thackery's Ragnarok (1989) can be excluded because some minor Arthurian characters appear in background roles. The same is true for Gail Van Asten's The Blind Knight (1989), which tells of Uther, Merlin's brother, and a knight called Mallory. Arthur appears in this tale, but only in a very minor role that has no significant part to play in the plot. Arthur also appears in Joel Gross's The Lives of Rachel (1985), which is a series of tales of the past lives of a modern day woman. As his appearance is so brief it must be considered minor. It only serves to portray Rachel as having been his lover.
David Gemmell's two novels dealing with Uther, Ghost King and Last Sword of Power (both 1988), however, should be included because in these tales Uther's role is that of Arthur, while he is surrounded by characters such as the Lance Lord (Lancelot), Maedhlyn (Merlin), Laitha (Guinevere), and Gwalchmai. This, therefore, is a further qualification of the criterion: if a major character appears by another name, the text should be included. Guy Gavriel Kay's The Summer Tree (1986) is full of mythological symbology, the most prominent being Arthurian. The character Jennifer is later revealed, in the second novel of the series, to be a reincarnation of Guinevere, so this text should remain.
As can be seen from the brief account of the legend, there are a number of things that are just as important as the characters: the Round Table, the Grail, and the adultery and incest motifs. In any Arthurian story, with very few exceptions, in which the characters appear these are never very far away. The limits set on the Arthurian Legend for this study, therefore, shall be the appearance of major characters in a tale that echoes Geoffrey, Malory or both, with the elements and motifs both have laid down. There are, of course, some exceptions, as even these limits must conform to the legend's lack of consistency Loomis noted. Kay's The Fionavar Tapestry trilogy is one such exception; in this series some of the elements that I have drawn attention to above are not present. I shall return to this series later, and say why it is so important in Arthurian Fantasy.

Arthurian Fantasy 1938-1979: A Brief Survey

With the terms now defined I will now briefly look at the Arthurian fantasies of modern times, leading up to the period I shall be studying in more detail in the sections that follow. Modern fantasy is thought by some critics of the genre to have come into being in the late 1930's, specifically in 1938 with the publication of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. At this time the most popular of the twentieth-century Arthurian works, T.H. White's The Once and Future King, began its long process of publication.
This series is one of the best conceived fantasies of the modern period, but it has often been mistaken as a child's novel due to the tone of the first installment, The Sword in the Stone. White "creates a wondrous world where childhood dreams of high adventure are fulfilled in deeds such as the rescue of Friar Tuck from a fairy castle." [16] Immediately evident, however, is that White is not aiming at ordinary historical accuracy. He deliberately uses anachronistic objects, among other things, to help him tell a good story. The tone darkens in the later novels as Arthur becomes increasingly disillusioned in his attempts to create a peaceful world. The tragedy of the legend is very well drawn here, and is all the more powerful because the bright and wondrous atmosphere of the first instalment is not to be found at the end, when an old Arthur sends his page Malory away from the destruction that is about to befall his world.
C.S. Lewis was another author to use Arthurian characters in his works during this period. His That Hideous Strength (1945) has the powers of good fighting through human agents in a present-day university town (not unlike Oxford) devastated by science gone awry. Merlin is brought back from his long sleep to be a power that either side can use, though it is apparent that he will side with Dr. Ransom when Ransom is revealed to be a reincarnation of the Pendragon.
Arthurian fantasy went through a lax period for the next fifteen to twenty years, with fewer than twenty separate texts published between 1945 and 1960. Rosemary Manning's The Dragon's Quest (1961) and John Brunner's "Father of Lies" (1962) were indicative of the new form of Arthurian fantasy that emerged in the sixties: they were aimed at children. Quest is the sequel to the anthology Green Smoke (1957), which had stories telling of a 1,500 year old Cornish dragon and had only a few Arthurian episodes. In the sequel we are given a novel-length account of the dragon's adventures at Camelot. Brunner's story, later expanded to a novel of the same title (1968), could be considered science fantasy, if not for the fact that the fantasy in the secondary world is very real, with no rational explanation offered for it within the context of the world.
Rosemary Sutcliffe's historical romances for children at this time certainly contributed to the growth of juvenile Arthurian fantasy, but one major work of this period, Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising series (1965-77), which has been overlooked by some Arthuriana bibliographies, was certainly a major influence also. This series seems at first to be a mundane children's adventure, but as it progresses the story begins to reveal more fully the vision the author is conveying: courage in the face of great adversity always defeats the Dark. The story revolves around a group of children who have certain tasks to perform to aid the Old Ones, a group led by Merlin, in making one last stand against the Dark. The series concentrates on the roles of the children, and the Arthurian characters and themes become secondary to this.
With the seventies came an upsurge in Arthurian fantasy. The number of texts produced each year began to climb steadily, and is still doing so to this day. One author, Mary Stewart, was very influential to others of this time and to authors of the early eighties. I shall return to Stewart in the next section. Also appearing in this period were Vera Chapman's The Three Damosels trilogy (1975-6) and Victor Canning's trilogy The Crimson Chalice (1976-8). Both novels owe more to the romantic traditions they attempt to emulate (they are traditional accounts of various parts of the legend), but the magical elements of such romances lead me to include them here.
The influence of Mary Stewart tended to mean that more historical novels began to appear in the latter part of this decade, but fantasy began to reassert itself with David Drake's The Dragon Lord (1979), in which an Irish warrior fights for Arthur against the Saxons. This is a poor, sadistically violent novel that is not indicative of the fantasy that would follow in the next decade.
Roger Zelazny's 1979 short story "The Last Defender of Camelot" (LDC), however, is a more worthwhile addition to Arthurian fantasy, and, like White's novels, it gives the reader a very individual portrait of Merlin. In the story Merlin wakens from his long sleep, and is eager to set right wrongs, and punish the wicked in a modern day world. Lancelot and Morgan Le Fey, however, prevent him, for, as they have discovered:
Today, in an age of monstrous weapons, with the right leader as his catspaw, he could unleash something totally devastating. (LDC, 279).
Arthurian fantasy has grown in the forty years since T.H. White's The Sword in the Stone. After a slack period, it has been rescued by juvenile fantasy and Mary Stewart. In the eighties, however, it would take on an altogether greater prominence in the field of Arthurian Literature in general.

II. The Influence of Mary Stewart on the Early Eighties

Mary Stewart is the most taught Arthurian novelist after T.H. White. [17] It is interesting to note that both novelists have such highly individualised portraits of certain characters, and the influences of both can be felt today mainly because of their original interpretations of the legend that others have attempted to follow. Stewart's Merlin trilogy concluded with The Last Enchantment (1979), although she added a further volume to her Arthurian epic, The Wicked Day (1983), narrated by Mordred. The popularity and instantly recognisable merits of these novels led the Arthurian fantasists of the early eighties to follow her methods and approach.
What Stewart has done is to modernise the legend to bring it into contemporary literature. Her novels are grounded in historical fact in a well-realised fifth-century Britain; thus they would seem to belong to the historical genre. Yet by choosing Merlin as her narrator Stewart has written a fantasy series. The fantasy comes from the magic that surrounds the figure of Merlin, and it is made all the more prominent by the author's attempts to rationalise it whenever she can, because those instances when Stewart cannot do this stand out in the reader's mind by their rarity. She has also created women who are strong, original, self-willed characters that seem to belong in an historical Dark Age Britain. Her Guinevere is the first example of the Queen being portrayed as genuinely sympathetic.
Stewart's major theme is of destiny and fate. Her Merlin is constantly speaking of his god, and the role he has to play in a future that is already written. The influence of Stewart in this respect, and her method of using historical fact as background for her fiction, can be felt especially in Marion Bradley's The Mists of Avalon (1982). Stewart has also heavily influenced another major Arthurian fantasist of this period: Gillian Bradshaw, Down the Long Wind (1980-2). Parke Godwin's Firelord (1980) has been influenced indirectly as it follows the tone of the period that can be said to have begun with Stewart.
Bradley's The Mists of Avalon (MA) is considered by some to be the major Arthurian novel of the decade. [18] Thomas D. Clareson comments that it "provides a new perspective of the Matter of Britain," though he does add that she could have done some extensive editing. [19] The new perspective Clareson speaks of is Bradley's departure from the conventional form of the Arthurian narrator, usually Arthur or one of his knights. When one reads more of Bradley's work, however, this comes as no surprise.
Bradley is a leading SF and fantasy author, with a preference for the latter mode. She is also a feminist and a leading exponent of equal rights for women. This can be seen quite clearly in her 1977 novel The Forbidden Tower (FT), in which the protagonist has had to renounce her sexuality in order to enjoy the power her magic brings:
When she was trained as a Keeper, Callista was taught techniques which prevented her from being capable of--or even aware of-the slightest sexual response. . .her whole sexual system [was] made non-functional so that she could use her body as an energy transformer. (FT, 161-2)
The novel is the story of her struggle to free herself from this, to be in control of her sexuality as well as her power.
This theme, and its underlying feminism, is also present in Mists. Morgaine, the primary narrator and character, is very similar to Callista. Yet where Callista denied all her sexuality, Morgaine has acknowledged hers. Like Callista, however, she must give it up to her power. It is because of this that much of the tragedy of the novel unfolds. In the end Morgaine is as much a victim as Arthur whom she betrays. Her intolerance of his rejection of the Pendragon banner and Avalon for the banner of the Virgin Mary and Glastonbury Abbey echoes the intolerance of her Christian counterparts, such as the Queen and her vehement opposition to paganism.
Morgaine's power is that she reflects all the forms of her goddess: maiden, mother, wise woman, and dark queen. It is as we watch Morgaine go through each phase that we learn the story of Arthur. The very length of Mists suggests that Bradley has attempted a full rendition of the legend. That she did is not in doubt; that she may have been too ambitious is. Mists has all the elements of the legend already noted in the previous chapter, though some, such as the Round Table and the Sword in the Stone, are referred to but never developed.
These last two elements, of course, involve Arthur more than any other character. In Mists he is never more than a secondary character at best, and it is because of this that these elements are lessened. Our views of the king come from the women who narrate, and although he is the most complex male character in the novel, we never learn of his thoughts and feelings. Although Bradley brings the many opposing conflicts of his character to the surface, they are never explored because he is held at such a distance. As a minor character he is reduced to a background role, but this does not necessarily make Mists a poor reworking of the legend. Many characters may have minor, though eventful roles; the Grail is present, although in a much revised form, and one of the main narrators is a figure from the legend that could be made to be as important as Arthur: his Queen, Gwenhwyfar.
Since the character of Arthur is viewed at a distance we get an early impression of an idealised, romanticised figure, greatly resembling Stewart's Arthur. It is not until later, when Morgaine elaborates, and Gwenhwyfar narrates, that we learn how human he is. The same is true for Gwenhwyfar. We are first introduced to her as a young girl who has stumbled into Avalon from the convent in which she is being brought up:
[S]he seemed all white and gold, her skin pale as ivory just stained with coral, her eyes palest sky-blue, her hair long and pale and shining through the mist like living gold. (MA, 180)
Of all the women in the novel she holds the most material power and yet, paradoxically, she is the most unfertile, being unable to bring a pregnancy to full term. For Bradley this is a symbol of Gwenhwyfar's narrow-minded Christian beliefs which she has imposed on all around her, including Arthur.
It is this that causes Arthur's downfall, so Bradley keeps faith with the legend that Arthur's queen proves to be his bane. In an original touch, however, Bradley asserts that it is not the Queen's adultery with Lancelet [sic] that dooms Arthur, but her conversion of him to Christianity. By rejecting the goddess of Avalon, Arthur forces Morgaine to betray him and bring him down, in accordance with the oath he swore when he took up his sword and the Pendragon banner on the magical isle.
Thus in this novel, the action revolves around the deeds of the women. The plans of the Avalon priestesses and the quiet but intense convictions of the Christian Queen are at odds most of the time. Their interaction forms one of the main themes of the novel. Yet, even though these are the apparent strengths of the novel, it is because of them, and the unconventional narration, that the novel fails.
One of the reasons for this is that Bradley, by allowing her feminist attitudes free reign, has given the reader unconvincing portraits of Dark Age women. Although Bradley did not have to write within an established historical context, because Low Fantasy is not committed to historical accuracy as a general rule, her novel has encouraged the reader to believe that it is an historically accurate picture of the Dark Age. Therefore, such anachronisms do detract from the novel, and from the author's implied approach. The most noteworthy of a number of historical inaccuracies present is that her characters have distinctively twentieth-century attitudes. Compared to Stewart, Bradley has failed in her attempts to recreate the minds, emotions and environments of Dark Age women.
Another reason for its failure is the length. Bradley is guilty of what many Arthurian fantasists are increasingly doing: attempting to retell the legend in as much detail as possible with as many original touches as they can create. Stephen Lawhead is another such novelist, but I will return to him in the next section. Both these novelists use the legend as propaganda: Bradley for feminism, Lawhead for religion. Both pad their works with unnecessary passages to try to promote their views. This is, of course, what the legend has been used for throughout its history, but in nearly every period of the Arthurian Legend, with the probable exception of the Victorian period, the story itself has been most in demand, and in modern fantasy this is particularly true. As J.R.R Tolkien, who is considered by some to be the father of modern fantasy, says, "most people that have enjoyed The Lord of the Rings have been affected by it as an exciting story; and that is how it was written." [20] In any period of literature the "message" of the story is most effective if it emerges from the story itself, and least effective if it is separately argued by the narrator. By using the latter tactic these authors irritate readers who would otherwise have been open to the implied message of their stories.
The Mists of Avalon, therefore, is a much over-rated book. Bradley does succeed in a number of places in giving the reader an enthralling account of the Arthurian Legend, but she tries too hard to incorporate her own ideals and attitudes. It has other formal weaknesses too. Though it incorporates nearly every piece of the legend, it is too ambitious a work for one volume. Moreover, although using Morgaine as the main narrator is a highly original and very promising idea, Bradley herself undermines it when she has Morgaine relate events of which she could have no knowledge. Morgaine herself comments on this:
As I tell this tale I will speak at times of things which befell when I was too young to understand them. . .I have always held the gift of Sight, and of looking within the minds of men and women. (MA, x)
Such an explanation, while in keeping with the fantasy of the novel, is contrived. Charlotte Spivack, speaking of a similar device used by Stewart, comments that this is unconvincing. She attributes this to "the strain of the first-person narrative." [21] Mists was clearly an influential novel in the eighties, and if present scholarship continues to praise it blindly, it will remain so.
Gillian Bradshaw's Down the Long Wind (DLW), although less praised, is a much more compelling Arthurian fantasy. Published originally in three parts, Hawk of May (1980), Kingdom of Summer (1981), and In Winter's Shadow (1982), it first began as a university course project prior to 1977. This date suggests that Bradshaw's trilogy was completed before 1980, but the fact that it made its first appearance in the eighties, and that it reflects the changing face of Arthurian fantasy during this period, justifies its inclusion here.
The central theme to the trilogy is the struggle between Light and Dark, personified in the narrator of the first novel, Gwalchmai, and his mother, Morgause, respectively. Arthur is not allowed the role that is given to Gwalchmai--he is, rather, seen as an obstinate fanatic. Arthur's fanaticism is his over-zealous battle against the Dark. It is never in doubt that he serves the Light, for Gwalchmai's magical sword does not reject him. His obstinacy, his continuous self-created guilt over his incest with his sister, tears deeply at the heart of the battle for Light, finally contributing to its eventual defeat.
Bradshaw is a lot more down-to-earth than Bradley. Her trilogy is "a vitally serious and moving account of the great Arthurian story, not mere sword and sorcery." [22] All the elements of the Arthurian story are present, with few exceptions. The role of Merlin is clearly taken by Arthur's chief bard, Taliesin, who is one of the few survivors at the end. Yet he only seems "other-worldly" in the novel, and never acts in a way that the traditional Merlin would. It does seem that Bradshaw has deliberately omitted the greatest figure of magic in the legend so as to emphasise the magic that surrounds the figure of Gwalchmai.
The story is also firmly grounded in Dark Age history, reflecting the philosophy and theology of that time. In her notes to Hawk of May the author states:
The historical background of this novel is partially but by no means entirely accurate: I have used some anachronisms and made some complete departures from what little is known about Britain between the Roman withdrawal and the Saxon conquest. (DLW,269)
In this way she follows on from Stewart, and could have used the Merlin trilogy as part of her source material: "For the legendary background I have drawn ... on everything Arthurian written up to the present."(DLW, 219) The fantasic elements, however, do not derive from Stewart, as they are more overt and less rationalised.
The building sense of tragedy is very reminiscent of the Morte Darthur, and comes to a climax in the final novel, In Winter's Shadow (IWS), narrated by Gwynhwyfar. The sympathetic portrait of the Queen in Stewart's work, that Bradley has done little to develop, is better here, and has since become the foundation for many other authors' portrayals of the Queen. She is another, albeit reluctant, cause of Arthur's downfall. It seems that the curse noted by Rhys, Gwalchmai's servant, that the servants of the Light aid the Dark in destroying it, is the source of all the evil in the novel. It is strikingly articulated by Arthur's despairing question "Why must we love the Light so much when we are bound to work its destruction?" (IWS, 138)
It is this evil that destroys the aspirations of Arthur and Gwynhwyfar for a better world. These ideals are best reflected in Gwalchmai, who is the story's personified form of Arthur's empire. His ascent from darkness through the Kingdom of Summer and into the Light parallels the trials of Arthur as he attempts to gain the throne. His quest for Elidan becomes a catalyst for the gathering of the forces against him. Morgause seeks to destroy him; his servant Rhys is captured; and he is rejected by Elidan, never having learnt that he has a son. These episodes emphasise the background details of the growing unease within the Family, Arthur's knights. The opening of the second novel calls attention to this discord, and also brings the idea of the curse to the reader's attention for the first time, with the words of Sion to his son Rhys:
They will fail. . .They are trying to fight darkness when they have too much darkness in themselves. Not so much Gwalchmai, nor the Pendragon, either, but do you think the Family is made up of such men? (DLW, 330)
The rumours of treachery, madness and matricide attach themselves to Gwalchmai in the final novel. Forced against his will to fight for his honour and the stability of the Family he is shunned by the growing faction of malcontents. When he learns of his son and greets him he becomes happier than he ever was, until the adultery of Bedwyr and Gwynhwyfar is discovered and his son is killed in the ensuing skirmish. His need for revenge plunges Gwalchmai into darkness, reflecting the darkness of the empire infected with Medraut's lies and the adultery of the two people Arthur most loved and trusted. The darkness culminates in the final battle, which in turn is superseded by the Light of Taliesin's song of hope for the future, just as Gwalchmai's personal battle against the Darkness is won when he regains the Light as he dies. Through its death the empire was reborn to live on in the minds of men.
Bradshaw's trilogy is firmly grounded in fantasy, and owes a great deal to the modern renditions of the legend. Although not as original in concept as Bradley's Mists, the trilogy has much more to offer as a highly skilled integration of various traditional and modern sources to produce a Malorian tragedy. The increasingly sombre tones of the novels are not lessened by the conclusion, but they are put in perspective. Destiny has dealt its final cards, and the characters have to learn to live with their hands.
In the end it is realism that is the tone of these novels. The fantasy, the non-rational magic, has died with Gwalchmai. Arthur is not carried off to Avalon--he dies in a cavalry charge, his body trampled by the horses and no longer recognisable. The novels are Arthurian fantasy that let the fantasy die with the Arthurian ideal. The world of Gwynhwyfar in her convent narrating her tale is the bridge between the fantastic and the historical realism of the post-Arthurian world:
It is neither the austere primitive world of Stewart's. . .Merlin trilogy nor the dashing chivalric world of Chapman's Damosel trilogy. Rather it is the intellectual world of the Middle Ages, with its many conflicting ideologies through its vivid characters. [23]
In the final chapters the trilogy focuses on the heroic struggle of Arthur and Gwynhwyfar, and on their greatest achievements against the Darkness, thus somewhat lessening the tragedy.
Parke Godwin, in Firelord (F), also writes of the triumph and tragedy of Arthur. His narrator is the king himself, on his deathbed, "So many miles from Camlann, where nobody won but the crows." (F, 1) Again the story is as factual as the author can make it, and as historically accurate in its background details as Bradshaw or Stewart. The main difference is the author's portrayal of Arthur: a dreamer, whose inspiration is his vision of a bright future. In a highly original touch, Godwin's Merlin is part of Arthur, or rather the part of him that is his dreams.
Yet for all its seriousness, and the inherent tragedy of the story, Godwin deliberately makes light of everything. Arthur is able to laugh at himself; he sees the humour in every situation for, as he believes, that is the way to view life:
Young Brother Coel who writes [this testament] for me is very serious about life, but then no one ever told him it was a comedy.(F, 1)
It is this philosophy that Arthur carries with him through his life. An honest narrator, he tells of everything--his own youthful arrogance is well portrayed, and it is only purged when the Merlin aspect of his character takes him to the world of the Picts, or the Prydnn.
It is here that Arthur marries Morgana and begets Modred. Happy though he is, Merlin forces him to pay a price he is unwilling to pay--he has to return to the real world of Britain and claim his throne. Arthur, therefore, learns the first real lesson of his life: that all must be sacrificed for his bright vision. The otherworldly sense of these scenes with the Prydnn give the novel its fantastic elements, with the dreamlike figure of Merlin being the novel's main source of magic.
Arthur learns from Morgana and the Prydnn the value of love, and he brings this back with him when he returns to his old life. He begins to treat all those around him with the utmost compassion, thus forming the basis of his legend. As Arthur tells his story all the elements of the legend are revealed, but from what he sees as his reality:
I want to write of us the way we were before some pedant petrifies us in an epic and substitutes his current ideal for ours. As for poets and bards, let one of them redecorate your life and you'll never be able to find any of it again. (F, 2)
Godwin, however, has other ideas. While his narrator clearly keeps to his promise, the author paints another picture of him: that of a Christ-like demi-god.
The compassionate king has a final price to pay: his life. It is a price Arthur willingly accepts, as Christ had done before him:
To be a king, to wear a crown, is to know how apart and lonely we are and still exist and dare to love in the face of that void. To crown your brow with knowledge as sharp as thorns, bright and hard as gold. (F, 319)
To his subjects he is a god, and so has to fulfil the traditional pattern of the life of a hero-god: first to be hailed and loved, then betrayed and killed, and then have his people "feel remorse with the twice-crowing cock." (F, 319) All this would seem to suggest that the novel eventually, like Bradshaw's trilogy, becomes very sombre in tone, but the bright optimism at the novel's conclusion denies this suggestion. Godwin has shown the splendour that can be created by vision and dream, and, at the end, when all seems lost, the dream returns with the strength of legend behind it. A lesson has had to be learnt, and though Arthur joyfully does so, he still has the bitter knowledge that the poets and pedants will destroy his dream for all time.
Thus, Mary Stewart influenced these major Arthurian fantasies in two ways. Her Merlin trilogy, with its theme of destiny and its fateful hand, is clearly a precursor to the novels examined here, though these three novelists have approached the theme in different ways. Also, historical fact, clearly an over-riding concern with Stewart, was just as important to these authors, though they did not try to make their fantasy fit into their rational, historical worlds in the way she did. Godwin, whose novels are more a case of simultaneous evolution than anything else, became much more concerned with the history in his later novels. The fantasy in the novels examined in this section was, in fact, concentrated on the main characters, much as the fantasy in Stewart's novels was concentrated on Merlin. Her Merlin, however, did not take his magic to his grave--he passed it on to Nimue. With Bradshaw and Godwin, however, the magic, the non-rational fantasy, dies with the central characters, and the magic in Bradley's novel is replaced by the highly rational Christianity. This death of fantasy was not the shape of things to come, for the legend was to enter the genre of High Fantasy.

III. The High Fantasies of Lawhead and Kay

The promise that Bradshaw and Godwin offered for the eighties had not been satisfactorily fulfilled by 1986, when two authors emerged with the first Arthurian High Fantasies of the decade. With High Fantasy entering into Arthurian works the concern over historical accuracy was no longer necessary, and the entire area of Arthurian fantasy was to develop along new lines, until David Gemmell came along and reasserted the need for history to complement the fantasy. I shall be returning to Gemmell later.
Stephen Lawhead spent one year in Britain researching his Arthurian story that would become the transitional work of this period between the two genres of Low and High Fantasy. His Atlantis, his imaginary world, is destroyed in the first book of a tetralogy The Pendragon Cycle. [24] The Canadian fantasist Guy Gavriel Kay, with his debut series The Fionavar Tapestry, was writing at the same time as Lawhead. Kay has written with the Canadian fantasy tradition in mind, but he is notable because he is the first of the contemporary Arthurian fantasists to write solely in the High Fantasy genre, though he sacrifices a lot of the legend to make his novel work. Like Kay, Lawhead also writes within a tradition, that of religiousness, which has been used quite extensively by Arthurian authors throughout the legend's long history. These traditions are all the more conspicuous because they are present in two such transitional series.
Religion has been a prominent part of SF and fantasy from the early 1960's. That it took so long to develop into a major theme in these fields was due to the reluctance on the part of SF and fantasy authors to confront issues such as religion and sex. The relaxed atmosphere of the sixties was the ideal environment for the more audacious authors to approach these issues.
These authors display an inclination towards three features of "religious imagination", defined by Adam J. Frisch and Joseph Martos as fundementalizing, or reducing reality to its "most essential features;" ultimatizing, or looking for and pronouncing upon "the bottom-line meaning and value of life;" and moralizing, or "the way religious imagination seeks to describe the ethically good life." [25]
James Blish's A Case Of Conscience (1963), the anthology Dangerous Visions (1967), the 1967 short story "Faith of Our Fathers" by Philip K. Dick, or Harlan Ellison's Deathbird (1975), are among the pioneers in this growing area of SF and fantasy. All reflect the three features noted above, and Frisch and Martos conclude that:
If religious consciousness fundamentalizes reality, ultimatizes values, and moralizes about human behaviour, and if religious imagination pictures such realities, values, and behaviours in myths and parables, then it certainly seems that a good deal of science fiction is a product of religious consciousness and imagination. [26]
This would certainly seem to be the case with Lawhead. His two-part series Empyrion (1990), in which the apparent antagonists, the Fierra, are revealed to live every moment in the presence of God, is very hard to read. This is because of the constant religious symbolism that contributed to the overall lack of plot development and a narratorial ineptitude, for its existence is an indulgence of the author, who spends a lot of time in expanding them rather than getting on with his story. With The Pendragon Cycle this religiousness is slowly released on the unsuspecting reader: Taliesin (T), the first in the series, is a well written action fantasy and little else. However, by Arthur (A), the author's use of religious symbolism brings the plot to a virtual standstill. The final volume, Pendragon, returns to the tightly plotted style of the original novel, but it is a re-hash of the story of Merlin (M) and Arthur.
Published over a three-year period (1987-1989), the first three novels are nearly 1500 pages long. As such they are notable as the longest of the Arthurian fantasies, though Nikolai Tolstoy's Books of Merlin promise to be much longer. Unlike Tolstoy's novels (the products of a lifetime's study), Pendragon suffers from the same malady as Bradley's Mists: unnecessary padding.
Lawhead's novels, like the earlier Arthurian fantasies of this period, deal with destiny. Here, however, destiny is in the shape of an immortal Atlantean, born of the Princess Charis (a survivor of the destruction of the fabled continent) and the mysterious, otherworldly Taliesin. This instrument of destiny is Merlin, and the latter two novels are his story, with Arthur's being told as an aside. It seems likely that the third novel of the trilogy, Arthur, had originally been planned as two novels: one telling the rise of Arthur to the kingship; the other telling of his years as king. This can be seen in the role of Merlin in the final novel, for he no longer seems to be the prophet that the earlier parts had portrayed him as; in this part of the series the destiny that Merlin was the instrument of has been fulfilled in Arthur's realm. It would have made more sense in making this narratorial split between Arthur and Pendragon, rather than have them tell the same story from two narrative points-of-view.
Taliesin contains most of the High Fantasy of the series, with almost half the story taking place in a well-realised Atlantis, where the war leading up to the destruction is described in vivid detail. It is the story of Charis and her father Avallach. He is wounded in the war and left to die in a most horrific way which leaves him mentally and physically wounded for the rest of his life. Avallach thus becomes the Fisher King, the mystical guardian of the Grail in Arthurian legend. Here, however, he is a man haunted by his sins and totally committed to God in the way he had been previously committed to the war that had wounded him.
Charis is quite unlike her father. She is the narrator of the novel and will later assume the role of the Lady of the Lake, a figure from the legend as mysterious and mystical as the Fisher King. At the beginning, however, she is living an idyllic life that, with its constant mentioning of apples and apple-groves, evokes images of Eden. In a sense Charis is the Eve to Taliesin's Adam, and Merlin, their offspring, becomes the "Soul of Britain," (M, 273) the protector and conscience of all the people. The serpent of evil has already entered this Eden, and Charis becomes a victim of her father's war, banished to another kingdom and forced to risk her life in the name of religion and entertainment in a bull ring.
Charis also tells of the finding of Taliesin and of his growth to manhood while learning of the druidic rites and the coming of the Darkness. These two characters are fated to meet, as Taliesin's vision of her in the lake indicates. Apart, they are learning the lessons that they will need before they are finished with their battles against the Darkness. For Charis her lessons are much more harsh, much more realistic and true to life, for it is she, not Taliesin, who must carry the vision of the Kingdom of Summer through her long life and endure all the trials that God puts before her, her son, and the warriors who fight the Darkness. Taliesin's lessons, on the other hand, are on the spiritual plane, where he is gifted with the vision of the Kingdom of Summer, and with the talent to be able to sing of it to others:
I have seen a land shining with goodness where each man protects his brother's dignity as readily as his own, where war and want have ceased and all races live under the same law of love and honour. (T,468)
His death at the end of the first novel, when he willingly gives his life for his son's, is, therefore, not too surprising. The vision has been called into being and his widow, Charis, has been prepared to teach it to the Champion who will work to make it a reality.
Taliesin has prepared the way for Merlin, the most enigmatic and fascinating figure from the legend. With its growing sense of turmoil and strife, the novel also prepares the reader for the total collapse of society, and for Arthur's role in restoring order. Yet it also does one other thing: it has, to use the term adopted earlier, reduced the reality of Atlantis and, most especially, Dark Age Britain to its most essential features. Taliesin has fundamentalized or has defined good and evil in its most simple, mythopoeic terms and set the scene for their confrontations in the novels to come.
Merlin is, in every sense of the word, a transitional novel. It charts the life of the enchanter from his childhood at Ynys Avallach to the birth of Arthur, and the Sword in the Stone. All aspects of the Merlin legend have been included--his kingship, his madness, his battle prowess, his bardic talent, and his guidance to Aurelius and Uther that leads to Arthur's birth.
Early in the novel, however, the words that Taliesin spoke on Merlin's birth colour the reader's perception of the enchanter's role:
Look upon him, lords of Dyfed; here is your king! The Dark Time is coming, friends, but I hold the light before you. (T, 487)
The role that is later to become Arthur's seems to belong to Merlin in this volume. The first part of this novel continues to uphold this suggestion, as we watch Merlin grow both spiritually and physically into a king with the power to scare the minions of the Darkness. Merlin's legendary madness puts an end to these days of kingship and begin his days as counsellor.
Before he emerges from his madness, however, Satan himself approaches Merlin and tempts him in much the same way Christ was tempted in the wilderness just before He began His mission: Christ was offered all the kingdoms in the world in return for His homage (Matt. 4.8-9); Merlin is also offered this:
Come with me, Myrddin, together we could make you the greatest emperor this world has ever seen. You would be rich beyond all riches; your name would last forever. (M, 227)
Like Christ, Merlin does not succumb, and he returns from the wilderness of his madness to find his disciple, Pelleas, waiting for him. He is now ready to fight his battles; like Christ, he fulfils the words of Isaiah:
The people that lived in darkness have seen a great light; light has dawned on those who lived in the land of death's dark shadow. (Matt. 4.16)
And, also like Jesus, he has a message to proclaim: the Kingdom of Summer is at hand. Merlin, once its Champion, is now only its prophet, as the title of the final part of this novel indicates.
These biblical allusions are indicative of the growing religious tone of this series. From the point when Merlin comes out of the forest where he had spent the years of his madness these allusions become more prominent, and the religious tone begins to take over the story. Merlin also realises the second of the features of religious imagination noted already: it has sought for, and pronounced upon, the basic meaning of life. Lawhead believes this to be faith in God and the ability to love in the face of great adversity. He illustrates this by showing Merlin keeping faith with God even in the depths of his madness, and retaining the love for his murdered wife as his guiding force. For Merlin, in madness, life became meaningful in that he once more learned that he was the instrument of God's will. Destiny and fate, God's plan, have taken over and the battle that is to come, the emergence of the Kingdom of Summer from the Darkness of strife, is God's way of building a beacon of Light in a sea of Darkness, much as the sacrifice of His Son was a similar weapon in a similar battle.
Arthur begins with the fifteen-year old Arthur drawing the sword from the stone. The opening of Pendragon is intended to fill the gap between Arthur's birth and this event that the last section of Merlin does so well. The other kings and nobles, however, refuse to believe that Arthur is the one chosen to be their High King, as happens in legend, and it is only Merlin's intervention that gets Arthur elected as Warleader. Arthur, as the Warleader, has many battles to fight, but he does this in two stages--he first fights his fellow Britons and then the invading Saxons. This two-stage war is interrupted first by the breaking of the sword he drew from the stone, and then by a stay at Ynys Avallach, where he gets a new sword, and a vision to fight for:
You have given me a sword. . .And now you have given me the vision with which to use it. . .With the help of God and his angels, I will do it. I will establish the Kingdom of Summer. (A, 153)
When he takes up his new sword he first offers peace to all his enemies, and soon he has all Britain in his hand.
The plot, however, has slowed down somewhat. The early promise of the first novel, with its fascinating blend of High and Low Fantasy, of Atlantis and Dark Age W