I asked four authors who have used “the Matter of Britain” - the King Arthur stories - either directly or loosely in their own work about why and how they chose to do so. Below, you’ll find the thoughts of Lev Grossman (LG), Lavie Tidhar (LT), Nicola Griffith (NG), and Alix E Harrow (AH).
1.You each chose to write a story based in the Arthurian mythos, which suggests there is something about it that still appeals in the 21st century. What is it about this set of stories that still resonates today?
LG: Resonates is a good way to put it. One of the funny things about the Arthur story is that although it has remained recognizably the same story for about a thousand years, its meaning has changed over and over again. It’s a sensitive instrument: when you tell it, it somehow registers the world it’s being told in, and becomes about that world.
So when I started in on Arthur I found myself sort of tapping on bits of the story to see which ones were being activated by our world. And lots of bits were, but a big one was the issue of empire and its aftermath. Colonized populations, refugees, marginalized and erased cultures—they’re everywhere in the world now, and when you look through that lens they’re all over Arthur’s story too. He was a Celt, resisting the colonizing Anglo-Saxons, while himself still carrying the imprint of Rome’s 350-odd-year-long colonial occupation of Britain … the cracks run right through the Round Table and right through Arthur himself.
LT: I’m ashamed to say I never had any interest in Arthurian stories, beyond knowing the usual - Camelot, sword in the stone, lady in the lake, Monty Python, etc, I think there was a European-Japanese anime back in the 80s I can vaguely remember… I’ve told this story before, but basically what happened was that I was asked to step in last minute to teach a British Fantasy Fiction course at my old university, and I had to teach a three-hour session on Arthur. So I quickly crammed in as much as I could, only to realise that a) the entire thing was a sort of early shared-world fan fiction universe (with each subsequent author adding something new - a Round Table, Camelot, Lancelot, the Grail in its various permutations etc) and, b) that the entire plot of the story was basically the Godfather. It was just the rise and inevitable fall of a mobster. I couldn’t figure out where the chivalry played into it! It was just this horrible story - there’s a very funny (I hope!) moment in By Force Alone where Galahad is trying to explain it to some aliens (no, don’t ask) and they just Do. Not. Get it.
There is also the nationalist element of it - Arthurian fiction really came back at the height of the British Empire, and it’s being used today by white nationalist groups (my old professor’s done a whole research book about it, which is fascinating). So I would have had to tackle that head on!
But all I really did at that point was google it, as I was sure someone had already done my version of the King Arthur story and so I wouldn’t have to, but I couldn’t find it, and couldn’t understand why. So at that point I figured I’d have to write it myself. Which has never been my intention!
I would also say that perhaps there is still interest in the Arthurian mythos today but, if so, my own version of it mostly failed to find it! Which I pretty much suspected. I was actually in the middle of writing it when a certain publisher turned it down saying people didn’t want this, they wanted the “warmth and nostalgia” of the original tales. Which I thought was funny enough to write directly into the book!
“They just don’t understand. He wants to convey to them the warmth and nos-fucking-talgia of the tales. The glory of it all! The... The fucking chivalry! But they don’t fucking listen, do they. They make him question everything. As though it’s all so awful, this story of Arthur, just a sad, simple tale of violence and greed.”
Yeah… I regret nothing.
NG: Like Lavie, I, too, regret nothing—though for diametrically opposed reasons. (Also, Lavie, have you read Henry Treece’s The Great Captains? It was the first Arthur story I read that portrayed an absolutely-not-a-hero Arthur.)
I was eight when I read Malory's masterly synthesis of Arthuriana and fell in love with the Matter of Britain—that story cycle of myth and legend about the origins of Our Glorious Island Nation. These days I know better than to accept the British exceptionalism and pernicious supremacism that’s baked into this particular National Origin story. Yet I still love the essential story. That's because, for me, the stories of Arthur are inextricably bound to the land itself, the natural landscape marked with human habitation: the Neolithic trackways and Roman roads, Bronze Age barrows on the brow of the hill, menhirs emerging from the mist. For me, these aren't really stories of knights and kings but of lakes and forests, moorland and marsh and mountain all running with the wild magic of the landscape. I loved that. What I didn't love was never seeing people like me move through that landscape: no crips or queers (except to signify evil), no Black or brown people (except as being terrifying warriors because their blackness was, y’know, terrifying), no real women (apart from tropes), no poor people (except as comic relief) and so on. (And on.)
So like Lev I knew the story was always broken. I knew I could never write anything in that mythos that was both the kind of thing I like to write and still *felt* Arthurian.
Not everyone’s a landscape fan, though, so why does it appeal to everyone else? Two reasons. First, let’s go back to this idea of place—only now I’m not talking about the natural landscape but about Camelot—and Camelot not just as a physical place but as an idea. Camelot as a state of mind, a condition outside reality whose heroes fight not because of their Nietzschean will-to-power—acknowledged or not, religious or otherwise—but who, rather, battle for a dream of truth, justice, and equity under the law. In this sense I’m guessing most of the people I would like to know really wish Camelot had existed. And what makes it enduringly attractive is that, on some level, some of us fight for it to exist, every day.
Second, let’s take another look at the Matter of Britain as a national origin story. Like all such origin stories it is closely allied to myth: cosmogony, and so, inevitably, eschatology. Arthur is born and creates for one shining moment a place/band of companions/ideal/dream of justice, knowledge, equity, and goodness for all. But Arthur's need to defend the moment/people/idea/dream leads inevitably to his death, and therefore the fall of that one shining momentary dream. And, in turn, the death of the dream creates the space, and fertile ground, from which the seed of the next dream will spring. In the ending is the beginning; what goes around comes around; it's the circle of life 🎶 That is, the Arthurian legend is the first and most basic mythic story—Demeter and Persephone; the death and resurrection of Christ/Mithras; the loss of Eden; Inanna; Osiris… It is the essential cycle of death and rebirth: light from the dark, life from death. Once and future.
AH: I am, of course, a fraud in this conversation, having not really written an Arthurian book. Mine is sort of like if T.H. White and Edmund Spenser got left for a long time in the same drawer of the fridge with Alanna: the First Adventure. Which gets a little bit at your question: why was I, a kid in rural Kentucky in the 90s, so obsessed with knights and knighthood? Why was I so happily eating the re-heated leftovers of British nation-building?
I see my own obsession as part of our broader, cyclical obsession with the medieval--not the actual medieval (god forbid!) but the medieval fantasy we've constructed and reconstructed over the last thousand years or so. It serves as a sort of shared hallucination, full of things that never existed (a rightful king, a just war, a white ethnostate). But it's also full of: pretty great stories. Those mythic elements Nicola mentions--death and rebirth, heroism, betrayal, injustice, magic; the elements of our own lives and times, at a scale and distance where we can begin to make sense of them. We keep returning to the Arthurian mythos because it's a myth--and what's a myth, but a story we can't quit telling?
2. You also each chose a particular aspect of the Arthurian mythos - a character, event, broader idea - to play (mess) with. Why did you make the choices you did?
LT: I tried to cram all of them in. It’s amazing. At one point I needed a cat. Why wasn’t there a cat! And then, of course, it turns out that there is a cat - a monstrous one called Cath Palug. So in it went. I did terrible things with the Green Knight and I really messed about the Grail, turned the Lady of the Lake into a sort of Medieval arms trader (based off of a story Ben Aaronovitch told me about how Medieval swords ended up in the bottom of rivers - for all I know this might pop up in a Rivers of London book, in which case, I definitely stole it from Ben, for the record). Merlin was fun, as was eliminating the Six Kings in a manner meant to echo the Sunshine of Your Love / Layla montage from Goodfellas (“months after the robbery, they were still finding bodies all over”). I was surprisingly faithful to the early renditions of much of it, and did an afterword that made me sound like I knew what I was talking about, but it was smoke and mirrors and handwaving. Adios, Arthur, and all who ride with him.
LG: My experience was somewhat similar, to the extent that when you take up Arthur you end up having to take positions and declare your allegiances on a whole slate of characters and conventions. You have to fill out the whole ballot. In a lot of cases I did feel that travesty was warranted if not unavoidable. Merlin, for example – I love Disney Merlin, he is my spirit uncle, but unless you want to throw out a whole lot of canon, Merlin’s behavior towards women is repellent at best. Travesty for him.
In other cases I had to put my finger on the scale, because they can’t all be shits. I let Arthur off the slaughter of the innocents for example—I just skipped it. In general I was much more sentimental about Arthur than Lavie was. I wrote a draft where he was a boor—drunk, horny, not very bright—Robert Baratheon, basically. The problem I ran into is that when I did that the story stopped feeling Arthurian. Once my Arthur stopped being good, or at any rate stopped striving for goodness, he stopped being Arthur.
And I left out the cat. Though I was tempted. (Arthur mentions that he once owned a cat, but it is now in hell.) I also tried to make it all funny. And diverse.
But if there was a big swing in THE BRIGHT SWORD it was probably the decision to keep the cameras rolling after Arthur’s death. Like Lavie I wanted to move beyond the brief-shining-moment nos-fucking-stalgia. What’s the story of the survivors—the people who have to do the hard labor of keeping everything going after the lights have gone out? Is there some way to move this story beyond weepy tragedy and into something more almost postapocalyptic – make it not just about nostalgia and mourning, but also about survival and building something new? Per Nicola: life from death. Once and future.
NG: Okay. This is a long story. I’d just got an email asking me to contribute to an anthology of ‘race-bent, queer-inclusive’ Arthurian short fiction (SWORD, STONE, TABLE—some great stories in there; my favourite being by Nisi Shawl) and said no (because I didn’t think it could be done). Besides, I was working on MENEWOOD, deep into research trying to work backwards to potential early-sixth century Brythonic toponyms that I could then gently morph into plausible seventh-century Old English place names. Coincidentally—well, okay, probably more about the reticular activating system than coincidence—during that research I stumbled upon a whole sub-genre of philological arguments on the origins and/or existence of Arthur, Merlin and others.)
Anyway, just as I was about to plunge back into actually writing MENEWOOD I got a second email about this anthology. I opened my email intending to say no, again—my fingers were poised over the keyboard—when into my head dropped this image: a figure in tattered armour, holding a red spear and a broken sword, leading a bony horse through the woods. And, just like that I knew how to combine Arthurian legend with Welsh history and Irish myth—without all the nativist baggage. [Chortle.]
The figure in my vision was not a person of privilege. That bony gelding, for example, spelled poverty, or at least a sense of mix-and-make-do. And though the figure carried a splash of red—like the fifteenth century Sir Percival—their armour wasn’t medieval plate but leather sewn with horn panels: something from a much earlier era. But, Red, I thought. Red…
Written mention of the Arthurian hero most people know as Sir Percival begins in Welsh, stories told in Brythonic which became Primitive Welsh and were perhaps first written down in the Old Welsh of the sixth century, in a poem about Peretur, a northern prince. Then it morphs—via Latin, old French, Middle Welsh, and Middle High German—into Malory’s Middle English tale of the familiar princely knight in red armour.
The figure, then, had to be Peretur, from sixth-century Wales. Which was perfect—not only because the sixth and seventh century is my favourite period but because I wanted Wales: Dyfed, west Wales, specifically. In the fifth century, after Rome, the Irish raided Dyfed repeatedly, and eventually ruled it. So Dyfed could plausibly be linked to legends of the sidhe or Tuath Dé and their Four Treasures: the cauldron, the sword, the stone, and the spear.
The first three treasures, in the guise of the Grail, Excalibur, and the stone Excalibur is pulled from, fit very neatly into Arthurian legend. The spear, though? On first glance? Not so much. However, on one of those philological deep dives for MENEWOOD I’d learned just enough to convince myself that the name Peretur could stem from two Welsh words, bêr, which means hard or enduring, and hyddur, which means spear. So Bêr-hyddur, Peretur.
So Peretur/Percival’s story was doubly perfect—actually, triply perfect. In Welsh tales he is brought up in nature in seclusion by his mother. De Boron has him raised by his mother in the forest ‘ignorant of the ways of men’. In almost all versions he is a naïf, poor, and relentlessly teased by Cei/Kay. Plus, here’s the thing: if you’re raised away from any kind of social interaction, you grow up without any socialisation: everything you feel and do is just fine, something to be proud of, because no one has told you differently. So Peretur could grow up big and strong, capable and competent; she could like girls and have absolutely nothing in terms of money or status; and she could have zero clue that any of this might be frowned upon by anyone else. She is perfectly self-confident, and because she’s bigger and stronger and faster than anyone else in the valley it seems natural to her to be a protector. Even before she leaves home she is a wide-open, full-throated, delighting-in-her-strength hero who treats everyone of every variety as a human being worthy of her consideration. She’s the embodiment of all things knightly. Of course, being a demi-god helps.
AH: Only the very earliest, ugliest scraps of The Everlasting had any actual Arthurian characters. Very quickly I realized I was trying to wrestle the folklore into the shape of the book I wanted to write, which was stupid and also impossible. So there are only...pieces of it left. Some jokes, for the nerds. Echoes, for all of us who've grown up on the remixes and remakes and reinterpretations.
One of those echoes is, I think, that grand, knightly heroism that Nicola and Lev are talking about. That was the part of these stories that always hooked me right under the breastbone–this lone figure on the hillside, loyal and noble, brave and strong, etc. It was also the part that felt the most fiercely gendered, totally inaccessible to me. 90s girl power rhetoric was happy to tell me I could be a doctor or a CEO or an astronaut; but I only ever wanted to be the hero.
3. Are there parts of the story (character, theme, event) you’d like to see explored in future?
LT: I will say this firmly tongue-in-cheek, but it is my fervent wish to never see Arthurian fiction ever published again, and I had thought that writing By Force Alone would convince everyone of that. Clearly, I failed! But I have to admit I did have a pretty good time writing it.
LG: I have a feeling that Arthurian fiction is like most genres in that when you strike it down it only gets more powerful.
There were lots of things I personally wanted to do but was somehow unable to cram into a 600-page novel. (I had a moment of despair when I realized Nicola had done everything I wanted to do and more in Spear in ⅓ the pages.) I would’ve liked to have written a proper requited gay love story for Bedivere, who mostly just does a lot of hopeless longing. I skimped on Gawain, even though he’s probably the most interesting of the heavy hitters—I never did figure out why he came to Camelot, given that he’s a pagan from the North whose parents despised Arthur. Possibly he was engaged in some kind of deep psy-ops.
It feels like there aren’t many unturned stones in Arthur. Though probably it’s always felt that way. For anybody worrying that Camelot’s local train terminal has been insufficiently explored, I refer you to John M. Ford’s undersung masterpiece “Winter Solstice, Camelot Station:” “Camelot is served/By a sixteen-track stub terminal done in High Gothick Style … “
P.S another shout-out to that incredible formative anthology SWORD, STONE, TABLE, especially Maria Dahvana Headley’s story “Mayday.” One reason I wrote BRIGHT SWORD is because I wished I’d had a story in SWORD, STONE, TABLE.
NG: Ha—flattery will go a long way, Lev! But one of the reasons I was able to do so much was that there’s so much well-known story just there, floating in the cultural ether, that I could just jump into my fully-formed version of Camelot without bothering with origin stories and most readers would be able to orient themselves quickly. And if they didn’t, that was perfectly okay, too, because you can read the story as non-Arthurian and it still makes sense. It just makes more sense with the weight of the legend dragging along underneath the waterline.
As for trying to kill the story, it’ll never happen, unless and until we kill hope. Which to me is the absolute opposite of what I aim for in my work.
I think there’s a lot going on right now with reimagining the legend people with more various characters—poor folk, crips, queers, people of colour—though I admit I’d love to see more of that in the traditional ‘Dark Ages’ setting, mainly just because that’s what I like.
What I would love to see explored but haven’t so far is the story’s historicity explored in fiction. Alix’s THE EVERLASTING has done a brilliant sort of meta-version of this in her secondary world setting, but/and I want to see someone do it with our-world stuff: Gildas, ‘Nennius’, Geoffrey, Chrétien… I dither a bit about Malory, partly because I tend to lose interest once we hit the era of printing presses and written laws, etc., but mainly because he didn’t really add anything new to the legend, just streamlined and rationalised the rather, ah, stochastic mishmash of what went before, which is why his version is the one I really remember, why his version is what most of us might think of as canon (given that the entire legend is and always has been one giant fanfic). That and the fact that his version was written not long after Gutenberg and Caxton had figured out the printing press.Timing is everything.
Having said that, now I want to go do that exploration of Arthur’s historicity, go explore the legend in terms of the time/place of its creators. Of course, it would feel like cheating if I didn’t first let readers witness the end of the Camelot/Caer Leon I created, complete with the who, how, why, and what next. So, hmmm. I have some work to do…
AH: I am going to answer calmly, as if Nicola Griffith did not casually mention my book. Everyone act natural.
Oh, I'm greedy. I want it all! I want total camp (Guy Ritchie's King Arthur: Legend of the Sword) and vaguely chivalric bodice rippers (Laura Kinsale's For My Lady's Heart) and clever subversive retellings (Sword, Stone, Table: Old Legends, New Voices) and YA adventures (Tracy Deonn's Legendborn). I can't wait to read H.G. Parry's The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood and I hope (fervently) that Nicola writes three more books in the world of Spear! I like so much that there are pieces of these stories I still haven't paid attention to, angles I haven't considered. I have a tattoo of Excalibur, but shattered (stupid of me; everyone thinks it’s Narsil) specifically to remind myself that every old story gets broken and reforged over and over.
LT: I was just reminded to come back by our excellent editor, and delighted to read the conversation, where everyone has been a lot more thoughtful than I was! I will admit, re: Lev’s point on the After-Arthur-Dies story, that I fervently loved Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, which does it so beautifully. And Nicola, although I’ve lived in England for a long time now, I’m not, weirdly, enchanted by the land. Or should it be the Land, to quote Clute?. It’s just not my landscape, and I treat it with some suspicion, though I did have to follow through, foolishly, on having done Arthur by writing a book called The Hood, which essentially took John Clute’s definition of the Robin Hood story to heart (Robin as the Green Man, Maid Marian as the May Queen, it’s magic all the way down, and there are some very disturbing stories in the Child Ballads. I like that absolutely no one but Clute ever thought this was the Robin myth). Woods are creepy, and I don’t trust trees. (Seriously. If you’re ever in Australia, you can visit the Curtain Fig Tree, a 500 year old parasitic strangler fig. Shudder). Moan as I’d like about the Arthur story, it has endured for a thousand years, and if young Merlin hadn’t changed his shape into an old bearded guy just to be taken seriously, would our wizards ever look the same? Whence Gandalf, whence Dumbledore et al? And without Robert de Boron’s grail, would we have had Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? Would we have had… The Da Vinci Code?
Imagine a world without The Da Vinci Code.
NG: Please, oh pretty please, let us not end on The Da Vinci Code!
Lavie, oh, yep, forests are dangerous places--and at the same time the source of so much sustenance in early times; and still, of course, those places that literally change our brains when we spend time under the trees. They are temples of fear transmuted to awe (and transmuted again into stone in all those soaring cathedrals). The lovely difference about growing up in Britain vs most places is the scarcity of predators and poisonous plants; it’s easy for us to forget how dangerous the wild is, mostly because so little of Britain these days is.
How about we all write a TV show about the spaceship Excalibur, the last, lonely outpost of knowledge moving through the void. Camelot in space. All set to stunning needledrops, the epic anthems of every era…