The first mentions of King Arthur go back to ancient Welsh poetry, dated anywhere from the sixth to the tenth centuries. There have been a dozen or so (possibly more) retellings in the last few years alone. In The Bright Sword, Lev Grossman vacuums up seemingly every variant of the story, from the Prose Tristan (c. 1230) to Le Morte d’Arthur (1485) and Chrétien de Troyes (c. 1130-1180) among others. He riotously revels in their many contradictions, doublings, and additions to present us with a wildly entertaining but also thoughtful remix.
Our entry point into this particular Arthurian world is Collum, a young boy from Mull in the far north (that is, modern-day Scotland) who has left his unhappy life as a bullied and abused kid in a lord’s household and is heading toward Camelot. He hopes to become one of the hundred knights of the Round Table. On his way, he has an encounter with a knight that doesn’t end well for either of them. Worse, when he arrives at Camelot, he learns that he’s too late: from the reader’s perspectives, Collum has arrived at the end of Arthur’s story, not the beginning. The Grail Quest is over but not before it has decimated the Round Table. Lancelot and Guinevere have been accused of betraying the king and chased to France by Arthur, who has had to turn around and deal with a pretender, Mordred, usurping the throne in the king’s absence. When Collum arrives in Camelot, then, Mordred and Arthur have already killed each other in battle.
Now Britain is kingless. Guinevere is in a nunnery, Lancelot has disappeared, and the Table is down to only a few survivors: Bevidere, Arthur’s best friend; Palomides, a Muslim from Baghdad; Dagonet, once Arthur’s Fool; Constantine, Villiars, and Dinadan. As the book progresses, two other knights show up as well: Scipio and Kay.The rest of the book focuses on this group’s attempt to find a new king for Britain, which is already falling apart in Arthur’s absence. They are joined in this quest by Nimue, Merlin’s former apprentice, and are at times opposed, at times aided, by Morgan le Fay, Arthur’s half-sister, a sorceress in her own right, a leader of the fairies in the Otherworld, and someone staking her own claim to the throne. Guinevere, Lancelot, and Merlin, along with other Arthurian characters, make appearances as well.
Structurally, the book moves back and forth in time in episodic nature. The main narrative follows Collum and the others on their quest for a new king, which leads to a series of sub-quests, such as finding another Round Table knight who survived the battle with Mordred or journeying to the Otherworld. This present-time plotline is interrupted throughout by backstories for the knights. The novel therefore mirrors the episodic structure of many of its oldest predecessors, with the grand narrative of Arthur moving through becoming king, ruling, and dying, all peppered with digressions detailing a series of knights’ tales.
Grossman borrows more than a structural scaffold, though: he’s also a promiscuous literary thief when it comes to events, pulling from a wide range of sources while making no effort to smooth out any inherent contradictions or anachronisms. In fact, he seems to glory in them, having a lot of fun with how befuddlingly convoluted the legendarium has become. This confusion belongs not just to the readers. At one point, for instance, Sir Constantine complains, “I can never keep them straight … between Excalibur and the sword in the stone.” If two swords are confusing, how about two Ladies of the Lake?“I lived under the lake for seven years,” explains Lancelot at one point. “It was the Lady who taught me how to fight … I can see your brow wrinkling, Collum, so before you ask. She wasn’t the same Lady who gave Excalibur to Arthur. Lady of the Lake was her title, not her name. There must be lots of Ladies.” Yes. Yes, there are. And apparently lots of Morgans, as well (or perhaps one Morgan with a bewildering range of behaviors). Certainly Collum has a difficult time meshing the one he meets with the one he’s heard so much about:
Collum could not quite make out who he was dealing with. Was it possible that Morgan le Fay wasn’t really as bad as people said?The stories about her couldn’t all be true; certainly the number of knights who claimed to have been seduced or ravished by her was so large as to be physically impossible. And some of what she got up was just mischief . . . But there were worse stories . . Supposedly it was Morgan and the queen of Northgalis who boiled Elain of Corbenic alive for five years before Lancelot rescued her. And it was Morgan who stole Excalibur’s magic scabbard, the one that kept Arthur’s wounds from bleeding. But why not kill Arthur outright? It couldn’t be that hard for an enchantress.
Similarly, Sir Dinadan is “more irritated than confused” when it comes to trying to credit Arthur’s alleged removal-while-still-alive-to-Avalon and his alleged death-followed-by-burial-in-a-marked-grave and the claim that he is alive-or-maybe-dead-but-either-way-expected-to-return:
“I don’t understand … Either he went to Avalon, which doesn’t exist, and he didn’t die, or he didn’t go to Avalon and he died and he’s buried at the chapel. But then if he didn’t go and he did die then why does the [grave]stone say ‘will be’? What the ‘will be’ if he’s already dead and buried?”
For anyone seeking a singular “Story of Arthur,” this is a riot of confusion. But part of Grossman’s point seems to be that a completist’s goal is a fool’s journey. Arthur has never had a single story after that first mention in the ancient Welsh poem. Ever since then, people have tacked on what they will: new characters (Lancelot, Galahad, and so on), new concepts (chivalry, Romans), new plot points (a big green giant, the Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot triangle), more swords, more Ladies, more endings. A rolling stone may gather no moss, but a rolling Sword in the Stone gathers a veritable forest of story. This is why the legendarium has become one of the world’s most enduring set of tales. And also why those who complain about modern retellings that amp up female or non-white characters, or even make some of them out of whole cloth, are only showing that they don’t really understand the legend whose “fidelity” they’re allegedly protecting.
Story in fact is the key theme that runs throughout The Bright Sword. Stories are what led Collum to Camelot: “[The blacksmith] brought with him a deep fund of stories about the knights of the Round Table … They lived in a warm, safe world … rich with strength and love and fellowship, where evil was great but good was greater … That was the world Collum wanted to live in … It was only after he heard those stories that for the first time he actually wanted to be a knight.” And stories are what comfort him in his journey: “It was a good story. It made him feel better. Stories were good for that, they smoothed over the gaps and sharp edges of the world.” The characters also have a sense of themselves as characters in a story, adding a strong metafictional aspect to the novel. During one of their experiences, Author asks Bedivere: “What shall we call this? The adventure I mean? ‘Of the Red Knight’? ‘Of the Four-Gated Castle’? ‘Of the Stolen Hind’?” Likewise, Collum also has an awareness of himself as a character within a tale, noting at one point that “Adventures were quick and exciting when you heard about them, but when you were inside one they happened very, very slowly.” And later, after an encounter with Morgan, he sorrows that “She was one of those vibrant people who seemed to be part of a more interesting story than he was, and when she left she took it with her and left him behind in the dreary margins.”
Similarly, Bedivere feels himself to be a minor character, well aware he “would only ever be the companion—faithful Bedivere, always there to back up the leading man, ready with a bit of wry wisdom maybe, but not too much. Never enough to steal the scene.” This is a feeling shared by the other knights as well.Palomides abruptly realizes at one point “that he was not the hero of this story at all. Somewhere along the way he’d become a minor character in the big fat romance of Tristram and Isolde. He was the villain, at best. Or wait, no, the villain was King Mark! Palomides was the comic relief!” And when Dagonet and Constantine end up traveling for a while with Galahad in search of the Grail, they “understood … they had joined the Hero, the main character of the story of Britain, taking on the roles of two mismatched background players …” Just as a year later, when Percival appeared and he and Galahad struck out on their own, Dagonet and Constantine knew “the story had moved on without them.”
Grossman plays with this idea of story across a range of incarnations. There is story as metaphor for our own lives, those times we feel we’ve lost the thread of our own tale, that it has “moved on without” us; or, on rarer occasions, the times we feel the hero of our own epic tale. There is story as balm, the way we need story to create meaning, to inspire, to feel part of something, to heal (and there is healing in this tale). There are darker sides of story, too: the way one can become entangled in a tale that is set against one’s own desires, involved in a lie as Guinevere was:
“I knew even then the story that would be told … People love stories, I love them, but stories are like gods, they care little for the human beings in their care. They don’t care if they’re true or not. From that night on people would tell the story of Lancelot and Guinevere and their fateful passion and the king they betrayed and the nation that wrenched apart, and they would weep over it but they would love it. But it’s not true. I loved Arthur … That’s what no one understands. Our story was not a romance, it was a marriage.”
There is also the way that stories can morph, can gloss over or entirely erase things, depending on who gets to tell the tale. There is the glorious tale of King Arthur shining like the sun, the Arthur who was “the last light in the darkness,” and whose inner spark “lit up the whole world.” But that is only one version of the story. His former kingdom is in this novel a land at war between its British and Roman self, between fairies and humans, between the old gods and the one Christian god. As Palomides notes shortly after arriving in his newly adopted land:
Arthur and his knights were clearly in charge, and they spoke Latin and comported themselves like worthies of the Western Roman Empire … But there was an entirely different British people here too, who spoke an older language than Latin, and who mostly didn’t own the land they broke their backs to plow. This was a divided land. The Romans had cloven it in two and it had yet to heal.
Morgan has a far less disinterested take, as one who experienced the changeover personally and at great cost, bitterly telling Collum:
There would be no more talk of piskies, no more talk in British at all, we would learn good Roman Latin. Our little world, the world of furs and smoke, the old magic, and the old gods, that was gone. Dead and burned … You moon over the lost glory of Rome, the glass beads and the shiny coins, but you never look at what they took from us!
Collum’s awakening to the idea that the story, the “matter” of Britain as the Arthurian mythos is often labeled, is much more complicated than he’d originally believed is an interior journey to match the exterior ones he takes. Arthur was briefly a figure who brought together what had been fragmented: “The British had never in their long history been one people before … Arthur made the British for the first time actually want to be British … When they saw Arthur, they know who they were, and where they belonged, and that they were home at last.” But, in a novel that weaves a unity from disparate story-forms, we begin to see that Britain is undergoing constant change, must undergo constant change, in order to continue.
This is a point made sharply clear, and sharply topical, toward the end of the novel, as Collum’s group is witness to thousands of Saxons in boats heading toward the coast of Britain. At first some in the party are angry, but Morgan explains that the Saxons are “Emigrating, … Fleeing. They can’t stay in Saxony. The sea there is rising and flooding their lands, and the land that isn’t getting flooded is being taken away from them by the Huns … These people aren’t invaders, they’re refugees. They have nowhere else to go.” And Collum, who earlier had bitterly wondered after an encounter with a small band of Saxons,“Why cross the sea to come here, and die here, hunting for a meal in our woods? What the hell was wrong with Saxonia, or wherever they came from?” now looks down not with anger or fear but pity: “It looks cold down there.”
Throughout The Bright Sword, none of the characters feel they truly “belong.” The queer Bedivere thinks “there was no place on earth for one such as himself. He was deformed and perverted in both body and soul … God had denied him a hand as an outward sign of his inner corruption, so that everyone could see it and shun him.” In his youth, the trans knight Dinadan felt “A creeping fear … that no one would ever see him. He would never be at home anywhere, because his body itself was a foreign country to him, and the person who other people saw was a stranger to him.” Meanwhile, Palomides and Dagonet not only feel alone but recognize that same sense in another. The surviving knights thus form a sort of community of the lost.
As he continues to look out from the coast to the arriving Saxon boats, Collum sees that they are “groaning with women and children, sunburnt and rain-whipped and salt-sick … after days of seasickness and freezing spray in their faces and the terror of drowning … It wasn’t an army, it was a people.” When Bedivere asks what Arthur “would have thought,” Guinevere knows immediately: “You remember what he was like … He would’ve thought of some clever way that it was all right. That Britain with the Saxons was still Britain, it was just a different Britain, no better or worse than the old one.”
Once upon a time I would have argued we didn’t need it quite so spelled out (and still would maintain Grossman continues in this vein more than he needed to). But given our current world, I can’t really fault Grossman for being a bit more blunt in hammering home the concepts of compassion and empathy, the desperation of refugees, and how with regard to social and/or demographic change, “different” is not synonymous with “worse” or “destructive.”
