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- [00:02]
Jack Wilson
The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the Podglomerate Network and LitHub Radio.
- [00:09]
Lev Grossman
This episode is brought to you by Google Gemini. With the Gemini app, you can talk live and have a real time conversation with an AI assistant. It's great for all kinds of things, like if you want to practice for an upcoming interview, ask for advice on things to do in a new city, or brainstorm creative ideas. And by the way, this script was actually read by Gemini. Download the Gemini app for iOS and Android today. Must be 18 to use Gemini Live.
- [00:35]
Jack Wilson
This episode is brought to you by Disney's Mufasa the Lion King.
- [00:40]
Gabriel
Get tickets now for the ultimate family holiday movie experience. Reunite with the characters you know and.
- [00:45]
Jack Wilson
The untold story you'd never expect. Witness Mufasa's rise from orphan to king and see how the legendary villain Scar got his name. Disney's Mufasa the Lion King. In theaters everywhere. Now the kingdom awaits. Hello, the Great Brain and Great Britain. Lev Grossman takes a new approach to a very old story, the matter of Great Britain, also known as the Legend of King Arthur. That's all coming up today on the History of Literature. Okay, here we go. Welcome to the podcast. It's December, and that means Gabriel tickles the ivories in holiday style. Gabriel, that's the stuff. Somber one a little bit. Love this. Oh, Christmas tree. I love this. I love it. Every time Gabriel plays the piano. I would call him a genius, but I think he's actually 10 geniuses. Genius living in each finger. How I wish I could play like this. But instead, I'll stick to podcasting. And here's something new to tell you about some Jack news. I broke my rule not to appear as a guest on other podcasts. I don't know why I created that rule. Maybe because I think, aren't you getting enough Jack Wilson? Hasn't he said enough? 659 episodes, but I think I've made three exceptions now. Always. For people who are enthusiastic about this podcast, it feels ungracious not to return the favor. I say that, but it also helped that I had a bit of a gap in my schedule, which is rare. So please don't hate me if you invite me onto your show and I turn you down. This thing, this little podcast, takes up a lot of time, and I have some other things too, and I just don't always have the time. But I did in this case. I joined a podcast called WRTEs, which stands for Writers Read Their Early Shit. With the idea being we all had to start Somewhere. And it can be pretty awkward at the end of that song. It went so fast. Maybe we could have happier one now, Gabriel. There we go. Yes. A little more upbeat. I feel like Lucy asking Schroeder calling for jingle bells, Deck them halls and all that stuff. Stuff. Here we go. City sidewalks, busy sidewalks. Nice and bouncy. So where was I? Writers starting early. We all have to start somewhere. It can be awkward and painful to look back on that early work, but also revealing. That's the point of this podcast. You might remember that I had kind of dove into this dived. I immersed myself, if whatever, I jumped in pretty into the deep end in my episode Bad Poetry, where I confessed all. But in this case, I suggested to the host that we focus on my early podcasting efforts. And then we just talked about the Great Brain and a lot of other things too. It was fun. So check that out. If you'd like to hear the tables turned on your old friend Jack, hear him answer a few questions instead of asking them. Moving on, we have a great show for you today with Lev Grossman, whom many of you may know from his Magicians series. He has a new setting and subject matter in his new novel. Let me just tee this up with a quote. This is from George R.R. martin, the author of A Game of Thrones. He says, quote, if you love King Arthur as much as I do, you will love Lev Grossman's the Bright Sword, a fresh and engrossing take on the matter of Britain, featuring a colorful cast of roundtable knights who don't often get as much story time as they deserve. The creator of the magicians has woven another spell. End quote. Well, let's get some of the Arthurian legend out there. I'm reminded of my friend when I was a schoolboy, friend of mine didn't go to church and he was asking me once about the Bible, some biblical passages and the characters in the Bible, the people in the Bible. We were probably eight or nine years old and he was quizzing me. He was trying to get things straight in his head. He knew Jesus was in the Bible, but was Moses, was Noah. And I sort of laughed, astonished. It seemed so obvious to me. But when you think about it, that's not such a wild question for an 8 year old who's never been exposed to the Bible. You hear about Atlas? Is he in the Bible? No. Is Goliath? Yes. Is Achilles? No. It's an easy call for someone who goes to church. How about Jonah? He's there? Yes. What about Pinocchio? No, he's not. These characters float around in and out of context. Are Adam and Eve in the Bible? Yes, Most people know that. My friend probably did as well. What about Abelard and Eloise? You might pause on that one. Are Samson and Delilah in there? Romeo and Juliet? How about the Grapes of Wrath? The Four Horsemen? The Fox and the Grapes? The Good Samaritan? The Good Soldier? Nebuchadnezzar? Ebenezer Scrooge? It's easy for us grown ups to know what's what, or kids if they've been to Sunday school. You haven't. Maybe it's more of a mystery. You get the point. So with that in mind, let's go through some of the characters in the Matter of Britain, which is another name for the Arthurian legend. Remember or maybe learn. For the first time, Lev Grossman did not populate his book with these characters. He found a different approach, which we'll hear him explain in more detail. The characters in most popular recountings of the Arthurian legend are some familiar names. There's King Arthur, of course, who is a king in the legend. He may or may not have been based on an actual historic person, some kind of British war commander and or king. He lives in a time of magic and the supernatural and he's a defender of Britain. The sword Excalibur belongs in this tradition. And the Knights of the Round Table, including Lancelot, the chief knight and trusted friend, who cavorts with Arthur's wife Guinevere. Percival and Galahad. Gawain or Gawain, and the Green Knight, Tristan and Isolde. This is all part of the lore. The Holy Grail is in this tradition. And Merlin the magician and Morgan le Fay, which apparently Le Fay comes from the French word for fairy. She's a magician too, a sorceress, a witch, sometimes a goddess. And often she and Arthur are siblings. She's the apprentice to Merlin. It's a lot to work with and I've only told you the most common and most famous elements of the story, which has been worked and reworked, told, advanced, embellished, elaborated upon in many versions from the 12th century up to Monty Python and beyond. Mark Twain had his account of the legend, what it meant, and T.S. eliot refers to the Fisher King, which is also in the Arthurian legend. Thomas Hardy wrote a play about Arthur. Wagner wrote an Arthurian opera, Parsifal, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Henry Fielding, Walt Disney. They've all taken a crack at the Matter of Britain, Camelot, the musical, which is not even to mention some of our most powerful sources, the fountainheads of Arthurian legend like Geoffrey of Monmouth and Chretien Detroit, the Frenchman who, well, all he did was originate the character Lancelot. So if you're a novelist, well, where do you dig in? There's a whole feast here to select from. Or you can say, well, yes, there's a feast, plenty to eat, but I'm not a customer, I'm a chef. So let me go into the kitchen, see what ingredients might be left over there and come up with a savory new dish of my own to serve up to a grateful public. That's what Lev Grossman has done and he's here today to describe his efforts, both the recipe and and the results. Lev Grossman after this this episode is brought to you by Dutch Bros. Get stoked for all the holly jolly vibes this season at Dutch Bros. Stay cozy with returning winter faves. Hazelnut truffle mocha and candy cane mocha. Plus the new Winter Shimmer Rebel energy drink blends up sweet cream and blue razz flavor with soft top and shimmer sprinks to keep those spirits energized all winter long. Download the Dutch Bros. App to find your nearest shop. Order ahead and start earning rewards. You could get the most important meal of the day any time of day. I'm Talking about the $5 Big Deal Breakfast Meal from Jack in the Box, available all day and all night. A breakfast Jack with a freshly cracked egg, a hash brown and French toast sticks for five bucks sounds good for breakfast, lunch and dinner at Jack. Every bite's a big deal. Order Jack's $5 big deal breakfast Meal now.
- [12:07]
Gabriel
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- [12:58]
Jack Wilson
Okay. Joining me now is Lev Grossman, the author of eight novels, including the number one New York Times best selling Magicians trilogy, which has been published in 30 countries. He's here today to discuss his new novel, the Bright Sword, an epic retelling of the story of King Arthur. Lev Grossman, welcome to the history of literature.
- [13:18]
Gabriel
Thank you so much.
- [13:20]
Jack Wilson
So I haven't done an episode on the Arthurian legend. I think it's probably the most requested topic that we haven't yet covered. So I am looking forward to this, and I know that my listeners are very much looking forward to it as well.
- [13:37]
Gabriel
Excellent. I love to give the people what they want.
- [13:40]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. So I guess the first question then is, what. What do you think makes the Arthurian legend so compelling? Why are we. Why am I getting all these requests for people who want me to dive into this story?
- [13:54]
Gabriel
It's actually a really fascinating question. The Arthurian story. The Arthurian legend, it's much older than I realized when I began to really dig into it as a topic. We have been telling and retelling the story for at least 1300 years, which is an extraordinary thing. It's an extraordinary lifetime for a story to have. And I think there are a few different explanations for it. I mean, obviously it deals with some themes that are evergreen in our culture. This dream of a golden age which has just passed away. This story about people who are trying to be better than themselves. I think that one of the things that define Arthur and the knights as characters is their desire to attain an ideal which they know that they can. They can never reach. I think it's also the story of a family, the Arthurian legend. It's a story about a vast, toxic, dysfunctional extended family, which is never not news, dysfunctional families. And then there's something else that it's difficult to put one finger on. The Arthurian legend, it really. It changes its meaning over time. The story remains roughly the same. The architecture of it remained the same, and yet it sort of. It. It transforms and somehow becomes about the moment, the present in which it's being told, so that each age kind of gets the Arthur that it needs. And I have no explanation of the story's ability to do that, but it evolves and transforms in ways that make it somehow always current.
- [15:29]
Jack Wilson
Right, Right. I guess genre has a way of doing that. I'm thinking of stories about the Old west, for example, where different cultures can kind of adapt it to what's going on, and our own country in the US Adapts it as well, based on whether we're in the Vietnam War or whether we're in a kind of post colonial world or, you know, whatever the Zeitgeist is, can find a way to breathe new life into those stories.
- [16:00]
Gabriel
Yes, I agree. I think it's not true of all stories, but certainly the Arthurian story is a vessel that becomes filled with whatever it is that people need to know in this moment.
- [16:12]
Jack Wilson
So you're a former journalist, and I'm wondering what kind of research you did. Did you go looking for source material? Were you trying to find the historical Arthur or the historical time period? Or were you following the trails of the narratives as they were unfolding in different authors? Or how did you go about doing the legwork before you started writing?
- [16:37]
Gabriel
Well, this book, I should be upfront about the fact that it took me 10 years to write this book, which is an extraordinary long time to spend on anything. And one of the reasons it took so long is that there was a lot of legwork and it took several forms, and one of them was certainly historical. The era in which we think of Arthur as having lived was the 6th century, which was a very chaotic and strange and obscure period in British history. Arthur is also very much formed by the sort of high medieval period, the sort of 12th, 13th, 14th century, just when the story really became sort of repopularized. And our sense of the story that we have now, like Camelot and the once and Future King, was really kind of codified in that period. So it's. He's set in two periods at once. That's sort of very ancient Dark Ages period, and then also that high medieval period with the knights and the tournaments and that kind of thing. So really, both of those periods I needed to become very thoroughly acquainted with. And then the other part of it was the tradition, the Arthurian tradition. It has been going on for many centuries at this point. And I think in order to become a part of it, to write a work that belongs in that tradition and kind of advances it one step further, you really have to get to know the whole length and breadth of that tradition, which is a very long in breadth, and that took a long time, too.
- [17:58]
Jack Wilson
So how much of King Arthur's history and how much is myth or legend?
- [18:07]
Gabriel
I think the short and glib answer is that we will definitely never know whether Arthur truly existed. The period in which that we have put him in is a little bit of a blank spot in British history. There's very little historical testimony about it, very few documents about it, very little archaeological evidence survives from that period. We start getting references to an Arthur, 7th, 8th, 9th century, but actual contemporary accounts of him we have none. And there's no. We've never found a grave for him. You definitely won't ever find Camelot, which was invented much later, so we will never know. That said, people have been telling the story for sort of obsessively for such a long time. I think it's very much the case that he's a vital piece of mythology. We somehow need an Arthur. I think when people began telling the stories, he was very much kind of a resistance hero. This was the time when the Anglo Saxons were encroaching and taking over Britain and England and the indigenous Celts were fighting back against them. And Arthur was a kind of hero of the kind of Welsh resistance to the Saxons. And I think that was his first incarnation. But whether he was historical or not, I think it's been pretty definitively proved that we will never prove it one way or another.
- [19:25]
Jack Wilson
And do historians believe he may have been a composite or there may have been some real life hero types that he was, that he grew out of, or do the naysayers think, no, this is just an invention. This was some good storytellers around the campfire. Who dreamed this guy up?
- [19:47]
Gabriel
Well, you can find the full spectrum of nayfayers. People will say nay very loudly. It is an interesting fact that although we have no Arthur attested to in the early 6th century, which is when he would have lived, Arthur itself is a very unusual name. It didn't exist as a name before the 6th century. And we do know that late in the 6th century there are at least three Arthurs that are attested to by the historical record. It gives you a sense possibly that somewhere in the sixth century, in the early sixth century, somebody was named Arthur, who was very famous and a big celebrity hero. And in the subsequent generation people started to be named after him. So you have little sort of telltale traces which might suggest the existence of a real Arthur. But unquestionably there were warlords and kings and generals fighting the Saxon. Whether or not they were great and heroic like Arthur, we'll never know. But there was certainly a strong need to believe in somebody like Arthur.
- [20:45]
Jack Wilson
So I'm used to. Anyone who's a fan of literature is used to this. I think where we want to know about a figure and there's say, Homer and there's not much in the historical record and there's no memoirs or contemporary accounts to draw from. And so historians will kind of fill out, well, here's what we know about what life would have been like and here's where the type of education that this person would have received or here's what it would have been like to live day to day and so on. Do we know that about the historical period we're talking about? Do we know what life was like for a young person who was maybe aspiring to be a knight?
- [21:32]
Gabriel
If we had a video link up, you could see me making a certain kind of face that I'M making because it is such a difficult question. We know that obviously, Britain was a province of the Roman Empire. And in the early 5th century, the Romans departed in a great big hurry because they had a lot of problems back in Rome. And when they left, civilization in Britain kind of collapsed. The Romans had been running things and they left. And they left behind a very complicated patchwork nation in Britain. And they were definitely Celtic people speaking British. There were Romanized Britons, British who had taken on the ways of the Roman occupiers, who spoke Latin and were probably Christian. There was everything in between. There were people from remote parts of the Roman Empire who'd been stationed there. There were invaders from the invading Saxons and other Germanic tribes. There were pictures coming down from the north. There were people coming from and from Ireland. A very chaotic situation. And when you try to pin historians down about what exactly was going on, what language did they speak, what gods did they worship, it is very difficult to get anybody to commit to anything. I think it is the case probably that the cities were. The Romans built great cities, London and York and so on. These cities were largely abandoned during that period. People went to the countryside. Some of them went back to the hill forts from the Iron Age. But there were many different forms of plain society going on in Britain at that time, and they were all competing and striving with each other, and little kingdoms were rising up and warlords were rising up and they were fighting each other. And it's very difficult to be precise about what was going on, but Arthur himself would have been a Romanized Britain. So it's likely that he spoke Latin. It's likely that he probably kept to some of the social forms of the Romans. He probably wore, you know, a red cloak which was the sort of kind of badge of office of senior officers in the Roman army. So we can guess that Arthur was a sort of semi Roman British person who was kind of trying to keep alive the memory of Rome and the spirit of Rome in an increasingly chaotic and complicated world.
- [23:45]
Jack Wilson
Right. And one thing we know from chaotic worlds is a lot of potential danger, but also a lot of opportunities.
- [23:56]
Gabriel
I'm sure that's true, yes. Kingdoms were always rising up and falling again and swallowing each other. Britons were fighting the Saxons. They were fighting each other. They were allying with the Saxons. It was a very strange and chaotic time. The earliest references we have to Arthur don't actually refer to him as a king. They refer to him as. The Latin phrase is dux valorum. So he was a warlord, he was a General, he was a leader in battle. He was a great warrior himself. And now I've said just about everything that everybody knows about Arthur. There's nothing else but we can imagine him certainly as a sort of. If you could imagine a Celt pretending to be a Roman, I think there you have Arthur.
- [24:39]
Jack Wilson
Right. So what's your assessment of the more fantastical elements of the story, the magic and Merlin and so on? I guess my question is, do you think this was an era where people believed in that? Sometimes when we look back at the past, we don't necessarily think magic was real, but if the people believed in it, that it gives it a kind of weight to the story, that it's important and essential. And other times it seems like it's just there because it makes the story really good and fun and more of an adventure. It amplifies the fiction. Do you think this was an era where people were, you know, waiting for wizards to appear and so on?
- [25:25]
Gabriel
I'm sure that it is the case. One of the things that is very distinctive about the Arthurian universe, the world in which Arthur lives, is that it has sort of two kinds of supernatural force. Certainly the divine, the power of God, the Christian miracles on the one hand, and then also more of the indigenous pagan understanding of magic that would have belonged to the older Celtic strands of culture. And these things are both present in Arthur's world, both the magical and the divine. And I think there was probably strong belief in both. In a chaotic time like that, people tend to turn to these kind of beliefs to feel a sense of power and control. And I think it's probably the case that there was a lot of cross talk between the pagan and the Christian. I know that certainly people got very excited about the host, the Eucharist and even the pagans really liked the Eucharist. And that magic bread the Christians made was considered to be very good luck in battle. So, you know, you can imagine the pagans were, they would sacrifice to anybody. So I'm sure that a lot of the pagans sacrificed to Jesus and considered him one of the gods in this, in the pagan universe. So I think the, you know, the magic, both magic and Christian faith were a major part of the Arthurian world just from the beginning, which I find sort of fascinating and wonderful. There's a kind of vogue for very hard boiled Arthur's these days. Arthur is where the magic part of it and even the Christian part of it is kind of stripped away. And so you have just much more of a kind of earthy ground of Arthur. I noticed that when Aaron Sorkin rewrote the book of the musical Camelot, he took out all the magic because it didn't seem like an essential part of the story to him. I tend to lean the other way. I think that Arthur's world is a very, very magical world and a very fantastical world, and that's sort of an intrinsic part of the story. But there are other interpretations as well.
- [27:22]
Jack Wilson
Right. Okay. So as you're looking to put together your book, the Sorkin example is a great one because you need to make choices about these things, and you need to decide what am I going to draw upon and what am I going to clear away and try to, you know, what will I emphasize in my telling of the Arthurian legend? So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about some of the popular conceptions of the Arthurian legends and whether you had room for those in your book and you wanted to embrace those, or whether there were things that you thought, no, this doesn't really fit. I'm sorry to have to lose this character or this particular thing that people always want to see when they hear about knights at the round table and so on, but my book is going to have a little bit different focus or flavor.
- [28:13]
Gabriel
Well, I mean, I'm a bit of an Arthur fanboy. I didn't get into the Arthurian business to turn over everything and reinvent it. So the major iconic tropes of the Arthurian story, the Sword in the Stone, the Lady of the Lake, the Holy Grail, all of these things turn up in the Bright Sword because I do love them so much, and they still have such symbolic power in our culture now and then. At the same time, it's vulgar to say that you have to come to Arthur with a take to make your own Arthur distinctive. But I was very interested in the idea that I said earlier that every age sort of gets the Arthur that it needs. And I wasn't sure when I started out on this that we had the Arthur we needed yet. And I was very curious. All the authors that I was reading felt as though they were a little bit period pieces. And I wondered if it was possible to write an Arthurian story. Now, maybe it wasn't possible, I wasn't sure. But that would speak to this moment that we are in now, this moment in history. And of course, you look at the story and it's a very archaic story. It's a very white story, it's very heteronormative, and it's on a diverse story. And, you know, there are moments, they're viewed from certain angles, it doesn't seem urgent or relevant. And yet when I sort of sat with it quietly and thought about, well, what elements of the story are there that still resonate with what's happening in the world now, I came to feel that there. That there were some. Not least something we've talked about already, which was this idea that Arthur was. He was a Romanized Britain. He was living in a post colonial country. He was living in a. In a Britain that was still dealing with the aftershocks of imperial occupation. And not only. Which is still something that's still happening today. The aftermath of empire is still very much with us. But not only that, he was sort of on the wrong side of history. He was a Romanized Britain. So his legacy was that of the oppressors. He wasn't really on the side of the indigenous Celts, which tends to be the side that we root for these days. And so he obviously had a lot of work to do to figure out how to take this country which was very divided against itself, and somehow unite it and make it whole again. That seemed like something that was part of the tradition, but that also resonated very strongly, certainly with America as we live in it today, which is a country very much divided against itself. So things like that which are part of the story but are sort of maybe a little bit latent in earlier tellings, they jump out at you when you start thinking about them. And there are many things like that, and those are the ones that you lean into and others maybe you'll sort of let fall away a bit. There's a part of the story that tends to crop up a lot is this idea that Arthur, once he realized that he had slept with his half sister and that they'd had a child, which was Mordred, who will of course go on to kill him one day, that he then rounded up all the babies who were born on that day and drowned them. I felt from a character point of view, it was really difficult to accommodate that atrocity in the Arthur that I knew and loved. And so I dropped it. And there are lots of small things like that that you. That you let go. One of the fun things about the Arthurian story is that there's really no canonical version of it. We have a million different versions that show different aspects of it. But is there an original canonical version of Arthur which is the correct one? There isn't really. There's just all. People like to say that it's all fanfiction and it really is all fan fiction. And you get to take what you want and you leave aside the rest.
- [31:45]
Jack Wilson
Right. And when we're talking about fan fiction, I'll say there is fan service here. The very opening is a battle between two knights. And we're in the knight's head as he's dealing with his sword and his armor, and he takes a blow to the head that makes his ears ring. And he's thinking about his horse and his helmet and being so far from home and. And my take from that was, this is going to give me what I want. It's going to be nights on quests and fighting battles and so on, but with the advantage of a 21st century novelist's ability to be inside the mind and the consciousness of the character as he's going through this.
- [32:30]
Gabriel
I tried to begin to drop you right into it. Yeah. Into that sort of the physical reality of being a knight. And it's true. I wanted to signal to everybody that there was going to be. Not fan service exactly. But if you're worried that you're not going to get a lot of sword fighting and magic and action. Well, I wanted to reassure everybody on that score right up front. We're not going to get an overly door or, I don't know, contemplative, lyrical Arthur. Sure, there'll be some of that. But again, I got into the Arthurian business because I'm a fan, and so all that good stuff is in there.
- [33:09]
Jack Wilson
Okay, let's take a quick break and then come back with more from Lev Grossman. This year, Santa's bringing the power of.
- [33:27]
Gabriel
Energizer into his workshop. Whoa. The Energizer Bunny's got so much power. Wait, he's powered up all the toys?
- [33:33]
Jack Wilson
I think that means we're done for the year.
- [33:35]
Gabriel
I love this bunny.
- [33:37]
Jack Wilson
He's the hardest working helper the North Pole has ever seen. And he wants all your gifts to have the power of the number one longest lasting AA battery.
- [33:46]
Gabriel
So this holiday season, stock up on.
- [33:48]
Jack Wilson
Santa's and the the elves favorite battery, Energizer Ultimate Lithium.
- [33:54]
Gabriel
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- [34:35]
Jack Wilson
Okay, we're back. So, Lev, let's talk about your book, the Bright Sword. Tell us about Colm. Who is he and what does he want?
- [34:44]
Gabriel
Well, Colm, in some ways, he's not a stock character exactly, but he is a strong and handsome young man with a mysterious past who rocks up a Camelot, and he's looking for a place at the Round Table. This is something that happens all the time in the Arthurian canon. And so people will recognize this, and then we try to make something sort of a little bit more particular and interesting about it. Colin comes from the North. He comes from the out Isles, which I identify with the Hebrides, the part of Britain where the Romans really didn't. They didn't really take over there. So this is a part of Britain which is very Gaelic, very pagan. People look on, generally look at Camelot as it's part of the South. It's newfangled. It's the invaders. It's not authentically British column. Because he had a really rough time in his childhood in the Out Isles, he wants to go the other way. He kind of wants to piss people off and rebel. This is how. This is the punk in him. He decides that, no, he's going to be an Arthur guy, he's going to be a Camelot guy. And as soon as he gets a chance, he takes off and heads out, hoping to meet Arthur and become a part of Camelot. What he discovers when he gets there, tragically, is that he's too late. He's arrived a week after the Battle of Camlan, where Arthur died and most of the Round Table died as well. And so he suddenly discovers that this golden world that he thought he was going to walk into, the central pillar that held it up, you know, the light that illuminated it all had gone out, and he'd missed the Golden Age, and he didn't know what he was looking at. Darkness and chaos. And that's where his story begins.
- [36:27]
Jack Wilson
That's an interesting place for you to start your story, because, as we've talked about so often, the Arthurian legend is one of the reader looking back with nostalgia at an age that no longer exists. But the reader or listener is spending time in that era where things are better and bright. And, I mean, Camelot has become synonymous with the idea of a Golden Age and a time of great glory. So your Camelot is sort of the day after the party.
- [37:01]
Gabriel
It's very much a Post apocalyptic Camelot. And I went that way for a few different reasons. I was certainly thinking a lot about the once and Future King, which was the Arthur that I was obsessed with as a kid. And one of the special amazing things about that book is that to write when he wrote it, White discovered a whole blank space on the Arthurian map. Even after a thousand years of Arthur stories, nobody had ever actually told the story of Arthur's childhood. We had never gotten Arthur as a little boy. And that was one of White's strokes of genius to tell that story. And I found myself thinking about where else were there blank spots on the map? And one of those, of course, is the world after Arthur's death. It is traditional for Arthur's stories to end with Arthur's death, and then we all feel terrible, and then that's the end of the story and it's a great tragedy. But what if you began the story with Arthur's death and you looked into that world which we really don't know very much about, the world that Arthur left behind. I got very interested in that and that idea of a world where, yes, we've missed the Golden Age, where the center has not held, where the institutions that we relied upon have all fallen down. I felt as though I recognized that world. It felt very modern to me. It felt as though there was something there that resonated with the world that we're in now. Obviously, I also wanted to tell stories about Arthur and the Golden Age. And so there are very many flashbacks to the world with Arthur in it. But one of the major narrative strands of the book is this question of what do you do after Arthur is gone? Is it possible to bring him back from Avalon? Is it possible to find a new king we can put on the throne who will bring back that Golden Age? And those are the questions that face Colm and the very few survivors from the Roundtable who are also left still at Camelot.
- [38:48]
Jack Wilson
Right. So you have characters like Sir Palomides, the Saracen knight, and, I don't know if I'm pronouncing these correctly, Sir Dagonet. Where did they come from? Are those characters you made up or are there references to them in some of the other accounts?
- [39:05]
Gabriel
Those two, as it happens, are part of the tradition. But what I love about them is that these are people who have spent their whole lives at the very edges of the King Arthur story. They are secondary or even tertiary characters. They're the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. And I love the idea of here we are in a world where all the heroes are gone. Galahad is gone, Gawain is gone, Lionel, Tristan, Lancelot's not dead. You just can't kill that guy. But he is retired in the monastery. And so you have a few people left who have never thought of themselves as heroes. They've never thought of themselves as the center of the story. What if we take those people and take them from the very edges of the story, put them in the center, and then they have ahead of them the task of becoming heroes. And one of them is Sir Palamydes, who is a Muslim who we all. He has always been seen riding around Britain. He tends to chase the questing beast. He's also in love with Sold, who was in love with Tristan, obviously. And he generally shows up as comic relief. But I became very interested in the story of Palamydes. What was he doing in Britain? How did he get there? Where did he come from and why did he stay? And why did he chase the Question Beast? I found him fascinating. And again, he's a little piece of blank space on the map because never really heard his backstory or really felt what it was like to be him. And I felt like it was time. And the same is true of Sir Dagonet, who is the court jester at Camelot. He was Arthur's fool. Fools are always great characters, but no one has really dug into him. Again, he's comic relief. Arthur, one day, as a joke, knights him and puts him on the round table, even though he can't really hold a sword or ride a horse. And again, what might it actually be like to be Sir Dagonet? Where did he come from and how did he feel about the role that life had dealt him? I think probably his feelings were very complicated. There's these wonderful characters just lying around, and they're underutilized, but here's their moment because everybody else is gone, and it's down to them to do what must be done.
- [41:13]
Jack Wilson
And for Colm, who's showing up, these are people who. They're not his heroes, probably, but they knew his heroes or they were there for it. And it is a kind of. I think everybody can kind of identify with that type of experience when you get there just a little bit too late. But there are still people who you can kind of look to, to tell you about how great things once were. And maybe you can think about, well, what's stopping it from. From happening again.
- [41:47]
Gabriel
They can't let go of this idea that it could come back, and they realize that they can't give up. And they'll do what they have to do to complete this quest, which they have reason to believe. It's not entirely out of the question that Arthur couldn't come back. Not least because, of course, there are rumors that he's still alive on Avalon. So they're grasping at these treads of fading glory and seeing, could they possibly bring it all back? And you can see how they would not be able to resist that idea.
- [42:16]
Jack Wilson
Right. I was wondering if you could read a passage for us so listeners can get a sense of what the voice of the book is like.
- [42:27]
Gabriel
That's a great idea. I could certainly do that. It's funny, I very rarely read aloud from this book. When I do events, I generally just talk about it. But I suppose I could read a passage.
- [42:40]
Jack Wilson
Okay.
- [42:41]
Gabriel
Did you have one in mind?
- [42:42]
Jack Wilson
No, I'll leave it up to you. Although. Yeah, I'll leave it up to you. Unless. But the opening is good if you want to just read from that.
- [42:51]
Gabriel
Why don't we read the opening? Okay. I'll start with the book. One is called A War of Wonders, and it has an epigraph which people either love or hate. It's from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It goes like this. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. One of many pieces of wisdom in that movie which is truly brilliant. It's a piece of Arthurian fiction. Chapter one is called as your three scepters. A chevron, or colm, punched the other knight in the face with the pommel of his sword gripped in his gauntleted fist so hard the dark inlaid metal dimpled under his knuckles. But his opponent showed absolutely no sign of falling over or surrendering to him. He swore under his breath and folded it up with a kick to the ankle, but missed and almost fell down. And the other knight spun gracefully and quickly clouted him smartly in the head so his ears rang. He would have given £1,000 to be able to wipe the sweat out of his eyes. Not that he had a thousand pounds. He had exactly three shillings and two silver pennies to his name. That's the opening paragraph.
- [44:05]
Jack Wilson
And we are off. Yep.
- [44:09]
Gabriel
Yes. One great advantage I have over TH White. And you have to use every advantage you have is that. But we know a lot more about how knights actually fought now than we did even a couple of decades ago. People have done magnificent research in kind of reconstructing the martial arts that these knights practice. So I've taken as much as I can from that research to try to have Colin and his colleagues fight in a way that is actually period appropriate, which you don't find in that much Arthurian fiction.
- [44:40]
Jack Wilson
Mm. Right. I'm guessing they tend to probably put them in a more dignified way, on horseback and so on. Right. Than the kind of fight for your life, scrounging through the mud variety.
- [44:57]
Gabriel
One of the great things you discover when you start to look at this stuff, which people call it Hema, Historical European martial arts, and the people who do it are just brilliant. One thing you find is that, yeah, it's a lot dirtier than you're probably imagining. There's a lot more grappling, there's a lot more ground game, a lot more punching with pommels, you know, and tripping and gouging and whatever else. It's a lot dirtier and sort of a lot more fun than it is often made out to be.
- [45:25]
Jack Wilson
Right. Okay, so I have prepared a surprise bonus question for you here. So let me read it out to you. Now. It's a little bit longer than my usual question.
- [45:37]
Gabriel
Sure.
- [45:37]
Jack Wilson
On a rainy autumn afternoon, you go for a walk in a nearby forest. Unfortunately, the trail is slippery. You lose your footing and slide to the bottom of a ravine. When you awake, you find yourself in the presence of a man with a white beard and a dignified air. Greetings, young scholar, he says. Welcome to the other side. Other side, you gasp. Am I? No. No, you're not dead, he says with a gentle smile. Everyone always asks that. No, you're on the other side of what is known and what isn't. On this side, we know everything. You stumbled into this place, and I will now need to lead you out again. But I'm a generous person and I'm going to give you a gift for your trouble. Either I can outfit you with a suit of armor, and you can join a good nightly battle where you'll be asked to help repel a small force attempting to invade the castle of King Arthur himself. If you and your fellow knights succeed, which is likely, you might even get to shake hands with the good king. Or I can let you travel to Arthur's library. You won't meet the king, but you'll have an afternoon to peruse all of the books that he himself had access to. Which do you choose and why?
- [46:55]
Gabriel
Well, don't think I haven't asked myself questions very similar. I would absolutely go into battle. I would, definitely would. If I could have. If I could have plate, if I could have proper armor. I think it was probably the case that the knights in these battles was more sport than truly life or death. I don't think that they generally expected to get hurt too badly unless they did something silly like their visor at the wrong time.
- [47:25]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [47:26]
Gabriel
And I will also add that I don't have enormous faith in artist library, certainly, if we're talking about a Dark Ages, Arthur, you know, in Baghdad they had libraries with hundreds of thousands of books. At this time in Britain, Britain was a little bit of a backwater. And I'm beginning to that. They probably had, you know, 20 copies of the Bible and, you know, it's a really bad alchemy. I don't know how much I would get out of the library, I'll be honest. Probably they had some wonderful classical texts which are now lost and would be an amazing thing to go there. But I'm gonna. My ancient Greek is rusty at best. And I think I'd go into battle. I think I'd want to feel it. As Samuel Johnson said, every man thinks less of himself than ever. Having been a soldier, I think I'd want to know. I think I'd want to know if I was a hero or a coward.
- [48:22]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. Now, it also strikes me, when you were talking about what battle was actually like, that you would need to bring a kind of, I don't know, fury or energy that you could summon up because it's almost like you'd be. You need to bring forth all of your strength. That it wouldn't be technology that would get you through. It would have to be a desire to really defeat the other guy. Do you think you'd be able to summon that up? I guess if you had a potential to meet the king at the other end of it, you'd have at least a good motive for it.
- [48:59]
Gabriel
This is a question that everyone has asked themselves at one time or another. I'm sure battle was partly a physical, much like tennis, partly a physical game and partly a game of psychology and emotions.
- [49:13]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [49:13]
Gabriel
And how would one's own sense of self hold up? I truly think what that one never knows. And really one can't know without having been placed in that situation. I personally am a man of peace and have never been in a pitched battle. But there are things that true that one wants to know about oneself. And you would, I think, certainly find them out if you ever had the misfortune to have to fight for your life right now.
- [49:40]
Jack Wilson
We talked about how the Arthurian legend kind of resonates with us today. And for the features that we share with it. But also a lot of this is about absence. And do you think that what is in the story that appeals to us today? Is it just escapism? Or is there something that we are looking for in that world that our own world lacks?
- [50:08]
Gabriel
I mean, there certainly is. I wrote this book, I worked on it for 10 years. Four of those years had Trump in the White House. And this question of who is to lead us, who are we going to look to, who is going to be the leader? We look to who embodies our values, who looks the way we think a leader should look. Those sound like outdated questions. And then you look around you and you see the passion and anger and longing all around us in America over this question of who will sit in the White House. And you realize these issues are very live. That's something that. That question of, we have presidents, obviously, and not kings, but I think we ask of them some of the same things. And so that question of what is a king and what is a good king? I think these questions are still very alive. And it goes beyond escapism. And then, you know, and there's another question that I particularly try to pose in the Bright Sword, which is this question of, well, if you take the story and you tell the story of Arthur and you follow it to his death and then you keep the cameras rolling and you look at this world after Arthur is gone, and the knights in it go on a very different kind of adventure than we've ever really seen in the Arthurian world before. And that adventure is the challenge of trying to live after the worst thing possible has happened. How to survive in this post apocalyptic world. I got very invested in them in the Last of Us, both the game and that and the show, while I was working on this book. I think it's a very Arthurian show, actually. But this question of how do you keep going once the bottom has fallen out of everything, I think that's a very live question for us now. We live in a world without an Arthur and we are constantly trying to find our way in it. And that seemed like a very important, powerful story to tell. And you can tell it using the tools of the kind of Arthurian legendarium. And that's sort of what I tried to do. And that was the urgent question, the really urgent question I think I was trying to answer.
- [52:05]
Jack Wilson
What if we don't have a leader whose character we can count on and who will organize things for us and give us a sense that everything's going to be okay? And what if it's just us.
- [52:21]
Gabriel
Yes. And we don't have a sixth star to steer by. And we kind of have to muddle through and find our way, even though it's dark and we can't see five feet in front of our faces. It's one way of framing the challenge that we face. And we all sort of deal with it in different ways. Something that was in my mind a lot when I was writing was waiting for Godot, the Samuel Becket play, which was one of my very formative early kind of literary experiences. And that way in which they sit and they wait and they have to keep going even though they just can't anymore, that was very much in my mind as I was writing.
- [53:00]
Jack Wilson
And so we will all strap on our armor, maybe literally for some of us, probably metaphorically for most of us, and we will try to become the heroes that our Eren needs. The book is called the Bright Sword. Lev Grossman, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.
- [53:19]
Gabriel
It's a great pleasure to be here.
- [53:27]
Jack Wilson
Okay, there we go. Wasn't that fun? My thanks to Lev Grossman for joining me. You can find his book at bookstores everywhere. The Bright Sword. A great gift for that Arthurian lover in your life or that adventurer or those who like to curl up beside a fire and read about action packed adventures in lands far away and times long ago. Speaking of long, it won't be long before we have another episode of the History of Literature for you. Just three more days, I think, and it will be a special story about an incredible event. A man in London leaves his family, heads out for a few hours and doesn't come home for 20 years. Instead, where does he go? He goes the next street over where he lives for 20 years, spying on his family. That story sparked something in Nathaniel Hawthorne and he wrote his own story about it. We'll hear that story, Wakefield, and we'll hear about the story next time. And then James Baldwin with Irish poet poetry. Wait, wait, what am I saying? Irish writer James Baldwin with Irish writer Colm Toibine and a special look at some black women writers. And then we start a two part run of Irish stories or an Irish story. For my money. The best Irish story of all time because it might be the greatest short story of all time. The Dead by James Joyce. That's for Christmas Eve Eve and Christmas Eve itself. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.
- [55:24]
Lev Grossman
From Academy Award winning actor Matthew McConaughey's soulful and humorous picture book to New York Times bestselling author Kristin Hanna's the Women Moms don't have Time to Read Books is an author interview podcast unlike any other. In 30 minutes or less, each episode of this chart topping and Webby Award winning show dives deep beneath the COVID fostering friendship and camaraderie, support and curiosity, connection and compassion. Hosted by me, Zibby Owens, authority bookstore owner and head of what the LA Times called the Zibbyverse, Moms don't have Time to Read Books has something for everyone, whether you're a mom like me or simply a busy reader. So don't miss out. Follow Moms don't have Time to Read Books on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now. New episodes are released every weekday, bringing books to life.
- [56:25]
Jack Wilson
I did consider Barney a friend, and he's still a friend to this day.
- [56:28]
Gabriel
The idea of Barney is something that I want to live up to. You know I love you, you love me. I call it the Purple Mantra.
- [56:39]
Jack Wilson
Barney taught me how to be a man.
- [56:43]
Lev Grossman
Generation Barney, a podcast about the media we loved as kids and how it shapes us. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.