It’s easy to think we’ve outgrown King Arthur. As one of the English-speaking world’s oldest and foundational works of fantasy, reinvented time and again for over a thousand years, it becomes hard to imagine what is left to mine from it in 2024. Lev Grossman’s The Bright Sword, it turns out, finds a dazzling amount.
Initially a story about Collum, an aspiring knight who arrives in Camelot two weeks after Arthur’s death to find a Britain in crisis, Grossman’s novel takes an expansive look at the whole of Arthurian myth and folklore, forging a new version of the familiar myth that speaks to how stories build identities and nations.
Recently Grossman spoke to Polygon about his longtime love of King Arthur, the common threads between The Bright Sword and his Magicians trilogy, and how Merlin was always, always, a huge dick.
Polygon: King Arthur has kind of been supplanted as the first thing people think of in fantasy, even though he’s still constantly referenced. Was that something you felt going into this?
Lev Grossman: I still felt for some reason that I hadn’t met my King Arthur in this millennium. I think some of what has happened with Arthur is there has been a an understandable kind of enthusiasm for— not exactly cutting him down to size, but putting him back in his historical, Dark Ages, context, cutting down or cutting out all of the magic. I know Aaron Sorkin cut out the magic from Camelot when he redid the musical. Lately we’ve had a very human King Arthur. And for whatever reason, I wanted to go the other way. I wanted to lean into the romance of it and the magic and also a little bit of Arthur as — it doesn’t work if he’s not human, but just a little bit larger than life and very good. He has to be a good guy. If he’s a jerk, he’s not really King Arthur.
Your story notably focuses on characters on the fringe of Arthurian myth. Was there ever a point in this where you weren’t going to include Arthur or Lancelot or any of the big well-known heroes?
That was never question for me. As a King Arthur nerd, I knew that I wanted to meet most of the big heroes. I wanted to witness some of the iconic events in Arthur’s life. I didn’t want you to get to the end of 700 pages and not feel like you’ve spent your time with Arthur and seen him do what you came to see: Pull the sword out of the stone, the Quest for the Holy Grail, all the rest of it.
Was it hard to figure out the right amount of Arthur? He doesn’t show up or speak much, but when he does it’s a big, ‘words of Christ in red’ kind of deal.
Arthur is a challenging character. In the classic material, he doesn’t speak that much, and doesn’t have a lot of big monologues. It would have been great if Shakespeare wrote a King Arthur play, but he never got around to it.
For most of his life, he is a relatively passive presence. People go on adventures around him. They do scandalous things around him, but he mostly sits at the table; he doesn’t go on the quest for the Holy Grail. He’s quite still. And you have to think a man this brilliant and ambitious, something really intense was going on in his mind. I spent a lot time thinking about what he would sound like, and what it would be like to be in his head.
I want to talk a bit about God and his presence in the story, or what a lot of characters think is his presence in the story. You’re working in a Catholic, High Medieval romance tradition, so he kind of has to be there — but what is his place in it for you personally?
From very near the beginning of the tradition, Arthur is a very Christian king. And in something like Le Morte d’Arthur, God is practically a character. He’s constantly sticking his [nose] in and sending marvels and miracles. He’s very present god, he’s very near. He’s not distant. He’s always around the place. And I felt as though I needed to honor that.
I also felt awkward about it, because I’m not a Christian myself. And I found myself treating God as part of a mythology, basically. And I desperately hope that I did it respectfully. Because I do see that it’s a big part of Arthur’s story, his relationship with God, God’s presence and/or absence. So much about Arthur is about trying to please God, trying to attain the kind of ideal that they think that God wants from them, and not succeeding. That’s got to be somewhere in there.
Between The Magicians trilogy and The Bright Sword, you tend to have a strong emphasis on work in your fantasy. Magic is difficult to do in The Magicians, and you seem to have studied some swordsmanship in order to show off your heroes’ mastery. There’s a technical pleasure you dive into. What’s that about?
I think for a lot of fantasy writers, magic and to a lesser extent, swordplay, there’s always an element to it where it’s a stand-in for writing. And I will say that I was not somebody blessed with an overabundance of natural gifts. It took me a very long time to figure out the mechanics of writing, and how to get my voice on the page. It came with a lot of effort. I mean, The Magicians was published when I was 40. I had been writing fiction for for 20 years before that, and without a huge amount of success. So that feeling of laboring at something, and then feeling the the power that comes with it. It’s something that always happens in my books. It happens for Gollum. And it happens for Quentin, too.
You also seem to wrestle with how stories have a way of making the hearer, or reader, feel special. In your retelling of Lancelot and Guinevere in particular, you write a lot about how seductive a story can be.
Yeah, it’s true. And it’s not meant as a political commentary in any way. However, I think we are all very aware of the power that storytelling has to shape the course of nations right now through disinformation — people telling powerful stories, which lack the virtue of being true, but are no less powerful for that. Some of these characters are caught up in stories that are not the ones they want to be in. They don’t feel like the story is their story. The story has a life of its own.
While your take on Arthur is definitely heroic in The Bright Sword, a lot of the other well-known Arthurian characters known for being paragons of virtue seem to have something deeply wrong with them. Was that an intentional subversion?
One fear I have about this book is… in The Magicians I was not always respectful about the stories I was referencing, I was having some fun with them. I’m actually worried that people will feel like that’s what I’m going to do with Arthur. I think my approach is very different with Arthur!
That said, when I sat with some of the characters, like Merlin, for example, I began to think about who he was: He was probably a true practitioner of the indigenous magical arts of Britain. Why would a druid be serving in the court of a very Christian king? What would such a man have had to do to survive when every other druid was exterminated by the Romans? Maybe not such good things!
Conversely, I would point to somebody like Guinevere, who often is portrayed as ditzy or weak, she can’t resist Lancelot’s seductive wiles. It was important to me Guinevere be the smartest person in the book, and be absolutely tough as nails because I felt like it was it was her turn.
Merlin’s such a dick in this book, man.
But he always was! Always! Look what he did as an enabler for Uther Pendragon — he’s an accessory for sexual assault! And then he starts bothering his apprentice Nimue, which, I didn’t make that up. That is what he has always done. And often Nimue gets blamed for that, it’s her seductive wiles that are causing Merlin to harass her to the extent that she has to fight back. It’s just present in the canon. I found myself I wasn’t making making a big point out of it. I couldn’t get away from it.
A lot of people are currently engaged in the project of reclaiming myths for ideological projects — Arthur, for example, has been repeatedly co-opted as a nationalist symbol. As someone who is engaged in the re-interpretation of myth, does it feel like an arms race? Or a work of hope?
It’s complicated. One of the things that I love about novels and fiction is that you can have it both ways. I love Arthur and I love Camelot. And! And something that we and Arthur become aware of over the course of the book is that Camelot is a remnant of empire. Arthur was historically a Romanized Briton, one of the British who took on the ways of the Roman occupiers and kept them going after the Romans left. He’s, in other words, a collaborator. He sometimes gets appropriated a symbol of Britishness, of national purity — which is funny, because he was trying to keep the English out.
I wanted to look at the beginning of a nation. And that beginning was complicated. There’s no, “we were always here.” Everyone was an invader: the Saxons were invaders, but the Celts were invaders, too. And I’m sure whoever came before them invaded Britain. No one has always been there. Arthur’s Britain is deeply, deeply divided, and has to try to become itself even as someone else was invading it. You’re seeing the birth of the nation, but it is a very complicated birth, and that’s sort of what’s great about it.
The Bright Sword is now available wherever books are sold.
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