wondered why should be …
we are made for a bright world
but live in a dark one
He didn’t know it, but by then he was the very last knight of the Round Table still alive.
All the others were gone.
And when at last his time came, too, he lay down on a hot dry hill in the shade of an ancient silvery-leafed olive tree, alone except for his horse, and a single tiny perching bird that almost seemed to glow from within, as if it had swallowed a star, though it could just as easily have been a trick of the light. He looked up at the empty clouds, and as he died he wondered, not for the first time but for the very last, why it should be that we are made for a bright world, but live in a dark one.
The closing sentences of The Bright Sword : a Novel of King Arthur by Lev Grossman, New York] : Viking, 2024.
I love Arthur books.
Not so much the movies as no one really gets Arthur right because of the timing of it all.
As Mr. Grossman write in a note a the end of his book: “But the Arthur of our collective popular imagination comes primarily from versions of the story written a thousand years after that, in the high medieval period, by authors who weren’t much interested in historical rigor. A historically accurate sixth-century Briton wouldn’t have fought in plate armor, because there wasn’t any in Britain at that time. He wouldn’t have lived in England, because England didn’t exist yet—England is named after the Angles, one of those Germanic tribes Arthur was fighting so hard to keep out. Likewise he wouldn’t have competed in tournaments or lived in a castle, and if he did it definitely wouldn’t have been Camelot, which was also made up by Chrétien de Troyes in the twelfth century. He couldn’t have known Sir Palomides, because Palomides is a Muslim, and Muhammad wasn’t born till around the year 570. This Arthur—the Arthur of Malory and Tennyson, of T. H. White’s The Once and Future King and the musical Camelot—is a loose mash-up of a thousand-odd years of British history.“
So Knights of the Round Table but no suits of armor …
Luckily its all fiction and disbelief is suspended anyway.
But I do enjoy the Arthur stories.
I especially like the ones were Lancelot comes off as a royal pain in the arse.
I like a little redemption of Guinevere and more mystery to Merlin.
And I have always liked a Nimue who is independent and can show the way home.
And I enjoy how writers stuggle to get Morgan le Fey into the story line.
From A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court to Bernard Cornwell’s Arthur Trilogy, I read them all.
Of all them however, its Mr. Grossman’s Bright Sword that got me to think the most.
Not want to so too much as maybe some one will read it on there own.
If you do, let me know ur thoughts.
No Haiku For You 