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Mar. 4th, 2019 10:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsThe thing about Naomi Mitchison's To the Chapel Perilous is that Naomi Mitchison clearly knows her Arthuriana inside and out, and has decided to do some wonderfully weird and meta things with it, and I don't understand or agree with all of what she is doing but overall I'm extremely here for it!
The plot: Lienors and Dalyn are the ace reporters covering the Grail Quest for (respectively) the Camelot Chronicle and the Northern Pict. The Camelot Chronicle is run by Merlin and heavily funded by Church dollars, although Lienors herself secretly likes to go hang out with the White Lady and the Wild Hunt in her off-hours; the Northern Pict is run by 'Lord Horny' (Satan? Cernunnos? both? UNCLEAR) and has a strong pro-Orkney slant. And Dalyn and Lienors would quite like to report the truth, ideally, and, you know, they're doing their best, but there's the matter of the sponsors and the readership and the editors are going to chop it all up in post anyway ...
After seeing a collection of knights each come out carrying different maybe-Grails, Lienors and Dalyn make the executive decision to simplify the story for the readers and write up nice, uncontroversial Galahad as the Official Grail Achiever in their reports. The rest of the book consists of their attempts to follow up on the Grail story, while all the pieces are beginning to line up around them for the fall of Camelot.
Mitchison is interested in: irreconcilable and undeniable simultaneous truths, the public and private faces of major political figures, red carpet reporting, the ties between Arthurian legends and various early religious traditions, the way commercial news impacts public policy, journalistic ethics in wartime, whether the existence of a Cauldron of Plenty renders the human condition meaningless, and cute romances between rival reporters (extra cute in a when you learn that her daughter and son-in-law worked as reporters for rival papers! MITCHISON SHIPS IT.)
Takes on major Arthurian figures include:
King Arthur: mostly an offscreen cipher, which is extra interesting as this book comes out pretty much right in the middle of T.H. White's intermittent publications of bits and pieces of The Once and Future King, which spends a lot of time working as an in-depth study of Arthur's Character; I think the one thing we factually get about him is he's way more invested in Lancelot than in Guinevere
Lancelot: Everyone Loves Lancelot, Including Lienors (But In Like A Hot Celebrity Way, You Know)
Guinevere: Dignified, Sad And Mad. While Mitchison's take on the trio is disappointingly non-threesome, I like her Guinevere quite a lot. As does Lienors, who ships Lancelot and Guinevere so much that she ends up accidentally kick-starting the downfall of Camelot.
Sir Bors: just a nice man with a nice farm and also maybe a holy grail? but, like, a very domestic one.
Sir Percival: owner of the least domestic grail, constantly code-switching between Peredur the Extremely Pagan Wild Man of the Woods, and Percival the Extremely Holy Christian Knight; makes unwanted passes at girls at parties.
Galahad's Mom Elaine: Mean And Christian; presides over both Lancelot's Grail, which heals the sick, and Galahad's Grail, which raises the dead. Not unexpected, as even the most Revisionist Arthurianas tend to have a hard time finding a flattering take on Galahad's Mom Elaine, although I'm sure someone will attempt it someday.
Gareth: has a larger-than-cameo appearance to be kind and noble and make Dalyn feel a bit guilty about his trashy coverage of the Orkney Grail (a very Mabinogian Cauldron of Plenty). Has anyone in the history of Arthuriana ever written an unflattering Gareth? I mean, he is pretty uniformly a sweetheart, so I get it, I also would not write an unflattering Gareth, but I do wonder if we're due for the first negative take.
(Sidenote: I don't know why you would name a character Lienors Blanchemains and then not associate them with Gareth in any way whatsoever. I trust Naomi Mitchison to know what she was doing and have a reason for this but I'm still baffled!)
Sir Palomides: does not really show up in the story enough to get a personality but I was just excited to see him at all, especially since he DOES get a Grail (which is not much officially reported because Lienors and Dalyn sadly agree that their papers' backers would not be happy with coverage of a foreign knight getting a grail)
Sir Kay: appears once in the novel at a joust and is then immediately called away again to fix a backed-up drain, which is exactly as it should be.
Anyway, I am now all fired up about Arthurian meta, please tell me:
- your favorite weird work of Arthurian fiction
- your best-beloved Arthurian character
- your most important Unpopular Arthurian Opinion/Hot Take
Also if you have any good recs for interesting Arthurian scholarship, please let me know! I now desperately want to read a compare-contrast between The Once And Future King and To The Chapel Perilous focusing on Arthuriana as political allegory in postwar Britain, so ... you know .... if you've got one up your sleeve .......
The plot: Lienors and Dalyn are the ace reporters covering the Grail Quest for (respectively) the Camelot Chronicle and the Northern Pict. The Camelot Chronicle is run by Merlin and heavily funded by Church dollars, although Lienors herself secretly likes to go hang out with the White Lady and the Wild Hunt in her off-hours; the Northern Pict is run by 'Lord Horny' (Satan? Cernunnos? both? UNCLEAR) and has a strong pro-Orkney slant. And Dalyn and Lienors would quite like to report the truth, ideally, and, you know, they're doing their best, but there's the matter of the sponsors and the readership and the editors are going to chop it all up in post anyway ...
After seeing a collection of knights each come out carrying different maybe-Grails, Lienors and Dalyn make the executive decision to simplify the story for the readers and write up nice, uncontroversial Galahad as the Official Grail Achiever in their reports. The rest of the book consists of their attempts to follow up on the Grail story, while all the pieces are beginning to line up around them for the fall of Camelot.
Mitchison is interested in: irreconcilable and undeniable simultaneous truths, the public and private faces of major political figures, red carpet reporting, the ties between Arthurian legends and various early religious traditions, the way commercial news impacts public policy, journalistic ethics in wartime, whether the existence of a Cauldron of Plenty renders the human condition meaningless, and cute romances between rival reporters (extra cute in a when you learn that her daughter and son-in-law worked as reporters for rival papers! MITCHISON SHIPS IT.)
Takes on major Arthurian figures include:
King Arthur: mostly an offscreen cipher, which is extra interesting as this book comes out pretty much right in the middle of T.H. White's intermittent publications of bits and pieces of The Once and Future King, which spends a lot of time working as an in-depth study of Arthur's Character; I think the one thing we factually get about him is he's way more invested in Lancelot than in Guinevere
Lancelot: Everyone Loves Lancelot, Including Lienors (But In Like A Hot Celebrity Way, You Know)
Guinevere: Dignified, Sad And Mad. While Mitchison's take on the trio is disappointingly non-threesome, I like her Guinevere quite a lot. As does Lienors, who ships Lancelot and Guinevere so much that she ends up accidentally kick-starting the downfall of Camelot.
Sir Bors: just a nice man with a nice farm and also maybe a holy grail? but, like, a very domestic one.
Sir Percival: owner of the least domestic grail, constantly code-switching between Peredur the Extremely Pagan Wild Man of the Woods, and Percival the Extremely Holy Christian Knight; makes unwanted passes at girls at parties.
Galahad's Mom Elaine: Mean And Christian; presides over both Lancelot's Grail, which heals the sick, and Galahad's Grail, which raises the dead. Not unexpected, as even the most Revisionist Arthurianas tend to have a hard time finding a flattering take on Galahad's Mom Elaine, although I'm sure someone will attempt it someday.
Gareth: has a larger-than-cameo appearance to be kind and noble and make Dalyn feel a bit guilty about his trashy coverage of the Orkney Grail (a very Mabinogian Cauldron of Plenty). Has anyone in the history of Arthuriana ever written an unflattering Gareth? I mean, he is pretty uniformly a sweetheart, so I get it, I also would not write an unflattering Gareth, but I do wonder if we're due for the first negative take.
(Sidenote: I don't know why you would name a character Lienors Blanchemains and then not associate them with Gareth in any way whatsoever. I trust Naomi Mitchison to know what she was doing and have a reason for this but I'm still baffled!)
Sir Palomides: does not really show up in the story enough to get a personality but I was just excited to see him at all, especially since he DOES get a Grail (which is not much officially reported because Lienors and Dalyn sadly agree that their papers' backers would not be happy with coverage of a foreign knight getting a grail)
Sir Kay: appears once in the novel at a joust and is then immediately called away again to fix a backed-up drain, which is exactly as it should be.
Anyway, I am now all fired up about Arthurian meta, please tell me:
- your favorite weird work of Arthurian fiction
- your best-beloved Arthurian character
- your most important Unpopular Arthurian Opinion/Hot Take
Also if you have any good recs for interesting Arthurian scholarship, please let me know! I now desperately want to read a compare-contrast between The Once And Future King and To The Chapel Perilous focusing on Arthuriana as political allegory in postwar Britain, so ... you know .... if you've got one up your sleeve .......
no subject
Date: 2019-03-04 03:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-04 03:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-04 04:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-04 04:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-04 05:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-04 05:37 pm (UTC)(Surely SOMEONE out there in the wide, wide world is nursing a deep hatred of virtuous young Sir Gareth. I'm waiting!)
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Date: 2019-03-04 05:56 pm (UTC)- Most beloved Arthurian character - Arthur. Yeah, even in the best of adaptations he tends to be a stick figure, but I like the straight arrow heroes.
Hot take: There will never be a good King Arthur film that isn't a satire (Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a great film about Arthur and more accurate than most about the era, but it's not exactly epic.)
no subject
Date: 2019-03-04 06:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-04 06:06 pm (UTC)My absolute favorite Arthurian fanfic, which I will never stop reccing to everyone, is The Green Year, which is canon-divergence Gawain and Green Knight + T.H. White and OT3s all over the place and Gareth LIVES, SO THERE.
(I think the reason no one writes anything with mean!Gareth is that honestly I would close up the book right there and never come back to it, and they know there are people like me out there :P )
But I am sort of surprised at Elaine of Corbenic becoming mean, really? I guess because I've been thoroughly imprinted by T.H. White not thinking she was mean at all (but kind of pathetic). (Also I then wrote clone!AU where Elaine of Corbenic was the hero (and not pathetic as in White), so, um, there's that.)
no subject
Date: 2019-03-04 06:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-04 06:24 pm (UTC)I like Arthur a lot, but I like a very specific pattern of Arthur that was described to me by T.H. White and I'm always a little saddened and betrayed when I encounter Arthurs who don't fit that pattern at all, which unfortunately is most of them.
I heard ... The Kid Who Would Be King .... is surprisingly non-terrible ......... um.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-04 06:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-04 06:29 pm (UTC)(IT'S POSSIBLE. I just find it interesting that Arthurian canon diverges so wildly and yet, on this one point, all divergent sides agree both in- and out-of-text: Gareth is a sweet child who must be protected at all costs!)
HOW DID I MISS YOUR CLONE ELAINES
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Date: 2019-03-04 06:31 pm (UTC)Yaaaaay!
Sir Kay: appears once in the novel at a joust and is then immediately called away again to fix a backed-up drain, which is exactly as it should be.
I had forgotten this and strongly approve.
I will try to think if I've seen a non-terrible version of Elaine. I feel statistically the answer has to be yes, but I'm not coming up with anything off the top of my head.
(Did you find a print copy or an e-book? I used to have a very nice paperback, but then I lent it to someone and have never seen it since and have regretted it ever since. If it's back in print again, I wish to remedy this state of affairs.)
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Date: 2019-03-04 06:33 pm (UTC)I think of The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931) as the Mitchison that even people unfamiliar with Mitchison have heard of, but I started with To the Chapel Perilous, so I don't know.
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Date: 2019-03-04 06:39 pm (UTC)(nota bene: i have never read any Cherryh, though I have been meaning to for some years)
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Date: 2019-03-04 06:42 pm (UTC)So . . . uh, sort of?
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Date: 2019-03-04 06:43 pm (UTC)(Oh, I cheated and ordered a used copy online as a holiday present for
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Date: 2019-03-04 06:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-04 06:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-04 07:14 pm (UTC)I think her most famous is probably The Corn King and the Spring Queen, a massive historical novel about an invented Mediterranean culture and an attempt at government reform in ancient Sparta. I love that as well, but it has a very different feel from the whimsical and deliberately anachronistic Travel Light and To the Chapel Perilous.
Travel Light is especially easy to get hold of in the US right now, compared to her other work, because Small Beer reprinted it relatively recently.
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Date: 2019-03-04 07:22 pm (UTC)I was going to ask if it's just that bed tricks are really hard to write sympathetically, but then I've seen it done with Uther and Igraine, so never mind.
Otherwise it unfortunately seems nearly impossible to find!
Dammit!
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Date: 2019-03-04 07:24 pm (UTC)A ton of her work is being reprinted in the UK, which despite the costs I really appreciate.
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Date: 2019-03-04 07:27 pm (UTC)Me too!
The Corn King and the Spring Queen and The Blood of Martyrs (another big historical novel, early Christians in Rome prefiguring socialism, it works better than you'd expect) are also in print in the US, or at least in ebook.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-04 08:19 pm (UTC)It does have a nonterrible Elaine, but I think it's Astolat.