Arthurian’s Guide to Book Six

Greetings, Arthurians! I often enjoy and take advantage of the wisdom and knowledge of the people on these Facebook groups, so instead of a blanket preview of Book Six of my series, I thought I would write one tailored specifically to knowledgeable Arthurians. 

If you don’t know, my series The Swithen is a deluxe telling of the 1136-1485 Arthurian legends over 25 novels. The deal with my series is that I have to remain completely faithful to the pre-1485 Arthurian material, so we avoid some of the flights of fancy that some later Arthurian works have gone into, and we don’t try to “fix” what the original medieval writers put down. 

My personal interest is in imagining what these characters could possibly be thinking and feeling as they experience these incredible events, so I try to express their psychology and make them real people, not just blank archetypes. I have to include the events as they occur in the sources, but I add in psychology and connecting material, so that events follow logically and lead into one another, and we imagine how a real human might act is such extraordinary circumstances.

Which brings us to Book Six: Gifts With Hard Swords.This one covers the material of Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, but also incorporates storylines from the Vulgate Cycle that Malory chose not to include… so if you’ve only read Le Morte D’Arthur, you have some exciting new [but still medieval] stories to discover.

Back into legendary material

In my series, Book One starts with Merlin’s birth, and Vortigern’s inviting the Saxons into Britain. Book Two concludes the Vortigern story and the reign of Pendragon [AKA Aurelius] and Uther’s taking the throne. Book Three is the Uther and Igraine story with the birth of Arthur (and Morgan le Fay and Margause as little girls). In Books Four and Five I added original installments that take us through the childhood and adolescence of Arthur, ending with him being crowned king. Now this book picks up in the first years of his reign, and his looming battles against the rebel kings.

The False Guinevere

One of the characters present in the Vulgate Cycle but not Le Morte D’Arthur is the woman known as the False Guinevere. She is an exact twin to Guinevere except for a birthmark on the future queen’s back, and she will be an important part of the series through Book Fourteen. There are only a limited number of Guinevere-based storylines in the sources, and thus few opportunities to know her as a character and include her as an active participant in the action. Her story has a lot of intrigue and scandal and I’m excited to get it started now.

Guinevere!

Another exciting feature is the first substantial appearance by Guinevere in the series. We do see her first meeting with Arthur as depicted in the source material, but Guinevere also has issues dealing with her parents and she her own adventure that has nothing to do with the young king. If you know about the False Guinevere you might also know where her mother is, and I delve into that and the family secrets Guinevere has to navigate while still at home. There is also a featured role for Guinevere’s mother, a character who does not exist in the sources.

Kings Ban and Bors

Kings Ban and Bors do appear in Le Morte D’Arthur, where they help Arthur and then vanish, but they have a very substantial presence in the Vulgate Cycle, and an influence on the overall story that is so massive I am actually shocked that Malory left it out. I can only imagine that their influence was SO massive that Malory just decided to not even get into it, but it does influence the saga right up until the very end. They are the descendants of Nascien, and King Ban is the father of Lancelot and Hector [AKA Ector de Maris], and King Bors is the father of Lionel and Bors, so their descendants, and the family split between Arthur’s line and Lancelot’s line, will drive the saga right up until the end. 

Peripheral characters and minor knights

Both Guinevere’s parents and Ban and Bors have servants that play a significant role in the story going forward, so I had to have all that laid out to ensure that I positioned them early. Since this is the beginning of Arthur’s reign and we are going to be with the same set of characters until the end, I wanted to start bringing in some of the known Knights of the Round Table, which meant some significant research into which knights had important backstories and which knights could be introduced without having to account for some larger narrative. I live in terror of getting into the story and finding there’s some narrative in a character’s past I failed to account for.

Arthurian Mysticism

This book also has the first extended sequences of Arthurian mysticism. So far we have had some magic here and there, but what I mean is when a character enters a reality-adjacent dream world for an extended period of time, one where nothing makes sense but nevertheless has very serious consequences for the real world. To me this is one of the elements at the heart of the medieval Arthurian material; events that don’t make logical sense but sing with a poetic resonance about life and mortality. This is also, hopefully, the fruit of my ambition to remain faithful to the medieval material without trying to “correct” it, so that these scenes retain the mystery and mysticism of the earlier works.

All storylines converge

If you have been following the series—and if you have, thank you!—you know we have the stories of Arthur’s adoptive family, the family of King Lot and Margause with their sons including Gawain, her sister Morgan le Fay and mother Igraine, Accolon, Balin and Balan, Ulfius and Bretel, Arthur himself, and Merlin (not to mention still others!), but they have all been kept separate. In this book, all of those stories converge and start to intertwine. It was exciting to see Arthur’s group of familiar knights start to fall into place and just for all of these characters to interact. This will also be the culmination of one of my goals of this series—that we experience new stories with characters whose histories have known since their childhood, offering an accumulating sense of meaning as we understand the implications of their winding together. 

Mystery events!

I shouldn’t tell you this but I’m excited, so I’m going to be as vague as possible. This book contains two events that are the culmination of material I have been steadily building toward since Book Two.

Arthur becomes King Arthur

This book is where Le Morte D’Arthur begins (after a quick rehash of Arthur’s conception). Everything in my first five novels was either left out by Malory or my own additions. So the vast majority of people begin the King Arthur story at this point, not knowing the history of all these characters. Thus, this is the point at most of us conceive of King Arthur and what he means, and by the end of this book, Arthur fully embodies the conception of the King Arthur we know. With my own slant on it, obviously.

The main storyline begins

The reason Malory left all that stuff out is that this is where the main thrust of the King Arthur story begins, and what that means is that we are now with characters we are going to be with until the end of the saga—the very last book of the series to come—and from now on we are just going to be with them as their lives intertwine and they have their adventures. So that’s why I’m excited about this book. You could say that the first five books were all prelude, leading to this moment. (That’s why I also say this is a good place to jump into the series.) 

From now on, with work and luck, the promise of the series will be fulfilled as we follow the same characters through nineteen more novels as they grow from youth to death, a civilization rises and falls and a whole society of characters interact and intersect over the course of about forty years, until it all comes crashing down.

Read an excerpt from Book Six: Arthur learns of his parentage