Fantasy: Back to the Round Table
By: Tom Shippey (WSJ)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Elaine of Astolat is a minor figure in Arthurian romance. In Sir Thomas Malory's version, she's a maiden who falls in love with Lancelot and, once rejected, pines away and then drifts downriver to Camelot with a reproachful letter in her dead hand. As "The Lady of Shalott," she caught the Victorian imagination in Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem and three famous paintings by John William Waterhouse.
In Tennyson's version, however, she became even more marginal. Not empowered but "imbowered," shut in, working endlessly at her loom, unable even to look at Camelot except in a mirror, and under a fatal curse which kills her the moment she succumbs to temptation and looks at Lancelot, riding by, singing along with the jingle of his flashing armor and his bridle bells. How many Victorian maidens, shut up in lonely vicarages, must have sighed and thought, "She's just like me."
All very well for Victorians, but what kind of a story is that for young women today? As Laura Sebastian declares in the afterword to her novel "Half Sick of Shadows" (Ace, 434 pages, $27), the old figure of Elaine is "no longer the kind of heroine we want or need." How should she, how must she, be re-imagined?
In Ms. Sebastian's story, which takes both its title and its theme from Tennyson rather than Malory, Lancelot is infatuated with Elaine, not the other way around, and he has been ever since the childhood they shared with Arthur and Guinevere in Avalon, land of the fays. Elaine is vital as well for the whole struggle to bring Arthur to the throne of Albion, and it is Elaine who channels the power that enables Arthur to draw the sword of kingship from the stone. As for being shut in, enclosed, "half sick of shadows": that's just not the true story!
So how to deal with her unfortunate end in both Malory and Tennyson? Ms. Sebastian, whose previous forays into fantasy include the young-adult "Ash Princess" trilogy, has noted the presence in the Arthurian background of several powerful female figures, such as Morgause, Morgan le Fay and Nimue, the Lady of the Lake. Are they the ones who come, according to legend, to take the dying Arthur away in their boat to Avalon? Not necessarily.
It seems as if all the Arthurian scenes and scenarios—Camelot, Lyonesse, Avalon, Excalibur—are asking to be reworked, and that is the case with the 16 stories collected in “Sword Stone Table: Old Legends, New Voices” (Vintage, 465 pages, $17). The editors, Swapna Krishna and Jenn Northington, two top players at Book Riot, a website devoted to diversity and representation in popular literature, asked themselves: “Where are the gender-bent Arthur stories? . . . The race-bent retellings, the queered ones?” Not finding them, they commissioned them.
Some stories are questions asked of the past. How would the trial of Guinevere have gone if the judge had been a learned Muslim, as in Ausma Zehanat Khan’s “The Once and Future Qadi”? Waubgeshig Rice’s story “Heartbeat” is set in the present on a reservation, where the children are forbidden to speak their own language or learn the old ceremonies from their grandparents. But little Art is told about a giant boulder. It doesn’t have a sword stuck in it, but when Art finds the magic strength to lift it, underneath are the sacred drums of his Anishinaabe ancestors, and the dances which were the heartbeat of their culture can live again.
The past stretches into the present in a different way in Jessica Plummer’s “Flat White,” where Elaine is a barista working an espresso machine. Then “Lance” walks in, and she falls in love. Which would be fine, except that soon his friends Arthur and “Gwen” turn up, and crash their first date. Haunted by dreams of floating downriver, Elaine fears she is just “a minor figure in a grand tragedy,” doomed to repeat an unhappy fate.
But she isn’t because today you can just text goodbye and break the pattern. As “The Bladesmith Queen” does in Sarah MacLean’s story, this one set in the heroic past. Its protagonist also has a curse on her, for the swords she makes bring victory to the wielders, but anyone who kisses her dies. Curses, like other old narrative-patterns, can be broken, and sometimes they should be.
Except when the old patterns still cast a spell. The medieval poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” has remained popular right up to the present day. The studio A24 is soon to release a film directed by David Lowery, and in the meantime we have “The Green Knight” (Penguin, 94 pages, $16), a tie-in paperback reprint of Bernard O’Donoghue’s 2006 verse translation.
In the original poem, Sir Gawain has to pass on his daily winnings to his large, bearded, violently masculine host—but the winnings are kisses from Sir Gawain’s seductive cheating hostess. Is one kiss the same as another, just a commodity? The poem, says Mr. Lowery in his foreword to this new edition, is not only “very modern” but “surprisingly—to put it in knightly terms—lascivious.”
This sets Alexander Chee an unusually tricky puzzle in “Little Green Men,” one of the stories collected in “Sword Stone Table,” which retells “Sir Gawain” in a sci-fi-future Martian setting. Mr. Chee’s Gavin-on-Mars saves his friend Arturo, just as in the medieval poem, but this time the kisses aren’t a joke.
Similarly, in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s old story, Arthur is conceived by Igraine and Uther Pendragon in the shape of Gorlois, Igraine’s husband. How will that seem in the far future, on Venus, when changing your morph or body-shape is routine? It will only prove, says Ken Liu in “White Hempen Sleeves,” that love is about the ego, not the morph.
Tolkien’s Sam Gamgee asked a lifetime ago, “Don’t the great tales never end?” When it comes to King Arthur, the answer has to be “no.” They just get filled with new life, new applications.
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