Galahad and the Grail: Malcolm Guite Is on a Quest

Hello and welcome to Mythmakers. Mythmakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. My name is Julia Golding and today I am joined by a friend to the Oxford Centre for Fantasy and also a friend to all things Tolkienian, a CS Lewis and much in between. That is Malcolm Guight and for those of you who are watching us on YouTube we'll see that Malcolm is following in Tolkien and CS Lewis's footsteps and Gandalf and Billbert. He's smoking a rather splendid pipe. So welcome Malcolm. Hello Julia, nice to see you again and thanks for having me on this podcast so try and enjoy. So we've summoned you back because you have just published a fantastic, well it's sort of a metrical story called Galahad and the Grail with illustrations by Stephen Crottes. So it's a lovely book in just a hold it's a lovely book but you are at the beginning of a retelling of Arthurian tales and you have chosen to go in on Galahad for your Arthurian epic. So we've known you as a poet and we've known you as literary critic and we've known you as someone who writes thought pieces for an essays. So how did Arthur nibble away at you and get you wanting to tell his story? Well I can probably answer that question best inverted. This is literally this is the prelude to the poem but this is pretty much how it happened. People think I'm being metaphorical but I'm not. Okay let's go on the adventure with you then. As I walked out one morning all in the soft fine rain it seemed as though a silver veil was shining over hill and as though some lovely long lost spell had made all new again and through that shimmer in the air I seem to hear a sound as though a distant horn were blown in some lost land that I had known that seemed to speak from tree and stone and echo all around and with the music came these words. Poet take up the tale take up the tale this land still keeps in earth and water magic sleeps the dry-out size the nigh ad weeks you can left the veil from where the waves wash cornwalls caves out to the white horse male the land still hold the tails of old like hidden treasure buried gold once more the story must be told poet take up the tale tale of the king who will return tell of the holy grail tell of old knights and shivery tell of the pristine mystery of Merlin's Isle of Grammarie poet take up the tale take up the tale of courtesy take up the tale of grace revive the land's long memory some in the fair folk let them be something of fairy wild and free still lingers in this place lift up your eyes to see the light on Glastonbury tour then come down from that far green hill to wear the sacred waters spill and shine within the chalice well and listen to their law yay listen well before you start be still are you begin see through the surface round about the noise the rush the fear the doubt though modern Britain lies without fair logres lives within you you may yet walk through Merlin's Isle by oak and ash and thorn the ancient hills do not forget and you might wake there wisdom yet who knows what wonders might be met on this midsummer morning so I have taken up the tale to tell it full and free the tale makes my heart rejoice I tell it for I have no choice I tell it till another voice takes up the tale from me well sitting here in the white horse veil I'm particularly late they're not to my local landmarks are not not any to the white horse veil but the kind of most recent example at least for me is that works of telling a story in this ringing singing ballad form is in fact Chesterton's ballad of the white horse so there was a little nod there yes so that takes me to the first question I've had for you which is I'm a I love the long tales of Arthur I've read most of the sources that you probably read but I couldn't think of anything really much after well Charles Williams is a little bit on his own but let's say you know sort of Tennyson really as opposed to retellings for kids I'm thinking about more in the sort poetic form what did you feel like answering that call to stop thinking then start to tell the tale again and how did you persuade a publisher to go with you well yes indeed I mean well first of all I wanted to do this for years and years ever since my mother told me the stories and I was little but I was in fact mentioning Charles Williams on those kind of high modernist lyric cycles of talisman through Lugres and I was a bit daunted I knew I didn't want to do the big tennis only in blank verse thing I think the problem is is so my problem was formed really I knew I wanted it to be poetry but Tennyson a it had already been done and B I think after Milton it's almost impossible to write a long blank verse poem without kind of blundering into kind of ponderous sub-miltonics it's just been done so well by Milton you you can't get out from under his shadow as early observed um so I had a problem of form I mean I loved David Jones but you know then again this is very high modernist praise poetry that's kind of kind of um an absolute thicker to footnotes everywhere and four or five languages I didn't want it to be recession like that eventually I realized the answer was staring me in the face that I just I'd written a long meditation and reflection on Coleridge's rhyme of the ancient Mariner in a book called Mariner in which of course I just looked at how he took the common ballad form and turned it into this really delicate instrument he kept its vividness and its directness and its repetitions and its strong rhythm but he would occasionally extend the standards or shorten it or do various things that heighten the effect and um so I just thought I think I'll have a go in the ballad form and make it much more accessible my original plan was to do combination of prose and poetry I thought I'd do it as a travelogue around great Britain with a naprozeneration in the modern day the surface roundabout and then invoke each Arthurian place in poetry and have the place set so so the matter of Britain was like literally the matter the physical matter but then I thought that's two tricks here in postmodern and double matter I just don't I'm really going for a second naivete here I think I'm done with that you know I really think we need wonder and enchantment and that was the other side of of course because you know the word chant is inside the word enchantment and um I think I wanted this I have a little note at the beginning saying read this aloud you know then you'll get it um so anyway uh persuading a publisher now there you put your finger on to me because I mean you're right tenison is the last really long treatment of this as an epic poem in 12 books so we're talking 1850s and 1860s there is a rather extraordinary little book in between in the 20th century by John Heath Stubbs called Latorius which is in 12 books in varied magical forms but they're they're little books I mean it's once you know fairly slim volume and unfortunately I mean it's full of brilliant things but unfortunately also like TH white he can't resist being being satirical or ironic and I just wanted no satire or iron iron anywhere in this I wanted it to be cleansed of that we've had more than enough of that um so I this is the first really big retelling so I mean you know they say to publishes you're or anything you're supposed to have what they call a usp a unique selling point so my unique selling point was this hasn't been done for the last 150 years but I had to point out that might also be the unique sinking point in that there might be a reason for that but I was willing to bet that the time might be right for this kind of retelling again the sense of the need for reenchantment lots of things coming together and I thought nobody else literally nobody else is going to do this I'm you know I've spent you know decades learning the art and craft of of metrical writing and and you subrime without torturing the syntax that kind of thing I know I mastered the sonnet which is obviously much shorter form but I thought if I don't do it nobody will and if I don't do it now starting as the thing says on that mid summer morning when I did indeed walk out one morning I I'm not going to finish it because you know I'm in my 60s so so it was now or never and I decided to go for unfortunately rabbit room in America got totally got what I was doing and we're going to do it beautifully I mean I think they said you an advanced reader's copy which is paperback that the real thing is hardback and glorious and then obviously I didn't want to write a British epic without it being published in Britain as well so I got rabbit room and can't be pressed into conversation with each other and then can't be pressed jumped on board as well so I ended up with two publishers you know taking a chance on me as the as I would say yeah that I didn't pick up any other abba references in what's the network of references but in that I was a reference to the rhyme scheme of in memoriam a bba but they go in in the little prelude extract you just read there is actually a sort of reference to a very current theme so and there's a beautiful part of the episode sort of the episodic adventure that Gala had goes on which is about repairing the land renewal refreshing the rivers the kind of stories that you see in the press every day healing of the wasteland yeah so there's a sort of modern applicability but we're yeah in fact I've just been reading I mean I would already start in fact I'd already written the sort of probably the most I try not to be overtly allegorical but there is one episode called Galaad in the night which is very much about ribbons and improvisation and things and I wrote that before I got Robert McFarlane's is a river alive but you know it is pretty topical actually and in fact I sent that to him you know say because we nature the slightly yeah so for people outside the UK Robert McFarlane is well known beautiful prose writer about landscape and travel fantastic one of the great nature writers of our age I think yeah and the reference here is to the ongoing debate in this country about what's happened to our rivers and to the lack of investment in keeping them clean even places that look clean as there are dead rivers because of too much nitrates and things so it's a very hot topic here as it probably is in many other countries so I advise I've sort of mentioned I heard all sorts of echoes as I went through and I sometimes would note them when they were really strong when yet and then I picked up like very strong I noted it in the margins but you know obviously there was some Tolkienian moments and there was some CS Lewis moments and there was Milton there was Kohler Ridge Tennyson and other obviously Mallory and the further back sources so how did you cope with this I don't know the anxiety of influence or whatever it is we supposed to call it well I don't I mean I don't believe in that whole literary critical line about the anxiety of influence which sets the whole of literary life in the endeavor of competition okay yeah one of the great literary critics who does all that name as Templars gave me American critic who wrote the anxiety of influence anyway I've read those books but I don't go along with them I think we are in the realm of creative collaboration I think you know people say are you afraid of the blank piece of paper when you sit down to write and for me as a poet in the full square English tradition there is no blank piece of paper there's a long beautiful conversation which I've been listening to for years and which I now have the temerity to chip into and join occasionally so Elliot brilliantly says in his essay on tradition and the individual talent but that although we have to perceive at one sense writers coming in a chronological order that's mere historicity in fact because we don't necessarily read writers in chronological order they're all contemporary to our minds he says they also have a simultaneous order and everything that anybody writes kind of subtly affects whatever reels writes now Elliot of course takes that to the end to green a thing like the wasteland which but the problem is that you don't get it you know if you don't you don't really get the fullness of it until you know the illusions I do want to write like that but I did want every so often to tip my cap to other writers or to put in an illusion which will be a pleasure to anyone who gets it but no diminishment to anyone who doesn't so my sense must be absolutely clear as a writer I don't think much is is a is a pattern of obfuscation I think it's meant to be lucid of course it doesn't give you everything on a first reading there's always more to find so some of them are you know just light little tips of the hat some of them are more significant I mean the I have a direct quotation for example from the rhyme of the ancient marina when lance lot having had his dream in which he's convicted of sin repent and turns to nasian and I give him exactly the the ancient marina's lion oh shrieve me shrieve me holy man I mean it works in valid form it works as a piece of language of that age but I also wanted to communicate something of the transformation that's on offer from nasian the way and I tell you what's this is brilliant I mean Stephen Cross the illustrator is absolutely brilliant and he's my ideal reader and illustrator really like he not only got that but but in his illustration of that moment just as I'm quoting Coleridge he quotes visually Dore's engraving for the rhyme of the ancient marina of the repentance of the marina so sometimes those are moments of deep connection and I mean sometimes it's more yeah no there's a reason for for example when guinevere is revealing both to to the young and still not you know fully aware gala had first of all revealing that that lance lot is his father but also revealing her her love you know her guilty love for lance lot and asking somehow for some kind of prayer or renewal or pagation to come out of all of this and I have she says something like all I've been has is caught between the dove and the fire you know and I'm obviously thinking of that great passage in in a little getting where you know we only live only suspire redeemed by either fire or fire you know and the fire of all the medieval sources make it clear that that that that gala had as the pentacostal night he's completely associated visually in in other ways and he arrives on the feast of pentacostal you know so so there's something about the coming of the spirit and the redemptive but pegative qualities of the sort of flaming presence of the spirit I wanted I wanted you know you can read that without knowing the elite but if you do know the Elliott it gives you a deeper sense of the the the pagation that is to come literally pagation by fire for lance lot later I think I I really like that idea that you said of in fact that it's not chronological that everything is present to you as a writer because I sometimes find myself when I'm writing something reaching for a moment which is very different from a context where I may have come across it but I suddenly see it's got the same rhythm yeah so I lean into that thinking I really like that and it really works here there's a sort of yeah no as you said a nod of the cap you're not copying you're still so it's just thanking and it's actually saying thank you yeah the double elution so I create a lot I mean obviously I'm telling a lot of the stories as they are but I'm also developing them I'm looking for gaps I'm foregrounding things that the medieval mindset didn't bring it to foreground most obviously I'm giving lots more kind of agency and heroism to dandrain the the grail maiden who you know she is since has her own quest and has her own gifts and I really want to make much more of her but I do a double tip of the cap well when I'm so I tell a much more of her story than is in the sources and really bring her out as a character and I have a bit where she's at the top of a cliff and can't get down but she knows she has to get to the sea and somehow from the sea to someone solemn and ship the grail ship and I have her praying for aid and then I have a thing which is both an elusion to the rhyme of the ancient but also specifically an elusion to Lewis's elusion to the rhyme of the ancient marriage the voyage of the dawn treader when Lucy is at the top master and they're in the going into the dark island and she sees what she first thinks is across and then realize it's an albatross and the albatross flies close to Lucy and it's the only time Lewis ever gives the voice of of Aslan to anything on the line or a lamb the albatross says to Lucy in that moment courage dear heart and I quote that directly when the albatross comes to lift my dandrain and that's partly saying dandrain is my Lucy dandrain is is the person who has natural spiritual insight and gifts and and it's you know Lucy's always the person to see Aslan first and so she's you know I so it's in a way I'm saying thank you yes Lewis but in another way I'm saying to my readers who might know that story when you're thinking of dandrain think of Lucy yeah it's and also it's a wonderful picture just to go back to the illustrations why not actually ride an albatross how cool that really went for that forget dragons albatross is the way to go much softer yeah whatever riding the albatross like a throne you know and I have the albatross singing to her and telling her to sing to the city and you know I really go for it I grateful it's one of my favorite episodes because it's the poem is a poem of episode so if you are going to buy it and read it it's something definitely to relish in like little pearls as well as the narrative thread particularly if you're really going to laugh it's quite hard to sit and read the whole thing in why did you do this but volume is divided into three books but each book is divided into what are called staves partly boring from from Dickens use of that term in a Christmas character but Dickens of course is boring from the ballad tradition of a ballad is divided into staves so one of the things I was thinking about as I was reading it is one of the problems that Gala had gives a writer is that he is known as the perfect night he is pretty much almost weighs very Christlike isn't he and we are also told because of the nature of the sort of prophetic feel of the piece that he's going to achieve the quest but yet we also have to be in the midst of the adventure yeah feeling that he's going to lose and it's going to be some jeopardy what did you do about that or how did you do all the prophetic stuff but I did you know so you kind of know you know you're a proctor boiler this is Gala how do you choose the graph but I do think there is there is I think there is danger I think there is genuine jeopardy because all them well they're all told before they set off by nasian that this will work if they win through if they stay true that they all have trials and temptations to deal with and possibilities just as Christ has the temptations in the wilderness now the specific place where I make that really clear is when they're getting towards the end of the wasteland each of the three nights has a different kind of trial which is particular to their calling so Percival is tried because he's in love with Blanche Flare and part of his story is that he will meet Blanche Flare again in the in the grail castle so his his trial is is the temptation to despair of love to be told that love is nothing but lust to be to be introduced to to kind of corroded forms of of love in the person of this particular kind of ice demon and Gala had trial comes when they go into a kind of it's a bit of a mind's of more of a thing really they get into this dark sort of passage and he suddenly he he turns back and tries to use the key to get them out of them and it doesn't work and he then has complete despair and his despair is about having failed as a leader and he's younger than the other nights have written near and partly says just a lad you know says he's just a lad and so he is this is the great challenge of the growing boy becoming a man as to what it is to be trusted by other people and to be trustworthy so I do introduce a piece of genuine hazard and I have to have boars you know actually help Gala had get himself back together again and tell him no no you misunderstood you must go forward not backwards and you know sort of fair forward voyages so I did a little bit of that the other thing which I thought might bring some interest to Gala had is I'm there is as it were a spiritual kinship between Gala had and Dandran from the get go I've various plots across reference what's happening to them when she has a sort of kind of spiritual ordination to go forward is it is just when he's being knighted and there is a kind of almost you know I don't want to go too far down a child's Williams or even a Yates road down here but there is a kind of spiritual man they're both pure they're both chased they both represent the sort of lost virtues of chastity considered as a positive brother than a mere negation in the way that say Milton and others did mystically but they precisely that that setting aside of the whole appetitive part of sex allows for a new and deeper spiritual intimacy which is kind of untrammeled and so there is a kind of spiritual bond between the two of them and I have them to you know together at the end so I wanted that I want to see how I could develop that how I could develop you know a story of that intimate spiritual friendship and offer that my readers as a possibility if the world were like a sleep number mattress everything would adapt for your comfort because as your life changes and your body changes sleep number mattresses adapt and shift to give you personalized comfort night after night and now everything's on sale during our memorial day event save up to twelve hundred dollars on mattresses for a limited time to experience a whole new world of comfort visit a sleep number store or go to sleep number dot com sleep number to a good life sleep yeah I mean the one another defense is if you're setting out to write a romance you know that it you know they're going to live well sort of happily ever after some sort of couple Elizabeth and Darcy there's going to be some resolution at the end and it's the journey to get there that's where you suspend your your sort of awareness of the likely outcome and of course I have the tragedy of the death of Dandrein how partly clear the story yes yes exactly so there are surprises even though you may feel it's all foretold it doesn't I know people do find galahad very sort of it's like painting white on white you know you can't see the outlines in the character and I did try to address that but I think it is a that's partly why I think all the narrators they never have galahad on his own except perhaps at the very end the tradition of the three grail nights is very strong yes because he's almost impossibly ideal is more than personal and then of course we bring onslaught in as well so that gives us enough variety to be I really like the onslaught I mean he always he has he is that bit of human failing that you kind of need yeah exactly I mean interestingly the feedback I've had so far quite a lot of people have told me that one of them things that move them most was the kind of crisis and repentance of onslaught and they felt really manised him so you made it clear that the communion is the center center of this grail quest which of course it always has been and I but I also loved your echo of something that appears in a Charles Williams novel boring heaven which is whether the grail itself isn't really that important the grail matters when people are using it for the purpose it's been set aside exactly so that's what makes it holy not so well I should acknowledge a big debt to Charles Williams here and it turns out in the end it wasn't the Charles Williams Arthurian poetry that I was indebted to I decided to take a different path except for bringing Taliesin in which I do very strongly in the same but here's here's what I owe Charles Williams first of all he was going to write this book the figure of Arthur and he died we completed it so Lewis published Arthurian torso which has what his Arthur book was up to that point I think it's a brilliance of every material and it's a huge vindication of the fact that these medieval poets intended this to be the grail and it wasn't just a pagan thing with a light Christian glass it's a pagan thing meeting the gospel and being transformed and radically so I and he says time and again in that prose piece that the Camelot exists for the grail and not the other way around and he specifically critiques Tennyson for making the grail into a kind of unfortunate side quest for religious types that ends up just draining everybody off from Camelot you know he's much more in forming the kind of late 19th century Christian gentleman go and run the empire and he sees the kind of grail as a bit of a distraction so Williams resists that with full force and I'm with him 100% there but the second debt is specifically to the novel you mentioned war in heaven which is a fascinating novel because it's set in what was for Williams his own contemporary time so it's more like Elliott showing that the old Joyce that the fundamental mythic pattern can reassert itself again and again in in modern circumstances so he has three grail nights they're not called galahad personal and boys but they are the equivalent of it and you know so now the great challenge for me the thing that actually quite apart from the difficulty persuading a publisher to do this the thing that held me in all and held me back and daunted me was precisely this question of the achievement of the grail the apotheosis at the end when the load veil is lifted from the grail how can I rise to that you know to have I got enough spiritual insight to begin to do it now Williams in war in heaven does an absolutely brilliant thing because when they have the grail mass as it were his three protagonists all give their own account a bit and the anglican guy hears it as book of common prayer and the Roman Catholic guy hears it as the Latin mass so they all get something of it but they don't they each get something of it but the whole of it is not you know they have to hear each other's version of it so I did that they're not really helped me at the moment when I give you what Percibel saw what Boris saw and then I finally give you galahad's view which which includes both of them that was very so I felt you know Williams I mean I'm very keen on Williams and Williams was a sort of more of a benign influence at the ideas and structure level rather than as with almost all the other poets I directly quote at that sort of echoed conversational level yeah absolutely I think I find the actual reading of a Williams novel a bit stilted but thinking about it afterwards it's full of riches for me exactly so exactly so they're flawed novels but he had brilliant ideas I don't the executioners was great though yeah they're clunky in places and they're really weird you have to be in the mood for weird they are they are really weird that was another way of describing him is a very weird inkling um yeah yeah well I mean it wasn't serena higgins I think calls him the oddest inkling yeah yeah so you were talking about not taking anything from him in terms of form and you touched on this um decision early on that you're going to use the ballad form and mentioned how the ancient mariner had sort of helped you navigate when you were setting off with a long ballad like this if you look at the sort of per se's relics or something the ballads that come out are in the dupty dupty they're the same all the way through with perhaps a little refrain that's just how they were done as a song um but yours isn't like that at all so was this something you composed whilst walking or did you claim it how did you get that that sort of thing well yeah mine didn't it certainly your mind seems so first of all ballads go back a long way with me would because my mother constantly resided poetry including ballads and also sometimes sang them so my mother would sing you you banks and razor-bony do you can you bloom so fresh and say but she would recite ballads I mean she would recite Thomas the Rhymer to me or or really quite dark ballads like the twire Corby's all those kind of you know so I thought we're glued to that but the the I quote it directly when when we hear about the death of Perseval's father and how the the crows the birds took his head to think their nests I don't use a Scotts dialect word that so I had that rhythm in me quite early um and I as I say I mean my mother resided the ancient mariner to me many times when I was a young boy before I ever and while we were out at sea in fact so before I ever I ever read it but I realized you can't do a long poem in you know strictly four stress three stress four stress three stress understands a rhyme a b c b even if you have the odd internal rhyme so I noticed that Coleridge extends the sands are every so often and adds more internal rhymes and chimes and then I saw and and Chastatin uses one of those extended forms for ballad of the white horse but then he doesn't vary it so I thought I'm going to vary it but I'm also going to let myself go occasionally when I'm when I'm when I'm trying to lift you and I'm really trying to enchant you I'm going to do long strings of chimes rather like tense and does in the shallot but even more one of the most beautiful I mean I used to ask myself when I started reading contemporary poetry in the seventies because I wanted to be a poet and it was just flat dull chopped prose I thought what happened you know where did all the good stuff go and the answer was of course it went on to records it was being done by Dylan and Leonard Cohen and people like that so there's a great bit in about the experience of that kind of chiming rhyme in Dylan's Mr. Tambourine man which is very much about the kind of rhyming poet so I didn't remember the line triggers if you hear vague traces of skipping reels of rhyme to your tambourine in time I wouldn't pay it any mind it's just a ragged cloud behind it's just a shadow you're seeing that he's chasing and then that enchant you see already at that great moment in the in the song to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free silhouetted by the sea circled by the circus sounds with all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves I mean it so I occasionally and particularly when I want to hide in things I I I I I'll expand the four line very often to six but I'll sometimes expand it to 10 if I really want to do something distinct and I think and then now the times I'll keep it absolutely tight in my in my seven part story which is completely original and it's not in the material of gall out in the night I keep the form very strictly so I hope there's enough variety would you like to read us one of those sections so we can hear it as we've mentioned is is that I've really made much more of a of a figure out of Dundrain and she becomes becomes very much a figure in her own right and I also draw a lot out of you know one of the things I love about George McDonald is he re draws your attention to the wisdom of older women and you know we told at one point in Mallory that one of the hermits that Percival meets his is aunt just as we're told that this grail maiden unnamed in Mallory's his sister so I thought what's the backstory there you know I imagined you know this poor widow has sons gone off which she didn't want him to and then the sister gently telling her look your daughter has gifts to and I imagine the two women going off into the woods to learn prayer together at the the older woman's hermitess's cell and I that gave me a chance I mean who am I as a man to do this but I tried to imagine this passing on of wisdom from one woman to another and I what I did was I was partly thinking about what I know about Celtic spirituality but also I was actually channeling my inner hildegard of Bingen um hildegard's whole interest in nature and her belief that everything is a word from God you know and that you know God is speaking to us through I put all that in so I'll read you this bit and you'll hear me really let myself go on the um on on the internal rhymes here so I'll just read you a couple of stanzas she taught Dandrain the way of prayer the way to steal her soul the way to woo each beast and bird and know each creature as a word breathed into being by our Lord for God himself is the true part and sings creation through his word and Dandrain learned from all she heard and knew each star each stone each bird as parts of one great hole by night she kept pure vigil there and morning came too soon for she would see the stars wheel by and hear their music from on high and feel their influence and cry in ecstasy when she'd destroy a sphere of silver light draw night then she would lift her eyes and spy above the valley's chalice spy the wafer of the moon for those of you who listening or watching this on YouTube there's a fantastic illustration which was one of those toploi ideas where you can see the valley but you can also see the chalice with the moon as the way so the stem of the chalice is actually the reflection of the moon on the water and as soon as Stephen Crock sent me that like I've got the right guy here like he said that's what I'm doing yeah so yeah that gives you a bit of the sense of incantation kind of enchanted incantation that I'm trying to get but also where some of the spirituality is in the in the poem so you've gone straight in at the ultimate quest in a sense of the grail quest but yeah that's quite a radical decision yeah this isn't the the end of Arthur for you what other plans do you have for I mean Aristotle says in his poetics that if you're writing an epic you should begin in medias res you know you've done that back so I partly do that but to be honest when I because of that what I was so convinced by Williams that the grail is the heart of the whole matter of Britain that in a sense come a lot this broadened to existence that the grail might be manifest it's not that the grail is manifest because Camelot is you know great you know the the grail is the heart of it so when I first you know when I did walk out that meant some a mourn I I'm gonna add some health issues I really didn't know I actually thought I may not live to complete this and I also thought I'll never persuade a publisher to do the entire thing as I envisage it you know in four volumes maybe I'll just have to write the grail as a single separate volume and then if that floats and gets a fair wind then they'll let me do the rest in fact by the time I'd shown this to rabbit room they just were on it and they said we want to do the whole thing and we want you to guarantee the whole thing and we want to say this is four volumes so I'm beginning as it were almost two-thirds of the way through so what's going to happen next is we're gonna I mean there is precedence for this um both aspects I mean even in the Lewis there are nine out here people are going to have the arguments about which order to read the books in so this is basically this volume as you have it now is going to have two prequels in a sequel so next up is going to be we're going to go back to the coming of Arthur you know in Arthur's conception and fostering and we're going to bring him right up in that volume through the sword in the stone and next caliber and the founding of the round table marriage are going to be the first question to the round table then after that there's going to be a more general night to the round table where we can bring in a you know going in the green night and and and Tristan and his old and and a whole section on Morgan and the fan all that sort of thing and then we'll have the final volume which will be the passing of the Arthur and the kind of tragic outworking of the effect of of um launched on whenever is it also and so on so you know tragedy but not complete tragedy because the whole thing is you know it's it's a it's a light that's been kindle that'll never be forgotten and of course there is the promise of the return of Arthur and um so that's going to be the shape of it and the second volume coming of Arthur has already been finished I'm doing the last edits and so I'm stuck writing the appendices because I'm going to have an appendix on Merlin and one on Taliesin and one on Fairy more generally and I've got so much I want to say I'm kind of stuck on the account yeah so I am hoping that by the end four volumes each with three books it will be your actual 12 book epic but also I mean people I mean the way I'm writing it now when people read the backstory I hope there'll be a certain free song as they see what's coming you know when in in volume two in the the next one that's coming out I tell the story it's alluded to throughout here but I tell the story of the dollarous stroke and the the the the the the wounding of the Fisher King and the the wasting of the land as it happens as it were but they will already know how hard it was to get through the wasteland for the for the nights and but that the wasteland will be healed in itself and there are marvelous stories and I think perhaps what what I find really exciting is that they have been sort of dumbed down isn't quite that they've been simplified and stupid yeah I mean I've seen tellings which don't mention the dollarous stroke or the wasteland at all which seems to be to miss almost all the way to them and everything and there's been quite a few that are sort of flavor of I was very fond of the BBC version which took Merlin as their main character yeah there's some lovely things in it but it didn't really have any narrative structure to it of any sort it was that they're my daughter enjoyed it yeah no we we enjoyed it watching it of my kids it was it was great fun and particularly because it thinking of what a young Merlin might have been like was and how he how he was struggling in a kingdom which didn't like magic that was all great it was like a prequel read it concentrated on that that that element of his life well of course one month tells us first about the young Merlin when he's nearly sacrificed to put his blood on the foundations of Vortigan's tower I don't remember them doing that in the BBC version I got I got a loot that various ways I'm probably in before I'm going to have talliesin tell Merlin's backstory along after Merlin has departed from the narrative but we're going to you know it's called Merlin's Island I've got to keep bringing Merlin anymore where and yes well Merlin it's always such a huge privilege and pleasure to talk to you particularly I love hearing you read your own verse I always ask like guests to expand their minds beyond their own world that they're working in but take an element into other fancy worlds and I thought it would be fun to ask you and I'll have a think about this myself where would be the best place to go on a quest for the Grail think you about the Grail as an element that's for all time in all places um obviously Indiana Jones has already done it but where would you go for a quest? I would take it well if it was going to take into the realm of another great um you know mytho parake writer yeah exactly I think I would be with CS Lewis on the on the um and with with Reaper cheap and all the others on the voyage of the dawn treader my favorite of the nonion chronicles partly because of the ship in fact it although the only mention of Arthur by name is in Prince Caspian when when the kids come back and he says it's like Arthur was coming back for the nonions and and I say there's some say he will and I say the sum of the better says that says Lewis but actually at the deepest level there's all kinds of grail motifs going on they're going closer and closer to the utterly holy Reaper cheap is finally on a quest you know for Aslan's country which has been prophesied as a you know uh over him as a bait that he would make this quest we even he's the kind of the good night I mean and he's totally shiv alric and of course Paul in veins gets it all and then when they when they finally get to Aslan's table it's Reaper cheaper picks up a chalice obviously it's not the grail but you have the image of the good night who will go on the who leave all the companions behind and go into the heart of heaven itself and there he is holding a chalice on the table I mean you know um so I could imagine another voyage of the dawn treader as it were in which you know I would sail you know with Chosen there is Chosen Heroes and we would we would it would the dawn treader would become the grail ship and that would suit me absolutely fine yeah so I think one of the problems about thinking about the grail quest in other contexts is because it is specifically about Christ and Christ sacrifice there's sometimes dropping it into another world oh yeah I wouldn't I mean oh yeah it kind of deletes it doesn't it because I was thinking I'll be really interesting to sort of have it as a as a plot in Doctor Who or something I don't know exactly you know that with the trouble is I mean that's why you know I mean I haven't seen me in down in the other Jones thing and nor have I seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail for me it's just too sacred I just don't want to go yeah but yeah because it is it is you know the I make you know it is the meeting of heaven and earth in and through the body and a lot of Christ so it's like massive thing and that sense you can't but you can still the humility of Christ as the human I mean one of the in coming in anything form at all let alone you know simply this chalice I mean I rather love in war in heaven in with the Williams where you know the Holy Grail turns up just in you know in the in the cupboard of a parish church and the best thing there's the art like he makes the hero an archdeacon probably the single most unglamorous role you can have in the one of things archdeacons visitations eyes for checking the silverware of parish churches and making sure they're all there and he takes that totally mundane thing and makes it a grail quest it's fantastic you might not dislike the Indiana Jones version because though it has slightly multiply the nest elements at the end with the way they did their night who's been guarding this thing forever but it was in Petra so that would be worth seeing Petra and of course there's loads of goblins all lined up and you have to choose the one it's like that merchant's tale yeah yeah yeah don't choose the one diamond in cross did you choose the battered don't use the bling yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so I mean you might quite like it it's not too bad and and it's sort of reverential about the the sort of religious context of it oh yeah so not not a complete disaster from that point of view um but yes so I think I've only come up with faces I wouldn't put it um so I have to go and think about that a bit more thank you so much Malcolm and um for those of you who now want to rush out and get your copy of Gallahad and the grail um if you're in the US look up um rabbit room is that the rabbit room melons out they've got a whole site about it and they've got they've done a really cool thing actually they're recognizing that book clubs and book groups might want to do this and they've created a whole free sort of um set of resources you know including like dramatizing the wasteland section you read that in parts and even like coloring sheets for kids that might be hanging around the book group and the suggestion is that you know some book groups you read the chapter and then you discuss it but in others you read out loud to each other and they think this would really work well for that so there in the states and then here in in England it's good old Canterbury press my my usual poetry publisher and they've got it uh and in both cases it's a wonderful you know solid hardback with as I say these beautiful illustrations I I love booked physically as objects and I read beautiful objects and it really is yeah so and that makes it a great present as well so you know yeah yeah for yourself or for someone else and so thank you very much Malcolm and we look forward if you've got a title for part two the coming of Arthur one yeah we should call the coming of Arthur well there you go yeah and that's um that'll be out in November I think so quite soon and then the other the final two will be one in 27 and one in 28 um my aim is to finish writing it all before I turn 17 and I'm 68 okay so that's that's the that's the goal that's it's just to talk to you again um I I mentioned joyd our collaboration together on our lent book yes wardrobe rings yes I rather miss those trips to Oxford yes so um we we must um if you didn't catch it this lent um everybody and there will be another lent coming around so look out ball doves and rings which includes Malcolm myself and Simon Horobin um sort of picking sort of lovely moments from Tolkien um or CS Lewis or their influences and connecting them to lend and to the Easter story so anyway thank you very much Malcolm and thank you very much for introducing us to Galahad and the Grail thanks for listening to myth makers podcast brought to you by the Oxford Center for Fantasy visit Oxford Center for Fantasy.org to join in the fun find out about our online courses in person stays in Oxford plus visit our shop for great gifts tell a friend and subscribe wherever you find your favorite podcasts worldwide