King Arthur and the Tolkien Lecture

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. I'm the director of the Centre and an author and today I am joined by special guest Gabriel Schaith. Now Gabriel, perhaps you could introduce yourself just a little to the listeners. Hi, thank you so much for having me Julia. My name is Gabriel. I teach online at Signal University which is an online university specialising in fantasy studies and as an MA in Tolkien studies as well. I did my PhD or as we call it an Oxford D refill in Arthurian literature at Oxford specifically at Pembroke College which is the college where Tolkien was for about 20 years where he wrote the Hobbit and most Law of the Rings and I also work for Japanese charity in my spare time so I split my time between lots of different things at the moment and help out with various things as well based near Oxford and I love reading fantasy and talking about fantasy. So that's a little taster of the kind of area we'll be covering but we're talking in the week when you have just hosted the annual Tolkien lecture and I think a lot of people listening to this we're really interested to hear about the existence of this lecture who your guests in the past have been and who it was this year so perhaps we could start by talking a little bit about that. You're on the what the committee organising this are you and inviting people. Absolutely yes so about 10 years ago back in 2012 my friend and I who were both doing their PhDs at Oxford at Pembroke College in English realised that there was nothing in the college to ever say that Tolkien had been there. We found one painting which was actually donated by Tolkien to the college and that was it. That was the only hint that he'd been there. Meanwhile there was a Samuel Johnson building because Samuel Johnson had been there briefly as an undergraduate there were you know various other people commemorated all throughout the college so it felt like a bit of an oversight and we wanted to do something to commemorate Tolkien and back back in 2012 it didn't feel like there was a huge amount out there doing that. I think there was a lot of appreciation for Tolkien's work but not necessarily a sense that academia had caught up with that. Not many people doing PhDs on Tolkien compared to today I mean and not many things sort of celebrating his work and by extension celebrating fantasy and science fiction you know they still kind of a bit of a sense that people were sort of looking down on it to some extent maybe I don't know if that was deliberate or not but we thought we really wanted to do something to commemorate Tolkien and also to celebrate fantasy and to promote it as a subject that is worth serious study. I studied Arthurian literature stories about King Arthur partly because I wanted to study fantasy but I needed to find a legitimate way in to that topic which is a bit silly you should just be able to study what you want to study. As much as I love Arthurian literature it felt a bit silly to have to sneak around to the topic of fantasy when there was so much fantastic incredible work being done in fantasy and science fiction and it was so worthy of study and people are studying it and were studying it back then as well but it just wasn't kind of as much on the surface publicly as we thought it should be. So we started up this lecture series in honor of J.R. Tolkien but the lecture itself is on fantasy literature fantasy very broadly defined a bit like in the Hugo Awards so it can include science fiction and can include speculative fiction. You know we don't get too engrossed in defining what is and isn't fantasy we invite leading professionals writers, editors, artists in the field of fantasy to talk about their thoughts on the field as broadly as that. So we had Kid Johnson give the first lecture back in 2013 and she's an amazing writer and an academic as well and then that was followed by Professor Adam Roberts from Royal Holloway University who is also an incredible writer and an incredible academic so there's a bit of a theme going there because we like to sort of mirror Tolkien a little bit in that he was an academic a scholar but also a fantasy writer of course and then we've had just so many brilliant speakers and Marlon James, Love Grossman, Terry Wendling who's also an editor and artist as well as a writer Susan Cooper who was taught by Sirs Lewis and J.R. Tolkien and isn't just one of the most important fantasy writers ever as well in her own right and recently on Monday we had Rebecca Afkwang give her speech which was delayed from 2020. She was supposed to give it in May 2020 of course the pandemic intervened she was actually in Oxford at the time doing her masters and she had to evacuate the city in the middle of the night and then we had a kind of zoom symposium to make up for that in 2020 which was a lot of past speakers including our then future speaker Rebecca and that was called fantasy and times of crisis and that's a really interesting discussion that you can look at on YouTube if you're interested in that topic and then the following year we had a zoom lecture with Guy Gavreau K who again you know is an incredible fantasy writer but also has this history of working with Christopher Tolkien on the Silmarillion so that was a kind of nice link even though he didn't talk about that it was a nice link to have that and then finally we got to have the in-person lecture that was always intended for 2020 and Rebecca spoke on Monday which was the 23rd of May in person with a packed audience and we got to do all the great things that we can't do over zoom as much as I love things like this online teaching and online conversations that great but there's some things you can't do and we could have a kind of we could sort of hang out a bit more and exchange ideas a bit more freely and it was a brilliant lecture highly recommend you watch the recording if you haven't done so already it's on YouTube. Welcome to seeing the links into the show notes so people can find. Brilliant. Yeah do check it out. What I find with the Tolkien lectures is I get a lot out of it the first time but then if I keep on going back to it I keep on getting more and more out of it because they tend to be scholarly but accessible so there's a lot of quotations a lot of ideas and Rebecca had been thinking about this talk for at least two years and it's part it kind of responds to the panel discussion we had which is why write fantasy when there are about things happening in the world how much is this actually helping and she comes to some beautiful conclusions about the value of art and beauty and truth and all that good stuff but she expresses it so brilliantly and and I think in a very relatable way like a lot of the things she's talking about I've struggled with as well and along the way she gives really interesting insights into the public and publishing industry and the Q&A especially the the lecture itself is only it's about 35 minutes long and then the rest of the video is the Q&A which expands on some of her ideas so do check it out and check out our previous videos as well got all the lectures previous lectures recording they're all really really useful and inspiring and full of great ideas. Yeah I mean one of the things I was interested in hearing her say is the what you could hear the weirdness in her voice of because she is Chinese-American heritage of having always to be of you know in some sense seen as a flag carrier and there was one particularly telling phrase about publishing predominantly white publishing white people in publishing sort of presenting writers from other communities as though they've saved them you know yeah here's our flagship person for this particular ethnicity and I just felt I sympathize with her so much when I heard I thought oh yeah that's I've got a good friend who was an editor of mine and also a writer Jasmine Richards who has come on one of our courses you know spoke on one of our courses I remember saying she she's from a black British person she said I want a kid living in Brixton just to be able to write about a dragon egg that they find not the experience of a black person living in Brixton who finds a dragon egg you know just bring them up from the responsibility of having to you know always feel that they're having to think about identity politics when they just want to tell a story so I'm looking forward to catching up with the rest of the lecture right so that's just brilliant I'm so pleased that you've made this move to honor Tolkien in his college but we're now going to have a quick look at our theory and literature because as you said when you look at the any inheritance of the literature that we've got even though people have been sniffy until fairly recently about fantasy literature they've been teaching it for yeah it's gallevers travels pilgrims progress bear wolf you know it's you can't really move without finding what we would call fantasy literature and of course in the heart of that is the Arthurian cycle the matter of Britain so how did you how did you get there and what are your main Arthurian writers that you follow as it were what's your where's your interest settled in that right well I mean I got I came to Arthur as a child as a lot of people do I remember going over to my grandparents house and watching the sword and the stone which the Disney film and my grandmother showed it to me and loved it and and then I played you know as King Arthur's one of King Arthur's knights with my friends afterwards and then when I did my masters at Durham I did a fantastic course called narrative transpositions and we read Homer and we read Mallory and we read various other authors big you know epic volumes yeah and yeah we read Mallory so so Thomas Mallory wrote this book called the Mort d'Artha the late 15th century it was about 1470 and there was published 1485 and it's a enormous book in the background somewhere there but it's a bit about this big and he collates all these different sources I always feel like I should back up whenever I talk about King Arthur just specify he probably wasn't real sorry to disappoint but I think the literature is so much more interesting than the reality if he had been real he would have been like a kind of Celtic warlord and there's actually some really good fiction written about that setting so Rosemary Sarkloff I think is the absolute best of that sword at sunset there's a beautiful novel which is kind of like the historical Arthur but most of what we mean by King Arthur actually is medieval retellings of Arthur so Jeffrey of Monmouth being pretty much the earliest written down so I'm terrible dates off the top of my head but we're talking about kind of 11th to 12th century that sort of time and then 13th century French writers come in and Welsh writers in the collection known as the Mabinogion French writers such as Cretti and the Toire Marie de France and they kind of create more of a kind of romantic chivalrous exciting adventurous Arthur bit more of what we might recognise as fantasy elements as well and then Mallory sort of collates a lot of these sources together puts them all into this enormous book the Mort D'Artha which I read during my master's it was you know it's a big book it's 600 700 pages but I loved it and it was I think a lot of people with Mallory discover to their surprise that it's not dry it feels very real the characters feel real there's a lot of lists in it there's a lot of kind of the results of tournaments and things like that so there are bits you can sort of skim read but there's also the sense that these are real characters and most of the time they're not actually the stories aren't actually about Arthur Arthur's in the background get Arthur the beginning Arthur at the end most of the stories about Arthur's nights and sorceresses and dragons and quests and so on so it's great fun and it really helped me understand it was a kind of missing link in my love for fantasy because I grew up with talking and Lewis non-earned middle earth and I could see the roots of that in Arthurian literature specifically in Sir Thomas Mallory and just we should just say here that it's title is a bit of a misnomer because the Mort D'Artha is the death of Arthur you get far more than just Arthur's death yes exactly and it's not French as well so that confuses people too so it's an English it's written in English written in middle English you can you can still understand the original you know as well we we don't know exactly how Mallory wrote it but we have Kexton's printed version which came out shortly after Mallory wrote it and then there are kind of updated editions that update the spelling and so on which are much easier to read um yeah there's there's a big debate about the title some people think that Kexton gave it to the title of the Mort D'Artha because he got confused as he just was thought the name of one section was the name of the entire thing but other people have argued that actually the Mort D'Artha is a good title for the whole thing because although it's not all about the death of Arthur it's all leading up to that point although people see the Arthur in legend as essentially a tragedy which you know you can certainly make that argument I'm not sure I personally agree but yeah so it's an incredible work I do recommend slogging through it there's some beautiful beautiful things inside and it was really eye-opening for me and then when I went to do my PhD I was looking around for topics and I remember um I was listening to the soundtrack of I think it was a 1998 TV movie called Merlin starring Sam Neal and it has this amazing soundtrack and I was on the YouTube comments page for the soundtrack and someone who wrote in a comment saying I wish I could live back in this time and I was thinking this is weird because this time never existed especially not in the time depicted in Merlin which has magic and so on but they wanted to live in another time even though it didn't exist they're in nostalgic for something that never existed and I thought this is a fascinating phenomenon and I then that led me to I think I actually that led me to do my masters and William Morris at Durham um William Morris wrote kind of very early fantasy late pro-Zero amount is such as the would be on the world and the well at the world's end and and then for my PhD I thought well I'll just keep on going down this track and look at King Arthur as a way of understanding fantasy and so I focused on revival Arthurian literature um from the 19th century and the 20th century King Arthur kind of went away in the 18th century when we all sort of became very rational for about a hundred years and then he was republished the more Arthur was republished in 1816 in two new editions and there was about 186 year hiatus when you couldn't get a new copy of the more Arthur and then it came back two new editions in 1816 third edition in 1817 just it's never stopped being popular since then there was an explosion of interest in King Arthur then you get you know King Arthur plays King Arthur chocolate King Arthur hotels and then into the 20th century King Arthur movies King Arthur Dean Parks it's just everything goes kind of crazy King Arthur so it's really a fascinating period of study that's what I focused on in my PhD research and I've just finished giving a course at Sigma University called the return of King Arthur which is about this period as well why did Arthur come back what does it mean for Arthur to come back because essentially he always comes back every new edition every new retelling is a is a return and every time the Arthurian story is told it's told differently so you won't hear me saying this is the story there is no single story it's a playground for authors to explore ideas Tennyson did that TH white did that Tracy Dion recently in the legend born series is doing that as well every author brings something new to it new perspective and so that's what's really enjoyable about reading Arthur in literature really enjoy about studying it as well I've done that I did it for kids a few years ago at the university press I did young nights at the round table which was the sort of my take on it was that the Fey World was a kind of Arthurian world and that it was about changelings and the children over there were a bit like they're in North Korea they were told that humans were the enemy so it's kind of flipping the Arthurian story looking at it from the Morgan the Face eye anyway um why do you think Shakespeare didn't write you know the the tale of King Arthur because he's they obviously had the Spencer Fairy Queen at the time which was like you know a huge book in his own era but there was never the play yeah I mean unless he wrote it and it's lost I mean for a long time the birth it would be a great story well yeah there is a there's a novel called the tragedy of Arthur which is about that about the idea that he did write a play and it was rediscovered and then everyone who the author is but it's quite a good novel and at the end the author's reconstructed the entire play obviously made it up but if you want to read what a Shakespeare play about King Arthur would look like you can read the tragedy of Arthur um but yeah it's a really good question because Shakespeare drew on a lot of folklore and history as well um I mean King Lear is you know maybe his his closest equivalent uh I mean John Milton also didn't write about Arthur he thought about it and it ended up writing Paradise Lost Instead I think with Shakespeare A he was writing enough other stuff he was quite busy so he maybe just didn't get around to it um he may have felt it had already been done um he mean he would have had the Fairy Queen but he would have had access to Le Mord Arthur as well I should think um and Le Mord Arthur's quite Catholic um it was quite a lot of masses in this there's a lot about the Holy Grail which is the cup that Christ used so maybe um he didn't want to go down that route um he does mention Arthur a few times uh there's about two or three mentions of Arthur and about two mentions of Merlin, full-starth um there's a character who appears in a few of Shakespeare's plays mentions Arthur uh so you know Shakespeare definitely aware of him um but it's I think the there's a lot of plays from that period about Arthur that were lost a lot of plays full-stop that were lost and there's some really interesting work being done I went to a talk recently by De Phil at Jesus College, Oxford who was working on early modern Arthurian plays and sometimes we only have the titles so there's a whole kind of world in that era um that we don't know about but it's a fascinating question to think why didn't Shakespeare write about it? So it skips a couple of the bigons like Shakespeare and Milton in a considerable way but the one that I am land on next is Tennyson if I missed anybody out before that um not not really I don't think okay that's good because otherwise I'll sue Cambridge and Oxford for migration right okay so I'm okay um so in Tennyson you've got a poetic approach to Arthur with Idols of the King and that comes along with a whole craze for Arthurian names if you just look at the names of um particularly for women just the whole you know lane and all of this suddenly this is a really common name people using it was obviously a real craze in Victorian society so did you what's your feelings of you mentioned you went to William Morris but what do you think about the Tennyson pro uh poetry? I love Tennyson I adore Tennyson Idols of the King or Idols of the King depending on how you you said is not everyone loves it um some some people have some issues with some of the idols um such as Gwenevere and just to explain their 12 kind of separate narrative poems that are written in blank verse so they're really they're quite easy to read for poetry you know it's not rhyming um it's just kind of a flowing story and the the Idols vary a lot so some of them are kind of intimate sort of domestic dramas um kind of one-to-one like um Berlin in Nimmoway some of them are kind of more like epics um the coming of Arthur the passing of Arthur some of almost like fairy tales there's elements in the passing of Arthur that is like a fairy tale the repetition of the Excalibur going into into the the lake and so on so even within go in three times yeah exactly three times and the and the number nine turns up a lot in the text as well so even within a single section there's a lot of variety which I think makes them fascinating incredibly beautiful I think incredibly beautiful verse um and I think he really captures the spiritual side of the legend as well um and it was interesting teaching Tennyson recently at Signum because some people really were very moved by Tennyson um by Idols the King and the religious elements some people were a bit more turned off by that so there's something in Arthurian literature for everyone if you've read a bit of Arthurian literature and you think that's not for me just find something else because uh I mean it was interesting hearing you talk about your story you can take so many different approaches to it you can take so many different angles um and I think one thing that I want to remind people about Tennyson is that he was kind of radical for his time because he became poet laureate and is quoted and studied in school he becomes this establishment figure but he was taking a big bold risk writing about Arthur and he was very anxious about that it took him a long time to write Idols the King it was really his life's work um he wrote the first lines when he was in his early 20s and he was working up on it still up to his death bed um in his late 80s I think so it was a great labor of love for him and the first thing he published was a kind of framing device for what would later become the passing of Arthur and the framing device is that someone found this poem and the author had burnt all the other parts of it because it wasn't good enough because why should man remodel models why go back to the past you know we can't bring back the past so why should we even try and this is Tennyson's sort of anxiety about what am I even doing why I should be writing about contemporary things why am I writing about someone you probably never even existed but I'm glad he did persevere with that because then that becomes a standard thing no one's going to say why are you writing about King Arthur anymore because of the work that he did but it's worth remembering that that was that was bold and radical at its time um to sort of establish that and help establish the what later becomes the fantasy genre as well so we had a podcast devoted to William Morris with Dr. Ingrid Hanson who's an expert on Morris and we were talking in that about the defense of Gwynnevere which is obviously a really fascinating development of the Arthurian themes which William Morris usher in but we should also mention that William Morris with his connection to the arts and craft movement and the pre-raffelite movement kind of they're all part of the same movement really um very much gives us the iconography which we can all summon up if I just say think of a Arthurian lady you immediately think of those you know drop wasted gowns and the you know thick hair yeah all of that uh the look is very much a pre-raffelite look which is still carried over to understandings of fantasy now so um we've touched on William Morris I think he also did an addition of Mort Arthur didn't he with fantastic um from the at least he's done some prints Arthurian prints would he yeah possibly from the council court um publishes I'm not sure I've seen that actually um but there's I mean Aubrey Beardsley has did um prints which are kind of quite similar I mean that aren't no though rather than pre-raffelite but they're sort of um quite arresting as well and and um I think uh Morris did certainly did prints for some of his Arthurian poems okay maybe that's what I'm thinking of then yeah I'm not if you haven't heard of it I'm then I'm probably wrong um so then moving on into the 20th century uh also on these podcasts we've spent a couple of um a couple of times we've thought about Charles Williams of course rights his extraordinary um Arthurian poems centered around Taliass in the bard figure but before we get to Charles Williams who's writing in the 1930s is there anybody else who bridges us in the Edwardian period carrying the Arthurian flame forwards yeah there's lots I mean not not necessarily big names um there was a lot of very good drama um sort of fun to see at the 1890s Edwardian era there was a big kind of blockbuster performance of King Arthur the Lighting Theatre starring Sir Henry Irving who was the first actor ever to be knighted with Bram Stoker the author of Dracula as the stage manager and Ellen Terry as Gwynneville so these are you know the biggest names in the 19th century stage what a production team that would have been amazing amazing and you can still read the um the script and there's lots of kind of photographs and stuff of the performance and stuff so that's kind of fascinating one to think about although you really need to have been there I feel um the script isn't quite good enough but you get the sense of the scale of it um another author I've I really really highly right is Clemens Houseman who was the sister of AE Houseman and she incredible writer um highly recommend her um Douglas Anderson has included her in tales before talking as kind of roots of modern fantasy um he's what he's one of the world experts on on Houseman uh and she wrote a novel called The Life of Sir Agleville De Galas she's spent about 16 years writing it um I taught it recently in this course um it was published I think 1906 around that time taught it in the Signum University course and the students the reaction of the students was um quite a few of them said when they started it first 10 50 pages they were thinking why are we reading this and then about 100 pages in they were thinking this book is changed by life like it is just extraordinary um it's so intense there's so much in it it's written in this kind of old sort of Mallory style it's very kind of close to Mallory's Lamort Datham and actually even quotes Mallory verbatim within the narrative without you even realizing what Houseman is doing but it is this really intense psychological journey um about a minor character in Arthur's court Sir Agleville so that's a really fascinating one and I think that one needs to be read more and known more um and then 1930s I mean you have the beginning of T.H. Whites the Once of Future King so the Sword and the Stone comes out in the late 1930s um and that's kind of the next big thing really uh the sword the the Once of Future King is a really big important epic um but yeah Charles Williams fits in around that time too I've just spent some time thinking about that book because I was reading H's for Hawk but yeah um which is a book about training training at Hawk by Helen McDonald and she is basically partnering throughout with her thoughts about T.H. Whites and um because he also wrote a book about training at Hawk and it was particularly interesting to read her take on the bits when Wart the the boy who becomes the Once of Future King is turned into animals and how this is it's a very good companion piece if you're thinking of how do I get into the Once of Future King I would imagine this is a very good way of approaching it because it picks out things about the way that Arthur is used to reflect on contemporary issues that everybody has and identity issues for T.H. Whites um yeah absolutely yeah I mean so McDonald makes the case that that white was a deeply unhappy man um and that's fair enough I mean I've been to Whites archives which are weirdly enough in Austin Texas and the ransom center and they've got all of his journals and diaries and letters and so on so I've read through all his journals whilst he was writing The Once of Future King and he was suffering he was he was a bit tortured he was very isolated very lonely um he was a repressed homosexual he um you know uh was given some very bad psychological advice about repressing his homosexuality um he was kind of feeling very cut off from the rest of the world and he was in Ireland at the time the rest of the world well his country England was going to war um and he felt like you know he should really help out with that but he didn't know how to and he was kind of a bit useless at the jobs that would be important for the war efforts so he's kind of yeah he feels very cut off in Ireland and he channeled a lot of his pain into this incredibly beautiful and moving and powerful story um which he also sees as a tragedy so I mean it there's lots of fun things in The Once of Future King and it is an extremely funny series of books especially the first one but there's also pain and um sadness in there as well I think I think McDonald's sort of brings that out in ages for hawk um because that's a book about grief as much as anything else yeah and maybe that's what's so fascinating about the Arthurian cycle as it does have this melancholy it feels very for those of people who know they're talking that talking is basically part of what's the mix is the you know ragnarok we're all heading for the great defeat kind of feel it's getting um we're moving away from a golden age yeah and there is definitely that feeling in Arthur too that we are the greats go and they may possibly come back like in ragnarok they may possibly come back but I don't know if you ever think they will it's the hope that maybe they will yeah it's interesting isn't because the the Arthur story is that Arthur is not actually dead that he's going to come back one day um and there are stories about Arthur coming back but really it works best if he is some way off into the future and shivalry itself the time of shivalry never really existed you know this time of nights and quests and so on there are historical periods of shivalry but even then the kind of nostalgic yeah even at the time like even the medieval writers and people you know they're trying to recreate something that never really existed um so shivalry always really exists in the past and Arthur always comes back at a predetermined future date so there there is some kind of hope for it but there's a yearning too um and I'm reminded there's a line in a doctor who episode blink when one of the characters Sally Sparrow says uh I like all houses they're sad and her friend says what's so good about sad and she says sad is happy for deep people and that really resonates with me I love all this kind of sad stuff because it's it I don't know it just sort of gives it inspires me and and yeah it kind of gives me a weird kind of happiness at the same time because it's not all sad it's not you know there's lots of not everyone dies at the end you know but it is this kind of loss in this yearning which I think absolutely also get in Tolkien um the loss of previous civilizations and the the the sense that even you know the the elves are going to stick around forever and um the order order changes yielding place to the new is Tennyson put it I think that's absolutely something that Tolkien is getting from Tennyson um he actually translated one of Tennyson's poems I think it was break break break um into Elvish um so he was he was very taken by Tennyson and uh and and Tennyson break break break uh it was either that poem or crossing the bar both written about Halem Arthur Halem who he was you know this man that that Tennyson loved deeply and died before his time and that really it was like the most life changing event for Tennyson and a lot of that goes into idols of the king a lot of that goes into all his poetry and I think Tolkien himself you know had early losses you know his mother um his father um his friends in the First World War and even before the First World War um so uh yeah there's something that speaks to those writers about fantasy and Arthur and of course Tolkien wrote um his own Arthurian poem as well the fall of Arthur which is incomplete but still published and that's tremendous too and of course C.S. Lewis it's full of um Arthurian I mean we haven't got time to cover it here but just for people who've read Narnia for example they'll know that again and again there is an Arthurian feel almost like Arthur and would Juvenate it um in Narnwich in the wardrobe and the way that the uh leadership is is described as being shared um and the order of knights anyway we can go on there's loads of it um and of course C.S. Lewis was the great medievalist and knew all this stuff inside out but maybe people would be interested to know what you rate as really good Arthurian entertainment on their TV or film choices so let's come bang up to date there's keeps coming up um sometimes relatively big film sometimes missing the mark but what's your feeling of Arthurian themed series that people should dip into well I really enjoy Merlin the BBC TV series and that's something a lot of people have watched in Britain at least I think that's very relatable on Netflix actually now so yeah it's great fun I mean it's if you've seen Smallville or Gotham it's a similar kind of story in that it's the kind of the prequel series when Merlin and Arthur were young of course Merlin in most versions isn't the same age as Arthur but it doesn't matter you can do what do you like with the legends and they have great fun with them they have great sort of um banter banter yeah exactly I mean I think I mean I as I kind of maybe shocked my students when I was teaching King Arthur recently because I said I don't actually care about King Arthur they don't I don't have like a King Arthur duvet set I don't have like King Arthur Cuddly Tory I'm not a King Arthur fan that's not what I'm fascinated about with the Arthurian legend King Arthur isn't actually about King Arthur King Arthur is about people and people's relationships and the best Arthurian fiction whether that be TV or film or books is about those human relationships so I think that's something that the Merlin series does well in terms of films I mean Excalibur is worth watching it's very intense um 1983 something like that early 80s and actually John Baldwin the director wanted to get the rights to Lord of the Rings and couldn't so he did King Arthur instead um but that's that's quite intense um I would say the kid who would be King directed by Joe Cornish is much more uh accessible and fun that's a recent film that came out a few years ago um and I also think although it's a bit controversial um the the guy Richie King Arthur film King Arthur legend of the sword is actually a lot of fun I rewatched it recently it's much better than I remember it being I think when it came out a lot of us were sort of feeling like oh this goes too far who's the who's the lead in that one Charlie Hunman I think is yeah yeah okay I'll just I'm afraid I get confused with the Robin Hood films right yeah and run parallel that if someone's doing King Arthur there's also a Robin Hood film happening okay right it's a similar kind of thing and it's basically it's very much a guy Richie version of King Arthur so there's even a bit where Bed of It says you know we've got to assault the the castle and we've got to bring you know all these armies and you think okay well this is like a standard kind of Lord of the Rings sort of fantasy story with the big armies and so on and then King Arthur played by Charlie Hunman says no no what we've got to do is get a couple of diamond geese and we'll go and do ice and that's what they do so it's like a kind of it almost goes that way the standard route and then it it's actually a very different kind of story um and it's just great fun then with great love costumes don't analyze it too much um don't go into it thinking I want historical realism because you're not going to get it in any Arthurian story so you might as well enjoy the ride um so those those are the ones I would pick out I think for for accessible kind of TV and film I did think that cursed which was on Netflix was actually doing some really interesting things unfortunately you got canceled after one season but it is still worth checking out and that's about Nimmerway the Lady of the Lake uh this from her perspective and it's a shame because they were going some they were pushing things in some interesting directions in that series but that that's another recent one which I enjoyed so that's thank you that's fantastic so and just before we get to where in the world um how I usually end um Gabriel you're also involved in curating some literary estates associated with the inkling so maybe you want to tell you a little bit about that role and what that involves yeah um so I work with Owen Barfield's grandson on the Owen Barfield's literary estate and that's been great fun and very rewarding I've been doing that for over 10 years now and we've seen interest in Barfield grow in that time Barfield is one of the inklings who is arguably the most important because he sort of glues everyone together and you can find so much of talking and Lewis in Barfield or rather the other around so much of Barfield and talking and Lewis and huge huge influence on them both especially Lewis and but so someone who's been sort of a little bit more forgotten than the others because he didn't write like a big fantasy universe that was his mistake I guess but a fantastic philosopher and wrote lots of you know wrote the first inklings fairy tale uh the sulfur trumpet um which is available on the website and so that that's something I've been involved in getting the word out about Barfield making the information as accessible as possible because talking to Lewis is so big the literary estates have to be a bit more close off and protective whereas with Barfield we're bringing everyone in um we're putting up there's lots of texts that you can just read for free on the website there's fantastic Facebook discussion board there's YouTube videos Barfield has a reputation of being quite difficult to understand and it is proper deep philosophy that he's writing about but it's actually very accessible once you get your head around it and especially if you're not Christian um that you will find lots in Barfield because I think some people feel like they're missing stuff out especially in Lewis if they're not Christian um because Christianity is so central to to Lewis and to less extent to Tolkien whereas Barfield is kind of writing for everyone and a much kind of broader approach and the brilliant novel to read actually is Peron Easy by Susanna Clark which I just ignored and that is laced with Barfieldian philosophy and she was inspired by Barfield uh to write it and she mentions Barfield by name at one point that that kind of central idea is is extremely Barfieldian and it's also really important to fantasies so if you're interested in the study of fantasy you have to read Barfield he have to engage with Barfield and that's been really fun thing that I've been involved in um with Barfield literary estate. Brilliant thank you okay so right down to the final question which is wherein all the fantasy world is best and uh in your honour because we've been talking about Arthur I'm going to ask where in all the fantasy worlds is the best place to find an enchanted sword now obviously perhaps we could just put aside a scalaba because it might be like the winner uh just because it's the most famous enchanted sword so we'll all just do a sort of nod to a scalaba but in other books you've read what enchanted sword has taken your fancy. Well I mean the first thing to explain is that a scalaba of the sword and the stone are separates usually I mean sometimes they're combined because it makes more sense um but scalaba comes from the lady of the lake uh and is it's it's an important sword although in Mallory it's not actually the sword that's important it's the scabbard the scabbard is the enchanted part which means that you won't die you won't lose any blood as long as you've got the scabbard. um the sword of the stone is just a sword that just proves that Arthur is the rightful king so that the sword itself isn't actually important um so if we if we if we assume that scalaba is the sword from the lake and we're we're nodding at that but not going into detail I would still say that enchanted lakes are good sources for swords um I mean in the real world you know people do drop swords and they get washed up on the shoreline and there are stories of children finding swords and you know the story becomes uh the new king Arthur and why not um but yeah the the sword in the stone would be another another place to find good swords especially if you can pull it out there's some great stories there's a short story by Jane Yearlan written in the 1980s and there's a short story written in the 1910s Thomas Wood Stevens about people pulling the sword out of the stone using their initiative using um science to freeze the metal or to lubricate the metal in order to pull it out and then becoming the rightful owner of Excalibur or sorry the sword on the stone um using their ingenuity so I quite quite like that so if you if you do find a sword in a stone and you can't pull it out because you're not the rightful you know you don't have the right lineage rewrite the story rebel against the story and say it's actually about your ingenuity that gives you the right to be the ruler and find another way of pulling at the sword out of the stone but um the the only other place to think of where you might find an enchanted sword would be in a castle usually with some kind of ritual ceremony involved maybe a procession comes out with the holy grail and then there's a sword there quite often there's the spear of long enough as well spear of destiny um if anyone ever or if you ever get a vision of a sword seek that out I read you to a castle you'll probably have to pass some kind of test um maybe it's a riddle maybe it's um a morality test um but if you can pass that test and gain the sword then it will be a great boon to you and uh you can yeah it will serve you well I thought of three which don't fit that category so obviously let's do a nod to sting your bow sword because it's an early warning system excellent use for a sword uh shines blue get worried excellent idea um but the other two I thought of one is in um the uh Percy Jackson series where he gets the sword which is from the Greek Olympic Olympian gods and the thing that attracts me to that is it changes shape so it's a very user friendly sword you can carry it around with you in your pocket um and then of course probably my favorite sword is actually a lightsaber um because that was the one I think we were pretending to play within the playground so and I was little and if you really think about that that is just an enchanted sword yeah because it works on um the force a kind of Jedi magic I'm probably going to get those people telling me why I'm wrong but that's my understanding of the Star Wars universe um so I think that up there with Excalibur these days is the lightsaber is an instantly recognizable form of enchanted sword so that's my favorite yeah absolutely and and both Bilbo sorry both Frodo and um Luke gain their swords from inheritance this has passed down to them from their relatives and so that's a nice thing as well and that's the thing about sword it lasts practically forever you can still find swords buried in the ground um so it represents great continuity um and there's this idea also you know there's a period in history after the Romans left when um things slid back a bit and there were kind of civil wars and so on um the early medieval period where you might find an all sword or you might be inheriting all swords there's actually really well made and made with the technology that doesn't exist anymore and that kind of I think that comes into stories about magical swords so you know the sting is a really all sword but it has this amazing properties um you know it was in this really old battle um killed a lot of goblins that's very different to today when it's like you've got to get the new iPhone or something you're not going to inherit your grandfather's iPhone and it's going to be much better than the current one so it's a different perspective though but it's certainly yeah that's a thing about magic swords all there is often better that's an excellent uh last thought inheriting your grandfather's iPhone that would be quite a thing so thank you so much Gabriel it's lovely talking to you and I feel we've covered um king of quite well in our chat and people will be uh i'm sure looking up some of those books that you've mentioned which they were already familiar with so thank you so much i'm certainly going to go and check them out thank you and and thanks for all the work you do um as well and it's great i think the talking election fantasy literature is sort of we're trying to do similar things to what you in doing as well which is promote the study of fantasy but also bring as many people in as possible exactly doors should definitely be open thank you so much and um goodbye thank you very much bye bye 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 this episode is brought to you by 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