The Oddest Inkling - Charles William... with Sørina Higgins

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 an author but also I'm a director of the Centre and today I'm joined by a very special guest who is one of the world experts on Charles Williams who perhaps we could call the third inkling after CS Lewis and Tolkien. So Sorina would you like to introduce yourself and say who you are and where you come from? Hello yes thank you so very much for having me on. It's a pleasure to talk to you. I am Dr. Sorina Higgins. I currently reside in Waco, Texas where I've just finished my PhD at Baylor University and I teach at Sigmund University which is an online institution and yes I've done research into Charles Williams but more recently my research has shifted towards William Butler Yates, Alistair Crowley and the modern occult movement of which Charles Williams was a member. Oh fantastic we must we must talk about that because that's one of his interesting differences in a way from the other. Yes, that particular axis in his life. Okay so let's start with the basics. I'm not going to assume that people know who Charles Williams is so would you like to give us like the headlines on him? Sure so Charles Williams born in 1886 in London and he spent most of his life in the city. He was a city boy. He wasn't as into nature as the other inklings. Spent a little time outside the city in St Albans, went to university for only a couple of years and had to drop out for financial reasons so he was not one of the Oxbridge educated men. He was largely self-taught. He began a job at the lowest ranks at Oxford University Press just doing the checking of some proofs. I think it was the complete work of Anthony Trollock and then he worked his way up. He was doing it alone. He was doing it with Fred Page who became his office mate and a very good friend for decades. So he worked his way up the ranks of Oxbridge University Press from a lowly proof reader to become a senior editor and through his editorial work and the introductions and preferences he wrote and the authors with whom he corresponded and the collections he brought together, he actually had a fair influence on the literary tastes of the times and what literature was available. He was the first to publish the works of Soren Kierkegaard in England and was maybe the first person ever in England's lecture on Kierkegaard as just one example of his editorial work. So for most of his life, his day job and his ordinary activities were very different from the rest of the inclinings. Now we should mention that though he worked for Oxbridge University Press his actual office was in London. That's right. That's right because it was not the what we would now call the peer reviewed line of the press. It was academic but for a more popular audience work that was what was going on in London whereas Oxbridge was where the strictly academic works were being produced. But then in 1939 when the war hit and London was being bombed, he did evacuate two Oxbridge and that's when he joined the inclinings for the last six years of his life which were six highly productive years. However even before joining the inclinings, he was like all of them addicted to writing and he wrote ravenously in all of his spare time and then seems never to have slept. So he'll be writing all night. He would carry tiny little pads of paper with him wherever he went so you can find him on a train scribbling some esoteric poem on his knee while he's in the train or in odd moments at the office. So those are kind of the external details of his life. Not a very not a very adventurous in life from an external point of view but he had many spiritual intellectual adventures that I'm sure we will get into. He was married which is an interesting story. They had one son. He was a member of the Fellowship of the Rosie Cross Occult Group for 10 years and then an unofficial member of another Occult Exploration Group for about 20 years. Let's cover the occult at this point because I think when people hear the occult, people assume it means I know weager boards and black magic and things. This is not that. This is very much occult as in the sense of hidden private, a sense of magic but it's trying to use it for good and healing and sharing of burdens isn't it? That's the sort of philosophy of that group. That's the theory. It was weager boards. There was one instance when he walked into a room where people were playing with weager boards and apparently it had been doing nothing and as soon as he walked in it went mad and told them all sorts of things. The occult groups in which he was involved were quote-unquote Christian occult groups. We can get into what that means and how that's possible but they did practice many forms of divination, you know, tarot cards, astrology, meditation on the Sephirotic Tree from the Jewish Kabbalistic Mystical Tradition. They did practice high ceremonial magic with great ritual dressing up, choreography, words of power and so forth. It was not black magic, you're right, which is a different tradition and it was meant to do good but it often since it's being wielded by weak and sinful people, it often did go wrong and end up in coercion and control and even abuse of other people. Yes, there's Gregor Lindock's biography of Charles Williams is very interesting on this isn't it with the strange relationships he had with some women as a result of this. Yes, so let's think about him as a writer though of course this interest in his private life does come so much into his writing. I mean you can't really understand him as a writer without having a sense of where he came from. He, as he was saying he was working as an editor and a sort of person who set the taste by choosing to write certain introductions and things like that but he also started writing poetry and novels of his own which which which we go for first the poetry or the novels because they have different beasts. Let's go for the novels first because they're easy to understand and I also don't want us to overlook the plays and the nonfiction prose as well because those are extremely important. So the novels are the most accessible which isn't saying much because for him the bar of accessibility is fairly high but they are lively and delightful and strange and memorable creatures. I think one of the things that struck me about the novels is that each of them has a very different concept. It's as though he's inventing a bit like CS Lewis and Tolkien could be claimed to invent a whole new fantasy genre for both of them. He's doing the same but in rapid succession. So you've got the kind of Indiana Jones the what's it called the War in Heaven thank you and then you've got the philosophical one with the place of the lion which is the amazing one with the platonic ideals breaking through to ordinary life and so on and so on and then a very haunting one or Hallows Eve which is in a sort of blitz London it's quite extraordinary isn't it that one. Half of the characters are in the sort of anti-room to the afterlife. Yes the two characters have been killed immediately at the very beginning of the novel but they continue to be active in London and with the lives of the living through the whole novel. Yes you're right he picks he chooses as sort of a central or sacred object for each of these novels and it's the point around which all the spiritual energy turns and it works it works the way a murder works and a lot of murder mysteries. Now how you have like say broad church and it starts in this nice quiet little English village and everyone seems so nice and ordinary but then the crime is committed and as the story goes forward you start to learn all the dark wicked things about each character and before the end you suspect everyone. Well the way of crime kind of reveals people's spiritual condition so this sacred object in Williams novels reveals people's spiritual condition essentially whether they're on a path moving toward God or away from God by how they respond to the object like if they desire to possess it if they want to use it for worldly pleasures or for spiritual powers or if they are willing to submit themselves to it and not possess it or use it for good. So we have a holy grail we have this magical stone in many dimensions, platonic archetypes it's a play in descent into hell that's sort of that central object and there's a thing. That one is that's fascinating because it does link through to the plays it reminded me a bit of between the acts and the Virginia Wolf book which is has another fascination in a very different use of course but this sense of the amateur dramatic world of the interwar period yeah and so there's a definitely a sense of how societies draw a village society in these cases how all the characters are drawn together by the power of the play. So should we talk about his plays then because that's something which doesn't get much of a mention just to sort of put in context this is the time when you've got people like T.S. Elliott writing murder in the cathedral it's in that tradition of plays isn't it? Exactly and that's a perfect comparison because he and Elliott were friends they were pretty close they spent a lot of time together he actually said that T.S. Elliott was probably his second best male friend after C.S. Lewis later in his life I want the only people who understood him and they wrote plays for the Canterbury festival back to back so Williams wrote Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury and Elliott wrote murder in the cathedral for the same festival they attended each other's productions they went to see other plays together like Neville Coghill's production of Hamlet wouldn't you have loved to be there to hear what T.S. Elliott and Charles Williams were staying about Neville Coghill's production of Hamlet in which Richard Burton had his debut. Oh no that was amazing. Yeah I'm thinking of like Elliott's essays on Hamlet right and the fact they both wrote dramas and wrote about Shakespeare it's just that must have been an amazing day. Any any extent comment like oh you did a good job or that was pretty ropey. I have not I have not seen any of them it's a shame yeah I imagine they liked it. So what's the flavor of Thomas Cranmer is it similar with is it a metrical drama like the T.S. Elliott one? Yes it is a first drama Williams wrote many first dramas and as a matter of fact he was probably best known as a playwright in his lifetime rather than as a poet or a novelist because some of his plays were quite popular he often had commissions for ecclesiastical settings he had schools that had had teenage girls put on his plays which is funny to think about so yes what is the flavor very bizarre of course it's Charles Williams it's very different from murder in the cathedral in its sort of it's atmosphere or spiritual sense but it does have some mechanical similarities both set in a historical time about a martyr set on locations so you have this kind of meta-performative thing going on right the play is happening more or less in the same place the events occurred historically and that they both have the main character tempted and wrestling with these deep existential crises and in the end having to decide to submit to martyrdom so there are those similarities but Williams play is well I was going to say much less narrative but then again murder in the cathedral had does some strange narrative things too doesn't it but what makes Williams play distinctive is the character of the skeleton so there's this characters named that and who wore one of those skeleton suits you know black outfit with the white bones painted on and apparently gave a brilliant performance and he acts as sort of a conscience for Thomas Kramer and a temper and a a goad and a demonic figure but apparently in the end it turns out he's actually a sort of a holy spirit figure he says he's the backside of Christ the skeleton and he's always challenging and tempting and taunting Kramer and in the end inspires him inspires Kramer to go running towards his doom and to embrace his martyrdom and so he's actually kind of the catalyst for Kramer's salvation so he's something of a chorus figure except that he's individual rather than collective and he's a mad manic figure who dances and does acrobatics all around the stage and raises all these spiritual questions so this is indicative I haven't read that one and I'm definitely going to have to now go away and find a copy of it he's quite a lot of my girls with him's material these days isn't it unless you've got it is thanks to a couple of publishers working hard on reissuing things and getting new things out so that's great I think wrote an exciting moment for that but yes we absolutely need a complete place there's a lovely line with a collective plays edited by John Heath Stubbs but that's only about half of the plays and there are even still more in the Marion Wade Center that have yet to be published so we are getting the sense here aren't we that he is a man of very distinctive personality and tastes so I think it might be worth before we do the poetry have a look at the theology because and this is an interesting comparison to CS Lewis if you think of CS Lewis as being the plain man speaking plain words to people it very much you know the communicator on radio as well a lot of his theology started Jos Williams is very much the esoteric man having his own sort of approach to theology but it was very appreciated at the time and it and it definitely had its audience if you're following this at all it's sort of in the evening underhill and more sort of metaphysical kind of way of thinking isn't it so tell us a huge thing to do on a podcast but have a go adding a little bit about how he approached theology yes well as everything else he approached theology in a highly distinctive fashion and I think this is partly because he didn't go through the standard sort of Utan Oxford education he didn't read all the same classics in the same order and the same commentaries on them so he developed his ideas he was syncratically part of his approach to theology can be attributed to his father when he was young he and his dad would go for long walks however his father um was extremely near sighted ended up going blind and Charles himself was very near sighted so they didn't go for walks to look at the landscape they went for walks to have conversations and they would get into deep entangled theological issues and halfway through his dad would make them switch sides of a debate so Charles was always having to try out both sides of any conversation and apparently he would do this all his life so you'd be halfway into I don't know predestination and free will and he'd be arguing for God's complete control of every detail and also he'd flip be arguing for free will and you'd have to reorient yourself in the conversation but he also was coming at theology with a literary scholar's point of view not a theologians so when he read say done scotus who he did he was reading him through the tradition of courtly love which as we know is much more of a literary than an actual historical tradition so he would get from that these ideas of the place of romantic love in one's theological life rather than say a nice tidy history of Christianity and systematic theology or something okay but um we should get into some of his really specific ideas and and what he contributed so the things that he contributed primarily are co-inherence substitution exchange and romantic theology if you have another one we should talk about my understanding is enough to yeah I'm headlines only okay and that's pretty dangerous although I think with these doctors the more you know the more dangerous it gets so his core doctrine is co-inherence and it's founded on the historical Christian doctrine of the paracaresis or the dance of the members of the Trinity so the idea that God is three who are living in loving harmony and unity as one and then the second notion is the two in one nature's of Christ so the hypostatic union the divine and the human nature so you have this idea of things that are defined the laws of physics right things we have more than one in the same space at the same time whether it's three persons of the Trinity two natures of Christ or then Christ in us or us in each other and the two most perfect angels of co-inherence and human experience are pregnancy and romantic love because in pregnancy you literally have one person inside the other and they are they're not exactly mutually interdependent but they are mutually exchanging nutrition and so forth but also ideally love but sexual love was the number one example that he used of how humans enact this co-inherent theology so in his strange little book outlines of romantic theology which he wrote in 1924 but it wasn't published until after his death he argues that any romantic relationship follows the stages of Christ's earthly life and so that every couple that is in love are enacting Jesus by their love so he's following after Dante in the via affirmative or the affirmative way saying that created things are images of God and that we get to know God through them by pursuing those things but he thinks it's quite an extreme he's not limiting it to Christian marriage it's just really sort of any sexual attraction can be rungs on the ladder to God and while he says that this could be any sort of relationship and that it works for either partner the way he writes it does seem to be very much a male centered you know the man who has this idealized woman who is amused for him and she's sort of upon a pedestal and by idealizing and idolizing her he's seeing God through her although he claims it can work the other way around or in any relationship. Rachel that's the Dante and Beatrice thing isn't it absolutely that was his model for it and so his final expression of this is one of his last books the figure of Beatrice that gets a lot more subtle it's not as mechanistic as the early work it's like mapping a relationship on the life of Christ it's much more how does the affirmative way work out in history and theology literature and in your life. So thinking about the connections to the other inkling so you can see some of this resonance in things like till we have faces by C. S. Lewis and even sort of the perilandra you know the second of the space the ransom. And I think there's as oodles of proof that C. S. Lewis in particular thought Charles Williams was just the bee's knees and absorbed a lot of his ideas and because C. S. Lewis it comes out in a slightly well it's a simpler version shall we say than the Charles Williams form of this one of the things which I think is particularly interesting and you might even see in Tolkien as well this is idea of you had a particular term for it but it's the substitution idea that you take on the the burden for somebody else which of course feels a bit like Frodo carrying the ring and then I'm carrying Frodo I can carry it sir but I can carry you wrap that should be a line from Charles Williams and so perhaps you want to explain a little bit about this because you see it in his novels as well to do it in a place when you when you know it's there yes so his idea of the way of substitution or the way of exchange exactly it's the idea that suppose that you have some very very difficult thing that you're going through suppose you've lost a loved one and say you have this burden of grief or you've gotten some terrible news or an awful diagnosis and you just feel like you can't handle this mental emotional spiritual burden well you could tell me about it and we could make a contract and then I would take it for you and you would no longer feel it as a burden now it's not that your memory would be erased or anything like that you would still if it were a grief for a lost loved one you'd still be able to remember them more them and and honor them but you would no longer feel it as a burden you would be lightened and I would carry that burden for you but because it wasn't mine it wouldn't feel as burdensome to me either so he bases this on the verse bury you one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ and he takes it absolutely literally he says it's exactly like if you're carrying a box and your arms have gotten tired and so now the box is too heavy for you I can take the box and carry it for you because my arms are not as worn out so it's that literal and there is a debate among scholars as to how Christian this doctrine is and how magical this doctrine is there are people who find it absolutely inspiring and try to practice this in their own lives there well there was there was a Yahoo group called co-inherence.net which I think is hilarious and people would get on there and talk about sharing each other's burdens I don't know if there's some descendant of that group now I think there is I'm on the side that thinks that it's much more magical and that he never really did grow out of his occult training but instead he went on to establish his own group the order of the co-inherence or the companions of the co-inherence because to my mind this looks more mechanistic than miraculous and it looks to be much more of a piece of ceremonial ritual that you perform and it has to happen if you execute the formula correctly rather than a much more Christian supplication to God and God being the one who performs it so I fall on the more magical side of that but I just want your listeners to know this is a debate and not everyone agrees with me yeah and it's certainly something you can imagine the Inglings discussing at great length and disagreeing on and toying with and so it's not surprising that we see it coming out in how they're thinking of what you do with practice in in their fiction there was a conversation oh I wish we had more details we had a letter from CS Lewis to his brother saying that they had an Inglings and there was another visitor named Charles Ren and in the course of their conversation Ren expressed almost seriously a desire to burn Charles Williams as a heretic and we don't know what the doctrine was and CS Lewis goes on to say Charles Williams at least makes us understand why people were burned at the stake he is eminently combustible so this this world of sort of a particular form of theology it's very much lace behind his Arthurian cyclopones which is where I first met your work Serena and I want to thank you first of all for supplying a very cogent introduction so there's the two collections of the Arthurian cycle are Taliesin through Logras now Taliesin just to explain these terms he's the name of a bard a singer who Charles Williams imagines that the court of King Arthur is actually a character already existing in folklore and Logras is a word meaning Britain at the time and then the second series is called The Region of the Summer Stars now these are a series of short poems that sort of joined together like a quilt to tell the story of King Arthur's court from the point of view really of the poets in that court more or less I mean it's more it's obviously a bit more complicated than that but that gives the sort of approach so tell us about what you think are the strengths of this and what's the experience of reading them for a modern reader who's thinking I really want to know what his poetry is like right the strengths of this cycle are Williams distinctive theological perspectives and his willingness to experiment with some modern poetic forms more than perhaps the other inklings and there is friendship with T.S. Eliot's and I think was fruitful for him so the poems are really balanced in a very careful way on the ancient tree of the Arthurian tradition but somewhat metrically experimental and certainly very vivid in their imagery and in the musicality of the poems they're absolutely beautiful what is the experience of a reader approaching them complete bafflement but as I do say in that introduction tell you some through Logras I think that if a reader approaches them first just to experience them like music then I think they would have a really enjoyable experience because the poems sound absolutely lovely and we do need audiobooks of these and we do need composers to step up and set these to music by the way but if you were to read these poems say three times through the first time just enjoy the aesthetic sensory experience the gorgeous imagery of roses and heraldic banners and lions and unicorns and the luscious clothing of the people in King Arthur's court and the exciting action moments of the battle scenes and so forth and then on a second read perhaps start picking up on what are the major themes and what are the images that are coming up over and over again and starting to distinguish some of the characters because although Williams is not writing strict narrative poetry with details character arcs he does occasionally do a deep dive into a character state of the mind state of mind the way lyric poetry can do and then finally on a third reading you can start to pick up on much more of the plot and the details and the things that Williams is adding to the tradition and just to sort of give a spoiler on that what Williams is adding to the tradition not surprisingly are his distinctive beliefs, coherence, exchange and romantic theology but also the absolute centrality of the grail he did more with the holy grail than probably any previous author since Roberto Barone in the 14th century friendship romance which was one of his primary sources so he uses the grail the same way that he does in his novels and like all those other ritual objects we talked about that each person's reaction to the grail reveals his or her spiritual condition and that's specifically revealed in whether they're willing to submit to and participate in coherence or whether they insist on being an individual and being free from that interwoven fabric of reality basically whether they would rather rain and hell or serve in heaven pretty much I don't want to scare people off too much I mean if listeners have managed the wasteland for example or they can manage this pretty I mean it's more I think it's easier to unpick in some ways than the four quartets I just sweat to see the ray finds readings of the you know the stage readings which absolutely brilliant but I did have to read a lot in advance to understand them and I think Charles Williams pays off if you give it equal attention but it's not so impossible because you've got some of the Arthurian material to sort of help you the superstructure underneath you can see where he's varying the tune for example and then you ask yourself well why is he varying it what's going on here so in your introduction to you now I'm looking at the this description of how he treats history and I think there's another interesting link here to particularly to Tolkien the idea that he crunches up basically a thousand years of history from the sort of beginning you know what we call the Dark Ages just after the fall of the Roman Empire to the fall of Constantinople that sort of swath of time which was about 400 to about 1600 something like that so if you can imagine that period of history he is dealing dealing as if it's all happening in King Arthur's reign so I like this idea that you can sort of crunch history together because I think in a sense that's what Tolkien does in he invents a pre history and he wants to imagine what it could have been like and I think just at that simple level Charles Williams is doing this is what it could have been like so if you if you like that sort of reinventing of history it's another reason for thinking about Charles Williams as someone you might read it really really is and he does that primarily because he wants to erase the east west schism of the church he hates schism he hates division yes so he has this beautiful imagined Roman Byzantine empire that never existed historically but it says if what if those east and west halves of the empire were completely united and what if England were a province of the Byzantine empire not only of the Roman and what would this mean historically and theologically so it positions Arthur sort of in dialogue with Constantine really and so you get all the deep theological and artistic resonances of those two empire those three empires really the Roman the Arthurian and the Byzantine conflated together and I'm just thinking about what because a lot of people who listen to this have come from Tolkien that's where they're coming from and I'm just thinking that if you if you want to find a sense of some of the really interesting poems about the Roman emperor who's a sort of figure in in his city there's a sense of a I know I'm minister of the type world and imagine there is there's resonance there there's also sort of the forests and I think lapse a lot rather charmingly goes wild is it wolf so many little treasures defined in this sequence yeah it is absolutely gorgeous you're right they both love the city and the empire and they see glory in those human achievements of the beautiful building of a city and Charles Williams as a world builder I think has not been appreciated enough he just he grabs from all these different traditions but he does synthesize them he doesn't end up with a hodgepodge as Tolkien accused Narnia of being he ends up with something beautifully synthesized of layers and layers of symbolism and yet also just real human emotion his poems are frequently spoken in the first person by one character or another Mordred gets a poem in which he's just cursing against Arthur it's really powerful we get Percival singing one of the songs so you're right there are a lot of beauties in this work and I think your listeners would love it it definitely repays the attention given to it so don't go expecting to understand it go in the sense go expecting to just enjoy it I think it's from somewhere looking at it so it's really obvious that the early death of Charles Williams brought to a sudden stop a really interesting career and he wasn't that he he died as a result of a operation which he wasn't expected to have any complications from and this was right towards the end of the said well war so he suddenly vanishes from the literary scene and I think people like yourself are trying to remind us of his existence because he was a bigger deal in his time than he is now and he had more influence on people so should we talk about him as a sort of influence figure we've mentioned the inklings but he's connected to in other ways to well we've mentioned T.S. Eliot but also there's Auden who admired him and others do you want to talk about his sort of circle beyond the inklings yes please thank you that's one of my favorite things W. H. Auden attributed his conversion to Christianity to the reading of Charles Williams works and to meeting Williams several people who met him thought of him as a saintly figure so his theological influence but also his literary influence went on and on after his death now another person we need to talk about in this connection although he died sooner than Williams is William Butler Yates I don't think they ever met in person but they corresponded a good deal because they worked together on an anthology that Yates was putting together and Williams was editing and of course they were occult cousins because they were in related occult groups and their poetry can be very very fruitfully compared and they both have this deep profound mysticism shot through all of their works and yet those two poets in their lives evolved from sort of a more romanticism through an Edwardian style into very very modern poetic styles so it's important to look at those overlapping groups but there was also a generation of young writers kind of in the extended Oxford circles who really admired Charles Williams and I think carried carried his legacy forward the complete list is in Grebel Linda at the camera right now all of them I know Philip Larkin loved Williams works was influenced by it and there were some others in that generation of younger poets but then we also see some of his legacy going forward in perhaps the more Gothic strain of modern fantasy I think of for instance Madeline Langel and Ursula K. Larkin as kind of later people who were carrying on an inklings like legacy but I see it even on into things like Doctor Who and the Marvel Cinematic Universe that we have these these superhero stories of this main figure with this honestly spiritual power even though they often scientize it in those works but those works are the Doctor Who universe and the Marvel Universe and DC and so forth it's just the one story over and over again of the central heroic figure who sacrifices themselves to save one person or to save the multiverse and frequently comes back again so the dying and rising god story connected to the sacrificial story of the co-inherence so I think that Williams was part of this really really important network or web in his own time with the inklings with the modernists with the alcohol tests and then those influences go on and on and on and ways that have not yet been explored thoroughly yeah I mean when you say like that of course we can just carry on listing them we've got Ben Kenobi everyone Kenobi we've got Harry Potter and I think one of the one of the stories which isn't the dying god one but is from um the grail influence is of course Indiana Jones because the last moves in Indiana Jones are so totally taken from the Charles Williams playbook so yeah it's fascinating isn't it Serena more power to you for your work on Charles Williams I look forward to seeing more of his work coming back into more general circulation always end these podcasts with asking where in all the fantasy world is the best place for something and I thought in honor of King Arthur and all things Arthurian we should ask where is the best place to be a knight where would you choose to go if you had to don the armor or the knightly code and go to any world and I suppose it depends if you're going for longevity you might not want to go into game of thrones I certainly wouldn't last very long there but we ever do want to game oh boy I've been thinking this back in my head the whole time we've been talking and I'm really torn and I think I'm going to go with an unexpected move because of course I'm expected to say Charles Williams is Byzantine Roman Empire and I will just say that would be an awesome place to go if you are both a poet and a knight yeah the valiance and is the court poet but he's also Arthur's captain of horse and so he also commands a battle so that would be a brilliant place to go but I'm also thinking of the Celtic world of Ternanug and the Tuatha de Don and this shadowy Celtic twilight world where you could be a fairy knight and sail off to the west and live in this these islands of mist and magic and mystery I think that's where I would like to go if I were a knight wonderful I know where I would go there's an American writer called Tamora Pierce who wrote a sort of young person's a YA series called The Song of the Lioness which is a quartet and it's quite an interesting experience in that it's two twins who swap so the girl goes to take the boy's training and the boy goes to be the wizard magician which was royal destiny and it's beautifully written wonderfully sort of coming of age story a traditional knight's place but it's serious about training I mean there's a lot of detail about how you build up muscle strength if you're you know a five foot four girl as opposed to a six foot two boy yeah so I think that gives you serious tips so I think that training you might survive as a knight for a bit it helps that she's also magical yeah yeah yeah magic and my fault it's a good combination yeah thank you so much for joining us and it's been absolutely a joy to talk about Charles William so I'm oh thank you so delightful I do hope that I'm most intriguing of the inklings I think so the oddest inkling I do hope that your listeners pick them up and try some of the novels or poetry or theology whatever appeals to the most thank you very much goodbye all right thank you 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 Progressive Insurance do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash progressive makes it easy just drop in some details about yourself and see if you're eligible to save money when you bundle your home and auto policies the process only takes minutes and it could mean hundreds more in your pocket visit Progressive.com after this episode to see if you could save progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates potential savings will vary not available in all states