Finding the Road to Camelot
Originally written with the intent to post it on the publisher's blog, as part of the promotion for Tales of the Once And Future King
The road to Camelot opened up to me when I was stuck in bed with a bad sinus infection for the better part of a month, during the winter that I was eight, and my dad brought home a vintage set of children's classics he'd found at an indoor flea market. Titles included the usual fare of 1940s classic literature for children: 1001 Nights (carefully sanitized), Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer, and the one that jumped out at me King Arthur and His Noble Knights. The cast of characters and the range of them fascinated me, and the scope of the tale impressed me, like the biographies of great men and women we were reading as part of the homeschooling course my mother had enrolled me in. To say nothing of the virtues and qualities embodied by King Arthur's court: Merlin with his wisdom, Lancelot with his bravery, Gawaine and his loyalty, Perceval with his innocence. In that moment, I wondered if King Arthur could have been a real person (imagine when I first heard about the archaeological sites linked to Arthur and the growing body of evidence that backs up the reality behind the stories). I wanted to be a page in King Arthur's court. Not a court lady in training, but a knight in training, and if that wasn't possible, I'd prefer to be Merlin's apprentice (I'd even be nicer than Nimue/Vivian: no magicking him into a tree).
Alas, but schoolwork and outside/extracurricular activities kept me distracted from pursuing the road to Camelot in earnest. But the gates to that road would reopen in a big way, the late winter into spring that I was in the 10th grade, when my literature text book covered several extended selections from Alfred Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the King, which my mom read alongside me via a copy I'd scared up at a yard sale some months before. One of the great things about homeschooling is the way it allowed us to go at our own pace, and that meant I could focus more on something that caught my interest and build my own unit studies, with the help of the good folk at our town's library.
At that time, I'd started listening to a lot of classical music and opera, and that included listening to the Metropolitan Opera through the local classical radio station, and I had the luck to catch a performance of Wagner's Parsifal. I was hooked. As lengthy and ponderous as the opera might be, it left me wrapt, and when it ended, when the final curtain rang down, I felt as though I had come down from the top of a holy mountain. The German script might be beyond me, but the music and the singers' acting helped carry the spirit of the tale; with a good performance, you almost don't need a translation in front of you. Later, through the library, I'd find a recording (with translated libretto!) of Parsifal and immerse myself even further. It captivated me just as much as that first hearing, and I found myself relating to Perceval (or Parsifal, in this Wagnerian incarnation): innocent, well-meaning, bungling, but still managing to land on his feet quite often. His quest, which he barely expected to become a part of his life and his previous quest to find his destiny, reminded me of my own: a young person with a somewhat sequestered upbringing, venturing out into the world, finding their way, finding their strengths and weaknesses, making mistakes, learning from them. I had to read more, I had to learn more about this quest, I had to find an answer to my own version of Parsifal's question, “Wer is der Graal? (Where is the Grail?)” I had to know what this thing was, that brought King Arthur's knights on a quest to discover it. The road to Camelot took me onto an interesting detour.
And of all the detours to choose, I came upon a very winding one, leading into some interesting territory. I read everything I could lay hands to that dealt with the lore of the Grail, past and present, from the pre- and proto-Christian origins of the Grail motifs, to the legends associated with St. Joseph of Arimithea, to some at-best questionable takes on the Grail lore (I admit it, I've read Lincoln and Baigent's Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and while there's some interesting concepts in it, the alleged history seems a bit too well-crafted to be credible). A family friend who had been a college English literature professor at the University of Massachusetts, Fortunata Caliri, guided me to some of the best primary sources, giving me a copy of Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, which I kept on my night stand to be read every chance I got. My mother loaned me her copy of T.H. White's The Once and Future King, which I also read studiously. I pored through second hand bookstores looking for a copy of Jessie L. Weston's From Ritual to Romance, after I learned about via the end notes on T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (which I wrote a book report on, in my next year of school). I found the writings of Charles Williams, a friend of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis (and a member of the Inklings), in particular the novel War in Heaven and his poetry cycle Taliessin Through Logres, which used the Grail as a unifying concept for the entire King Arthur mythos.
After finding all these threads, I tried my hand at weaving everything together as a Unifying Epic Poem, a blank verse poem that eventually filled two thick loose-leaf binders, which I credited to one Ekkehard von der Nachtigall, a supposed medieval minnesinger (something between a knight and a minstrel). Needless to say, I bit off more than I could chew, and I never really completed all the ideas I'd come upon. The manuscript, now yellowing, still sits on my desk; I haven't the heart to discard it.
And again, life would move on, and I would move on to other things. Learning about my Grandfather Mulhare's role in the European theater of World War II would lead me to explore that probably darkest chapter in human history.
But the King Arthur legend hadn't finished with me. In Britain, during the darkest hours of the Blitz, the British people grew fascinated once again with the legend of Britain's most mysterious king, and some even wondered if Sir Winston Churchill, then Prime Minister of Great Britain, might not be the manifestation of their Once and Future King, come back to lead Britain through her darkest hour.
I knew I wanted to write a tale that rose from this twist on the legendarium, but I wasn't sure how to frame it. I'd started writing and submitting my tales for publication. Most of my tales were horror or dark fantasy (very often borrowing from another, much darker mythos, devised by fellow New Englander H.P. Lovecraft), but once in a while, the darkness would fall away and a lighter idea would offer itself for consideration.
That's when the idea came to me: why not retell the Grail quest in reverse? There were allegations that Adolf Hitler, with his fascination for the occult, had sent several Schutzstaffel officers in quest of the Holy Grail, but they never found it. I knew I wanted to tell a story like that, but Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas, in their Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, had beaten me, as it were, to a tale of Nazis targeting the Grail and the Allies, or someone aligned with them, protecting it. I decided I wanted to tell a tale involving the Grail being already found and needing new Knights of the Grail to guard and protect it and bring it to safety. The book The Monuments Men gave me an idea that I knew would work. I even found a way to weave in a character inspired partly by Sir Galahad and partly by my grandfather as the teller of that tale. A potential market for the tale presented itself, but again, life got in the way: I moonlight in grocery retail when I'm not writing, and due to how busy the store I work at gets between Thanksgiving and New Year's Day, I wasn't able to get the tale typed before the deadline. The story went back onto the virtual shelf.
Until a listing came up for another call for Arthurian stories. I jumped at the chance and sent it off.
And to my surprise, it was accepted and woven into the tapestry that is to be these Tales of the Once and Future King. You, dear reader, are probably on your own road to Camelot: perhaps you've followed the road for a number of years, or perhaps you're venturing the road for the first time. I hope that my story and the rest of the tales in the soon-to-be available volume inspire you to continue the journey, or that it becomes a fond path, as it were, on that quest.
"The Damsel of the Holy Grail" by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
The road to Camelot opened up to me when I was stuck in bed with a bad sinus infection for the better part of a month, during the winter that I was eight, and my dad brought home a vintage set of children's classics he'd found at an indoor flea market. Titles included the usual fare of 1940s classic literature for children: 1001 Nights (carefully sanitized), Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer, and the one that jumped out at me King Arthur and His Noble Knights. The cast of characters and the range of them fascinated me, and the scope of the tale impressed me, like the biographies of great men and women we were reading as part of the homeschooling course my mother had enrolled me in. To say nothing of the virtues and qualities embodied by King Arthur's court: Merlin with his wisdom, Lancelot with his bravery, Gawaine and his loyalty, Perceval with his innocence. In that moment, I wondered if King Arthur could have been a real person (imagine when I first heard about the archaeological sites linked to Arthur and the growing body of evidence that backs up the reality behind the stories). I wanted to be a page in King Arthur's court. Not a court lady in training, but a knight in training, and if that wasn't possible, I'd prefer to be Merlin's apprentice (I'd even be nicer than Nimue/Vivian: no magicking him into a tree).
Alas, but schoolwork and outside/extracurricular activities kept me distracted from pursuing the road to Camelot in earnest. But the gates to that road would reopen in a big way, the late winter into spring that I was in the 10th grade, when my literature text book covered several extended selections from Alfred Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the King, which my mom read alongside me via a copy I'd scared up at a yard sale some months before. One of the great things about homeschooling is the way it allowed us to go at our own pace, and that meant I could focus more on something that caught my interest and build my own unit studies, with the help of the good folk at our town's library.
At that time, I'd started listening to a lot of classical music and opera, and that included listening to the Metropolitan Opera through the local classical radio station, and I had the luck to catch a performance of Wagner's Parsifal. I was hooked. As lengthy and ponderous as the opera might be, it left me wrapt, and when it ended, when the final curtain rang down, I felt as though I had come down from the top of a holy mountain. The German script might be beyond me, but the music and the singers' acting helped carry the spirit of the tale; with a good performance, you almost don't need a translation in front of you. Later, through the library, I'd find a recording (with translated libretto!) of Parsifal and immerse myself even further. It captivated me just as much as that first hearing, and I found myself relating to Perceval (or Parsifal, in this Wagnerian incarnation): innocent, well-meaning, bungling, but still managing to land on his feet quite often. His quest, which he barely expected to become a part of his life and his previous quest to find his destiny, reminded me of my own: a young person with a somewhat sequestered upbringing, venturing out into the world, finding their way, finding their strengths and weaknesses, making mistakes, learning from them. I had to read more, I had to learn more about this quest, I had to find an answer to my own version of Parsifal's question, “Wer is der Graal? (Where is the Grail?)” I had to know what this thing was, that brought King Arthur's knights on a quest to discover it. The road to Camelot took me onto an interesting detour.
And of all the detours to choose, I came upon a very winding one, leading into some interesting territory. I read everything I could lay hands to that dealt with the lore of the Grail, past and present, from the pre- and proto-Christian origins of the Grail motifs, to the legends associated with St. Joseph of Arimithea, to some at-best questionable takes on the Grail lore (I admit it, I've read Lincoln and Baigent's Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and while there's some interesting concepts in it, the alleged history seems a bit too well-crafted to be credible). A family friend who had been a college English literature professor at the University of Massachusetts, Fortunata Caliri, guided me to some of the best primary sources, giving me a copy of Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, which I kept on my night stand to be read every chance I got. My mother loaned me her copy of T.H. White's The Once and Future King, which I also read studiously. I pored through second hand bookstores looking for a copy of Jessie L. Weston's From Ritual to Romance, after I learned about via the end notes on T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (which I wrote a book report on, in my next year of school). I found the writings of Charles Williams, a friend of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis (and a member of the Inklings), in particular the novel War in Heaven and his poetry cycle Taliessin Through Logres, which used the Grail as a unifying concept for the entire King Arthur mythos.
After finding all these threads, I tried my hand at weaving everything together as a Unifying Epic Poem, a blank verse poem that eventually filled two thick loose-leaf binders, which I credited to one Ekkehard von der Nachtigall, a supposed medieval minnesinger (something between a knight and a minstrel). Needless to say, I bit off more than I could chew, and I never really completed all the ideas I'd come upon. The manuscript, now yellowing, still sits on my desk; I haven't the heart to discard it.
And again, life would move on, and I would move on to other things. Learning about my Grandfather Mulhare's role in the European theater of World War II would lead me to explore that probably darkest chapter in human history.
But the King Arthur legend hadn't finished with me. In Britain, during the darkest hours of the Blitz, the British people grew fascinated once again with the legend of Britain's most mysterious king, and some even wondered if Sir Winston Churchill, then Prime Minister of Great Britain, might not be the manifestation of their Once and Future King, come back to lead Britain through her darkest hour.
I knew I wanted to write a tale that rose from this twist on the legendarium, but I wasn't sure how to frame it. I'd started writing and submitting my tales for publication. Most of my tales were horror or dark fantasy (very often borrowing from another, much darker mythos, devised by fellow New Englander H.P. Lovecraft), but once in a while, the darkness would fall away and a lighter idea would offer itself for consideration.
That's when the idea came to me: why not retell the Grail quest in reverse? There were allegations that Adolf Hitler, with his fascination for the occult, had sent several Schutzstaffel officers in quest of the Holy Grail, but they never found it. I knew I wanted to tell a story like that, but Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas, in their Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, had beaten me, as it were, to a tale of Nazis targeting the Grail and the Allies, or someone aligned with them, protecting it. I decided I wanted to tell a tale involving the Grail being already found and needing new Knights of the Grail to guard and protect it and bring it to safety. The book The Monuments Men gave me an idea that I knew would work. I even found a way to weave in a character inspired partly by Sir Galahad and partly by my grandfather as the teller of that tale. A potential market for the tale presented itself, but again, life got in the way: I moonlight in grocery retail when I'm not writing, and due to how busy the store I work at gets between Thanksgiving and New Year's Day, I wasn't able to get the tale typed before the deadline. The story went back onto the virtual shelf.
Until a listing came up for another call for Arthurian stories. I jumped at the chance and sent it off.
And to my surprise, it was accepted and woven into the tapestry that is to be these Tales of the Once and Future King. You, dear reader, are probably on your own road to Camelot: perhaps you've followed the road for a number of years, or perhaps you're venturing the road for the first time. I hope that my story and the rest of the tales in the soon-to-be available volume inspire you to continue the journey, or that it becomes a fond path, as it were, on that quest.
"The Damsel of the Holy Grail" by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
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