Tag Archives: Arthurian Legend

Merlin Dreams by Peter Dickinson

Posted on by
Merlin Dreams cover

I had completely forgotten about Merlin Dreams by Peter Dickinson until I came across it while Bookshelf Travelling in Insane Times, so I decided to make it my next read – before I forgot about it again! The book is illustrated by Alan Lee, I really like his work, you can see some of it here.

This isn’t really a book for children, or if it is then they are older children. It’s 167 pages long and was published in 1988.

If you know the Arthurian legends you’ll remember that Merlin was tricked by the young woman he was besotted with and the upshot was that he is entombed beneath rocks, unable to get out and there he dreams – medieval Celtic fantasies.

As you would expect the stories feature dragons, swords, unicorns, mermaids. knights – the usual Arthurian fare – entertaining reads and good for bedtime, no matter what your age, and there’s some poetry thrown in too.

Apparently the illustrator Alan Lee is well known for illustrating Tolkien books and the author Peter Dickinson is well known for his crime fiction as well as books for children.

The Wicked Day by Mary Stewart

Posted on by
The Wicked Day cover

I went through a Mary Stewart phase as a teenager and I read the first three books of this series way back in the 1970s and I absolutely loved them. The Merlin trilogy comprises of The Hollow Hills, The Crystal Cave and The Last Enchantment and The Wicked Day is the fourth and I didn’t even realise until recently that there was a fouth and fifth book. I sort of wish that I had gone back to the beginning and read them all in order but I didn’t really think it was necessary because I remembered the books so well. The trouble is that although I enjoyed the book I wasn’t as into it as I was with the others in the 1970s. I don’t know if it’s an age thing because I’m certainly not a teenager anymore but then again even as a teenager I was never one of those daft romantic girls, it was more than just King Arthur which appealed to me. The 1970s serial ‘Arthur of the Britons’ was on TV when I got home from school and I have to admit that I loved it and the actor playing Arthur Oliver Tobias was a big PLUS!

Anyway, back to the book, I did enjoy it but at some point when I don’t have such a big backlog of books still to be read in the house I’m going to go back to the beginning of the series again. Will that day ever come, I ask myself?

You might remember that Arthur was duped into sleeping with Morgause who unbeknown to him is his half-sister and when Morgause gives birth to the resulting son Mordred she farms him out to be brought up by an old couple who are fisher-folk on an Orkney island in the North of Scotland. Merlin had prophesied that Mordred would be Arthur’s doom and as Morgause hates Arthur she hopes that Merlin is right.

Eventually Mordred is taken from his foster parents and goes to live with Morgause and her sons by her dead husband King Lot. King Arthur hears about this and takes Mordred to live with him at Camelot, and although the half-brothers go too, they aren’t happy about Mordred being given special treatment by Arthur, Mordred’s paternity is a secret, even to him.

Mordred’s half-brothers are a wild bunch and mayhem ensues. If you’re at all interested in Arthurian legend then this is a book for you. There have been plenty of stories throughout the centuries and Mary Stewart has taken some of them and come up with a good storyline.

There is a map on the end papers of the book and it has various places of importance on it. One of them is Dumbarton and I was agog the whole way through to find out what part the place was going to play in the story as it is the town which I grew up in. However it wasn’t mentioned until near the end of the book and it was only that Mordred’s youngest son was born there. If you look to the top left hand of my header you will see Dumbarton Castle Rock and this is where his son was supposed to be. Another name for Dumbarton Castle is Arthur’s Castle as it is in the west and Arthur was supposedly King of the West. The name Dumbarton is a corruption of Dunbritton, meaning fort of the Britons.

That’s your Scottish history lesson for the day! I’m now looking for the last book in the series The Prince and the Pilgrim, but I’m not in a hurry to get it as I’ll need to seriously get stuck into my TBR pile first.

If you want to know what Oliver Tobias looked like wayback in the 1970s have a look here.

Mary Stewart / Arthurian trilogy

Posted on by

I found myself in possession of a few small but sturdy boxes recently. Ideal for packing books in I thought because as you well know, bigger boxes are useless for books because they quickly become too heavy to budge.

So I decided to pack some books away in them and started having a rake around bookcases where I have books ‘double parked’ on wide shelves. I had thought that I could take the opportunity to weed out unwanted books to pass on to a charity shop. Some hope!

I think I must have already parted with everything which I’ve read and didn’t want to keep. I couldn’t even part with my old Penguin Classic books, Bronte, Hardy, Eliot and such, most of which I bought when I was about 13 or 14. Since then I’ve inherited lovely old editions of a lot of them, but I had an inkling that charity shops don’t cherish classics, preferring to have best sellers donated to them. So I thought my old books probably wouldn’t be given good homes and decided to keep them.

But I did unearth my copies of the Arthurian trilogy by Mary Stewart –

The Crystal Cave
The Hollow Hills
The Last Enchantment

I remember that I really enjoyed reading those books and others by her way back in the 1970s, I think they’re due a re-read by me. They set me off on an Arthurian phase and I went on to read and enjoy The Once and Future King by T.H. White and being keen on Mark Twain I just had to read A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur, both of which I still have.

I can’t think what else I read though so I suppose I must have got others from the library.

If you’re interested you can read an interview here in which Mary Stewart answers questions about the trilogy.

Although Mary Stewart was born in the north of England, she married a Scot and has lived most of her life in Scotland so I think she can be regarded as a Scottish author.