1973 Arthurian fantasy, second of its series. Merlin watches over
Arthur, from his birth to his coronation.
As in the first book, Merlin here is more pushed around by
prophecy and feelings of what needs to be done than he is an active
character. At the same time, since nobody else has the prophetic gift,
they come over to him as ignorant and blundering. It makes the whole
business feels oddly directionless at times, and the ongoing sense of
inevitable doom can be a bit much, even as it all makes sense.
There's a traditional Christian approach to morality that anything
good you do is God working in you so you don't get the credit, and
anything bad you do is your own failure so you do get the blame. I was
reminded of that here, because the one thing that goes substantially
wrong here – Merlin refusing to teach the young Morgause magic and
fobbing her off with obvious partial excuses rather than explaining
why he can't, thus leading to various bad things later – is clearly
depicted as his own fault. (And in a series that's mostly managed
nuanced characters, she comes over as pettily evil for the sake of
it.)
The descriptive language is lovely, as always, with the sense of love
for wild and open places that one finds in Buchan and Sutcliff.
(Indeed, I got a strong sense of Sutcliff's Roman Britain here,
fallen to decay.) Perhaps more important to the true feeling of
fantasy is the sense that magic and wonder could be found behind every
tree (and not necessarily in a good way). The historical attitude in
which religious and supernatural thinking permeated every aspect of
someone's life is one that it's hard to capture as a modern writer,
and Stewart does an excellent job of it even while omitting the large
and blatantly miraculous events like a sword being handed up from a
lake.
Of course, she changes around the elements of the legends, as everyone
does; here Excalibur is the Sword in the Stone, as well as the sword
of Magnus Maximus who went off to conquer Rome. Everything gets
altered, but the core of the story remains.
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