The Bright Sword is a Radiant Reimagining of Arthurian Legend
The medieval poem St. Erkenwald takes place in post-Pagan England. St. Augustine converted the pagans and threw out the idols, we’re told, and since then London has been a Christian metropolis. It’s a surprise then when a corpse is unearthed with no name or record, “melted out of memory”, and turns out to be a pagan king. At the heart of St. Paul’s Cathedral a bishop miraculously speaks with the corpse, and what was thought to be dead—the man, and Pagan Britain—once again comes alive.
The Bright Sword is based on a different slice of medieval poetry, the Arthurian romances. Emerging from Latin and Welsh texts, the Arthur legend was rewritten by Chretien de Troyes in the 12th century and has been readapted many times since. Generally, these adaptations follow the king and his group of knights as they travel around Britain and perform miracles. Like Erkenwald, Arthuriana tends to be concerned with Britain’s pagan origins, which are seen as the opposing force to the knights’ Christianity. In other words, Arthur’s triumph over unnatural magic is the story of Britain’s Christianization and the story of that process’s incompleteness.
Lev Grossman’s adaptation of the Arthur legend begins with Collum, a knight-hopeful who is coming down from the North to Camelot to try and join the Round Table. When he arrives, he learns that Arthur and all his closest knights are dead, and the succession has been thrown into chaos. The Bright Sword follows Collum as he joins the Camelot B Team on a quest to find a missing knight and perhaps Arthur himself, who may not be as dead as he seems.
This is a time period where Old Britain lives under the skin of New Britain. Everywhere there are Roman roads, old battlefields, and lingering ghosts. Arthur’s death, while we’re informed of it a few chapters in, precedes the start of the novel, meaning that the whole book takes place in the time After. Collum and all his companions are living in the shadow of Camelot’s golden age, which was itself happening in the shadow of the Romans. As Collum puts it, “the light went out.”
However, miracles are still omnipresent, of both the Christian and Pagan variety. A sword in a stone appears at St. Paul’s, the same place as Erkenwald’s corpse conversation. Collum accidentally summons an otherworldly being into a dining room on his first day among knights. Camelot might be “a rest home for elderly soldiers,” but Britain retains magic inside daily life. Even non-magical images, like swallows exploding from a pie or a fish-knight’s piscine armor, lingered in my head.
Since Arthur is dead, the five or so remaining members of the Round Table share the stage with Collum. You probably know Sir Gawain, but here instead you’ll find Sir Scipo, Sir Bevedere, and a whole bunch of other sirs that you’ve never heard of. Every few chapters comes an adventure story from one of their pasts that characterizes that knight and their relationship with Arthur. The flashbacks drag sometimes because they’re where Grossman is compelled to give us the most lore. I can see him writing through the problem of how to convey a bunch of legendary information without being boring. At times the knights’ tales, which focus on their adventures before the events of the novel, dragged me too far away from the present with excess history. However, when put beside the present-day story they create a massive time scale that makes the novels’ events feel like the small moments of an epic fantasy.
The flashbacks also have some of the best characterizations of Arthur, who is for the most part absent during this story. Although he’s the narrative linchpin that all the other knights revolve around, this Arthur feels like a real, three-dimensional person with appropriate flaws and never crosses into being a cliche. Perhaps characterization like this is easier when you’re working from a template, and Grossman is working with one of the biggest templates in literary history. It’s a bit like fanfiction, which is a similarity the book shares with its medieval source material. Medieval literature de-emphasizes authorship and borrows freely from stories of the past. Grossman takes full advantage of all the pre-existing works about Arthur, as well as our preconceptions about him from other media, creating a character who is captivating even when he appears only in retrospect.
Similarly, the new knight Collum is described with sympathy but not let off the hook. His first reaction to Arthur’s death is to ask “who’s going to fix me now?”, a move anticipating the self-centeredness and insecurity that makes him an interesting narrator. His adventures with the knights are still based on Arthuriana, but because they’re in the moment and not yet solidified in legend, we get more personal thoughts and an outsider’s perspective on the culture of the Round Table.
The Bright Sword is written in modern English, with chapter epigraphs and occasional poems in Middle English. This approach is smart and much less annoying than being unnecessarily formal or, more commonly, using fake “ye olde”-style English. I’d like to take a moment to say that this is how you should do Middle English in fiction– that is, for the most part, don’t. I wish everyone writing a medieval fantasy book would learn this lesson. Using modern English for conversations while reserving Middle English for quoted poetry and other special occasions is just a way of reinterpreting how someone speaks to give a contemporary audience the soul of what they’d say. In other words, any medieval fantasy novel is automatically a reinterpretation; you gotta lean all the way into it.
Grossman has a bad habit of fitting in medieval poems that don’t have much relevance, I assume to give a sense of continuity or authenticity to the larger work. The effect is the opposite, where the poetry seems to be included just because it’s medieval and has a vague relation to the story. For instance, I would rather have had a line from Chaucer’s Tristram and Iseult, who appear in the novel, rather than from his more well-known Canterbury Tales. Some medieval terms feel similarly artificial, like Collum’s frequent self-diagnosis of acedia, a Classical and early Medieval feeling that’s something like hopelessness. At the same time, some moments just work, like the description of Sir Palomides, who unwillingly converted from Islam to Christianity, as a palimpsest, a manuscript written over with new words. All this goes to show that Grossman is at his best when he’s providing his own spin on this story, whether that’s unique adventures or reinterpretations of old ones.
Reading The Bright Sword, I was often reminded of T.H. White, the author of the famous Arthurian retelling The Once and Future King. (White’s own life often resembled the more sorrowful medieval stories, but you’ll have to go read H is for Hawk for that one.) The Once and Future King is, like The Bright Sword, heavily focused on description and also uses the vernacular of its time. Its underlying theme is darkness bubbling up in an otherwise just world.
War and death are omnipresent, informed by White’s experience as a conscientious objector during World War II. This combination of miracles amid creeping evil is part of what’s made The Once and Future King so enduring. It’s also, I think, what’s behind the resurgence of interest in the medieval that we’re seeing recently. Media like The Green Knight have understood that the appeal of the medieval now is this balance of decay with new growth and that any successful retelling will straddle the two. Now we can add The Bright Sword to that list.
The Bright Sword made me love fantasy again. Its many asides are pearls of inventiveness that are a bunch of fun to read whether or not you know the story already. Its central narrative draws on existing past adventures to infuse its story with new purpose and drama. But it doesn’t neglect the slow moments of the journey either, such as nights resting under a beeswax tarp beneath the stars, or a pining horseback ride between a knight and his lord. It’s really lovely. And there’s so much of it, enough to hold faster readers than me over for the rest of the summer. For pretty much everyone, The Bright Sword is a must-read.
The Bright Sword is available now wherever books are sold.
Emily Price is a former intern at Paste and a columnist at Unwinnable Magazine. She is also a PhD Candidate in literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. She can be found on Twitter @the_emilyap.