Here Lies Arthur
I'm always happy to pick up an arthurian retelling and among a box of books from my mum ( a mixture of returns to the library at our house and loans from the library at theirs ) I found Here Lies Arthur by Phillip Reeve. It's a very clever low Arthurian story, set in post-roman britain and centred around a young girl who is rescued by Myrddin and then goes on to be part of the world around which the myths grew. It is full of very terse storytelling - each word is carefully chosen to fit the story and carry it onwards and the cast is edited down to the bare essentials, so the number of named characters is kept very low. The whole thing is a textbook example of how to write for it's target audience ( which is probably early teens ) in an economical and effective way.
What I found interesting about it, more than anything else, was what it said about the present and our wider culture. In this story, Arthur is a brutal bully ( which is probably quite accurate for a 6th Century war leader ) and Myrddin is his brilliant myth-making spin doctor. What it teaches us is that anyone who wants to lead is unfit to do so, and that to be a leader is to be self-serving, cynical and willing to do anything to achieve your own goals.
This is what our leaders have taught us, over the last ten years or so - with Bush, Blair, Brown and surely many others that you will be able to think of, we have seen that our political leaders say one thing for the cameras and do something else when they think nobody is looking. We have seen the greed, the cynicism, the vested interests, naked ambition and the cruelty they are willing to inflict to get their way and we have learned from it. This, they have said to us, is what a leader is.
The more I have learned about horses the more I have seen how wrong that is. Because a horse needs to be lead, when they feel they are in charge they get anxious and potentially unpredictable. As far as they are concerned, they are responsible for the good of the herd- maybe they see their human as part of that herd, probably they don't, but they believe that if a lion leaps out of that hedgerow or a pack of wolves come rushing through the trees, they will have to look out for themselves. What they need us to do when we work with them is to show that we can be a reliable leader, that by listening to what we ask we can keep them safe. And this is a totally different way of thinking about leadership, it's leadership through accepting responsibility rather than leadership through taking charge. Sometimes you need firmness, certainly you need consistency and boundaries to establish and maintain that leadership, but you're showing those things not as a way of disempowering the horse, but as a way of reassuring them that the rules you have established still apply. Everything is still alright. It is a relationship where the leader gives back more than they take.
This is part of one of the core themes of the Arthurian cycle in some retellings, the notion of the connection between the king and the land- when the king is sick, the land sickens with him. The king is a part of everything and ( quite literally if you read Frazer ) sacrifices himself for his kingdom absolutely. The king who tries to impose the rule of law rather than might is right, the king who spends his life campaigning against vortigern's well established invaders and their destructive march westward, the leader who gives more than they take.
I wonder whether we have reached a turning point here, whether the arrival of a more aspirational president in the US will start to give people the idea that a leader can have something to offer them, rather than giving orders and making demands. These tides only turn slowly and storytelling often seems to lag behind the prevailing cultural trend, but I find myself hoping that a book like this written ten years from now might have a different view of what it means to be a leader. This isn't a bad book, by any measure, but the ideas reflected in it make me a little sad. It is certainly worth a read, but my recommended historical Arthur remains the one described in Sword At Sunset which is in a league of it's own.
What I found interesting about it, more than anything else, was what it said about the present and our wider culture. In this story, Arthur is a brutal bully ( which is probably quite accurate for a 6th Century war leader ) and Myrddin is his brilliant myth-making spin doctor. What it teaches us is that anyone who wants to lead is unfit to do so, and that to be a leader is to be self-serving, cynical and willing to do anything to achieve your own goals.
This is what our leaders have taught us, over the last ten years or so - with Bush, Blair, Brown and surely many others that you will be able to think of, we have seen that our political leaders say one thing for the cameras and do something else when they think nobody is looking. We have seen the greed, the cynicism, the vested interests, naked ambition and the cruelty they are willing to inflict to get their way and we have learned from it. This, they have said to us, is what a leader is.
The more I have learned about horses the more I have seen how wrong that is. Because a horse needs to be lead, when they feel they are in charge they get anxious and potentially unpredictable. As far as they are concerned, they are responsible for the good of the herd- maybe they see their human as part of that herd, probably they don't, but they believe that if a lion leaps out of that hedgerow or a pack of wolves come rushing through the trees, they will have to look out for themselves. What they need us to do when we work with them is to show that we can be a reliable leader, that by listening to what we ask we can keep them safe. And this is a totally different way of thinking about leadership, it's leadership through accepting responsibility rather than leadership through taking charge. Sometimes you need firmness, certainly you need consistency and boundaries to establish and maintain that leadership, but you're showing those things not as a way of disempowering the horse, but as a way of reassuring them that the rules you have established still apply. Everything is still alright. It is a relationship where the leader gives back more than they take.
This is part of one of the core themes of the Arthurian cycle in some retellings, the notion of the connection between the king and the land- when the king is sick, the land sickens with him. The king is a part of everything and ( quite literally if you read Frazer ) sacrifices himself for his kingdom absolutely. The king who tries to impose the rule of law rather than might is right, the king who spends his life campaigning against vortigern's well established invaders and their destructive march westward, the leader who gives more than they take.
I wonder whether we have reached a turning point here, whether the arrival of a more aspirational president in the US will start to give people the idea that a leader can have something to offer them, rather than giving orders and making demands. These tides only turn slowly and storytelling often seems to lag behind the prevailing cultural trend, but I find myself hoping that a book like this written ten years from now might have a different view of what it means to be a leader. This isn't a bad book, by any measure, but the ideas reflected in it make me a little sad. It is certainly worth a read, but my recommended historical Arthur remains the one described in Sword At Sunset which is in a league of it's own.