Catching up with some very old reading

[sjwright]

Obviously, I'm still doing reading for the Hugo nominations thing - thoughts on this are collected at my Wordpress thing here: https://stevejwright.wordpress.com/ . (Why Wordpress instead of LJ?  Made it easier to coordinate with the recs blog I was contributing to, mainly.  A fair amount of stuff here made it over to there, anyway

Comments

[starcat_jewel]

The Crystal Cave is good, but for my money The Hollow Hills is even better. And there's one absolutely lovely throwaway line in one of the last two (I've forgotten which one) in which Arthur tells Merlin how he feels about the whole Guinevere/Lancelot thing, and it's not at all what you'd expect.

(Not a spoiler, but you should be aware: Lancelot doesn't appear by that name in this series. His role is given to one of the young Arthur's staunchest and longest-known friends, Bedwyr.)

[sjwright]

That makes a certain amount of sense, given that Stewart seems to be hewing fairly close to the original Mabinogion source material (as converted into gibberish by Geoffrey of Monmouth), and Lancelot himself seems to be a late twelfth century French interpolation, most probably stuck into the storyline by Chretien de Troyes. (Seems a bit hard luck on poor old Bedwyr... but, then, he's another one whose character is malleable, depending on who's writing the story.)