Summer Reading 2015, #5a: ‘A trilogy’, part 1
It’s time for Merlin! Well, young Merlin. The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart is the first Arthurian tale I’ve read in... longer than I care to admit. Especially given my background in such things.
I’ve been a fan of different takes on the Arthurian mythos since a very young age. Admittedly, part of that is just the fun of the romanticized medieval setting that usually comes with it. As a child, it absolutely caught my attention, something that certainly wasn’t hurt by a gift I was given for my eighth birthday, an Arthur-themed pop-up book that features no shortage of excitement in its pages. The Sword in the Stone may not have been my favorite Disney film growing up (that would be Robin Hood), but that didn’t stop me from being fascinated by the story of the boy king.
(As an aside, my aunt, who gave me said pop-up book, never ceases to remind me that at the time, I was reading The Hobbit, and it made her feel kind of bad about giving me a pop-up book. I always remind her that quite honestly, it's the only pop-up book I had as a child that stuck with me into adulthood quite that way. Part of it may be the way it doesn’t bowdlerize the content; the illustration pictured here features those weapons plunging into and through the combatants, and the arms make plunging motions as the pages open and close. My aunt was unaware of its presence in the book.)
So, on to this one. The Crystal Cave is the first of Mary Stewart’s books dealing with the Arthurian themes, and focuses solely on the early life of Merlin. Arthur only puts in two appearances, both in visions of the future. Of course, Arthur’s childhood is the theme of the next book, so that can be better-explored next time. Merlin is positioned as being the grandson of a Welsh king, the bastard son of Ambrosius, the cousin of Arthur, and rather than the Disneyesque wizard that he might be depicted as in many conceptions, comes across almost as a variation on Leonardo da Vinci, much of his magic being simply a sharp mind and the ability to take poetic metaphor and drag usable knowledge from it, then apply that knowledge to his works.
From the start, Merlin is an outsider, the sort who is far more interested in learning how the world around him works than in learning the ‘traditional’ male things of the era. Even as he grows up and is drawn into travels outside of his native Wales, he’s always in that mindset, devoting his energies to a combination of learning engineering and mysticism from the chain of teachers he learns from over the years. And these skills are put to good use; by the end of the book, Merlin has used the know-how he’s developed to get a large stone moved from Ireland to Amesbury to serve as a centerpiece to Stonehenge, here positioned as being already ancient but with the stones having fallen, a problem that he remedies as well.
Stewart absolutely knew what she was doing here; even though she calls herself out on the historical inaccuracies in an appendix at the end, it’s largely a matter of language used, not technology or politics, erring on the side of ‘recognizable’ in the sense of saying Cornwall instead of Dumnonia every time. Honestly, I see no problem with this; one doesn’t read Arthurian lit for historical accuracy. She also provided, as the first appendix to the book, the passage regarding Merlin from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, which she drew from in order to construct her narrative.
Of course, the story of Merlin is, almost by definition these days, inextricably linked with that of Arthur. And as good a read as this was, it really does leave you wanting more, not least because of how it sets itself up, from the introduction but especially in the last section of the book, as being the first part of a longer tale. Speaking of which, on to The Hollow Hills.
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