Book Review: The Squire's Tales

[osprey_archer]

Barred from more active employment by my shoulder injury (got an X-ray; it’s not broken; I have regained most of my range of motion and some of my muscle strength, though it still hurts), I spent the last four days reading more or less non-stop, and motored through Gerald Morris’s entire ten-book Squire’s Tales series. These are more-or-less straightforward retellings of classic King Arthur stories, braided together into novels, and I’ve read enough retellings now not only to enjoy the stories, but to find an extra level of pleasure in the choices that the author has made in the retelling.

Who is the author’s favorite knight? Gawain of Orkney, and Gerald Morris never loses the chance to remind us that Gawain, not that Johnny-come-lately upstart Lancelot, is the best knight in Camelot.

Which other knights does the author love? Morris loves grumpy seneschal Kai, and feels that Kai’s combat skills have been unfairly denigrated in later sources, and therefore occasionally reminds us that Kai killed TWO of the five kings at the Battle of the Five Kings early in Arthur’s reign. He also loves Parsifal, and in fact is generally drawn to fish out of water stories. There is a second knight, Beaufils, who shares Parsifal’s “raised in the woods by mother and never saw another human being till he left home” backstory, and when Palomides arrives in England from the Holy Land (he’s curious about the knights he fought against in the Crusades), he also brings a bemused outsider’s point of view to the world of knighthood. (It occurs to me that his traveling companion Dinadan, a knight who would really rather be a minstrel, is an outsider in another way.)

Morris also loves Gaheris, which is a bold choice. Most people plume for Gareth as second-best Orkney brother, but Morris can’t get over Gareth’s stupidity in not falling in love with Lynet when they went on a whole entire adventure together, and instead falling for her sister Lyonesse whose only real character trait is “beautiful.” (In general Morris is a substance over style guy, to the point of finding style suspicious for its own sake.)

He also, perhaps surprisingly, loves Lancelot, once Lancelot realizes that he’s made a complete ass of himself by trying to embody the image of the perfect knight - winner of tournaments! courtly lover of the most unattainable lady around! - which neglecting the substance of knighthood, which is using one’s strength to protect the weak.

How does the author feel about courtly love? Stupid! Destructive! Incredibly selfish! Morris is emphatically not on Team OT3. He is on Team What If You Honor-Obsessed Chuckleheads Honored Marriage Vows, Hmmm?

How does the author feel about Mordred? The actual worst. He and his armies wander the countryside killing unarmed peasants, occasionally leaving a few survivors specifically so they can inform said survivors that these evil, marauding knights were sent by King Arthur, because Mordred doesn’t want to merely overthrow his uncle-father, he wants to utterly destroy his reputation too.

(Sidebar: how does the author feel about incest? An astute reader who paid attention to Morris’s family tree a couple of books back could figure out that Morgause and Arthur are half-siblings, but Morris absolutely does not draw attention to this fact when he’s revealing Mordred’s parentage. In fact, Arthur didn’t know himself until the Big Reveal: Morgause didn’t bother to tell him at the time. What makes this weird is that Morris’s Morgan La Fay, here a chaotic neutral enchantress who trains a few other characters in the enchanting arts but is also maybe a little bit too into vengeance, is canonically in love with her half-brother Arthur. Maybe Morris found an unrequited and unconsummated crush a less icky way to get in the contractually required Arthurian levels of incest than doubling down on the Morgause/Arthur thing.)

Morris describes his use of history as “like the meat in stew” - there’s a little thrown in for savor, but for the most part he’s aiming to capture for a young modern-day audience something of the feel of the original stories, full of magic and adventure. For me, at least, he succeeded: one can always quibble (the female characters struck me as very nineties, which is both good and bad), but overall I found them fun, fast-paced, and absorbing, just the right tonic when I needed something to distract me from my external woes.

(Well, okay, “fun” is maybe the wrong word for the last book, but that’s just what happens when you go all the way to the end of the Camelot story.)

And they introduced me to a lot of new Arthurian stories, too! I’d never even heard of Beaufils, for instance. No matter how much Arthuriana you read, there’s always more out there.

Comments

[troisoiseaux]

because Mordred doesn’t want to merely overthrow his uncle-father

You know, for all our previous discussion of the Hamlet parallels of Phyllis Ann Karr's Mordred, this aspect of similarity didn't strike me until just now...?

The thing that I love about, like, Arthuriana, and Greek mythology, and generally the kind of stories have been retold over and over throughout history and continue to be retold, is how much the reteller's personality and personal thoughts bleed through. White's Arthur, et al., is not Karr's is not Wein's is not this guy's.

(Speaking of which, have you read John Steinbeck's The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights?)

[osprey_archer]

Oh, man, I forgot Morris's Arthur! He is a just, noble, compassionate king, much more hurt by Lancelot and Guinevere's affair than White's Arthur, but ultimately forgiving. (There's an interesting twist on the beginning of the Green Knight story, which in this version happens during Lancelot and Guinevere's affair: the eagerness with which Gawain agrees to strike the blow in Arthur's place reminds Arthur that his knights still love him, and romantic love isn't the only kind worth living for.)

And yes, absolutely about the way that retellings showcase an author's personality and thoughts about the story! The ability to compare an interpretation to so many other versions makes it easier to see the individuality.

I didn't even know John Steinbeck wrote a King Arthur book. What approach does he take? Years ago I tried to read Mark Twain's A Confederate Yankee in King Arthur's Court, but I couldn't get through it because Twain's attitude felt so snide. (I've never gotten on with Twain. I've tried multiple books and something about his personality just seems to be inimical to me.)

[troisoiseaux]

What approach does he take?

Pretty... straightforward, actually? My memory of it is kind of blurry, to be honest - it's been a few years - but iirc, he really seemed like he was just trying to make Malory readable without rocking the boat too much. (Which is in itself a choice! I'm just. not sure how to describe it??)

I liked Mark Twain as a kid— at least, I liked Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn; around the same time, I was given a copy of A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court that for reasons I'm not entirely clear on, I disliked enough to shove it under my dresser rather than read it.

[osprey_archer]

I'll have to give the Steinbeck a try. At some point I should probably just read Malory.

I got to the part where the Connecticut Yankee is using Science to expose the "magic" of Merlin, and the narrative was just so cruel and mocking toward Merlin, really depicting him as this pathetic old man, that I just couldn't with the book anymore.

[troisoiseaux]

I have tried to read Malory. I gave up fairly quickly, because the writing - and, iirc, the lack of any sort of paragraph breaks? - made my head hurt. I probably should give it another shot, but on the other hand, life feels too short to force oneself to read a book, when there are so many more to read willingly.

I don't think I even got that far into the book. I would read pretty much anything within reach as a kid but the one thing I couldn't work with was ye olde medievalisms.

[sovay]

I got to the part where the Connecticut Yankee is using Science to expose the "magic" of Merlin, and the narrative was just so cruel and mocking toward Merlin, really depicting him as this pathetic old man, that I just couldn't with the book anymore.

I like Twain generally, but I do not like A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. It gets extremely, nastily grim about its collision of medievalism and modernity and the ending scales up to several flavors of horror which the frame of satire has never rendered palatable for me. It's a weird book and its influence on the sub-genre of time travel where people attempt to introduce modern innovations into the past is significant, but it's an incredibly corrosive reading experience and I have only attempted it twice (it upset me so much as a child that I decided to revisit it as an adult and it turned out I didn't like it then, either).

[asakiyume]

How does the author feel about courtly love? Stupid! Destructive! Incredibly selfish! Morris is emphatically not on Team OT3. He is on Team What If You Honor-Obsessed Chuckleheads Honored Marriage Vows, Hmmm?

Wow, this guy sounds like the Arthuriana-retelling author for me!

I'm confused about Morgause v/ Morgan. They're both Arthur's half-sisters? Which one does he sleep with to beget Mordred?

"Beaufils" = "Beautiful son" = the "Prince Charming" of French knight-names. (I had never heard of him either, but I'm realizing my dip into Arthuriana was so shallow as to barely have qualified as a dip at all.)

What makes a 90s woman 90s-ish?

Also, I'm glad you're getting strength back. Keep healing up.

[osprey_archer]

It's almost too bad I didn't read these books when I was twelve or so, because I would have vibed with such a passionate intensity of agreement that I might have set the book on fire with the pure power of my feelings. I still enjoyed it now! Just not with the same ferocity.

As with the Orkney boys with G names, I took a long time to get Morgause and Morgan sorted out. They are both Arthur's half-sisters (Morris also dug up another half-sister from an obscure source, named Dioneta - these Arthurian families just keep growing!), both enchantresses. Morgause is the mother of the Orkney boys (with her husband King Lot) and of Mordred (with Arthur) and although someone may have tried to rehabilitate her (there's always someone with Arthuriana), she's generally portrayed as wicked. Morgan has no children (that I know of; but again, those Arthurian families...) and in modern books is often sympathetically portrayed, although I think originally she was wicked too.

I think when I said 90s woman I should have said "female characters in 1990s children books, particular fantasy novels," because there's a whole set of tropes that go together which I associate with that time. The heroine is a stalwart, plainspoken, feisty lass, often plainer than some vapid beautiful foil, although generally "pretty enough for all ordinary purposes." Being too interested in one's physical appearance or in romantic love shows a flawed character. Troops of silly girls giggle as they chase after the most handsome and popular man. Morris often has multiple sympathetic female characters in a book, but I've read books with this trope constellation the heroine is the only girl in the book who is worth anything.

Listing it out this way makes it sound like a bigger part of the reading experience than it actually was - I think I noticed it mostly because these tropes were so common in my childhood reading: hence "90s tropes," although I think they started earlier (maybe 1970s?) and ended, to the extent that they have ended, in the 2000s...

To be fair, Morris also writes his fair share of vapid, courtly-love obsessed men. (In his courtly love affair, both parties are invariably shallow, vain, and self-obsessed to the point of cheerfully letting other people die to further their love.) Sometimes instead of courtly love, the men are vapidly obsessed with the pageantry of knighthood, which is just as bad.

[asakiyume]

At "pretty enough for all ordinary purposes" I started giggling because this is SUCH a trope. "I'm not beautiful like silly shallow Lilibriatrillia over there, why, I'm barely worth noticing at all ... well ... until you ... take off my glasses and uncoil and unbraid my hair".

I do like the image of you setting a book on fire with the intensity of your love--I think this has to happen in some story somewhere.

[osprey_archer]

The "setting the book on fire with the intensity of my love" thing was specifically a reference to its attitude toward courtly love, which I hated with the fiery passion of a thousand suns, possibly because many young teenagers go through a period where they think it sounds ~so romantic~, or at least are expected to do so? I did not! I could not stand the thought that anyone would believe I favored anything so sappy and self-destructive!

[skygiants]

There's also an Elaine half-sister in some sources because the families just keep growing and so does the number of Elaines!

(People sometimes condense it and make Morgan Mordred's mother but if you do that I don't know what you do with the Orkney boys.)

[osprey_archer]

Yes, there's an Elaine Orkney girl in one of these books! Morris must have found her in a source and gone "why not."

Can't the Orkney boys be Morgan's children too, if you've decided to do away with Morgause?

[slashmarks]

Morgan's earliest appearances are sympathetic but she's not always related to Arthur in them, although I think she goes through a period of just being his apparently legitimate, helpful sister who does magic. Then she becomes moderately evil or at least ambiguous, but without being conflated with Morgause - she has affairs with various people, sometimes Merlin, sometimes she's in love with Lancelot and hates Guinevere out of jealousy, etc. This is all pre-Mallory though. /Morgan is the single Arthuriana character I'm most emotionally invested in for no particular reason.

(You might be interested in this - the Camelot Project at the University of Rochester has a website with comprehensive cataloguing of characters in Arthurian literature if you're ever curious about their individual appearances over time, and a lot of the older public domain stuff available online and linked in one place - here's Morgan's page: https://d.lib.rochester.edu/camelot-project)

[osprey_archer]

Oh, thank you for linking that website! What a fantastic resource. I'm particularly looking forward to looking at all the various Arthurian paintings and illustrations.

[slashmarks]

Oops, that was the url of the main page, wasn't it - but probably more useful anyway. The database of paintings is so neat!

[genarti]

Oooh, I'm deeply intrigued! This definitely sounds up my alley, as Arthurian retellings go, though whether it's all the way up my alley knocking on my back door or just standing in the mouth of it waving vaguely I can't tell. Though ten books is an awful lot of books... we shall see!

[osprey_archer]

The series is episodic enough that you could easily just read the books that most interest you, if you want. The first two (The Squire's Tale and The Squire, His Knight, and His Lady) are sort of a duology, heavy on the Gawain stories. I think most of the first eight would function as standalones - the first two are sort of a duology, and The Lioness and Her Knight is a sort of sequel to The Savage Damsel and the Dwarf (the heroine of Lioness is the daughter of one of the pairings in Savage Damsel). Most of the others are basically standalones - they reference events in the other books, but not so heavily they would be hard to follow - with the exception of the last two, which do lean more heavily on the earlier books.

Do you have a favorite knight or Arthurian tale that you'd be most interested in? I could tell you if Morris does that one.

[landofnowhere]

I read *The Lioness and Her Knight* as a standalone, the only one I've read in the series (I was like, oooh, an Owain/Yvain retelling from the point of view of Lunete!) and it worked by itself. So I can recommend the "pick your favorite Arthurian tale and read that one" approach, though I haven't read any more of the series.

[genarti]

Do you have a favorite knight or Arthurian tale that you'd be most interested in? I could tell you if Morris does that one.

So, the answer to this is wildly unhelpful and idiosyncratic, lol, because I'm more interested in ~general vibes~ and the Round Table as a whole than a specific knight, though I am very interested in Arthur.

I didn't really grow up on Arthuriana -- I mean, I ran into some, I wasn't totally unaware of them or anything, but Robin Hood was the formative medieval tale-cluster in my house. My formative Arthuriana was 1) a book of Celtic folktales, including things like the story about Arthur and all his knights hunting the boar Twrch Trwyth to get the comb and shears and razor from between his ears for Reasons, as you do, and 2) The Sword and the Stone movie, but I only watched it once or twice without really getting enthralled by it, and 3) Mary Stewart's The Crystal Cave about Merlin's youth in post-Roman Britain, which I adored, and subsequent books, which I liked decreasingly well as they got closer to The Tragic Doom of Camelot and then just stopped reading when it was looming too much, and 4) the The Dark is Rising series. Also Anne McCaffrey's Black Horses for the King, in which said king barely features, since it's about a boy traveling to the Mediterranean to help get fancy strong horses to carry knights for Lord Artos.

All of which led me to expect stories of Arthur and his knights to feature 1) knights doing quests that were very numinous and set in a web of interconnecting supernatural events but might or might not make sense, and 2) lots of Merlin and/or other magic OR lots of historical fiction-y detail, and 3) a cool setting, and none of which led me to feel particularly attached to any specific knight.

I do also love fish-out-of-water settings, though, and outside perspectives on a known story, and I love virtuous honorable characters who aren't tragically punished for that virtuous honor. (They don't have to have a great time of things, I just rarely want to watch The Slow Unescapable Downfall Of An Honorable Man, if you know what I mean, or "lol what if this honorable character was ACTUALLY SECRETLY the worst???" which is why Mordred-centric stories are rarely my thing.)

[osprey_archer]

You might like Parsifal's Page (fish out of water; a numinous quest) or The Quest of the Fair Unknown (ALSO fish out of water; a large portion of the book takes place in actual fairyland). Generally speaking Morris's virtuous honorable characters come off well: obviously they suffer all the usual difficulties of questing, but no one actually gets punished for being honorable (until Mordred hits the scene in the last couple of books and then it is Mordred himself taking advantage of their honor, not the narrative punishing them for it).

I actually found Morris's straightforward endorsement of honor and honesty and justice such a pleasure to read. Sometimes I just want to read about basically good characters behaving well and maybe also slaying recreant knights!

[genarti]

Oooooh, both of these sound extremely up my alley. Thank you for the targeted rec!

And YES, exactly, about sometimes I just want to read about basically good characters behaving well. Sometimes I want to read about other things, and I love a number of characters who don't necessarily match that description, but there's pretty much never a time when I'd say no to a story about fundamentally decent people doing their best.

[sovay]

Gerald Morris’s entire ten-book Squire’s Tales series

I have never heard of these books! I approve of the author's orientation toward the outsiders of Arthurian legend, except I have never had much time for Actual Worst Mordred.

[osprey_archer]

Actual Worst Mordred doesn't show up until the last couple of books (well, briefly in book eight, but it's just one scene), although before that we have Morgause being the Actual Worst. But I don't think there's the range of Morgauses that there is of Mordreds? At any rate I've never read a woobie Morgause.

[sovay]

At any rate I've never read a woobie Morgause.

Karr is neutral about her in retrospect: "And the lady was not quite so unwilling . . . God rest her soul."

Parke Godwin's Morgana is one of the contemporary fusions with Morgause in that she is the mother of the novel's Modred by Artos, but she is sympathetically drawn (in a way that I suspect is a bit more obviously wincing now than when the novel was originally published: a chieftain of the matriarchal Prydn, the small dark Faerie-identified indigenous people who live up beyond the Wall and steal changelings from the "tallfolk" and have no sense of time like the taller, blonder interlopers on their land; their way of life is simpler, freer, more primitive, doomed. Godwin doesn't go for the incest per se, but his Artos is later revealed to be half-Prydn, his mother a changeling of the same royal lineage as Morgana. You can probably tell that I am not exactly recommending this novel based on my high-school-aged memories of it, but it is the major post-Roman treatment to follow Sutcliff and Stewart that I know about, so it's relevant. It's determinedly un-numinous, very down on Christianity as I recall. I like Godwin's take on Robin Hood better, even if he was totally, physically wrong about how you draw a bow).

[asakiyume]

their way of life is simpler, freer, more primitive, doomed.

Aaaaaahhh no. No no no no.

(I like the line from Karr, though)

[sovay]

Aaaaaahhh no. No no no no.

I repeat that I haven't read it since high school, but I don't remember it a win on all cylinders!

(I like the line from Karr, though)

(This is my eternal plug for The Idylls of the Queen, which is one of my favorite Arthurian retellings ever.)

[oracne]

These sound intriguing!

[osprey_archer]

It was the right series at the right time!

[thisbluespirit]

I realise this isn't the point here, but we had a couple of those in my libraries when I was a librarian, and idk why but I am STUNNED to learn there were NINE! nINE!

Nobody ever took the ones we had out even!! lol (Sadly, because they did look quite good and all, but the children of my authority did not want them and the books were really good condition and I couldn't quite weed them out straight off, so I kept sending them to other libraries, where they were also Not Read. So, I'm just, omg, we could have had NINE of the damn things!!)

Ahem. Interested to hear they are in fact good!

[osprey_archer]

I would cry "What were the children in your library thinking!" except that I was a child when these books came out (at least the first few of them), and as you can see I did not read them either till now. I guess I just never noticed them? I don't even know.

[thisbluespirit]

I know, I don't know why, either! It just meant they became one of several books or series that I started to bear a grudge against because they kept sitting on my shelves doing nothing, heh. But I daresay they still went out once or twice, and when it comes to books, that may be all that was ever needed from them.

[thisbluespirit]

Oh, also, because I think you maybe said you wanted to find a book that compared all the Arthuriana (I was too ill to do commenting that day, also if that wasn't you, sorry) - I don't know of such a thing (although I bet there are several), but there is one Arthurian retelling that winds up going off-the-wall meta in the last book, which is Fay Sampson's Daughter of Tintagel series (well, it was a quartet, but then there was a fifth). I'm not sure if I'd recommend them (it's a long time ago and I remember being SHOCKED (being a prudish teen) that there was actually blunt talk of sex in the first one! Right at the beginning!!) because they do retell the exact same version of Morgan Le Fay's story from four different POVs, which did get a tad repetitive, BUT

the fifth book, Herself was basically Morgan's own commentary on this, her own story from the earliest Arthur myths right up to people like MZB and Stephen Lawhead, (and still waiting for people to realise she could be both/and, not always either/or, which I did like a lot). Which you might find kind of interesting. Although I suspect it's probably v hard to come by in the US anyway, but it was definitely a whole other thing than the rest. (Which might be good! I just can't remember enough to say anything, and they might not be.)

[osprey_archer]

Yes, that was me! Fascinated to hear that there's a five book series that retells Morgan's story from five different POVs, ending with Morgan's own POV? I hope the other four books have stuff going on alongside Morgan's story, because otherwise this sounds like it could get VERY repetitive. But at the same time, one of the things that is great about Arthuriana is that people will just come up with this sort of thing: a Rashomon-type retelling of Morgan's story! Why not!

[thisbluespirit]

Yes, it's been a while, and I can't really remember enough details and things to say. I liked them enough to keep re-reading them anyway, though! THey seemed like something different to me, and I have a feeling I had already grumpily bounced right off The Mists of Avalon and they were a timely antidote.

What I recall is that each of the four people narrating the first four knew Morgan at different points in her life, so the stories would overlap, but would each carry on further than the previous one. I know the first one was her childhood nurse, and I have a feeling there was a smith, but I can't remember the other two now.

I think, now that I come to try and dredge it out of my brain, that what was repetitive was that Herself retold the whole story (though shorter) from Morgan's own pov, BUT it had these alternating chapters where it would be chapter 1 - Morgan's story as by Fay Sampson; Ch 2 - Morgan comments on her story as it shaped through the ages - where she first appears, which authors included her and how they used her, how her role shifted through time (although obv with the caveat that it is within a fictional context, so not necessarily a reliable commentary, because the author has her own take on it), and I'd never seen any kind of overview of Arthuriana like that, and I absolutely loved it.

Which is to say, the set up means, that it would be entirely possible to only read Herself!