To Malham and Back

Birthday treat
As part of my 57th birthday celebrations, Sally took me to Malhamdale near the source of the River Aire. I’ve been before and I hope I’ll go again. It’s one of those places once seen never forgotten – whether you encounter it first on the big screen in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – or whether like me you were brought here by Geography teachers in mass groups of teenagers to be amazed at the clints, grikes, limestone pavement, sink holes, rocks galore and the realisation that the planet is a heaving, living, destructive, beautiful force of nature.

Malham Cove
It’s at the top of Malham Cove that Harry and Hermione rest and try and figure stuff out. The colossal waterfall that once poured over the top of it is long gone, but the sight of the curving cliff, from below, from above, from the sides and from afar is a wonder of the Yorkshire dales. Enough to make a Muggle marvel. Priest Thomas West in 1779 described Malham Cove as like “the age-tinted wall of a prodigious castle.”

Malham Tarn
No less weird is walking to and around Malham Tarn, the glacial lake which seems to sit like a spooky infinity pool in a flat patch of desolate moorland. An atmospheric place to sit in the rain among the sheep shit and eat your sandwiches…. tasty. Charles Kingsley was inspired to write The Water Babies after visiting the Cove and Tarn – child chimney sweeps forever rejoiced.

Janet’s Foss
As a teenager Janet’s Foss was my first sight of a waterfall in real life rather than in the pages of an Enid Blyton book. And on this trip we happened to visit twice – the second day after torrential rain the night before and the bigger volume of water made the magical place seem like a completely new location. Does a fairy queen live in the cave behind the fall? Is the pope a Catholic?

Gordale Scar
And the other oft-visited place is the terrifying ravine, Gordale Scar. It’s somewhere to visit if you want to feel insignificant – a crack or chasm in the crust of the Earth with humans staring up at the immense cliffs. On our Geography Field trip – back in the 1970s – the teachers led us UP the Scar which is still possible when the two waterfalls are not heavy but at my age now – and having been a teacher – it just seems to be such a reckless, dangerous, impossible thing to have done. But I know I did.

Beck Hall Hotel
After two days hiking (well over 20,000 steps each day) it was gorgeous to come to rest each night at Beck Hall, a gorgeously-sited and whimsical place to stay over a clapper bridge. A fireside snug, jigsaw/games table, hearty food, welcoming staff, a comfy bed and the sound of Malham Beck running by all night, having poured down from the Scar, over Janet’s Foss, through Malhamdale and joining the River Aire to flow back home through Saltaire.

Road to Avalon

Tintagel tourist sites: King Arthur's Great Halls and the Old Post Office

King Arthur’s Hall and Tintagel Old Post Office

Emily and I travelled from Plymouth to Cornwall and the spectacular site of Tintagel. Before venturing to the famous Castle we visited the eccentric Old Post Office (with its wonky roof) and the even more eccentric Great Hall of King Arthur. The Tintagel Old Post Office, curated by the National Trust, was a great place for a refreshing cuppa. King Arthur’s Hall, though, was our first Arthurian site – the gathering place in the 1930s for the Order of the Fellowship of the Knights of the Round Table, founded by Frederick Thomas Glasscock (yes, Glasscock.) This group of benign gentlemen met from 1927 to “promote Christian ideals and Arthurian notions of medieval chivalry.” (If you click on the picture above, it should enlarge and you can read the ideals more closely, should you wish!)

The extraordinary Tintagel Castle

Tintagel
The castle itself – or series of forts and castles – is a remarkable English Heritage site. The changing views are breathtaking and the displays give a good account of all the different theories about why this site became important over many centuries. I first discovered the tales of King Arthur through Enid Blyton’s and Rosemary Sutcliff’s retellings of the legends but went on to devour just about everything I could through school and university, graduating from cartoon versions to European classics translated from Welsh and from the French. It’s hard to know why Arthurian Romance has played such a big part in my reading over the years – there’s something about the yearning for a better world and the poignancy of the failed enterprise that captured my imagination. I have blogged earlier about reading The Goshawk by TH White before graduating to The Once and Future King. Tintagel did not disappoint. It captures the beautiful romantic nature of the stories in its seaside clifftop setting, but its precarious and precipitous geography suggests it will inevitably come crashing down just as the Round Table did in the stories.

Launceston Castle in Cornwall

Launceston Castle

Leaving Cornwall and heading towards Somerset we called at Launceston Castle for a leg stretch and an exploration of the unusual keep which was the base for the Cornish Royalist defence of the county during the Civil War. Fantastic views from the battlements made the visit well worthwhile. Our next stop was to be the possible site for “Avalon” or the legendary isle where King Arthur was conveyed after his death at the hands of his son, Mordred. Although France and Sicily have also been proposed as Avalon locations – and Tintagel itself has island qualities – Glastonbury is where tradition places Avalon and that’s where Emily and I headed next.

The Sword in the Stone and Arthurian Romance

Arthurian Romance

Where did my interest in the Myths and Legends of King Arthur come from? I know I’m not alone in being a little bit obsessive about seeking out adaptations of the different tales. King Arthur as a character has appeared in over 30 feature films and countless books; I’m even looking forward to Guy Ritchie’s version, scheduled for cinemas in 2017 according to imdb.com, starring Charlie Hunnam as King Arthur and David Beckham as “Blackleg leader” ….!? Charlie Hunnam joins a list of distinguished screen Arthurs over the years; in the picture below Charlie relaxes (with Excalibur I imagine) in a boat alongside an Arthur-fest of other actors: Clive Owen, Sean Connery, Nigel Terry, Liam Garrigan, Jamie Campbell Bower, Graham Chapman, Brian Aherne and Bradley James.

Arthur at the BBC

I felt the BBC TV series Merlin was strongly-designed and acted with involving relationships. I also thoroughly enjoyed the BBC Radio 4 adaptation of The Once and Future King with David Warner as Merlyn. I have no doubt there will be many future variations, additions and perversions of the Arthurian stories. All the elements have been recycled many times: the boy with a destiny, the noble leader, the magical weapon, the love triangle, the adventures and spiritual quests, the friendships and betrayals, the battles and the tragic end.

Disney's Sword in the Stone, Harry Potter, the Narnia series and Terry Pratchett novels borrow Arthurian elements

The Sword in the Stone

After reading The Goshawk by TH White in my teenage years I thought it would be entertaining to read The Sword in the Stone and I bought a paperback copy at Wakefield market. I had not read anything like it before – the knowing asides to the reader, the anachronistic references to the 20th century in a medieval narrative, the exquisite descriptions of English landscapes.

It was easy to identify with the Wart (to rhyme with Art) – a runt of a boy (misunderstood and bullied.) The other main characters are also vivid:

• the charismatic wizardly teacher, Merlyn
• the talking owl, Archimedes
• the affable but clumsy Kay
• the comical but brave King Pellinore
• the gruff but kindly Sir Ector. 

Disney’s whimsical film captures much of the plot of The Sword in the Stone but misses out the underlying philosophy and satirical politics.

Merlyn and Archimedes

Arthur pulls the sword

Mixing Fact and Fiction

Following my enjoyment of The Sword in the Stone I scoured references to potential historical figures on whom Arthur could have been based: Artorius, Artúr, Agitius, Ambrosius Aurelianus, Lucius Artorius Castus and Riothamus. Celtic, Briton, Roman or a mix of all three? I read Tennyson’s poetic version Idylls of the King, Enid Blyton’s children’s version of the stories, Rosemary Sutcliff’s retelling, Tristan tales in comic books, John Steinbeck’s skilful adaptation and Mary Stewart’s trilogy about Merlin. I looked up encyclopaedia entries about Tintagel, Glastonbury, Winchester, Cadbury Castle and many other sites around Britain laying claim to fragments of the legendary characters and ideas. I devoured (several times) Alan Garner’s superb tales of Alderley Edge: The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath and Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising Sequence of five books, starting with the unsettling Over Sea, Under Stone.

Academic Module

At university I took an optional course in Arthurian romance when I learned about Gildas, Nennius, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, Wace, Chrétien de Troyes (who introduced the Lancelot/Guenevere love triangle and the Holy Grail), Eschenbach’s Parzival, the Song of Roland, the Alliterative Morte Arthure, the Mabinogion and Spenser’s Faerie Queen. It became obvious that there was no such thing as a definitive Tales of King Arthur originating from a single narrative foundation but a collection of elements from a variety of sources, cultures and traditions. Arthurian Romance is a miscellaneous ragbag of bits and bobs, all the more marvellous for their open-ended possibilities. Alan Garner explains his idea about riffing on old ideas in the afterword to the Alderley Tales: “Originality is the personal colouring of existing themes.”

Films by Robert Bresson and John Boorman

Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur – a major landmark

There is probably one book, though, that is the nearest thing to a lodestone for fans of Arthurian Romance. Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur from 1485 is the book that seems to combine the most potent stories and ideas into as coherent a whole as currently exist and this mighty tome was the meat of the course at university. It was the work that was used for the beautiful-to-watch and eminently worthy (but in my opinion strangely dull) production at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2010 directed by one of my favourite directors, Greg Doran, and starring two of my favourite actors, Sam Troughton and Jonjo O’Neill. I’m not sure why that production didn’t light my fire since it brought together two of my favourite obsessions: the Arthurian legends and the RSC. William Goldman’s famous opening to Adventures in the Screen Trade is the only explanation I can come up with: in the entertainment industry he authoritatively stated: “Nobody knows anything.”

RSC's Morte d'Arthur with Jonjo O'Neill as Lancelot and James Howard as the Grail Angel

“Whoever pulls this sword out of this stone and anvil is born to be the rightful king of all England.”

Before getting to the academic study at university there were two other works that DID light my fire – one set of books and one film musical. The musical was based on the books and the books were based on Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. It was a series of books that, it is fair to say, have haunted me since I read them aged 15: the sequels to (or continuation of) The Sword in the Stone – The Once and Future King.

Ioan Gruffudd as Lancelot in Antoine Fuqua's King Arthur

Game-changing Novels

So my daughter was asked to name her Top Ten Most Influential Books -  not the BEST, nor the GREATEST, nor the ones you've READ RECENTLY, nor the ones you think SHOULD BE on a top ten list.

What are the ten novels that have been MOST INFLUENTIAL on your life?  The ones that CHANGED THE GAME for you?  The ones that, after reading, your life was forever different?

Harriet's list

Harriet’s list was (in alphabetical order of title):

Americanah - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress - Dai Sijie
The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood
The Far Cry - Emma Smith
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
The Night Circus - Erin Morgenstern
Sum: Tales from the Afterlives - David Eagleman
The Tiger's Wife - Tea Obreht
A Town like Alice - Nevil Shute
Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys

My list

Here are mine (in order of the age, roughly, when I first read them):

Lord of the Flies – William Golding (read aged 14)
The Once And Future King – TH White (read aged 15)
Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë (read aged 17)
To Kill A Mockingbird – Harper Lee (read aged 17)
Great Expectations  - Charles Dickens (read aged 20)
Dragonflight – Anne McCaffrey (read aged 24)
The Sea The Sea – Iris Murdoch (read aged 28)
A Man of his Word/A Handful of Men – Dave Duncan (read aged 38)
The Sunne in Splendour – Sharon Penman (read aged 40)
Oryx and Crake – Margaret Atwood (read aged 48)

What do I notice about the books that changed things for me forever?  History, myth, fantasy, love and violent actions are common threads.  Six of the ten works are written by women.  Should I have worked harder to include books by writers I admire like Alice Hoffmann or Anne Tyler, Philip Pullman or CS Lewis?  What about my childhood obsession, Enid Blyton?

What was I heartbroken to miss out?

Close misses from the list include (alphabetical by surname of writer) I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, Emma by Jane Austen, Villette by Charlotte Brontë, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Bleak House, Hard Times and Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens, Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett, Howards End and A Passage to India by EM Forster, Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy, Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, The Rainbow by DH Lawrence, The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing, Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, Beloved by Toni Morrison, Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, Treasure Island by RL Stevenson, Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh.

If anyone knows me well, and wants to prompt me with anything I’ve forgotten – or provide their own list, please do so.  I might attempt a future blog about poets/poems/plays – but might have to exclude Shakespeare because of the impossibility of choosing between his creations….