Elves in Elizabeth's England

This Scepter’d Isle
Ill Met by Moonlight

The first two novels in a series by Mercedes Lackey and Roberta Geillis, This Scepter’d Isle and Ill Met by Moonlight make for delightful light reading. The premise, that the balance of power in the land of the Sidhe will be disrupted if the Tudor succession does not happen as our earthly history says it did, allows for a delicious mix of life as it really was in the court of Henry VIII of England and a vision of Faerie that has room for all the folk under the hill, Seleighe, Unseleighe, and all that's inbetween.

The Farseers of the Sidhe have seen that if Henry's rule is followed by that of a certain red-haired heir, England will be a land of prosperity and creativity, but that if Henry's successor is instead one who would deliver the land into the hands of the Spanish Inquisition, then hatred and pain and sorrow will reign - and the power of the Unseleighe Court will be enhanced and the Seleighe Court diminished.

Vidal Dhu, ruler of the Unseleighe Court, picks two of his courtiers, Rhoslyn Teleri Dagfael Silverhair and Pasgen Peblig Rodrig Silverhair, twin brother and sister, to keep an eye on mortal affairs to prevent the coming to power of this red-haired heir. However, from the Seleighe Court, their half-siblings, Denoriel Siencyn Macreth Silverhair and Aleneil Arwyddion Ysfael Silverhair, also twin brother and sister, are preparing to find and protect the foretold heir and ensure that he - or she - gains the throne of England.

And frankly, the mix of Tudor England and the world of the Sidhe is a combination I can't resist. Lackey and her collaborator Geillis have begun a series that I'll be reading right until the last glimpse of Elizabeth of England they choose to provide. Yes, it's a bit overblown at times, and breathless at others, but it's glorious fun.

Bonny Braes and Banks

Outlander, by Diana Gabaldon

I have no idea why I waited so long to read this book. I'd heard about this great series about a woman from modern times (well, post-WWII, anyway) who is magically transported two hundred years into the past, where, despite having a nice husband in her own time, she falls in love - somewhat unwillingly - with another nice man in the past, and gets all mixed up in the events preceding the battle of Culloden.

But for some reason I just didn't get around to reading it until recently - and now I find that I must go out and buy about half-a-dozen sequels, because the first book was every bit as good as everyone has been telling me it was.

Outlander begins with one of the lead characters, Claire Randall, an English nurse, on a second honeymoon in Scotland. There's some discussion of the role her husband's ancestor, a Captain John Randall, played in the bloody hisory of the Jacobite Risings - the long attempt by the Highland Scots to return the house of Stuart to the throne of England and Scotland following deposition of James II in 1688, which was finally crushed in 1746 at the Battle of Culloden. (I should digress here to note that I myself am part Scot, part Welsh, and all Celt, and as far as the history of the time is concerned, my sympathies are all with the Scots and not the slightest with the Sassenach.)

While in Scotland, Claire discovers that there is a standing circle near where they are staying, where some of the local women still worship in the "old ways." When she explores the circle herself, she finds herself drawn back to 1745, where she finds herself caught up in the politics of the clans, the cause of the Jacobites, the invading Sassenach - one of whom is her husband's ancestor, and eventually a bold Scotsman named Jamie Fraser who wins her heart.

It's fascinating historical fiction wrapped up in a time-travelling frame, with all the complications that entails, it's a refreshing romance between two people who become friends and partners as well as lovers, and it's - most welcome of all - a story of an intelligent, resourceful, courageous and tough woman who survives and thrives despite being thrown out of her own time and all that she knows and understands.

(no subject)

Arthur, the Bear of Britain, Edward Frankland

One of the earlier modern recountings of the Arthurian material, and one of the first to take a purely historical approach by attempting to set the core story in a naturalistic, historically accurate post-Roman Britain, Arthur, the Bear of Britain was first published in 1944. Frankland says of his novel, in the author’s afterword:

"The outline of my story has been designed from any scraps of material which seem to be of historical value. Here and there, like Geoffrey, I have had recourse to pure, but I think not unreasonable, invention. I have preserved the central romance of Arthur, Medraut, and Guinevere (more correctly Gwenhwyvar), not only on account of its tragic splendour, but because intuitively one feels that it springs from a germ of truth rather than fiction."

The novel is organised in an episodic fashion, with each chapter headed by a reference to one of the traditional 12 battles fought by Arthur, or to another specific incident or situation in the Arthurian corpus, taken from some of the earliest sources available – Nennius, Gildas, the early Welsh and Scottish references to legends of Arthur.

The cast of characters and their interpersonal relationships are not always those that have been fixed into the modern version of the legend. There is the eternal trio, here constituted as Arthur, Medraut and Gwenhwyvar, with Medraut as the son of Arthur’s treacherous half-brother Modron, Arthur’s true companion for some time, who is slowly turned away though his desire for power and his uncle’s wife, and Gwenhwyvar as a rather selfish woman who wants her husband to stay at home and build her a comfortable castle rather than running all over Britain and southern Scotland using up his time, his strength and his resources fighting the Saxons wherever they may be. There are the traditional companions Kai and Bedwyr, and a host of Bitish and Cymic lords and princes who simply will not come together long enough in truce, if not in peace, for Arthur to do more than hold back the Saxons for a time.

I found it interesting but not especially enjoyable reading – Frankland’s style makes use of a great deal of (pages and pages, in fact) of inner ruminations and virtual monologues in which the characters discuss, somewhat repetitively, their inner thoughts and motivations. Medraut and Gwenhwyvar ponder, both separately and together, over whether or not they will betray Arthur for two-thirds of the book before they get around to doing it. Arthur is brought by circumstances to declare over and over again that he does not want power for himself, he does not wish to fight against other Britons, he wants only to keep the Britons free of Saxon overlords. As well, the episodic structure of the book makes it somewhat difficult to keep the story line flowing, but there are some very nice touches in the way key elements of the legend, such as the idea of the Round Table, are worked naturalistically and almost casually into the narrative.

What is important and memorable about this novel, beyond its insistence on an accurate portrayal of the casual brutality and violence of the historical period Arthur’s life must be placed against, is the portrait of Arthur himself. As Raymond Thompson says in his introduction to the current edition:

This is the world that Frankland creates for us…. First published in England in 1944, it reflects, perhaps, the savagery of a new dark age in which total war threatened the destruction of all that was held dear. The nobility and sacrifice of Arthur yr Amherawdyr, Arthur the emperor, also known as Artos the Bear, stand out in this world in a contrast made all the more striking by the enveloping darkness. When his nephew Medraut advises him to seek power after his great victory at Badon, Arthur, who had earlier vowed to fight against the invaders instead of other Britons, insists upon adhering to his principles: “A man may take it upon him to do as you counsel me to do and good may come of it; but for good or for ill I am not that man,” he responds. He pays the price for his decision on the battlefield of Camlann where, as she washed the blood from the face of his corpse, Garwen laments, “Of all the heroes that come up out of the race of Britons, this man sought least for himself and was most basely betrayed.”

At the end of the book, Frankland diverges from the legends of the three queens who bear Arthur's body away, but retains the essence and meaning of this, in his handling of the burial of Arthur. The two survivors of Camlann, Bedwyr the companion and Garwen the lover, take Arthur's body from the field of battle so that no one can know for certain, after, if he fell or lived on, and place his body within an ancient barrow, thought to be an entrance to the places of the folk under the hills, where he lies alone beneath the land he lived and died to defend. I found myself, as I read this, thinking of Jo Walton's Arthurian-themed books The King's Peace and The King's Name, because of the striking image - one that I've really only found so clearly in this work and in hers, of Arthur returning to be one with the heart and soul and spirit of the land, rather than being carried away into another place to wait for his time to come again.

Murder in the Mission House

A Monstrous Regiment of Women, Laurie R. King

This is the second of the Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes mysteries to be published, and I enjoyed it quite as completely as I did the first.

In this novel, Russell, about to finish with university and just on the verge of reaching her majority and gaining control of her fortune, meets an old friend who has become involved with a charismatic woman preacher and social reformer, Margery Childe. Russell, who has taken degree in theology (and in chemistry, but that is much less relevant here) is at first interested in Childe's profoundly feminist but theologically naive interpretation of Scripture, but following an attempt on her friend's life, and the discovery of a series of deaths associated with Childe's organisation, the detective in her takes over.

The Russell/Holmes relationship heats up somewhat - well, quite a bit toward the end - and while I'm not entirely certain that I would have written that aspect of the story the same way the King did, still it worked for me. However, after reading this novel, which is the second in publication order, I read somewhere that O Jerusalem is actually the next novel in chronological order, so I must read that next. Possibly it will fill in the gaps that made a few notes in the advancing Russell/Holmes relation seem not quite in key.