The World After Arthur

Why set a King Arthur book in a world without King Arthur? Why, Santa Claus, why? Five reasons

This is a detail from one of N.C. Wyeth’s illustrations for The Boy’s King Arthur. I wanted to put it on the cover of The Bright Sword, but it ended up looking like a Dan Jones history book so we scrapped it

I’m currently in St. Louis—for an event with Ann Leckie!—and this is the number one question I’ve been getting so far on tour.

And it’s a good question. Generally speaking books about King Arthur stop when he dies. There’s a reason Malory called it Le Morte d’Arthur—as we say in Australia, the label says what’s in the tin. Arthur dies, we mourn him and the passing of his age. That’s how it works.

Of course it does. It’s one of the most elegant and moving tragedies ever conceived. And obviously you can’t have a King Arthur book without King Arthur—about half of The Bright Sword is flashbacks to the time when he was alive.

But what if—what if—the cameras kept on rolling, after Arthur died? How would that change the story? Five reasons why I’m interested in post-Arthur Arthur.

1. MALORY GOT IT WRONG.

Or I think he did anyway.

When Arthur dies, he has no direct descendants. Or that’s not quite true—Arthur’s incestuous bastard Mordred had two sons, Arthur’s grandsons, but Lancelot hunts them down and does them in pretty quick. According to Malory, the crown passes peacefully, uncontested, to Arthur’s cousin Sir Constantine, a colorless spear-carrier. I don’t buy it!

Succession crises have been sparked by far less. Look at what happened to Henry I—and he had a daughter and five nephews. And Arthur’s realm was unstable as it was, witness the fact that half the realm supported Mordred even when they found out, contrary to what Mordred had just told them, that Arthur was still alive.

It can’t have been that easy. There’s a story left to be told.

2. MAGIC! AND FAIRIES!

The world after Arthur is a magic world. It’s a wild, romantic, fairy-haunted, enchanted world.

Even before Arthur’s death, really starting at the end of the Grail Quest, God has been backing away from Britain. From an active, hovering presence, forever sending the knights marvels and setting them adventures, He becomes the distant modern God with whom we are more familiar from personal experience.

And as one of the characters in The Bright Sword says, “Where God does not tend his garden, weeds will grow.” When God retreats, the indigenous spirits of Britain advance. Fairy magic, long in abeyance, floods back into the world, re-enchanting it and setting the stage for a final conflict with the divine. What fantasy writer worth their salt could resist that?

3. BECAUSE IT’S THERE.

It’s a blank space on the map, and there aren’t many left after 1,400 years of Arthuriana. One of T.H. White’s great strokes of genius was to tell the story of Arthur’s childhood for the very first time. No one had ever really done that before. All that business about Merlin transforming Arthur into animals and so on, White made it up out of whole cloth.

It was a blank space on the map. I went looking for another one.

4. ALL THE HEROES ARE DEAD

When I first started to look at the post-Arthur world, I panicked because I realized that everyone was dead. It’s not just Arthur, almost no one survives the battle of Camlann. We know Bedivere does; so do the handful of knights who fled across the channel with Lancelot; but that’s about it.

But gradually it dawned on me that this was a feature, not a bug. With all the heroes dead, we could bring to center stage some of the minor characters who spend most of their time in the margins. Knights like Sir Palomides and Sir Dagonet and Sir Dinadan. Or Sir Bedivere himself, who has spent a lifetime as Arthur’s staunch companion, but mostly in the background—he rarely gets a word in edgewise. It was time to give him a voice.

It was an opportunity to explore diversity. Just for example: I’ve often thought about the fact that although T.H. White’s sexuality is said to have been complex—the one biography I’m aware of describes him as “a homosexual and a sado-masochist”—there’s nothing but straight romance in The Once and Future King. White couldn’t write about other kinds of relationships.

But I can. More blank space on the map.

5. BECAUSE THAT’S WHERE WE LIVE

When Arthur dies, it’s a kind of apocalypse. The sun around which everything revolves has gone out. The center has failed, the lamps gone out. The world has lost its way. It’s I Am Legend, or The Last of Us.

How do you keep going after that? How do you live in a post-apocalyptic world? It’s one of those questions that, for deep deep reasons, pre-occupies our popular culture right now. I think that on some invisible but profound level, we feel like an apocalypse has occurred, and the world has lost its way, and become a Waste Land.

That’s the adventure the knights in The Bright Sword face. It’s the adventure of our time. Because the world without Arthur is our world, too.