Arthur: The Always King by Kevin Crossley-Holland and Chris Riddell

November 3rd 2021

It's no good trying to imprison Merlin.  It doesn't work.

True, the wizard's beautiful apprentice, Nimue, turns his own magic against him, and imprisons  him within a giant overhanging rock. . .   And later, she spirits Merlin to a house of glass, from where the magician is able to watch and listen as the generations pass. But not even she can prevent him from escaping into the imagination of one generation after another, the seer and prophet who can tell the future and cast magic spells, the wizard who guides the hand of the boy Arthur so that he is able to pull the sword from the stone and become King of Britain. The seam of magic - unpredictable, destabilising and, in the wrong hands, downright dangerous - is a crucial part of the Arthurian legends.  Perhaps it is right to think of it as the instinctive, illogical, wild part of ourselves, in touch with energies we can harness but not fully understand - alive to wonders everyday and extraordinary. The terrifying Green Knight threatens not only Sir Gawain - as many of you will have seen in the recent film - but Camelot itself.  And because of her hatred for Arthur, her half-brother, Morgan le Fay endangers the ideals underpinning the fellowship of the Round Table: friendship, bravery, romantic love, honour, loyalty, and spiritual quest.

Do you remember the horrifying scene in which Morgan sends Guinevere a beautiful dress made of crocodile skin?  When King Arthur tells Guinevere to try it on, Merlin intervenes, and insists that Morgan's young messenger should do so first.  As soon as she does, the dress bursts into flames and becomes as rigid as armour. In one of my favourite books when I was a boy, The Sword in the Stone, T.H. White made Merlin a teacher and educator, preparing Arthur for kingship, and I pursued this idea in my Arthur trilogy.  Seldom does he answer young Arthur's questions but, rather, returns them with interest, prompting Arthur to find his own way forward.  Questions, he says, are like nutshells with their nuts still inside them.  If you need to understand meanings, you have to find them out for yourself. So it has been a wonderful opportunity to engage with Merlin again in Arthur-The Always King.  True, the magician of medieval romance is largely the invention of the historian Geoffrey of Monmouth, based on ancient traditions and religious beliefs, but the author's and illustrator's privilege and responsibility is to remake him - to make him new as well as old. And in working alongside the peerless Chris Riddell, of course I've been influenced by the ways in which Chris sees  him: intent, enabling, deeply versed, farseeing, fly and sly, witty, powerful, age-old, and able to be in more than one place at the same time. 'Merlin lives by different rules to us and everyone else.' Sir Ector tells Arthur and Kay.  'You should know that by now.' And what does Merlin murmur to himself in his glass-house? 'This story of Arthur, and all the stories within it, it's a kind of dream, an imagining.  Is it a way with words?  A way of understanding?  A way of life?'

Arthur: the always king is published by Walker and is out now.

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