![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Yesterday afternoon, Matthias and I picked the remainder of the apples from our tree, which necessitated climbing the tree itself and handing them down to him. Our fridge is now filled with close to 80 Bramley apples. Autumn is well and truly here!
We've just returned from our monthly walk with our walking group, a meandering loop through the fields (and sometimes some very overgrown, blackberry- and nettle-filled pathways, including one point where an elderly woman emerged from the undergrowth with her dog, informing us that she'd gone through the whole area with a pair of secateurs), on a walk that took us past a massive — and unexpected — three-day eventing equestrian competition, which at least explained where all the horse floats we'd seen driving past were going. The walk finished in an orchard, where we spent some time scrounging around for windfall apples under the trees, just to add to our fridge apple collection! The photoset from the walk is pretty much peak fenland autumn!
Matthias and I added an extra 6km or so onto the walk by walking out in advance to the village where it began, where we had Thai food for lunch in the pub (which is run by a Thai family) before meeting the others. We got home before 5pm (which is early for these things), and now I'm just lounging around, catching up with Dreamwidth for a bit before sorting out dinner.
The only books I've finished this week are a reread — Jo Walton's Arthurian Tir Tanagiri Saga duology, which I deliberately left until this point in the year, because Arthuriana, with its sense of fleeting beauty and irreparable loss, always feels autumnal to me. These books were among my very favourite when I was younger, and I was curious as to how well they would hold up. The answer is very well, and I seriously feel that they are probably the best Arthurian retelling published in this century that I've read, and I could make a case for them being the best Arthurian retelling of the current and previous centuries, depending on how I feel about T.H. White and Susan Cooper's books.
They're set in an alternative version of our own universe, told from the point of view of a female war leader serving under the Arthur figure (this is a world which has gender equality — to a point), and most characters, countries, and plot points are easy to map onto familiar characters from the legends and places and peoples from our own world. (The one exception is the narrator, who has no analogue, and indeed about whom Walton goes out of her way to emphasise has no analogue in a very clever moment that passed me by until this reread.) This retelling draws heavily from the Welsh Arthurian tradition, but later medieval versions are there as well, plus the medieval Irish Táin, and loads of other western European medieval poetry and stories.
Different Arthurian retellings choose to emphasise different things, and Walton's focus is on people's experience of social, political, and cultural rupture brought about by the departure of the equivalent of the Romans from Britain 40 years before the start of the first book, and the arrival of the equivalent of Christianity and the spread of this proselytising religion. Characters who are young adults at the start of the first book have experienced nothing but chaos and civil war, and are in essence fighting to restore a well-functioning political structure in which safety and justice are not dependent on enforcement at the hands of a single powerful ruler, and in which written law will live on and persist after the death of the king whose regime created such law. In other words, they are fighting to build something which they themselves have never experienced, but which their ageing parents describe as some kind of half-forgotten, nostalgic dream.
Walton writes the sheer logistical effort of this — in a way that emphasises the monumental task — in brilliant way, in which polite diplomacy and political marriages, the work of keeping supplies well stocked, the need to have reliable communication through trusted messengers across the length of the country, and the work of setting up communities with marketplaces and prosperous craftspeople is of equal importance to valiant military deeds on the battlefield, and in which all of these things need to work together, with all the personalities involved working harmoniously. She's also one of the few writers writing fantasy (or indeed historical fiction) in a pre-industrial setting in which I really feel that her characters actually believe in their various religions in a tangible way. (It helps that in this world, the divine is palpable; people converse with their gods, the elemental powers of the land can be called on to provide fresh water or safe passage in moments of crisis, characters use charms in their everyday lives to heal wounds, and curses made in earnest are felt in such a way that they become part of the fabric of the universe, and inescapable in their doom.) It makes her depiction of the disruptive, disorienting arrival of a proselytising, monotheistic religion in a world that has until that point been pluralistic and pagan feel real and believable, with characters' individual choices in the face of such change seeming understandably human. The books do a fabulous job of depicting people whose values are very different to our own in a way that doesn't whitewash these differences, but still makes you empathise with their dilemmas and choices.
For me, Arthuriana should have an elegiac tone, a sense that it's written in mourning for something aspirationally beautiful, with built-in flaws that, from the very beginning, inevitably lead to its destruction. There should be a sense of ideals never quite lived up to, whose loss is mourned nevertheless. Walton's books do this, and they do it in a way that is lovely, and that is full of heart. I'm glad I returned to them, and found them to be as I remembered, while discovering new little things that served to increase my admiration of the writing even more.
We've just returned from our monthly walk with our walking group, a meandering loop through the fields (and sometimes some very overgrown, blackberry- and nettle-filled pathways, including one point where an elderly woman emerged from the undergrowth with her dog, informing us that she'd gone through the whole area with a pair of secateurs), on a walk that took us past a massive — and unexpected — three-day eventing equestrian competition, which at least explained where all the horse floats we'd seen driving past were going. The walk finished in an orchard, where we spent some time scrounging around for windfall apples under the trees, just to add to our fridge apple collection! The photoset from the walk is pretty much peak fenland autumn!
Matthias and I added an extra 6km or so onto the walk by walking out in advance to the village where it began, where we had Thai food for lunch in the pub (which is run by a Thai family) before meeting the others. We got home before 5pm (which is early for these things), and now I'm just lounging around, catching up with Dreamwidth for a bit before sorting out dinner.
The only books I've finished this week are a reread — Jo Walton's Arthurian Tir Tanagiri Saga duology, which I deliberately left until this point in the year, because Arthuriana, with its sense of fleeting beauty and irreparable loss, always feels autumnal to me. These books were among my very favourite when I was younger, and I was curious as to how well they would hold up. The answer is very well, and I seriously feel that they are probably the best Arthurian retelling published in this century that I've read, and I could make a case for them being the best Arthurian retelling of the current and previous centuries, depending on how I feel about T.H. White and Susan Cooper's books.
They're set in an alternative version of our own universe, told from the point of view of a female war leader serving under the Arthur figure (this is a world which has gender equality — to a point), and most characters, countries, and plot points are easy to map onto familiar characters from the legends and places and peoples from our own world. (The one exception is the narrator, who has no analogue, and indeed about whom Walton goes out of her way to emphasise has no analogue in a very clever moment that passed me by until this reread.) This retelling draws heavily from the Welsh Arthurian tradition, but later medieval versions are there as well, plus the medieval Irish Táin, and loads of other western European medieval poetry and stories.
Different Arthurian retellings choose to emphasise different things, and Walton's focus is on people's experience of social, political, and cultural rupture brought about by the departure of the equivalent of the Romans from Britain 40 years before the start of the first book, and the arrival of the equivalent of Christianity and the spread of this proselytising religion. Characters who are young adults at the start of the first book have experienced nothing but chaos and civil war, and are in essence fighting to restore a well-functioning political structure in which safety and justice are not dependent on enforcement at the hands of a single powerful ruler, and in which written law will live on and persist after the death of the king whose regime created such law. In other words, they are fighting to build something which they themselves have never experienced, but which their ageing parents describe as some kind of half-forgotten, nostalgic dream.
Walton writes the sheer logistical effort of this — in a way that emphasises the monumental task — in brilliant way, in which polite diplomacy and political marriages, the work of keeping supplies well stocked, the need to have reliable communication through trusted messengers across the length of the country, and the work of setting up communities with marketplaces and prosperous craftspeople is of equal importance to valiant military deeds on the battlefield, and in which all of these things need to work together, with all the personalities involved working harmoniously. She's also one of the few writers writing fantasy (or indeed historical fiction) in a pre-industrial setting in which I really feel that her characters actually believe in their various religions in a tangible way. (It helps that in this world, the divine is palpable; people converse with their gods, the elemental powers of the land can be called on to provide fresh water or safe passage in moments of crisis, characters use charms in their everyday lives to heal wounds, and curses made in earnest are felt in such a way that they become part of the fabric of the universe, and inescapable in their doom.) It makes her depiction of the disruptive, disorienting arrival of a proselytising, monotheistic religion in a world that has until that point been pluralistic and pagan feel real and believable, with characters' individual choices in the face of such change seeming understandably human. The books do a fabulous job of depicting people whose values are very different to our own in a way that doesn't whitewash these differences, but still makes you empathise with their dilemmas and choices.
For me, Arthuriana should have an elegiac tone, a sense that it's written in mourning for something aspirationally beautiful, with built-in flaws that, from the very beginning, inevitably lead to its destruction. There should be a sense of ideals never quite lived up to, whose loss is mourned nevertheless. Walton's books do this, and they do it in a way that is lovely, and that is full of heart. I'm glad I returned to them, and found them to be as I remembered, while discovering new little things that served to increase my admiration of the writing even more.
