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The #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Magicians trilogy returns with a triumphant reimagining of the King Arthur legend for the new millennium.
A gifted young knight named Collum arrives at Camelot to compete for a spot on the Round Table, only to find that he's too late. The king died two weeks ago at the Battle of Camlann, leaving no heir, and only a handful of the knights of the Round Table survive.
They aren't the heroes of legend, like Lancelot or Gawain. They're the oddballs of the Round Table, from the edges of the stories, like Sir Palomides, the Saracen Knight, and Sir Dagonet, Arthur's fool, who was knighted as a joke. They're joined by Nimue, who was Merlin's apprentice until she turned on him and buried him under a hill. Together this ragtag fellowship will set out to rebuild Camelot in a world that has lost its balance.
But Arthur's death has revealed Britain's fault lines. God has abandoned it, and the fairies and monsters and old gods are returning, led by Arthur's half-sister Morgan le Fay. Kingdoms are turning on each other, warlords lay siege to Camelot and rival factions are forming around the disgraced Lancelot and the fallen Queen Guinevere. It is up to Collum and his companions to reclaim Excalibur, solve the mysteries of this ruined world and make it whole again. But before they can restore Camelot they'll have to learn the truth of why the lonely, brilliant King Arthur fell, and lay to rest the ghosts of his troubled family and of Britain's dark past.
The first major Arthurian epic of the new millennium, The Bright Sword is steeped in tradition, full of duels and quests, battles and tournaments, magic swords and Fisher Kings. It also sheds a fresh light on Arthur's Britain, a diverse, complex nation struggling to come to terms with its bloody history. The Bright Sword is a story about imperfect men and women, full of strength and pain, who are looking for a way to reforge a broken land in spite of being broken themselves.
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Azure, Three Scepters, a Chevron Or
Collum punched the other knight in the face with the pommel of his sword gripped in his gauntleted fist, so hard the dark inlaid metal dimpled under his knuckles, but his opponent showed absolutely no sign of falling over or surrendering to him. He swore under his breath and followed it up with a kick to the ankle but missed and almost fell down, and the other knight spun gracefully and clouted him smartly in the head so his ears rang. He would've given a thousand pounds to be able to wipe the sweat out of his eyes, not that he had a thousand pounds. He had exactly three shillings and two silver pennies to his name.
The two men backed off and circled each other, big swords held up at stiff angles, shifting from guard to guard, heavy shards of bright sunlight glancing and glaring off the blades. They'd dropped their shields after the tilt to have both hands free. No mistakes now, Collum thought. Circles not lines, Marshal Aucassin whispered in his mind. Watch the body not the blade. He threw a diagonal cut that glanced harmlessly off the other knight's shoulder. The inside of his helmet was a furnace, sharp smells of hay and sweat and raw leather. He'd come here to test himself against the flower of British chivalry, the greatest knights in the world, and by God he was getting what he came for. He was getting the stuffing beaten out of him.
They stepped lightly, testing, offering, up on the balls of their feet. Every tiny movement made their armor squeak and clank and jingle in the quiet of the meadow; even the tips of their swords made tiny whips in the stifling air. Why—why had he thought this was a good idea? Why hadn't he stayed back on Mull? Heatstroke prickled at the back of Collum's neck. They weren't fighting to the death, but if he lost he'd lose his horse, and his armor, which he hadn't gone through all the trouble of stealing it from Lord Alasdair just so he could hand it over to some nameless knight who probably had half a dozen spares waiting for him back at his cozy castle.
And without his horse and armor Collum was nobody and nothing. An orphan and a bastard, poor as a church mouse and very far from home. And he could never go back. He'd made damn sure of that, hadn't he?
He didn't even know who he was fighting; he'd stumbled on this man purely by chance, or possibly by God's will—thanks a bunch, as always—sitting under a crooked ash in a meadow, head in his hands, as if the weight of the sunlight itself were too much for him. He'd looked up and shouted a challenge at Collum, and who did that anymore? It was like something out of the stories. Whoever this was, he was a knight of the old school.
His armor was old-fashioned, too, the breastplate black steel damascened with a pattern of fine silver whorls and a rose at the center. A rich man's armor. A nobleman's. His helmet had a pointy snout like a beak, and like Collum he bore the vergescu, the plain white shield of an unfledged knight. Collum bore it because he was not technically—as he'd tried to explain—a knight at all, not yet, he hadn't sworn the vows, but there were other reasons to bear the vergescu, like to hide your identity if you were in disgrace. Or Sir Lancelot bore it sometimes because otherwise no one would fight him.
This man was no Lancelot, but he was pretty damn good. Thoroughly fledged. Collum was taller but the mystery knight was faster—he barely saw him move when bang! his wrist went numb and ping! a tiny fastening pin sprang off his gauntlet and disappeared forever into the grass. He stepped neatly inside Collum's reach and grabbed for his wrist with his off hand, and Collum skipped back, panting like a bellows, but he stumbled and the man jammed his blade in the gap where his gardbrace didn't fit right, shaving off a sharp curl of bright steel.
He pressed his advantage, whipping a backhand strike at Collum's head that just missed—
There it was. The knight let...
Excerpted from THE BRIGHT SWORD by Lev Grossman. To be published by Viking, an imprint of the Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC on July 16, 2024. Copyright © 2024 by Cozy Horse Limited.
All his life, Collum has longed to become a Knight of the Round Table: to serve the great King Arthur, have heroic adventures, and go on glorious quests. Although a poor, illegitimate orphan from a backwater province of Britain, Collum has trained as a knight since boyhood and is determined to emulate his heroes, prove himself in combat, and be found worthy. But upon his arrival at Camelot, he finds only a handful of remaining knights. The rest, he is told, died with King Arthur at the Battle of Camlann, where Arthur and Mordred, the king's own son born of incest and his bitterest enemy, fought and killed each other.
Camelot, the knights who are left believe, is over — the age of marvels and quests is gone. And since Arthur and his wife Guinevere had no children, the throne of Britain is now anyone's for the taking. The Saxons are commandeering swaths of the country, the land is divided, and Arthur's great kingdom is falling into chaos. Meanwhile, the fairy queen and powerful sorceress Morgan le Fay, Arthur's half-sister and forever his ambivalent adversary, sees an opportunity for Old Britain and its ancient pagan ways, long suppressed by Rome and Christianity, to be restored. However, Collum's arrival is the catalyst for what appears to be the Camelot knights' last chance: a renewal of the marvels once witnessed in the age of Arthur, and one more epic quest across Britain and the Otherworld for a new king to take up Arthur's sword and lead them back to glory once more.
The Bright Sword is a vast, sprawling, entertaining adventure in true Arthurian tradition, encompassing influences from across the legend's immense spectrum, recalling everything from medieval Welsh texts such as Culhwch and Olwen to the 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. As the author observes in his historical note, the Arthurian legend is ever-changing, transitory; always evolving and adapting (see Beyond the Book). As they have developed over centuries, Arthurian tales have incorporated aspects of the ages in which they were written, and they often serve as a mirror to reflect the issues, attitudes, and anxieties of the day. With its tumultuous depiction of a world in chaos, lacking in leaders of depth and vision, full of unreliable allies and unexpected enemies, and bereft of meaningful convictions, values, or moral compass, it can be argued that The Bright Sword is heir to this tradition in its reflection of contemporary society's concerns.
The knights in the novel are characters from earlier Arthurian legend — some renowned, others less so. Not only do we follow them on their new quest with Collum, we learn their individual backstories in flashback chapters lending us insight into their personalities and motivations. At first, they seem to be a ragtag bunch of lost souls — not Camelot's finest, just all that is left of the once mighty Round Table. As Merlin dryly observes, "A quest is hero's work, hero's business, and that's just not quite you lot, is it? You're the other ones, the spear carriers. The stage is empty now but for the stagehands, and who will play the story?" But as we get to know them, it becomes clear that it is their very ordinariness that makes them heroic. Depression, dysphoria, displacement, self-doubt, the literal and figurative scars of abuse — all of these are experienced by one or the other of the knights, and how they overcome these burdens is as much a part of their noble fight as any battle or encounter with magic.
With chapters flashing back and forth in time, and supernatural worlds popping up everywhere and anyhow, the novel feels at times somewhat disjointed, even though this does give the reader an impression of the turmoil and confusion in which the characters find themselves. Some events that should be momentous are instead somewhat anticlimactic, such as the great battle between Morgan's fairy forces and the Christian knights. Futile actions and false endings can serve a valuable purpose in epic literature, but there are perhaps too many of them in this particular story. It is, however, a riotous, imaginative, and exciting series of exploits, and an overarching adventure imbued with Arthurian magic and mystery.
Reviewed by Jo-Anne Blanco
George R. R. Martin, #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Game of Thrones
Since the earliest texts of the 11th and 12th centuries (which in turn are based on much older narratives), Arthurian legend has been one of the richest sources of material available to authors. Over centuries, the tales, characters, and concepts of Arthuriana have lent themselves to a seemingly inexhaustible wealth of adaptations, interpretations, reimaginings, borrowings, and influences. The second half of the 20th century saw Arthuriana transcend genres, embracing everything from science fiction to feminist fiction, mystery thrillers to musicals, movies to comic books. Its hold on the popular imagination remains as powerful in the 21st century as it ever has been, and as society continues to evolve, so too does Arthuriana.
Some 21st-century works take a gritty, historically accurate approach. Among these are L. K. Alan's Arthur (The Dark Isles Chronicle Book I, 2019), and Giles Kristian's The Arthurian Tales series (2018–2024) comprising Lancelot (2018), Camelot (2020), and Arthur (2024). In the latter, the last two books take place after Arthur's death, as does Lev Grossman's The Bright Sword (2024), which combines realism, high fantasy, and subversive humor with societal preoccupations similar to our own. What happens when a cataclysm is upon us and the world is collapsing? How do we conserve all the benefits of the world bequeathed to us and at the same time deal with inevitable change? In his satirical Perilous Times (2023), Thomas D. Lee goes a step further, resurrecting the Knights of the Round Table to try to fix the modern world's problems.
Arthuriana has had a reputation for misogyny, reflecting as it often does the attitudes of society towards women during the times in which the texts were written. Arthurian women have in the past been portrayed as sexist stereotypes and troublemakers who were the cause of men's downfall. They were passive, lovelorn trophies (Guinevere, Elaine), manipulative temptresses (Morgan, Nimue), adulteresses (Isolde, Guinevere again), or evil, conniving witches (Morgause, Morgan again). However, Arthuriana has also, paradoxically, been ahead of its time when it comes to feminism and gender nonconformity. The legacy of female knights such as Bradamante, Britomart, and Melora lives on. In Philip Reeve's Here Lies Arthur (2007), Peredur (inspired by Percival) is a boy raised as a girl by his widowed mother. Peretur (another variation of Percival), the heroine of Nicola Griffith's Spear (2022), disguises herself as a boy to join King Artos as a knight. In the YA duology Once & Future (2019) and Sword in the Stars (2020) by A. R. Capetta and Cori McCarthy, teenage girl Ari Helix is the reincarnation of King Arthur, and she travels back in time to steal the Holy Grail. In my own Fata Morgana series (2017–present), the character Safir is a girl disguised as a boy so she can train to become a knight. One of The Bright Sword's greatest heroes is Sir Dinadan, first introduced as Orwen, who transitions to live as a man and become a Knight of the Round Table.
The two women most maligned in traditional Arthuriana are Guinevere and, especially, Morgan le Fay. Twenty-first-century authors have taken up the torch of writers such as Marion Zimmer Bradley, Persia Woolley, and Fay Sampson to champion these two women. Among the many titles involving the former are Kiersten White's Camelot Rising series (2019–2021) and Nicole Evelina's Guinevere's Tale trilogy. Morgan remains a favorite heroine of adult and YA fiction, from Alessa Ellefson's Morgana trilogy (2013–2019) to Katherine Sparrow's Fay Morgan Chronicles (2015).
When it comes to LGBTQ perspectives, Mary J. Jones' 1991 novel Avalon pioneered Arthurian lesbian romance, with Argante (Guinevere's daughter) and her lover Elin, and Nimue and her lover Morgant. In Lancelot: Her Story (2015) and Lancelot and Guinevere (2016), Carol Anne Douglas reimagines Lancelot as a woman disguised as a man, effecting a new spin on Lancelot and Guinevere's forbidden love. Sarah Luddington's Lancelot and the King (2011) has Lancelot (here a man) in love with Arthur himself. Douglas Clegg's novel Mordred, Bastard Son (2006) portrays a sympathetic Mordred who falls in love with Lancelot.
Authors like Nicola Griffith, co-founder of #CripLit, are ensuring there is disability representation in Arthuriana. One of the characters in Spear is Llanza, her version of Lancelot, who walks with an antalgic gait. In the Fata Morgana series, Merlin's sister Ganieda is born deafblind and with magic powers equal to his, and, as in early Welsh sources, The Bright Sword's Bedivere has only one hand. There has been controversy over the lack of racial diversity in Arthuriana, despite the fact that not all of the original Knights of the Round Table appeared white. Tracy Deonn's contemporary fantasy Legendborn series (2020–present), among others, attempts to remedy that, demonstrating yet again the ongoing adaptability and evolution of Arthuriana.
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