Astronomical Observations

Halfway through Mike Brown’s How I Killed Pluto, my son is still enthralled by the story of discovery of Kuiper-belt objects. Kudos to Mr. Brown for his skill in making this astronomy accessible and interesting enough to hold the attention of a stubbornly non-book 11-year-old boy. And his mother. (Will you lose all respect for me, dear reader, if I admit I did not know what the Kuiper belt was until I read about it in this book? I even had to look it up so I could pronounce it correctly.)

Meanwhile, I am halfway through Edith Pargeter’s massive Brothers of Gwynedd. More than once, as the dramatic story thread has seemed to get lost in more prosaic history retelling (and hey, I’m a big fan of history), I have worried I might just put the book down. (Dear reader, I have done this many times before. My attention span is not what it once was.) But I haven’t! I feel compelled to keep turning the page (or in this case, pushing the “Next Page” button on my Kindle). I even know what will happen, having recently read Marc Morris’s biography of Edward I, and it isn’t nice. All this to say, I can’t give enough credit to Pargeter’s masterly writing style. She’s just that good.

Writing (again)

One week and counting since I’ve been back to a morning writing routine. To say it feels wonderful would be an understatement. I’m working on what I’m cautiously telling myself is a “short story.” It’s enough. I have no idea how long this will last, but am so incredibly grateful for the gift of wanting to write. Again.

Meanwhile, I passed a milestone in my e-book sales: I have now earned enough in royalties to be sent real money. And I have been book-living my favorite historical era through Edith Pargeter’s The Brothers of Gwynedd. As a counterpoint, I’m reading Mike Brown’s How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming with my son. A little 13th century, a little 21st century. That gives me an average of, um, Shakespeare?

Also the garden is looking good, the kids are healthy, and it’s officially summer. Life is good.

Feeling Medieval-ish

When am I not? A writing friend once said I must have been a medieval princess in a former life. Which might make a lot of sense if I actually believed in reincarnation. Which I don’t. So perhaps I should look back into my childhood to account for this fascination with all things middle ages. Too many fairy tales? Too many King Arthur stories? I can hardly explain the thrill—nearing giddiness—I experience when I come across a book like Laura Amy Schlitz’s Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! (a Newbery winner, no less; and I absolutely swoon over the two-voice poems) or the bargain-bin tome Art of the Middle Ages by Riccardo Belcari and Giulia Marrucchi.

I have been perusing the latter of late. I have been especially transfixed by the beautiful photos of ruined Irish monasteries and the stone crosses dating from the 800s or so. Then there were the pages from the Book of Kells and Lindisfarne Gospels. I have a definite weakness for illuminated manuscripts. The colors! The gorgeous Latin script! (I recently picked up a library book on Vikings and right there on page 5 or so read about their raid on the Lindisfarne monastery in the late 700s. Coincidence? Hmm…)

Speaking of the library. A couple of days ago I had an hour to myself in the grown-up section and while wandering around in bliss, I came across a paperback copy of Maureen Ash’s Murder for Christ’s Mass, which led me into the stacks to find the first of her Templar Knight mysteries, The Alehouse Murders. Now I’ll say right off that Ash is no Ellis Peters, but so far I’m having fun getting to know the denizens of Lincoln in the year 1200, including the former Crusader Sir Bascot de Marins. (My nightly read-aloud with Number One Daughter, Kevin Crossley-Holland’s Arthur and the Seeing Stone, also is set in 1199/1200. Coincidence? Hmm…)

Reading update

I realize that I have been acting something like a tease. I wrote about how I ordered and almost finished Kevin Crossley-Holland’s Crossing to Paradise and how I checked out Jean Ferris’s Twice Upon a Marigold, but I didn’t write about how I finished both books or how I felt about them once I was done.

So, here’s the report. I enjoyed both books very much, and finished them in pretty good time considering the sad lack of time I have for reading these days. (Maybe I’m spending too much time blogging???) Crossing to Paradise was not as stirring as the earlier, related Arthur series (oh, how I missed Arthur—one of the most endearing characters I’ve ever read); but it makes a nice stand-alone, historical novel. I was tickled at how it referred back to the Arthur series, and how the ending satisfyingly tied up some loose ends in the Arthur series. I breezed through Twice Upon a Marigold, and found Ferris’s humor just as good as in the previous book, Once Upon a Marigold. At first I kept thinking to myself, “What a nice job she does getting a Message across through her charming story and humor,” but by the end of the book I began to feel that maybe the candy-coating on the message was wearing a bit thin. Overall, still an enjoyable read.

I have now entered a more “serious” phase of reading, having begun David Starkey’s Six Wives, about the queens of England’s Henry VIII. I keep hearing Starkey’s voice in my head as I read, having recently watched most of the PBS series Monarchy (ack, I have one last episode to go—thank goodness for Netflix and no due dates). I admit I am a history buff; but I have to say that for interest and readability, novels have nothing on the best popular history books of the last several years. Today I also picked up my inter-library loan copies of two books about Christopher Marlowe. I began reading the first in the dentist’s office just this afternoon. I promise to write reports on these books when I finish, though it may be a while, as Six Wives alone has more than 700 pages. To paraphrase Scarlett O’Hara: I won’t go hungry for quite some time.

Robin Hood and King Arthur

I have to confess, first of all, that I didn’t make it through Episode 3 of Monarchy last night. I got befuddled during the Wars of the Roses. I have a cold.

Instead of writing about monarchs, I’m going back to my theme of Robin Hood. I became attached to the character of Robin Hood at a young age. I’m not sure whose book I read as a child. When I recently read (or re-read?) the Howard Pyle version, it didn’t seem quite right, though the ending was the same delicious tragedy I remembered. Robin Hood, wounded and dying, shoots one last arrow to mark where he would like to be buried, and the desolate Little John grants his request. I love a good tragedy.

A few years ago I read Robin McKinley’s version, titled The Outlaws of Sherwood. It was OK. Something was missing; it lacked grand romanticism. (I’m not knocking Robin McKinley, by the way; I devoured The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown.)

Robin Hood makes a charming appearance in T. H. White’s Arthurian saga, The Once and Future King. Robin Hood and King Arthur in the same book. Yep. I have to say that The Once and Future King is a work of genius, and my top all-time favorite King Arthur book, which is saying a lot. In the first part, The Sword in the Stone (also made into a good Disney movie), young Arthur (nicknamed Wart) and his foster brother, Kay, get lost while hunting rabbits and meet up with the Merry Men.

Kay looked at him in blank surprise. “Who are you?” he asked.

“Naylor,” said the giant, “John Naylor in the wide world it were, till us come to be a man of the ’ood. Then ’twere John Little for some time, in the ’ood like, but mostly folk does put it back’ard now, and calls us Little John.”

“Oh!” cried the Wart in delight. “I have heard of you, often, when they tell Saxon stories in the evening, of you and Robin Hood.”

“Not Hood,” said Little John reprovingly. “That bain’t the way to name ’un, measter, not in the ’ood.”

“But it is Robin Hood in the stories,” said Kay.

“Ah, them book-learning chaps. They don’t know all.”

The Wart finally figures out that the outlaw’s name is Robin Wood. Then the boys help the Merry Men defeat the witch Morgan Le Fay (grown-ups can’t get into her castle made of lard).

You may well ask how the 13th-century Robin Hood gets involved in a book about the young King Arthur. Here is White’s genius at play: The Once and Future King is an alternative history that encompasses the romantic tradition of Malory (Le Morte d’Arthur, circa 1470s) and places Arthur firmly in the Age of Chivalry.

Another brilliant series about King Arthur is Mary Stewart’s Merlin trilogy. Stewart has Arthur back in the Dark Ages, after the withdrawal of Roman legions from Britain. The second book, The Hollow Hills, is my favorite portrayal of the young Arthur.

Finally, I must mention Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Lantern Keepers and Sword at Sunset, wonderful Dark Ages versions of Arthur and his Romano-British predecessors. Sutcliff is amazing at historical fiction of Roman and Dark Ages times.

More monarchs

Last night’s view of Monarchy was all about Henrys and Edwards, with a couple of Richards for good measure. Strong kings, weak kings, wars and murder. The history started to feel like those chapters in Kings in the Bible: so and so was good, so and so was bad.

And then there was King John.

History aside, my view of King John (reigned 1199–1216) will forever be colored by the 1973 Disney version of Robin Hood, in which John is represented as a whining, thumb-sucking lion without a mane, and voiced to hilarious perfection by Peter Ustinov (“Power! Power!”; “Do you savoir a faire, il y a, n’est pa?” Cracks me up every time.) They don’t make ’em like that anymore.

John makes a more serious, behind-the-scenes appearance in the wonderful Arthur and the Seeing Stone series by Kevin Crossley-Holland. These are my absolute favorite contemporary King Arthur books: The Seeing Stone, At the Crossing Places, and King of the Middle March. Crossley-Holland is a prose-poet who melds the traditional Arthur stories with the story of young Norman Arthur de Caldicot. Read them! Read them!

A couple of years ago, I read one other book in which King John plays a hefty role: Here Be Dragons by Sharon Kay Penman. The book is about John’s illegitimate daughter, Joan, and her marriage to the Welsh Prince Llewellyn (the Great). In Penman’s book, John is shown mostly as a womanizer and a king desperate to hold on to power.

Of course the real King John is known as the guy who was forced to sign the Magna Carta, the Great Charter, which set out boundaries for the king’s power vis-a-vis his barons. Today the Magna Carta is famous for its early delineating of what we call basic human rights.

A is for Anglophile

Last night I watched Episode 1 of Monarchy with David Starkey. It is a series about the British monarchy from Anglo-Saxon times through the Restoration. Why did I watch this?

1. I am a nerd (maybe even a super-nerd, according to my youngest sister).
2. I find the subject of the history of England’s monarchy interesting (see #1).
3. My husband was out of town.

The episode I watched began with the Anglo-Saxon incursions after the fall of the Roman empire. No mention of King Arthur, alas, but I guess I don’t need to feed my obsession with things Arthurian. Instead Starkey focused on the Anglo-Saxon rulers, of which there were many overlords of separate small kingdoms, but no one ruler over all the island. In the late 800s, the Danes (“Vikings”) swept over England, wiping out all but one of these small kingdoms, which was Wessex under the rule of Alfred. Alfred and his successors eventually reclaimed the land taken by the Danes and established the first unified kingdom. For anyone who wants to read more about this period in history, I recommend Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon Chronicles (fiction). His series focuses on a young warrior, Uhtred, who is English but captured and fostered by the Danes. What I like about this series is how Cornwell shows sympathy with both sides of the conflict between Dane and English. (By the way, for King Arthur fans, Cornwell also has an excellent series beginning with The Winter King.)

I knew virtually nothing about the next periods of English history, during which the Danes returned and defeated Ethelred (the Unready), to take control of the kingdom in the early 11th century. The interesting note here is that Ethelred’s widow, Emma, who was of Norman blood (seems Ethelred had tried to pacify the Normans when he saw his kingdom in danger from both Normans and Danes), knew a thing or two about politics and power. After Ethelred’s death, she married the Danish conqueror, Canute. Two of Emma’s sons and two of her stepsons ended up as kings of England in the turmoil following Canute’s death. Her great-nephew, William the Conqueror, achieved the Norman conquest in 1066. I don’t know of any fiction about Emma. I’ll have to look into that.

After Starkey’s overview of the Norman conquest came some discussion of the Norman assimilation (or lack of it), and King Henry I’s cathedral- and castle-building. I started to doze here—not Starkey’s fault!

The last bit was on the anarchy following the death of Henry I, and the civil war between King Stephen and Queen Matilda (also known as Maude), in the early 12th century. This civil war is the backdrop for Ellis Peters’ terrific mystery series featuring Brother Cadfael, the crusader-turned-monk. I highly recommend this series for history buffs; for me the history trumps the mystery. Of course Brother Cadfael is an endearing, enduring character (played by Derek Jacobi in the PBS Mystery versions); but my favorite character is the Sheriff Hugh Beringar (read One Corpse Too Many, The Virgin in the Ice, and Dead Man’s Ransom to find out why).

Tonight: The medieval monarchs (my nerdiness is not sated yet).