Lev Grossman’s ‘one fear’ for his King Arthur novel: People who expect more of The Magicians
It’s easy to think we’ve outgrown King Arthur. As one of the English-speaking world’s oldest and foundational works of fantasy, reinvented time and again for over a thousand years, it becomes hard to imagine what is left to mine from it in 2024. Lev Grossman’s The Bright Sword, it turns out, finds a dazzling amount.
Initially a story about Collum, an aspiring knight who arrives in Camelot two weeks after Arthur’s death to find a Britain in crisis, Grossman’s novel takes an expansive look at the whole of Arthurian myth and folklore, forging a new version of the familiar myth that speaks to how stories build identities and nations.
Recently Grossman spoke to Polygon about his longtime love of King Arthur, the common threads between The Bright Sword and his Magicians trilogy, and how Merlin was always, always, a huge dick.
Polygon: King Arthur has kind of been supplanted as the first thing people think of in fantasy, even though he’s still constantly referenced. Was that something you felt going into this?
Lev Grossman: I still felt for some reason that I hadn’t met my King Arthur in this millennium. I think some of what has happened with Arthur is there has been a an understandable kind of enthusiasm for— not exactly cutting him down to size, but putting him back in his historical, Dark Ages, context, cutting down or cutting out all of the magic. I know Aaron Sorkin cut out the magic from Camelot when he redid the musical. Lately we’ve had a very human King Arthur. And for whatever reason, I wanted to go the other way. I wanted to lean into the romance of it and the magic and also a little bit of Arthur as — it doesn’t work if he’s not human, but just a little bit larger than life and very good. He has to be a good guy. If he’s a jerk, he’s not really King Arthur.
Your story notably focuses on characters on the fringe of Arthurian myth. Was there ever a point in this where you weren’t going to include Arthur or Lancelot or any of the big well-known heroes?
That
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