storytellerknight:Twenty Days of Arthurian BooksThe ListDay Eighteen: The Merlin Trilogy (The Crysta
storytellerknight:Twenty Days of Arthurian BooksThe ListDay Eighteen: The Merlin Trilogy (The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills, The Last Enchantment, The Wicked Day, The Prince and the Pilgrim) by Mary StewartHow did you find this book and why did you decide to read it? It’s Mary Stewart. When I first started my hunt for Mordred centric books, Wicked Day was one of the first books that came up. I read Wicked Day years ago and while I liked it, I was not impressed enough to go read the previous three books that were centered around Merlin who is a character I generally have little to no interest in. I finally started reading the whole series last year when my good friend and frequent Guest Reviewer on Camelot’s Library, SamoaPhoenix, let me know of her intent to read them and I thought it would be fun for the two of us to do a joint review of the series.Would you recommend this book? Why? Um, yeah, I guess. I, personally, did not exactly come out of the series a fan. I found Merlin to be a sociopathic misogynistic ass hole, thought there were serious problems with Stewart’s inability to handle conflict (‘conflict is for suckers’ became my mantra throughout the reviews), and was really annoyed by the internal inconsistencies such as the spelling of characters names or the location of certain kingdoms. But, Mary Stewart is the mother of modern Arthurian literature. You would have a hard time finding a book written after 1970 that didn’t draw from this book in some way, shape or form even if that influence was just the fact that it was being written in the shadow of the Merlin Trilogy. In her introduction to the Mists of Avalon, Diana L. Paxson talks about how she didn’t believe that Marion Zimmer Bradley wouldn’t be able to bring anything new to the Arthurian myth after what Stewart had done. So this series is important and an important part of the Arthurian mythos that really should be read to understand the context of modern literature. -- source link
#mordred#merlin#wicked day#mary stewart