The Arthur Trilogy
Before I wrote my Arthur trilogy, I tried several times to map a route through the attractive, perilous world of Arthurian legend. First, I retold little-known legends but my versions were dry as dust and I threw them away; then I attempted to write a novel about Sir Thomas Malory in prison incorporating a number of legends; I wrote six BBC radio plays; then I was commissioned to write simple, straightforward retellings for children, grouped according to topic(magic, love, kingship, and so on. But I knew this commission was too tame. I wanted to challenge myself, and grow, or perish in the attempt.
One day I picked up the lovely hunk of obsidian on my desk that has long served as a paperweight. I held it in the palm of my hand:
‘Take it!’ said Merlin.
When I stared at the stone, I could see myself inside it. It was black of black, and deep, and very still. Like an eye of deep water…
‘It is made of ice and fire,’ Merlin said. ‘Its name is obsidian…The stone is not what I say it is. It’s what you see in it.’
What if, I thought. What if… What if I were to write two stories in tandem? One would be a historical novel, in which a boy, eager to serve as a squire and to go on crusade, is given this piece of obsidian; and one would be the stories, the Arthurian legends, this the boy sees in the obsidian. These legends, I thought, would anticipate and reflect his own eagerness and ideals and anxieties and passions and sorrows. His own rites of passage. After all, as William Caxton (the first printer of Malory) wrote of Le Morte d’Arthur in the 15th century, ‘Herein may be seen noble chivalry, courtesy, humanity, friendliness, hardiness, love, friendship, cowardice, murder, hate, virtue, and sin. Do after the good and leave the evil…’
So what, I wondered, should I call this boy. Arthur? Yes, let my Arthur discover his namesake in the stone. So when and where should the historical strand be set? At the end of the twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth centuries, I thought, because this is precisely when King Arthur was about to enter the literary mainstream and become the pan-European hero; and in some potent borderland, because my young Arthur will be crossing from childhood into adulthood, and because there will be a continuous interplay between the actual world (rough, gruff, tough, early medieval England) and the imaginative world of Arthurian legend. I didn’t have to think twice: I knew the setting should be the magical Welsh Marches so rich in Arthurian association, here secretive, there expansive, looking east to plainspoken England, looking west to dreaming Wales.
So I began to research, and to plan. I immersed myself in books not only about the fabric of medieval life but, so much more difficult to get at, the temper and imagination of the medieval world.
I read Le Ménagier de Paris’s domestic advice to his young wife and contemporary accounts of the crusades not only by Villehardouin and Robert of Clari but by Islamic writers. I read and reread Geoffrey of Monmouth, Sir Thomas Malory, Chrétien de Troyes, the lais of Marie de France, Perlesvaus, Culhwch and Olwen, the Vulgate Version, the anonymous Alliterative Morte Arthure, ranging further and further afield in search of likely candidates. But I also read historical fiction for children by living writers, and if there is one book that set me on fire and emboldened me to write in the first person, it is Karen Cushman’s wonderful Catherine, Called Birdy.
I visited museums, national and local, sometimes haphazard and dusty. I talked to medievalists, especially my generous friend (and Arthurian scholar) Richard Barber, author of the recently published The Holy Grail. I visited and revisited places in the Marches, in particular Stokesay Castle, the fortified manor I adopted as my Caldicot, as well as Venice and Zadar in Croatia where, in one of the most disgraceful episodes in the disastrous Fourth Crusade, Christian crusaders laid siege to a Christian city. Zadar (once known as Zara) is the theatre for much of the action in King of the Middle March.
As I began to get to know my Arthur de Caldicot, and to think about the legends he would see in his obsidian, it soon became clear that I was letting myself in not for one book but a trilogy. Frankly, this scared me. I had only recently concluded that I wasn’t capable of writing a novel, and now here I was proposing to write three. But I also saw there was no way round this if I were to explore in some detail the fabric and temper of medieval life and to engage full-bloodedly with the three phases of Arthurian legend: that is to say, Arthur’s childhood, the glory of Camelot, and Camelot’s decline and fall.
The Arthur trilogy has now been published in twenty-three languages and has sold well over one million copies. The first book, The Seeing Stone won the Guardian Children's Fiction Award, the Tir na n-Og Award, and the Smarties Prize Bronze Medal, and was followed by At the Crossing-Places and King of the Middle March.
Orion has published the trilogy in their adult Phoenix editions.
'... as bright and as vivid as the pictures in a Book of Hours. Deep scholarship, high imagination, and great gifts of storytelling have gone into this: I was spellbound.'
Philip Pullman, The Guardian Children's Book Supplement
'This is astonishing... a book that lasts has to create a world so real that you can run your fingertips over its walls, feels its morning frost bite at your throat, and remember the people who lived there for a lifetime. Crossley-Holland has done it and I am so, so jealous.'
Anne Fine, Children's Laureate
'A journey full of wonders, a journey into a different time, a journey into a famous story, told so brilliantly that you can taste and smell it on every page... The Arthur of this story moves softly into one's heart.'
Cornelia Funke, author of The Thief Lord