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Summary
Summary
It is 1199 and young Arthur de Caldicot is waiting impatiently to grow up and become a knight. One day his father's friend Merlin gives him a shining piece of obsidian and his life becomes entwined with that of his namesake, the Arthur whose story he sees unfold in the stone.In this many-layered novel, King Arthur is seen as a mysterious presence influencing not just one time and place but many. The 100 short chapters are like snapshots, not only of the mythic tales of King Arthur, but the earthy, uncomfortable reality of the Middle Ages.
Author Notes
Kevin Crossley-Holland is a well-known poet, a prize-winning children's author, and a translator.
Crossley-Holland has translated Beowulf and The Exeter Book of Riddles from the Anglo-Saxon. He has collaborated with composers Nicola Lefanu (The Green Children and The Wildman), Rupert Bawden (The Sailor's Tale), Sir Arthur Bliss, William Mathias, and Stephen Paulus.
Crossley-Holland's book The Seeing Stone won the Guardian Children's Fiction Award, the Smarties Prize Bronze Medal, and the Tir na n-Og Award. The trilogy has won critical acclaim and been translated into twenty-five languages. His recent and forthcoming books are The Hidden Roads: A Memoir of Childhood, Bracelet of Bones and his new and selected poems The Mountains of Norfolk.
Crossley-Holland often lectures abroad on behalf of the British Council and offers poetry and prose workshops and talks on the Anglo-Saxons and Vikings, King Arthur, heroines and heroes, and myth, legend and folk-tale.
Kevin Crossley-Holland is an Honorary Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford, a patron of the Society for Storytelling, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He lives on the north Norfolk coast in East Anglia with his wife and children.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
"In the first volume of the Arthur Trilogy, the author inventively reworks the legend of the Round Table through the diary of 13-year-old Arthur, living in an English manor in the 12th century," said PW in a starred review. "Readers will be itching for the sequel." Ages 10-up. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
(Intermediate, Middle School) High on a hill overlooking the Welsh border, Merlin tells the thirteen-year-old narrator, ÒOnce, there was a king with your name.... And he will be.Ó The old wizardÕs words are both legend and prophecy. This new Arthur, too, lives in uncertain times: the turn of the thirteenth century, when Welsh raiders have replaced Saxon invaders and the contested succession is from Richard the Lion-Hearted to his brother John. The Seeing Stone that Merlin gives the narrator enables him to relive incidents leading to King ArthurÕs drawing sword from stone. Meanwhile, heÕs engaged in life on the manor of his supposed father, Sir John de Caldicot. The interplay between vividly depicted medieval life and heroic legend illuminate both: the legendÕs idealism lends dignity and universality to the difficult realities of thirteenth-century life, while the earthy humanity of King JohnÕs subjects adds dimension to legendary characters enduring similar trials. The many parallels make a Merlin of the reader: it can be predicted that Arthur will triumph, and meet his doom, in the projected sequels, but how exactly will it work out? The continuing resonance of Arthurian legend, the inspired dual plot, an elegantly lucid narrative style plus a gift for lively dialogueÑall add up to a compelling story. The sequels will be avidly anticipated. j.r.l. From HORN BOOK, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Booklist Review
Gr. 4-8. Thirteen-year-old Arthur fervently hopes that his father wants him to become a squire, not a "schoolman," though his prowess with sword and lance is eclipsed by his skill with quill and ink. His friend Merlin gives the boy a strange secret stone; Arthur finds that he can look into the polished obsidian and see visions of another Arthur, whose life rather parallels his own. Narrated by Arthur, the novel unfolds in short, lucid chapters, vividly describing events, personalities, and life on a medieval manor. Crossley-Holland achieves a great deal here, from the fresh, engaging voice of Arthur to the ongoing mystery of how his life relates to the story in the stone that emerges in a series of vignettes. Knowledge of Arthurian legend heightens the sense of layered meanings; however, untutored readers will not be lost, but rather richer for discovering the tale here. Few historical novels achieve such a convincing sense of the medieval ages, and few first-person novels can boast such a convincing and sympathetic young narrator. The ending will leave readers eager for the next in this trilogy. As the book closes, Arthur is to become a squire and accompany his father on a Crusade to Jerusalem. Merlin says, "You'll take your stone with you." Carolyn Phelan
School Library Journal Review
Gr 5-8-An inventive, if seemingly interminable, take on the Matter of Britain. Arthur, a teenaged scion of minor nobility being raised on the Welsh Marches during the reign of Richard the Lion-Hearted, views episodes from King Arthur's youth on a sort of medieval television (the seeing stone), and discovers some eerie, exciting parallels with his own life. Like the protagonist in Karen Cushman's Catherine, Called Birdy (Clarion, 1994), Arthur (the fleshly one) spends much of his time alone, recording feelings, insights, observations, desires. He includes sheaves of minor incidents or conversations that artfully delineate the large cast of characters and the textures of manor life, but hold the story to a glacial pace. Meanwhile, on a polished piece of obsidian given to him by his mysterious mentor and guardian Merlin, he also catches glimpses of a familiar tale, from a prophetic battle between a red dragon and a white, to the pulling of the Sword from the Stone. By the end, as Arthur makes ready to depart on the ill-fated Fourth Crusade as a newly minted squire, the visions on the screen have begun to seem more and more real to him. Crossley-Holland has created a promising premise, and his young scribe has a sensitive, distinctly individual way with words-referring to Merlin's "slateshine eyes," for example. However, the author takes such pains to set the scene in this trilogy's first episode that only readers who can't get enough King Arthur are likely to stay the course.-John Peters, New York Public Library (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Guardian Review
In Kevin Crossley-Holland's medieval world, crossing-places are where the magic happens. Being betwixt and between, on the boundaries, neither here nor there is a state of grace from which good new things begin. Arthur, the hero of Crossley-Holland's trilogy, is 13 when the story opens, on the cusp between page and squire. The Middle March, where he lives, straddles the border between England and Wales, not entirely sure where it belongs. (This is not Eliot's Middlemarch, which is all about being at the heart of things, but something altogether more marginal.) How neatly pleasing, then, that the Arthur trilogy has become swept up in the latest publishing craze for "crossover fiction" - children's books that are read by adults even when not on bedtime-story duty. Fine things do indeed come out of no man's land. King of the Middle March , the final instalment of Arthur de Caldicot's journey through adolescence, is a longer, darker piece than the two books that went before. Arthur is now 16, a squire, and part of the fourth crusade to free Jerusalem from the infidel. This gives Crossley-Holland the chance to show a world that is far removed from Arthur's early life in the Marches, a place of gentle agrarian rhythms and repeating certainties. Now the young man is pitched into heaving, sweating camp life, where children are fired from catapults, women treated as whores and bullying is a matter of life and death. Running alongside this main narrative is the continuing thread of the Seeing Stone, a lump of black rock in which Arthur is able to watch the story of the Round Table's unravelling - complete with his Doppelganger, King Arthur. By the end of the book the two stories have been stitched together as the newly knighted Sir Arthur rides out to take pos session of his manor Catmole, a scrambled version of Camelot. Appropriately enough, Arthur's story is settled in the middle ground between then and now. In other words, the material world of the early 13th century is painstakingly recreated, and the language is of the clean, sharp, medieval variety. However, the psychology remains firmly contemporary. Arthur's challenges include having to rub along with a series of step and foster-siblings, puzzling out the rights and wrongs of the Saracens' jihad, and learning about the naturalness of mixed-race relationships. Being a modern kind of soldier, he even manages to spend some time in Croatia. In other hands this could all be blushingly clumsy, but Crossley-Holland's grasp of the medieval world is so firm and his touch so light (Middle English-inflected prose does not allow for much guff) that Arthur manages to convince as a boy-hero of both the Middle Ages and our own. If the fact that boys grew up as quickly in the 13th century as they do in the 21st works well for Crossley-Holland's project, the fact that girls were pretty much left barefoot in the kitchen is more problematic. Although he works hard to give his young female characters vim and grit, Crossley-Holland is too meticulous a scholar to create a tomboy figure and allow her the same life as Arthur. How much cannier does JK Rowling seem in comparison: Hogwarts may be almost as steeped in medieval references as Crossley- Holland's world, but she has created it in a way that gives Hermione as many possibilities as Harry or Ron. Arthur's girls, by contrast, are obliged to sit and wait until chosen to be someone's wife or chambermaid. The other possibility, the only one that offers any kind of agency, is to go into a convent, where at least you get taught to read and write. It might have seemed as if TE White's pre-war Arthurian sequence, The Once and Future King , had exhausted the Arthurian legends for at least another generation. But by cleverly embedding his version of Camelot in another narrative, Crossley-Holland is able to pick and choose the bits he wants to use, relying on a shared cultural consciousness to fill in any gaps (although it is probably only his adult readers who will have heard of Malory). At times, to be honest, the mechanism of the Seeing Stone can seem clunky (there is a limit to how often you want to hear about Arthur fishing it out of its hiding place, unwrapping it and waiting for the image to come into focus), but to children steeped in multimedia the little moment of nothingness while you wait for your computer or seeing stone to boot up probably seems entirely in the natural order of things. This small quibble aside, King of the Middle March makes a fittingly elegiac end (there is loss as well as hope as Sir Arthur spurs into his own version of Camelot, head full of grand plans) to a remarkably grown-up sequence of make believe. Kathryn Hughes is writing a biography of Mrs Beeton. To order Arthur, King of the Middle March for pounds 10.99 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979. Caption: article-arthur.1 If the fact that boys grew up as quickly in the 13th century as they do in the 21st works well for [Kevin Crossley- Holland]'s project, the fact that girls were pretty much left barefoot in the kitchen is more problematic. Although he works hard to give his young female characters vim and grit, Crossley-Holland is too meticulous a scholar to create a tomboy figure and allow her the same life as [Arthur]. How much cannier does JK Rowling seem in comparison: Hogwarts may be almost as steeped in medieval references as Crossley- Holland's world, but she has created it in a way that gives Hermione as many possibilities as Harry or Ron. Arthur's girls, by contrast, are obliged to sit and wait until chosen to be someone's wife or chambermaid. The other possibility, the only one that offers any kind of agency, is to go into a convent, where at least you get taught to read and write. - Kathryn Hughes.
Kirkus Review
In Great Britain, this first volume in a projected Arthurian trilogy was shortlisted for the Whitbread Award, the Guardian Children's Book Prize, and won the Bronze medal, Smarties Prize. On the level of medieval fantasy, it works very well indeed. The 13-year-old Arthur of this tale lives in the year 1199, the time of Richard Coeur de Lion, at Caldicot, and someone named Merlin also lives within the castle grounds. Merlin has given Arthur a piece of obsidian in which Arthur scries glimpses of another history: of Uther and Gorlois, of Sir Kay and a sword, and of a boy who shares his name and his countenance. He does not know these stories, but he is obsessed with reading and writing, with being named a squire, and with why his older brother hates him so. Arthur is a most engaging companion and a plenitude of historical facts about life in 12th-century England is imparted, but not a whole lot happens. At the end of this doorstopper all we know is that Arthur is not who he seems, nor is Merlin, and that his quest is about to begin. One cannot help but compare it to T.H. White's Once and Future King, and one might be far more inclined to put that in the hands of youngsters eager for legend. (Fiction. 11-15) $100,000 ad/promo
Table of Contents
| 1. Arthur and Merlin | p. 1 |
| 2. A Terrible Secret | p. 3 |
| 3. Into the Bullring | p. 5 |
| 4. My Black King Finger | p. 13 |
| 5. Duty | p. 14 |
| 6. Coeur De Lion | p. 18 |
| 7. My Tailbone | p. 21 |
| 8. Little Luke and Pigeon Pie | p. 23 |
| 9. Tumber Hill | p. 25 |
| 10. The Sleeping King | p. 30 |
| 11. Jack Words | p. 35 |
| 12. Fever | p. 36 |
| 13. Knowing and Understanding | p. 38 |
| 14. Jumpers and My Writing Room | p. 44 |
| 15. Nine | p. 48 |
| 16. Three Sorrows, Three Fears, Three Joys | p. 50 |
| 17. Tempest's Teeth | p. 51 |
| 18. Just Jack | p. 52 |
| 19. Nain in Armor | p. 53 |
| 20. Obsidian | p. 54 |
| 21. Lance and Longbow | p. 57 |
| 22. Long Live the King! | p. 63 |
| 23. The Messenger's Complaint | p. 66 |
| 24. Royal Brothers | p. 68 |
| 25. Ice and Fire | p. 73 |
| 26. Merlin | p. 74 |
| 27. Muffled | p. 77 |
| 28. The Peddler | p. 78 |
| 29. Luke | p. 81 |
| 30. Poor Stupid | p. 82 |
| 31. The Seeing Stone | p. 90 |
| 32. On My Own | p. 93 |
| 33. Nutshells and Good Earth | p. 94 |
| 34. Desire | p. 101 |
| 35. A Flyting | p. 106 |
| 36. Hallowe'en | p. 109 |
| 37. Passion | p. 121 |
| 38. Strange Saints | p. 126 |
| 39. Uther Explains | p. 128 |
| 40. Schoolmen, Scribes, and Artists | p. 130 |
| 41. Mouthfuls of Air | p. 135 |
| 42. Foster Child | p. 137 |
| 43. Crossing Places | p. 139 |
| 44. Luke's Illness | p. 140 |
| 45. Pains | p. 143 |
| 46. An Unfair Song | p. 144 |
| 47. A New Bow | p. 146 |
| 48. Ice | p. 150 |
| 49. Baptism | p. 151 |
| 50. My Name | p. 153 |
| 51. Hooter and Worse | p. 156 |
| 52. My Quest | p. 162 |
| 53. Brother | p. 165 |
| 54. Between Breath and Breath | p. 166 |
| 55. Hares and Angels | p. 170 |
| 56. Pots of Tears | p. 174 |
| 57. The Half=Dead King | p. 175 |
| 58. Lady Alice and My Tailbone | p. 177 |
| 59. Grace and Tom | p. 181 |
| 60. Fifth Son | p. 191 |
| 61. The Goshawk | p. 192 |
| 62. Thin Ice | p. 196 |
| 63. Devil's Berries | p. 200 |
| 64. Rot and Bad Blood | p. 203 |
| 65. The Art of Forgetting | p. 205 |
| 66. Hot and Important | p. 207 |
| 67. The Gates of Paradise | p. 208 |
| 68. Words for Luke | p. 211 |
| 69. Despair | p. 213 |
| 70. The Manor Court | p. 215 |
| 71. Butterflies | p. 226 |
| 72. Merlin and the Archbishop | p. 228 |
| 73. The Acorn | p. 231 |
| 74. Spelling | p. 232 |
| 75. The Pope's Proclamation | p. 234 |
| 76. Nothing's Not Worth Hiding | p. 238 |
| 77. Foul Stroke | p. 243 |
| 78. Not Yet | p. 250 |
| 79. The Archbishop's Messenger | p. 252 |
| 80. The Knight in the Yellow Dress | p. 256 |
| 81. Tanwen's Secret | p. 260 |
| 82. King John's Christmas Present | p. 267 |
| 83. Nine Gifts | p. 270 |
| 84. The Sword in the Stone | p. 272 |
| 85. Splatting and Sword=Pulling | p. 275 |
| 86. Riding to London | p. 281 |
| 87. Christmas | p. 283 |
| 88. Sir Kay | p. 292 |
| 89. Fourth Son | p. 294 |
| 90. The Turning of the Century | p. 297 |
| 91. Lightly and Fiercely | p. 299 |
| 92. The Whole Armor | p. 302 |
| 93. King of Britain | p. 304 |
| 94. Blood=Truths | p. 309 |
| 95. The Son of Uther | p. 317 |
| 96. Blood on the Snow | p. 321 |
| 97. Unhooded | p. 327 |
| 98. At Once | p. 330 |
| 99. What Matters | p. 334 |
| 100. Song of the North Star | p. 338 |
| Word List | p. 339 |
