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Episode 16 - Excalibur with Bryan Wigmore
354 Plays1 year ago
Merlin's Beard! What better topic to talk about as we enter the springtime and the regeneration of the land than Excalibur and the legend of Arthur, King of the Britons, who is prophesied to restore the land to verdance and glory and who knows much about the average velocity of unladen swallows. But we'll not be focusing on that particular cinematic incarnation of the once and future king. We'll be talking about the operatic 1981 John Boorman film Excalibur, which boldly attempts to condense a significant amount of Thomas Malory's 15th century manuscript, Le Morte d'Arthur, into two and-a-half hours of dreamlike cinema.
Joining us to talk through this is the fantasy author Bryan Wigmore, best known for his ongoing fantasy series The Fire Stealers, comprising The Goddess Project (2017), The Empyreus Proof (2018), and the forthcoming third instalment, The Mandala Praxis. With Bryan we discuss Arthur's connection to the land, what the Holy Grail represents, why it appears in the story when it does, and the mysterious figure of the Fisher King. We discuss the explicitly Christian imagery, the use of opera music in the score, the preponderance of Irish accents in a story about the King of the Britons (clue: it was filmed in County Wicklow); the scalable aspect of the Arthurian story, Merlin's pratfalls, and Brian Blessed's head.
We also talk about Bryan's own work and its foundation upon such ancient myths as these; his use of the land and the environment, the question of timing a publication to retain its topicality, and the bones of myth. We also talk about his forthcoming YA fantasy series called Earthwyrms, which leans heavily upon the Arthurian mythos, and we pester him for an update on when The Mandala Praxis will be ready.
Elsewhere, The Judge throws down her own gauntlet and challenges us to trial by combat, and how that strange aspect of the ancient judiciary came to be, and how the trial by combat we see in such films as Excalibur might work in reality.
We also hear Paranoid Marvin's victorious 75-word challenge entry from February, and The Judge's winning entry to the January 300-word writing challenge. Finally, a certain King Of The Britons is perturbed and discombobulated when he is approached by the Lieutenant Bungalow of the Martian space force for a rare interview.
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Transcript
Introduction to Kronscast and Excalibur
00:00:15
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Kronscast, the official podcast of SFF Chronicles, the world's largest science fiction and fantasy community. I'm Dan Jones. And I'm Christopher Bean. Today we're discussing one of the greatest myths ever told, the legend of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table and the Holy Grail.
00:00:32
Speaker
In particular, we're going to be focusing on the 1981 John Borman film Excalibur, which ambitiously attempted to squeeze the entirety of the original 15th century text by Thomas Mallory, Le Mocte d'Artur, into two and a half hours. It's a pretty good attempt showing us Arthur's conception by deception, his being taken at birth by Merlin, taking the sword Excalibur from the stone and claiming his birthright as king.
00:00:57
Speaker
assembling the Knights of the Round Table before falling into despair and ruin as the noble aspirations of the Knights crumble amid accusations, betrayals, lust and hopelessness. The tale ends with a return to glory, but this time tempered with humility and wisdom, and an acceptance of death, fate, the continuation of all things.
00:01:16
Speaker
John Borman's film is considered the seminal adaptation of the Arthurian myth for the screen and launched the film careers of household names such as Patrick Stewart, Kieran Hines, Liam Neeson, Gabriel Byrne, Nigel Terry and Sherry Longy, as well as one of the finest actors of the 20th century, Nicole Williamson as Merlin.
Introduction to Brian Wigmore
00:01:36
Speaker
We're talking with one of Crohnsey's most famous sons today, the fantasy author Brian Wigmore. Brian was born among the seaside town
00:01:45
Speaker
Bogner Regis, which probably explains his fascination with places that combine ruins with water. After studying Marillion lyrics and dungeons and dragons at university, along with an optional module of management science, he became a chartered accountant but then realised he was in too much danger of making a proper living and decided to try becoming a writer instead. And since then,
00:02:08
Speaker
first two novels in his series The Fire Stealers have been published by Snowbooks, The Goddess Project in 2017 and its sequel The Imperious Proof in 2018. He has at various times been a cyclist, a runner, a free diver, he's worked in environmental conservation and all of these things have informed various aspects of his work.
00:02:33
Speaker
He now lives in the Cathedral City of Chichester with, perhaps uniquely for an author who lives on his own, zero cats. So welcome, Brian. Hello. Thank you. Thanks for joining us. Thanks. Hi. How are you? I'm very well. Thank you. Excellent. Good stuff. Right. Well, let's kick off.
Impact of Excalibur on Arthurian Myths
00:02:52
Speaker
Why did you pick Excalibur?
00:02:56
Speaker
I guess because it's made a big impression on me when I first saw it. The Arthurian myths are part of the foundational bedrock of a lot of fantasy. It's got some interesting themes or things I find interesting. And I thought it wasn't too long. But apparently, apparently some people did. Who would that be? Well,
00:03:22
Speaker
A little bird tells me that one Christopher Bean was complaining about its being more than about 50 minutes. Well, South Park episodes are normally about 20 minutes. That's about as much as I can manage. Fair enough. There is a lot that they cram into South Park episodes to be fair. That's true. Well, as Chris was saying in his introduction, there is a lot they cram into Excalibur. Interestingly, it's not a full adaptation of Thomas Mallory.
00:03:51
Speaker
There are quite a lot of changes that Bormann has made. He's merged some stuff. He's left a lot out. And he's also brought in one, I think, major thematic element, which is the wasteland and the wounded king, which isn't really in Malory at all, which I thought was an interesting choice. And perhaps we can talk about a bit later. That's the Fisher King, right? That's right. He's alternatively called the Fisher King or the Wounded King, depending on whichever of the many sources you're looking at.
00:04:21
Speaker
Well, maybe we could start with that because it's a strange aspect of the Arthurian myth. It doesn't really fit. As far as I understand it, was it entirely completed by Mallory, the Fisher King? It's not really in Mallory at all. I've only read an abridged version of Mallory, but it doesn't really crop up in that.
00:04:43
Speaker
I don't know how much knowledge of the Arthurian myths we should assume people have. Is it worth a quick rundown of where Arthur comes from? Yeah, I think given that we're talking about the film in particular, it's probably, we gave a very quick pricey in the introduction, but yeah, I think it's worth giving a quick run through of the plot.
Origins of King Arthur
00:04:58
Speaker
Okay, so King Arthur is mentioned by various sources in the second half of the first millennium. But the legend first gets a more sort of complete treatment in
00:05:12
Speaker
something called The History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth, which introduces elements such as Merlin, Guinevere, and I think his betrayal by Lancelot. Between Geoffrey of Monmouth, who was writing in the 12th century, and Thomas Mallory, who was writing in about, I think, 1450, various European poets such as Chretien de Troy and
00:05:40
Speaker
man with the splendid name of Wolfram von Eschenbach, wrote some supplementary material, a lot of which was to do with the night Percival or Parsival. And Shreti in Detroit in 11-something or other developed this story of the Fisher King, where Percival goes to a castle. He's sort of put in a banquet.
00:06:07
Speaker
and the Lord of the castle is the Fisher King who has been wounded in the thigh and who cannot heal. Perceval then witnesses a procession through the banqueting hall, which includes a grail, which in that version is not anything to do with with Christ or a chalice, but is a serving dish and I think a bleeding lance. And they proceed into another room. The idea is that if Perceval had asked
00:06:37
Speaker
The question, basically, what's going on here?
Symbolism in Excalibur and Mythology
00:06:40
Speaker
The wounded king would have been healed and the land, which has fallen into a state of sort of famine and natural impotence, if you like, would have been restored. But through unhappy coincidence, Percival had previously been advised by another knight not to talk too much. So he fails to ask the question. And thus, nothing happens. And the whole Grail
00:07:05
Speaker
quest has to be completed later, although Chretien de Troy never finished his Percival story, and so we don't know what he had in mind for that. It's a very strange part of the Arthurian myth, isn't it? There are
00:07:21
Speaker
roots of the Fisher King in Irish mythology as well. There's a story of, do you know Bran the Blessed? Yeah. Yeah, which sounds a lot like, I always think Brian Blessed, which maybe that's where it comes from. I don't know. I imagine if Brian Blessed's head was cut off, it would continue to speak. Yeah, maybe that is the head that's been cut off. He had a cauldron that could restore the dead to life.
00:07:47
Speaker
Brown, blessed this was, and he travelled to Ireland and gave his, was it his daughter and the cauldron as a gift, but then he fell out of favour, so he invaded Ireland. But he fell into sorrow after the war, and he asked his soldiers because he was wounded from the war. Wasn't he poisoned in the foot by a lance? So it's always being lanced in the foot or lanced in the thigh, isn't it? It's always to do with the leg, so I suppose that's
00:08:17
Speaker
I mean, what do you think about the idea of propulsion, about the means to move on? It's always the leg or the foot that is wounded. Well, I've read that the idea of being wounded in the thigh would have been understood by contemporary readers as meaning the genitals. So rather than a means of propulsion, it's a means of generation. Hence the land also falling into famine and not giving any, not giving anything of itself. Okay.
00:08:44
Speaker
And in Excalibur, this is substituted for Arthur himself. That's right. Because of Arthur and the Fisher King are conflated in the second half of the film. Is this strange? Sorry, go on, Bean. I was just going to ask, you know, the earlier part about Percival walking through the hall and not asking questions, is that everything off when he's at the drawbridge? At the Grail Quest? Well, it's changed in the film because
00:09:13
Speaker
In the film, Excalibur, Percival's job is to answer the question, not to ask it. And the question he's asked by a big booming disembodied voice, not Brian Blessed, is what is the secret of the Grail? Who does it serve? And by answering that, he somehow acquires the Grail and is then able to restore Arthur with it.
00:09:41
Speaker
That's quite different from the portrayal in Percival in the true gender choice story. The way it interests me is it sort of ties up with this idea that Borman introduces quite early on in Excalibur. Merlin tells Arthur. Arthur asks Merlin, just after he's pulled the solid Excalibur from the stone, what does it mean to be king? And Merlin says,
00:10:06
Speaker
you are the land and the land is you. And as you thrive, the land will thrive. If you fail, the land will fail. Nothing really is made of that until the whole Grail Quest thing, where Percival answers the question, what is the secret that I have lost with the answer you and the lander won?
Arthur's Journey and Downfall
00:10:24
Speaker
And he then manages to restore Arthur by making Arthur understand this by letting him drink from the Grail. That's one of the
00:10:36
Speaker
most interesting aspects of the film, but also perhaps at least one of the least satisfactory. Because we don't know why Arthur has lost his secret or when he falls into despair, he tells his knights, we must find what was lost. We must seek the Grail. But the Grail hasn't been mentioned until that point. Yeah. We don't know why he understands that the Grail has anything to do with this idea that he and the land are one.
00:11:05
Speaker
The fall of Arthur is... I viewed this film, it's a very strange film, it's kind of a scalable film because all of the different characters, in a sense, they're all a different part of Arthur, they're all a different part of the individual. When we spoke with Tadde Thompson last month, when we were talking about Sandman, one of the things we mentioned was that The Endless,
00:11:33
Speaker
represent different facets, different aspects of an entire personality and I kind of think the same thing is going on here with the knights of the round table and you know that's why it's round as well why the table is round because it represents a balanced and a complete personality so the different knights may have different
00:11:52
Speaker
You know, they're not deep complex characters. They seem to be more symbolic or representative of certain virtues or certain character traits. Garret Gawain has suspicion and accusation. Lancelot is strength and purity, but he's also, he laterally becomes betrayal and Percival is truth and so on and so forth. And up to
00:12:18
Speaker
to the point where they're around the round table then Arthur's achieved his equilibrium and glory so he's at his height but then it's all taken away and then the Grail becomes apparent so I think up to that point so psychologically speaking the Grail isn't conceptualized by Arthur because
00:12:42
Speaker
It's an unknown unknown if you use Donald Romsfeldian language. It's something he doesn't even know exists. And he only knows it exists once he loses the glory that he had. So it kind of represents, it does represent a return to glory, but with wisdom and humility. I think that's what it represents, but you can't know that until you've lost what you've acquired. That's my reading of it.
00:13:10
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's fair. I like the way also that the, well, background reading on the film suggests that Bormann was somewhat influenced by James Fraser's The Golden Bough, which deals primarily with the idea of an ancient vegetative cult surrounding a goddess who's married to a king who is sacrificed.
00:13:36
Speaker
And it's possible that the Fisher King emblem in Trenton, Detroit, for example, comes from a similar idea if one ever existed. Unfortunately, one hasn't been proven to have existed. It might have come from Ireland or it might have come from elsewhere. But I like that theme, if you like, this tying of the land to the king. But it's kind of muddied because the land is also portrayed as a dragon.
00:14:08
Speaker
I think that's not uncommon. The dragon is an emblem of the wilderness. It's a chimera, so it's all the different things that can come up and snatch you and come and get you. But it's also the source of Merlin's magical power. Exactly.
00:14:25
Speaker
It's it's it's the essence of chaos rather, you know the chaos dragon typical chaos dragon It's something that's potentially dangerous and it can come and get you but it's also a source of potentially great strength as well and it's down to how you explore it and how you Confront it that determines what you're going to get out of it. Yeah Okay, I wonder what you think of the the way in which
00:14:51
Speaker
Arthur's rule fails. I'll ask the questions, thank you. So several things happen in quick succession. Oh no, go on, carry on. So Guenivere portrays Arthur by going out into the wilderness and sleeping with Lance a lot. Yeah.
00:15:13
Speaker
So Arthur loses his wife and queen. He finds that he stabs Excalibur into the earth. Merlin tells us that that means that Excalibur has been stabbed into the heart of the dragon, spine of the dragon, sorry. And that seems to cause a problem with Merlin. And then Morgana manipulates Merlin speaking the charm of making so she can learn it. She then
00:15:41
Speaker
lies with Arthur and begets the son Mordred. Mordred is born. Arthur and his knights attend some kind of church ceremony to assuage the evil that's happening, and Arthur gets struck by a bolt of lightning. The next thing we see, the realm has turned into a wasteland. But it's not made clear which of the preceding events have actually caused that to happen. Do you think it could go on?
00:16:11
Speaker
Well, it could be because he's lost his queen. It could be that Bormann sort of sees Guinevere as being a representation of the goddess figure, if we're drawing on that ancient mythology. It could be that he's lost Excalibur, because Lancelot, when he wakes up, says the king without a sword, a land without a king in horror, then runs off. Or it could be that the
00:16:40
Speaker
around turning into a wasteland is because of his incestuous relationship, or his more dread incestuous birth, if you like. But because they all happen in such quick succession of film, when we're left without the knowledge of what has led to what. Well, it's just, again, we've, it's a
00:17:03
Speaker
I read the review of Excalibur by Roger Ebert, the American film critic who wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times, and one of his complaints was that it's a very strange story because the causality between events is not always evident, and I think that's an example of it. But I think that's just
00:17:31
Speaker
a result of the mythological scope of the storytelling is that the bones of the storytelling are not necessarily sort of the cause and effect that we would need to account for when we're writing a modern novel.
Symbolic Significance of Excalibur
00:17:44
Speaker
It's not the same. So I think it may be all of the above. If you're saying that the land has fallen into ruin, it's not any one single thing, but it's a series of
00:17:56
Speaker
bad decisions. It's a series of betrayals and it's a series of deceptions that have caused the land to fall into ruin. Because maybe the land can withstand one betrayal or maybe it can withstand
00:18:10
Speaker
one deception. There are so many analogies and parallels with the Christ story in this and there are dozens and dozens and dozens and this is one of them. So when Christ dies or when he's taken to trial and crucified, it's not just one thing that leads up to that event, it's several things. He's betrayed by his friends, by Peter, he's betrayed by Judas Iscariot as well. He is
00:18:39
Speaker
chosen for persecution by Pontius Pilate. He's done nothing wrong. He's all compiled on top of that. He is supposed to be the ultimate ideal of good. So the ultimate representation of good. So the fact that he's been prosecuted for a crime that he hasn't committed is even worse.
00:19:06
Speaker
And so it's a compilation of different things. Yeah, I think that the trouble is that because we can't pin on anything, it stops any of them providing a proper sort of through line of cause and effect. So, for example, if it had been the loss of Excalibur, so when he pulls Excalibur from the stone that makes him the king, and he's then the king, him in the land of one, when he loses Excalibur, that would be quite a strong
00:19:34
Speaker
thematic cause for the land falling into ruin. And it's interesting, I think that although the film is called Excalibur, we don't really know anything about the sword itself and what it can do. It doesn't really do anything. No, he calls on his power once to defeat Lancelot. But apart from that, oh, and apart from the fact that it can pierce Mordred's armor, which we're told cannot be pierced by any weapon forged by man. So we know it's not forged by a man. We don't know what it who did forge it.
00:20:05
Speaker
which I think given its importance and its sort of continuity through the film is quite a strange choice.
Episodic Storytelling in Excalibur
00:20:13
Speaker
I think everything in this film is symbolic. There's nothing really that should be taken literally as far as I can see. So Excalibur doesn't have any specific properties but it has a hell of a lot of symbolic significance. So it's the sword that, what is it? Merlin who says it's made to heal not to hack?
00:20:34
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So it's made to heal, not to hack. I think it represents hope. That's like the Theodore Roosevelt line of, you know, talk quietly, but carry a big stick. That's partly what it's there for. So I think when, maybe when Arthur is challenging Lancelot to single combat, he's misusing the sword. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. It's not supposed to be used.
00:21:00
Speaker
Certainly, I mean, he engages in the combat in prideful wrath, doesn't he? So he's approaching it in bad faith anyway, and that causes the sword to break, not the act of combat. Well, it is the act of combat itself that breaks it, but it was not meant for combat, and it was used in combat in bad faith. Yeah, and even his, well, at the start of the film, Uther's mere possession of the sword is enough to get the Duke of Cornwall to agree to a truce with him.
00:21:31
Speaker
Yes, exactly. So it's almost like a weapon of mass destruction, I suppose. You don't need to use it. And if you should, and if you do happen to use it, then woe betide what happens to you. It also represents hope as well. Because it's the, Merlin, or no, it's Arthur who says, I've broken, when he breaks Excalibur in combat with Lancel, he says, I've broken what could not be broken, which is hope.
00:22:00
Speaker
because he's used it to defeat the symbol of purity and strength, Lancelot. Yes, you should have let Lancelot win. For once, Lancelot was meant to win. It feels like it's the same story being told in episodic fashion throughout the film. So the story of deception and
00:22:27
Speaker
rising to glory or a victory, but it's a false victory. And then it's degraded into a despair or ruin and then revitalization into a true victory. And it seems to be that's the case in microcosm. So in each of the episodic elements of the film, but it's also the overarching narrative of the film as well. Yeah.
00:22:51
Speaker
Well, what's going back to Roger Ebert's comment about lack of continuity? I don't think that's actually the case in the first half of the film. I think there is quite strong continuity in modern plot terms. It's just really the way in which the land falls into ruin. As you say, there are several possible explanations, but none of them are really explored. The only thing early on, I think, which
00:23:18
Speaker
raises a bit of a question is why Sir Gawain accuses Guinevere of inciting Lancelot to desire or desiring Lancelot when he knows that that will cause him to to meet Lancelot in trial by compact which he can't win because you know Lancelot is the best night. We know that we see Morgana whispering things into his ear but unless she's actually
00:23:47
Speaker
enchanted him, which doesn't seem to be the case from what we see. It seems to be a bit of a strange choice on his part.
Analysis of the Round Table Scene
00:23:55
Speaker
I think the round table scene is, I think it's my favourite scene in the film, actually. It represents Arthur at the height of his glory. And when he's the chief. Just before the darkness creeps in and everything goes wrong.
00:24:17
Speaker
Remember I said about the Knights representing different elements of a personality. That scene is almost like an individual having a conversation in their own head and putting forward the different
00:24:37
Speaker
ways of interpreting things that are happening. So it's Arthur, in a sense, who's questioning everything that's around them. So he's achieved everything, but he's questioning the relationship between his wife and his best friend, his best night.
00:24:55
Speaker
He's going through, mulling over whether it's better to voice the accusation and destroy everything, or whether it's better to keep it quiet.
00:25:10
Speaker
Ostensibly, they're at their greatest strength. Arthur's at his greatest strength. But they're also bickering because they're also asking Merlin, what's the greatest quality in a night, Merlin? Is it strength? Is it purity? Which I think is also, because they're also, I'm the pure one, I'm the strong one.
00:25:29
Speaker
I'm the true one, et cetera, et cetera. They all want to know what's the best quality. And Merlin gives the correct answer, which is something to do with alloys and metals. And he witters on about alchemy. And they say, we don't want to hear that. That's rubbish, rubbish. Just tell us the answer. So he says truth. Truth is the correct answer. Truth is the thing that will guide you. Whenever a man lies, he murders a part of the world.
00:25:55
Speaker
murders a part of the world, that's it. And I think that that scene is Arthur wrestling with himself as much as the knights are squabbling with each other, even if it is partly in jest. I think that's what's going on. We mustn't forget though of course that the downfall is brought about by Morgana's hatred of him and that hatred is inspired by
00:26:20
Speaker
what happened to her mother, in other words, the manner in which Arthur is conceived. So Arthur's conception had in itself the root of his downfall, which I think is quite interesting.
Impact of Arthur's Conception
00:26:33
Speaker
How do you mean? So the fact that he's come from inauspicious beginnings is sort of putting a sign over him.
00:26:44
Speaker
I think maybe just maybe just go through the initial plot. Okay. The origins of the story with Uther Pendragon. So Uther Pendragon has desires to be the overlord of all Britain. And the only person holding out at the beginning of the film is the Duke of Cornwall. They have a battle. Uther acquires the sword Excalibur from Merlin, shows it to the Duke of Cornwall, who is so impressed with it, he agrees to a truce and invites Uther
00:27:14
Speaker
to his castle for a feast. During this feast, the Duke of Cornwall gets his wife to dance for them, wishing to show her off, which backfires spectacularly because it inflames Uther to lust so extreme that he attacks the castle. He then agrees with Merlin that Merlin will magic
00:27:40
Speaker
Uther into the semblance of the Duke of Cornwall said that he can then lie with the grain, Duke of Cornwall's wife. And that is how Arthur is conceived. But Morgana witnesses this. And then Morgana being Arthur's half-sister, who's already a girl. Yeah. And then when Arthur is born, Merlin comes and takes him away to have him raised by a foster family. Uther is killed. Which is Clive Swift.
00:28:09
Speaker
Foster family Clive Swift. Clive Swift hides in bouquets husbands in keeping up appearances with a rather posh English accent and yet somehow has raised a foster son. He'd be a good foster dad, I think Clive Swift. Sorry? He'd be a good foster dad. Raised a foster son. Yeah, but I think Clive Swift would be a good foster dad. Oh, he'd be a brilliant foster dad. Yeah, I'm just wondering why Nigel Terry's Arthur has an Irish accent when he's been raised by a family with an English one.
00:28:39
Speaker
Well, he was followed by Gabriel Burns, I suppose. There you go. That's why. If they were following that logic, they should have been shouting their heads off every time they opened their mouths, because that's all everybody did at the beginning, was just shout their heads off. They did, yeah. I noticed that as well. It's weird, isn't it? It turns down, but at the beginning, I'm like, oh, I feel a little bit attacked.
00:29:03
Speaker
Well, they're all complete thugs at the beginning. I think that's deliberate. I think it's meant to show... Pre-civilized thought. Yeah, Arthur's reign civilizes everybody. You also noticed that the Uliama at the beginning is much duller. It's sort of like a dark metal grey. And when Lancelot turns up, his
00:29:27
Speaker
bright shiny armour is in fact is completely the exception but then everyone else seems to adopt it. That's where my queer reading comes from, lots a lot of shiny armour. Go ahead with it quickly, come on, you've got to spill the beans now. Well it's not a queer reading so much as a... I just thought it was a little... Admit it, it is. These days you know you can't watch that kind of scene without thinking
00:29:53
Speaker
of either Adam Ant ant rap or thinking about the implications of this very beautiful man with... Did ant rap come out before Excalibur? No, afterwards. Well, the one with Diana Dawes. Oh, okay. Diana Dawes is part of it. So Paulman wouldn't have been influenced by ant rap. I think we should ask our expert Brian.
00:30:16
Speaker
Brian will know about ant rap probably more, whether it's based on Excalibur or had any relevance, but I just thought there's just, I could just think about those academic discussions people trip themselves up over having saying, oh, and he kissed the end of his sword and it's a phallic symbol and all this kind of stuff. And it was just, I was just entertaining myself. Cause by that point I was like, I think, you know, I was, I was watching it for the image rather than the story, because as Brian said, it's,
00:30:47
Speaker
It's not particularly that clear, but I think if I can just go back onto that actually, one of the reasons I think you have to take into account is John Boorman as a filmmaker, and also the fact that there might be a conceit to the film that we already know all this. You know, people, it's our heritage, so therefore we know a lot about King Arthur. I mean, I didn't, obviously.
00:31:09
Speaker
But you knew of it, though. I learnt from this, for example, that Uther is different from Arthur. I just thought it was a different spelling. I've grown up thinking Uther was a different spelling of Arthur. There's lots of things like that. And I thought Nimway, although it isn't mentioned in the film, I thought Nimway and Morgan Le Fay were the same person or Morgana were the same person. There is a lot of messing about that Borman has done here. For example, in the original in Thomas Mallory,
00:31:40
Speaker
It's not Morgana that Arthur has an incestuous night with and begetting more drip. It's actually her sister, Morgana. So he's done quite a lot of this stuff. I mean, I agree actually, Arthur, sorry, Ixcalibur was the first time, even though I watched it probably when I was 19 or 20, it was the first time I'd come across a coherent
00:32:02
Speaker
account of the Arthurian legends from Arthur's conception to his death. I didn't really know what the story was. I knew bits of it. I knew some of the characters from it. I think it does it pretty well. Yeah, I think it's pretty well, yeah. It's very operatic. Also, you get a sense of it. You might not have the nuts and bolts down in terms of logic and understand what's going on from scene to scene, but I'm not a particularly intelligent observer of those kind of things and I understood what was going on.
00:32:28
Speaker
I think, you know, the yes, there is, I think it's also because it's such a long film, there's those bits like where suddenly the world, the country is, you know, in a decline. All those and the mention of the Grail could have caught on the edit being on the edit floor, because this film was already too long, you know, those things which would have forced Yeah, we don't know what was left out or what the extended cut would have been. Yeah. I mean, Dan, Dan just mentioned the word operatic, which gives me a good lead into the musical score.
Music in Excalibur
00:32:59
Speaker
Before you go into the music, just a general point on the song operatic. We've gone on a tangent.
00:33:10
Speaker
we do Morgana or the opera first. Right, okay, let's go back to Morgana. So Morgana witnesses her mother's rape by Uther in the guise of her father, and then harbors a hatred of particularly Merlin, I think, for having brought this around. Anyway, it doesn't do Merlin's image any favors that he's complicit in this. And she associates her Merlin with Arthur,
00:33:35
Speaker
And when she sees that Guinevere has some kind of attraction to Lancelot, she sees how she can use that to bring down the kingdom. And after that, she decides to beget a son to take over from Arthur and rule the kingdom herself. That's all I was saying, really, that Arthur's conception, because it was witnessed by Malgana, his half-sister, has in it the seeds of his own destruction.
00:34:02
Speaker
It's interesting that you say she sees Merlin's part in the deception and she blames Merlin. Really, Merlin's just a tool, isn't he? He's representative of the old gods, but the characters in the story can
00:34:23
Speaker
use the old magic or the spirits of the woods and the streams as he puts it for their different ends. It's Uther's wish for him to use the magic on himself. He doesn't have his price for that. He tells you that before that he comes and goes when he pleases. There are other worlds than these or something he says. Yeah, towards the end, yeah. But Uther, I think Merlin's first appearance, Uther demands of him, where have you been? I've been calling you and
00:34:53
Speaker
Merlin says, yeah, I've been walking my own way since the dawn of time. I come and go at my own choosing or something like that. I think he agrees to Uther's plan. Before he agrees to Uther's plan, you see him looking up at the castle, the Duke of Cornwall's castle, and he says something like, he just says the name of Ygraine, but you can tell that he's thinking that she would be the mother for Arthur.
00:35:21
Speaker
So he then agrees to Uther's scheme because it will bring about what he wants to happen. But why he particularly wants it to happen isn't quite clear because he then leaves Arthur at the moment just before the kingdom is destroyed. So he doesn't even know, I mean it's a question as to how, Merlin claims to be able to see the future but it's
00:35:46
Speaker
He either sees it fairly unclearly or he has some quite silly motivations. I think there's a line that he says when he's talking to Morgana, when Morgana is a grown woman and is played by Helen Mirren, and he says, I think is it the wedding scene? It might be at the wedding scene. And they're at the back and she's saying, teach me the spells and the
00:36:13
Speaker
and the laments and all of that. And he says, the one God drives out the many. Yeah, the spirits of wooden stream. The spirits of the wooden stream, yeah. So the old gods, the multitude of gods or the multiplicity of gods is driven out by the one God, specifically meaning the Christian God. But I was, I've got back to the, so let's go back to the Christian reading of this. In the Old Testament,
00:36:41
Speaker
God is at the beginning, so right at the beginning of Genesis, if you read the Bible as a piece of literature and God as a character, then in Genesis he's one of the main characters and in Exodus he's also one of the main characters but by that point the humans are doing a little bit more and they're showing a bit of agency in modern language and then as the Old Testament goes on and on God sort of recedes
00:37:07
Speaker
He comes and he's a bit like Merlin, he comes and goes as he pleases, he interferes in Job and Isaiah and bits and pieces here and there, but really it's about
00:37:20
Speaker
humanity awakening and learning to take master itself and be in control of its own destiny. And I think something similar is going on here. Because by the time you get to the New Testament, you have divinity personified into the form of a man, which is Christ, and then Christ dies. And the rest of the New Testament is all about human activity.
00:37:44
Speaker
and what they've learned and them going out into the world, which is acts of apostles, Paul, Corinthians, et cetera, et cetera, Romans, until he gets a revelation and all gets weird and dreamlike again. Yeah. That's true. And Merlin says a couple of times that once with Morgana and once with Arthur at the end, he says his time is over. It's now a time of men to make their own decisions.
00:38:09
Speaker
Yeah, and that's the story of humanity, I think, is what's going on. And he actually confesses that he has meddled in the affairs of men for too long. Yeah, it's also I mean, it's also I think the story of the individual as the individual is a is a baby or as an infant and is sort of in the world in the divine realm, if you like, and sort of children do have that divine spark about them. But as they grow into their life,
00:38:39
Speaker
then they've also got to figure out how to master their own destiny. And as you become older, after that sort of divine presence dies, let's say, then the rest of the story is about the acts of the apostles, which is yourself, the way that you carry yourself into the rest of the world. So it's like this sort of meta story that works episodically, but works for all of humanity, works for the
00:39:09
Speaker
the country of England in this sense, but also at the level of the individual as well.
00:39:17
Speaker
I've silenced everybody. Shall we talk about the opera then? Opera, yes. Go into the opera. Well, can I just say Morgaus is also the name of a sea monster in, where is it, Wales? Is it? Yeah, there's like, you know, like a Loch Ness Monster kind of thing called, oh, no, it's not. I'm thinking of Morgua, M-O-R-G-W-A-R or something. No, I'm conflating, sorry.
00:39:44
Speaker
but it's all it all has the same root doesn't it more which must come from death no that's no damn latin wouldn't it and these names are originally well should you be i don't know um let me find well actually it's not relevant so you two talk about wagner and carmina barana and i will look up morgue wall okay you do that yes so yes the when i saw the film especially on the big screen at a university lecture theater the the music
00:40:14
Speaker
I think was one of the most striking things about it. I heard O Fortuna from Kamini Burana before only in a TV ad for Old Spice Aftershave. This was before Excalibur?
00:40:32
Speaker
Yeah, it was. I think it was the 70s. Guy surfing. I think you can find it on YouTube. But they used it in the Omen, which is before, isn't it? Oh, did they? Yeah, of course they did. Yeah, of course they did. I hadn't come across any Wagner before, apart from Ride of the Valkyries, which I don't like. But I thought there were three pieces of Wagner's music used in this film. Some of them very on the nose. So
00:40:58
Speaker
Well, I think that's forgivable. Oh, it is forgivable. So the prelude to Percival he uses when Percival is interacting with the Great, if you like. The overture to Tristan and his older. Yeah, that's right. And again, it's superbly used. And perhaps less relevant, Siegfried's Funeral March from Twilight of the Gods, which is superb piece of music.
00:41:25
Speaker
Borman's done this before when he directed Zardoz several years previously. He used the Allegretto from Beethoven's 7th Symphony to good effect. I understand I haven't watched it myself. So he's obviously got a feel for what piece of classical music would work in his films. It's a shame. I don't think that that sort of thing would fly in a mainstream Hollywood
00:41:50
Speaker
movie these days. I mean, there's a certain level of assumption that Borman has that the people watching his films are going to have a, you know, they're going to meet the necessary threshold of understanding of our culture, you know, Beethoven.
Merlin's Unique Portrayal
00:42:06
Speaker
It's necessary to know what to be able to recognize the music he was using. Like I say, I didn't.
00:42:13
Speaker
I don't think it's any different really. It's just possibly a cheap way of getting... Most film soundtracks have a sort of classical instruments and ways of construction. Yeah, but the thematic resonance of the music that's used in Excalibur is... Rather than having music written for the film.
00:42:31
Speaker
stuff that already existed which he thought fitted when it does superbly. Well it does have some original score like Trevor Jones. The original music is quite often sort of a bit weird and spooky for the use of opera music, operatic music I think is
00:42:57
Speaker
It's apt because opera, when you're telling a story in the opera, you can only really tell the gist of the story. Again, it's all done in symbols because you can't tell a story going down. You can't have a complex plot in an opera. No, you can have characters really. Yeah. You just have the symbols thrown about and that's it. You get the gist of the story. Excalibur is quite an operatic looking film, I think, and the visual artist from this element.
00:43:24
Speaker
and Nicole Williamson's performance, of course, which makes it really... Yeah, so he's like Noel Coward as Merlin, basically. He is fantastic. Yeah, he is. He is fantastic. And nothing like any idea of Merlin I'd had before I saw that. In fact, I think a lot of people encountering it for the first time probably find it a bit weird as I did. My idea of Merlin, it wasn't the Sword in the Stone Disney version, but it was probably something like Gandalf.
00:43:52
Speaker
Yeah. Here we have a guy with a polished metal skull cap who talks in this
00:44:02
Speaker
almost comical delivery but it's not really it really it's um i think it's his performance it's just knowing isn't it it's witty yeah comical so there's a change there's a change in his character towards after the um say midpoint where he's there's you know a few pratfalls banging his head falling over he falls in the water yeah um and he becomes a bit more sort of mad like yoda rather than
00:44:28
Speaker
you know, this sort of oracle that he was at the beginning. But it's funny you mention that was the first depiction of Merlin I'd ever seen. I mean, I saw this when I was far too young to see it. And so for me, that is what Merlin looks like, a bit like Merciless the Ming, you know, Ming the Merciless or whatever with that thing. But then also I was reading on I think it's on the Wiki article. They were saying that they'd started off producing it as Lord of the Rings. So maybe that's an interesting story. Yeah.
00:44:58
Speaker
Yeah, maybe there was some conflation there.
Excalibur's Origins and Themes
00:45:01
Speaker
Yeah, so apparently some of the set designs and so on were conceived for being used in Lord of the Rings film. So originally Borman was shopping this Excalibur treatment around since the late 60s and he took it to United Artists and they said, no, it's going to be far too expensive for us to produce. So have a go at Lord of the Rings instead.
00:45:27
Speaker
Which is incredible really, but given that Excalibur cost 11 million to produce in 1980 and Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings cost 300 million to produce 20 years later. So probably adjusting for inflation is still about 10 times the amount. So Borman, he tried to develop Lord of the Rings and he even corresponded with Tolkien about it.
00:45:51
Speaker
but eventually you couldn't get it to work. But apparently some of the concepts you had carried over into the final excalibur treatment. But thematically there's a lot of resonance again with the wounded land and the king in exile and the chosen one. And Gandalf is a Merlin avatar. There's a lot of
00:46:12
Speaker
A lot of stuff that you can just pick up and plop in Excalibur. Yeah, actually, also Merle has the line at one point, follow your nose, which was then incorporated into both Peter Jackson's film and the recent Rings of Power series. Yes, yes, it was, wasn't it? That was the reveal. That's right. Okay. Is there anything else we need to talk about on Excalibur? Yes. Oh, there is, isn't there?
00:46:41
Speaker
I'm just trying to get involved. I don't know what it is. No, sorry. My notes were I have a lot of different sets of tarot cards. So there was a lot of, especially, it was nice to see, I didn't, I haven't done my due diligence, so I can't tell you where it was filmed, but there was a lot of beautiful use, use of what I assume is the UK countryside. Well, it is County Wicklow in Ireland, apparently most
Film's Setting and Locations
00:47:11
Speaker
of it was filmed.
00:47:11
Speaker
Okay, because you don't normally see that in, I don't know, I was just thinking that there tends to be a grandiose element of when we're meant to see what Britain was or what England was in modern filmmaking. But in that there was something very, I don't know, it reminded me of Kroll or something very not quaint, but supposed rustic, but also very
00:47:37
Speaker
very green, I don't know, I'm just just just just very sort of parochial rather than these massive, you know, vistas and stuff. Yeah. And there's a lot of use of words. Yeah. What's called? Yeah. Yeah. One one interesting point we haven't mentioned was that the its sense of place is non existent, apart from Cornwall. No, whereas Mallory mentioned loads of places like London, Dover, Canterbury, etc, etc.
00:48:05
Speaker
The film Excalibur mentions no place or whatever, apart from Cornwall. It's not even mentioned as being Britain. And that's why they didn't get away with so many accents at the beginning. Possibly. Yeah. It's a universal story. I think he wanted to say it in the world of myth rather than doing a pseudo-history. I don't.
00:48:26
Speaker
I don't think even Avalon is mentioned at the end, no. If you know your story, then you can sort of, that inferred, but otherwise, yeah. Yeah, it's not explicit.
00:48:40
Speaker
sort of expected some knowledge but on the other hand if it's not there it doesn't really matter I mean that was my favorite part of the film is those scenes at the end were just beautiful especially the boat sailing off with the three you know they have the hands up yeah that that pose and then the the sky with this tiny shaft of light shining on the um
00:49:00
Speaker
on the boat. It's just absolutely wonderful. I really like that. And I think, you know, going back to what we're saying about the filmmaker, maybe dropping the ball sometimes on plot at the expense of beautiful things, you know, that's a prime example of something that he's spent a lot of time on. There's a lot of time being spent on those shots, thinking about them. They tell so much without, you know, telling anything really.
00:49:28
Speaker
You don't mention Avalon. No, they don't. You could probably tell a lot of this story just in images. If you took a lot of the dialogue away, you could probably figure out what's going on. It's almost like a dream logic, isn't it, the film? Right.
00:49:47
Speaker
Should we wrap it up for there, for Excalibur? Well, if we're not going to talk about the bubble wrap wedding, then yeah. Oh yeah, the bubble wrap wedding and the animal noises. The animal noises, yeah. And we haven't talked about a Monty Python comparison because that was... Oh God, yes. They compliment each other so well. They really do. And I, you know, this is to my shame, there are certain films that I should have watched
00:50:10
Speaker
or books I should have read a lot earlier as a genre fan than I ever have. I only watched The Holy Grail, Monty Python's Holy Grail, at some point last year for the first time ever. No. Really? I'd seen Jabba Rocky and I'd seen The Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life, but I'd never seen
00:50:32
Speaker
um the holy grail because of my sort of bias against sort of this kind of stuff um but i really enjoy this sort of thing huh what say no to this sort of thing yeah well you know it's not it or at least there was killings in it i was happy then but um
00:50:51
Speaker
just I think at the beginning particularly I was like I was laughing because the shout the shouting and the the what was I was saying before when um yeah when um Arthur is very young and they're saying let the boy try let the boy try and it's just like let the boy try yes let the boy try let the boy try apparently almost all the dialogue was overdubbed
00:51:13
Speaker
Oh really? Which might account for its slightly odd quality. Well definitely with Merlin it does because sometimes I was thinking he's not even moving his lips. Yeah maybe that's it yeah but all the yeah like I said all the shouting from people it does. I think it makes more sense that they're shouting it into a microphone after they you know in a studio after they've shot the actual film.
00:51:37
Speaker
I just, it just really was reminiscent of that scene where they're shouting and not the French people on the battlements, but they're shouting.
00:51:44
Speaker
They're shouting and it just really, I was just laughing a lot at the beginning and then it sort of gets much more serious. It does have an innocence at the beginning, which is lost quite quickly. I think it does take, the filming scale of it does take itself very seriously. I don't think that's to its discredit necessarily, but it does mean that when you watch the Monty Python's Holy Grail afterwards, it's sort of, it's very refreshing change. Yeah, it cleanses the palette, doesn't it? A little bit. Anyway, yeah, let's wrap it up there.
00:52:14
Speaker
for part one and we'll join Brian Wigmore a little bit later on in the show. Hello and welcome to Mars Radio 14 the third best radio station in the Martian Space Force which by the way is the best space force in the solar system and in this episode we're going to be talking about dragons. So we sent Lieutenant Bungalow back to a round table in 12th century Britain.
00:52:44
Speaker
Can you hear me, bungalow? Just about half milk carton, it's pitch dark, so you have to speak up. I didn't realize there were no street lights in the olden days. Jeez. Oh, oh, oh, wait. Here comes a wobbly one. It's, uh, uh, hang on. It's, ah, man, it's wobbling all over the place. It's a fat guy on a horse. Only with a burning torch strapped to the saddle. Why is he a torch attached to his saddle? Little frickin' idea, half milk carton. Here, wait. I'll ask you. Excuse me, sir.
00:53:14
Speaker
Yeah, you might answer a few questions about dragons. Sir Arthur Pendragon to you. And no, I do not. I do not at all. Especially if you ask me about dragons. In fact, my name means dragon's head. I mean, is that a euphemism? No, I don't think so.
00:53:34
Speaker
Well, I hope not. What do you think? I think it'd be a fine name for an awful dank zomp, or like a human rock music group. A space rocket, that'd be good. Wait, I think there's already one of those. What? Who has seen fit to use my title? I shall cut them down. Relax, Tinkerbell. It happens in the future. My name is Lieutenant Bungalow of the Martian Space Force.
00:54:01
Speaker
And they've named the style of one-story house after me. It's just something they do. They're freaking idiots, I don't know. Anyways, it was Elon Musk, and he only named a dragon to prove drugs had no effect on him. Pardon me. You know, you know, Arthur Buff, magic dragon, song, Peter Paul Mary. What? You know, Buff, he was from Montelier. He used to hang around with Jackie Paper.
00:54:25
Speaker
kings would bow to the pair of them I bow to no man sir dead or alive well I mean what about Sir Lancelot what about him didn't he you know
00:54:37
Speaker
Kill you? Er, I don't think so. Oh, I don't know. I'm fairly sure he did. In the future. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's probably why you don't remember it. You humans. Ha ha ha. Hmm. I'll have to have a word with Merlin. I've to ask him about this torch strapped to my saddle anyway. It's supposed to guide me anywhere in the kingdom, but I have no clue where I am. And it's a fire hazard.
00:55:06
Speaker
I was wondering about that. Did you know how it's supposed to work? No, but Merlin's good at magic. He called this saddle light navigation. Wait, wait, wait. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. So you know magicians? Do you know any magician who is friendly with dragons? Certainly. And where does Sir Tanley live? Not Sir Tanley, certainly.
00:55:29
Speaker
Oh, oh yeah. Right, sorry. So where does he live? Camelot. Hey, do you want a lift? I could probably fit your horse into the rocket. The horse can stay here. It's a nightmare. Okay, I have milk cart. I don't know if you heard that, but I'm off to Camelot with Arthur. Well, actually wait. I realized I forgot my lunch. So I gotta swing by the studio first to pick it up. I'll give you a shot when I arrive. Thanks, bungalow. Safe travels.
00:55:59
Speaker
Hello, I'm Damaris Brown and this is The Judge's Corner, where I usually consider legal matters we as authors need to know about or which we might use in our stories. This month, though, I'm returning to my occasional series looking at aspects of the law which can be found in the science fiction and fantasy we read and watch. And today I'm delving into the film discussed in this month's podcast, John Bormann's Excalibur.
00:56:26
Speaker
The setting for this story of King Arthur and his knights is, of course, wholly ahistorical. Whoever Arthur may have been originally, he certainly wasn't riding around in the shining plate armour of the late middle ages, nor building shining stone castles in the middle of nowhere.
00:56:42
Speaker
Nonetheless, in Excalibur's amalgam of legend, myth, magic, and seriously anachronistic dresses, there are glimpses of historical English legal concepts, and the most notable being trial by combat.
00:56:58
Speaker
This arcane law was front and centre in film circles just a couple of years ago, as a result of Ridley Scott's The Last Duel. But it appeared some 40 years earlier in Excalibur when Lancelot battles Gawain to determine the guilt or innocence of Guinevere.
00:57:16
Speaker
It's important to understand that trial by combat wasn't simply a life or death fight between two men, at least not when it reached England with the Norman Conquest, by which time it had been practiced on the continent for some 500 years.
00:57:31
Speaker
It was in fact a formal judicial process bound about by rules and procedures, and founded on the same principle as the other trials by ordeal which had emerged in Anglo-Saxon England, such as an accused having to thrust his hand into boiling water, namely that what resulted would be the judgment of God, since he would ensure guilt was punished and innocence vindicated.
00:57:57
Speaker
This element of religious faith is retained in Excalibur, but the principle itself is distorted, so it's not a question of the Almighty intervening in a trial, producing a miracle if necessary. For when Arthur decrees Lancelot and Gawain should fight, he says, the champion shall meet and the truth shall be known, for by the law of God no knight who is false can win in combat with one who is true.
00:58:22
Speaker
In view of the bloodshed we've already seen by this point, and all that is to come as Morgana and Mordred rising power, this assertion seems somewhat naive to say the least. And that's before lawyers start arguing about what it means for a knight to be true. If Gawain sincerely believes Guinevere is guilty, how is he being false?
00:58:44
Speaker
Because trials by ordeal were faith-based, they were originally overseen by a priest, someone missing from the scene in Excalibur. Though we do see Lancelot praying beforehand, which was also usual, at least initially, with both parties spending up to three days in prayerful vigil. Yet even as early as the ninth century, there was theological disquiet over trial by combat, since it was seen as tempting God, tempting in the sense of testing him.
00:59:12
Speaker
requiring him to prove his power to ensure the right person won, something Pope Nicholas I decreed was blasphemous. But it wasn't until 1215 that the Fourth Lateran Council finally pronounced against such trials, ending all clerical oversight of them. Yet despite its misgivings, the Church wasn't above hiring champions to fight for it in trials regarding property disputes.
00:59:39
Speaker
With the growing sophistication of state judicial systems, religious opposition to judicial duels was echoed by legal criticism. An English jurist in the late 12th century wrote that trial by jury was to be preferred since justice was, seldom arrived at by battle. And as time progressed, trial by combat was seen as befouling everyone involved, including the judges who performed had to allow it if the requisite conditions were met.
01:00:08
Speaker
Secular authorities, and undoubtedly their subjects and citizens, also had doubts about the justice involved in trial by combat and its efficacy in discovering truth. And one 8th century ruler made provision for what should happen if the defeated competent were later found to be innocent.
01:00:27
Speaker
I'm not sure if this related only to civil matters though, or if it was in order to make provision for the man's family, because as far as criminal cases were concerned, the loser was likely to be long dead, either killed in combat or executed afterwards.
01:00:45
Speaker
The judicial deal seems to have been most popular and widely used in France, particularly among the nobility. But even here from the late 12th century the kings made attempts to restrict it. And in 1258 it was banned altogether, though barely 50 years later it was formally reinstated for criminal trials and in the meantime seems to have continued much as before and did so until the 16th century.
01:01:09
Speaker
In England too, there were attempts to curtail its use, with exemptions being granted to some people such as old or disabled men. Clergymen were exempt from 1176, the citizens of London early in the 12th century, and thereafter other towns and cities sought to purchase charters of exemption for their own people.
01:01:30
Speaker
As the crown drew more power to itself and its royal courts, legal duels faded away. And by the 1460s, when Thomas Malory was writing the Mort d'Arthur, on which Excalibur is based, judicial trial by combat was largely at an end, though it was not formally abolished until 1819. Duels continued to be fought in the 18th and 19th centuries, but these were private affairs, not part of the legal system.
01:01:59
Speaker
But if so many clerics, lawyers, rulers and ordinary people had doubts about try by combat, why did it last so long?
01:02:07
Speaker
Setting aside the matter of simple faith, there were sound secular arguments believing the matter to God or to chance. The king was seen as the ultimate court of appeal in the human realm, but use of trial by combat could allow the crown to step away from difficult decisions, particularly those involving nobles, or to avoid taking sides in politically dangerous squabbles.
01:02:31
Speaker
Trials by combat also gave a legal framework to contain violence in disputes that might otherwise have spun out of control into blood feuds or vendettas, while the aristocratic duels of chivalry provided ceremonial and a simulacrum of honour as well as a spectacle for a bloodthirsty general populace.
01:02:52
Speaker
And though victory would inevitably go to the stronger competent, not necessarily the one with truth on his side, a speedy wrong decision was accepted as better for social cohesion than a protracted, inconclusive investigation. It was a matter of preserving peace rather than serving justice.
01:03:14
Speaker
So it's ironic that trauma combat was a mechanism that thrived in a time of relatively weak state apparatus with unsophisticated legal systems and a lack of central authority. The exact opposite of what we're meant to believe of Arthur's idealized realm, especially as in Excalibur, he boasts that all his subjects have their own portion of happiness and justice. And he's insistent that his laws must bind everyone high and low
01:03:42
Speaker
otherwise they're not laws at all. Interestingly enough, in the original script for Excalibur, there is a scene where Arthur hears a legal case and delivers a Solomon-like judgment, giving credence to his claim of providing justice for his people, but there's nothing of the kind in the final film.
01:04:02
Speaker
But while trials by combat lack coherence in a properly functioning system of justice, they provide for exciting action, which is no doubt why there's a surfeit of them in La Morte d'Arthur, notwithstanding the paucity of them in 15th century reality. And since Mallory wasn't writing illegal treaties, he and Bormann after him doubtless felt justified in playing fast and loose with the rules which governed the trials in real life.
01:04:29
Speaker
These rules commenced with the basic fact that the necessary challenge for trial by combat could be issued only after legal proceedings were underway. In the case represented in Ridley Scott's The Lost Duel, the allegation of rape had already been tried by a lower court, and only after the King's Court of Appeal had investigated the matter was the duel allowed to proceed.
01:04:52
Speaker
This is in stark contrast to the scene at the round table in Excalibur, where there's no legal action commenced or contemplated and no investigation, no attempt at all by Arthur to look for evidence and resolve the matter without bloodshed.
01:05:07
Speaker
In England, two separate kinds of legal duels evolved. The duel of law, which covered civil and criminal matters and was open to everyone, and the duel of chivalry, largely restricted to the nobility and subject to specific criteria, first set down in France in 1306. The crime had to be capital, notorious and certain, the accused notoriously suspected, and combat the only means of procuring conviction and punishment.
01:05:36
Speaker
This last rule was echoed in England's Court of Chivalry later in the century under Richard II. The duel could only be allowed when they may not prove their cause by witness nor by no other manner.
01:05:50
Speaker
As a court process, indictments were filed with sworn statements given by both parties to the action setting out the accusations and defence. A late 13th century legal text gave templates to be followed, noting the need for precision in the allegations. Then, before combat began, another oath had to be taken by each man.
01:06:13
Speaker
I have neither eaten nor drunk anything, nor done or caused to be done for me any other thing, whereby the law of God may be abased, and the law of the devil advanced or exalted." That is, they had to swear they had no unholy, magical powers which might give them an advantage. Quite apart from the impiety involved, the courts were anxious to ensure parity between the combatants.
01:06:41
Speaker
A 13th century French jurist said that a knight couldn't challenge someone of lesser rank and expect to fight on horseback and in full armour, while the other had little or nothing. The two men must have equivalents of protection and weaponry.
01:06:57
Speaker
This is ignored in Excalibur, where we see Percival being knighted by Arthur, so he's made of equal status to Gawain, but that's the only equality between them, since Percival wears little more than rags and doesn't even have a saddle for the conveniently waiting horse.
01:07:14
Speaker
This requirement for equality pertained also to duels of law. But while the aristocratic Arthurian duels of chivalry might have an element of pageantry, this was lacking among the trials involving common folk, particularly towards the end of the era when judicial disapprobation reached its height.
01:07:33
Speaker
A judge who allowed one of the last duels in 1455 insisted the parties wear identical clothing and carry identical weapons, but they were to make their foul battle upon the most sorry and wretched green that might be found about the town. And if the weapons broke, as in fact happened, they were to continue with their bare hands for however many hours it took. And in a final humiliation, if they need any drink, they must take their own piss.
01:08:03
Speaker
The nose-biting, eye-gouging brawl that resulted, and which was the reality of the trials Mallory must have seen or known about, was a world away from the duel we see in Excalibur. What is also lacking, both in Mallory and the film, is Arthur taking responsibility for the duel as was expected of the monarch under the English Code of Chivalry. Although in Excalibur he tells Guinevere he can't be her champion because, I am your king and I must be your judge in this.
01:08:33
Speaker
we don't actually see him act as a judge. It was for the king to control judicial combat, and in particular he could end the fight at any point and demand the parties reconcile, and he alone could interpret its outcome. Yet in the film, having been beaten by Lancelot, Gawain pleads for mercy, yells at Guinevere is innocent and the matter ends there. In real life, an accuser who lost was unlikely to be executed for perjury having lied on oath,
01:09:04
Speaker
Indeed, if the loser was killed in the combat, he might still be dragged from the field and hanged in order to impress upon everybody that he was guilty in law.
01:09:15
Speaker
But to a lawyer, there's something even more important missing from the film than oaths and rules of procedure. Since trial by combat is a judicial exercise, there has to be a claim regarding an aspect of civil law or an allegation of a criminal offence. What actually is there in Excalibur to warrant a legal duel?
01:09:37
Speaker
In the original script, Guinevere is accused by Gawain of the murder of his brother, something which appears in Mallory and certainly provides an excellent reason for trial by combat.
01:09:47
Speaker
However, this was dropped, and in the film there is merely an insinuation of adultery that Lancelot is driven from the round table by a woman's desire, not the precise allegation required in real life, or even that given in Mallory where she's accused of being alone in her bedchamber with a wounded knight who is actually Lancelot.
01:10:09
Speaker
though the accused's failure to name him allows Lancelot to use legal trickery to swear to Guinevere's innocence without actually perjuring himself.
01:10:21
Speaker
Adultery was an offence in England in the Middle Ages, but largely a matter for the ecclesiastical courts where trial by combat wasn't an option. And while a finding of guilt might bring with it punishment and public disgrace, it certainly wasn't a capital crime. Yet on later learning that Guinevere and Lancelot are together, are the demands of Merlin. What must I do now? Kill them? That must, showing he's still talking as king and judge, not simply as an angry, cuckolded husband.
01:10:49
Speaker
It's unlikely this is meant to imply that common adultery is punishable by death throughout Arthur's realm, so we need to look deeper for the true accusation against Guinevere and Lancelot, and it's one that was also available in real life in the late Middle Ages. Treason.
01:11:06
Speaker
Until the 14th century, the offence of treason was pretty much whatever the king and his judges said it was. Then 1351 brought in the Treason Act, which remains part of UK law to this day. The first clause, as might be expected, declared it was treason to compass, that is, envisage, the death of the king or certain of his family. But the second clause states that it's treason if a man do violate the king companion, in other words, the queen.
01:11:34
Speaker
violate whilst now signifying the crime of rape. But then it included consensual sex, and that's how it seems to be defined in 1536, when the Grand Jury decided that Anne Boleyn and her supposed lovers were to be sent for trial, where the indictment reads that she procured Henry Norris to violate her, by reason whereof he did so, and they had illicit intercourse.
01:11:57
Speaker
and also that she incited her own natural brother George Boleyn to violate her, whereby he violated and carnally knew the said queen. As we all know, Anne and the men were executed, and Blackstone, the 18th century jurist, in his commentary on the treason act, spelled it out.
01:12:16
Speaker
By violation is understood carnal knowledge, as well without force as with it. And this is high treason in both parties, if both be consenting, as some of the wives of Henry VIII, by fatal experience, evinced. The plain intention of this law is to guard the blood royal from any suspicion of bastardy, whereby the succession to the crown might be rendered dubious. And yet,
01:12:43
Speaker
At the time, women tended not to be charged with adultery, only the man being held to be at legal fault. Anne and the others certainly died because of the allegations, as did Catherine Howard only a few years later. But in the indictment, there's a wealth of accusatory statements which did not remotely approach treason even then.
01:13:03
Speaker
And right at the end there's the accusation, probably equally implausible, that they compassed and imagined the king's death, which alone was needed to justify the sentence Henry required. It would appear that Cromwell wasn't convinced that consensual sex, even incestuous sex, was itself enough to come within the scope of the treason act, at least as far as Anne herself was concerned.
01:13:28
Speaker
But is this the threat hanging over Guinevere, Aslanslot and Gawain fight? The implicit accusation of treason by adultery, the breach of her allegiance to her husband the king, and with it a mandatory sentence of death?
01:13:43
Speaker
All we can be sure of is that it's Arthur's failing to deal properly with her subsequent adultery, which leads to Merlin being imprisoned, Morgana conceiving Mordred, and the land falling into ruin, because of the loss of the great sword of his fathers, after which the film is rightly named. The sword of power. Excalibur. Excalibur. Excalibur. Excalibur.
01:14:15
Speaker
This month's 75-word winner was Paranoid Marvin. The theme and genre were waste and science fiction, respectively. And I'm reading Marvin's triumphant entry, entitled, A Mission to Savor. We also have the winning 300-word challenge entry from January, which was won by her honor herself, the judge, with her entry, The Shirt on Your Back. A Mission to Savor by Paranoid Marvin.
01:14:45
Speaker
A waste of time. What is? Returning to the moon. Why? Well, you know Jeff. Your boss at NASA? That's him. He has a hankering for some... ...luna cheese. But hasn't it already been established that Earth's only natural satellite isn't comestible? Try telling Jeff that. Said he wants to make really sure this time.
01:15:16
Speaker
I thought he'd more of a sweet tooth. Why do you think the Mars Exploration Program got approved? Ah. The shirt on your back by the judge.
01:15:33
Speaker
Blood is always so damn difficult to clean off. Ditto brains. Unfortunately, my latest wearer had a very, very messy death. Still, at least I didn't get damaged, not even a rat bite afterwards. In the past, I was forever being slashed by a sword or ripped by a dagger, and you wouldn't believe the hours I've spent mending bullet holes recently.
01:16:00
Speaker
Of course, I don't have to clean myself, but being washed just isn't the same these days. In the past, there was a sensuality to it that made my fibres quiver, women at riverbanks beating me against sturdy rocks, the glorious heat of later laundry houses,
01:16:21
Speaker
It's all machines now, sterile and soulless. As for repairs, don't get me started on present-day mending skills. And with communal washing, there was a chance of encountering other unsourced clothes. Occasionally, I even met garments created by my own mage and would reminisce.
01:16:40
Speaker
Oh, he was a careless eater. No wonder self-cleaning was always the first power he gave us. Naturally, I've changed myself over the years. I've been shirt, night-shirt, chemise, shift, petticoat, blouse, long, short, ha, a raw cutty sock I was for one comely Scots girl, with sleeves without, collared or not. Ruffles and embroidery have come and gone.
01:17:08
Speaker
But my favourite embellishment remains black work, what I wore for my first murder. Black work indeed, you might say, but when the drunken bully wearing me beat a child to death I had to do something. Beguiling wearers is always easy. I simply inveigled the thug into drowning himself. Since then,
01:17:31
Speaker
To be honest, I've lost count of all I've killed. I'm no shirt of Nessus, though. Rather, think of me as Nemesis, punishing those who deserve it. But next time you're wearing a devastatingly exquisite shirt, remember me.
01:17:58
Speaker
Welcome back to Mars Radio 14, the third best radio station in the Martian Space Force. My name is Captain Half Milk Carton, and I'm joined by Lieutenant Bungalow, who has brought a medieval human called Arthur Pendragon back to Mars to, uh, why are you here? I told you, I forgot my sandwiches had milk carton. Gadzooks!
01:18:22
Speaker
Am I deceived, or do I see a giant creature the size of the Kingdom of Wales floating in the sky above us? It is truly a remarkable sight. That it is. That thing is every space captain's best friend. Theontoglobial Spire. A multi-limbed space jellyfish that floats on cosmic energy.
01:18:52
Speaker
Can I speak with you? You can try. It wouldn't work though.
01:18:57
Speaker
A radiation dose from just one of those tentacle bobs is enough to kill, I mean like a flingorian bull, man! Haha! It absorbs the photonic amplitude from the rotational drive of the large interstellar bulk carriers, and it gives them a smaller interplanetary craft, you know, like the ones in this system. Yeah! 87% of the Martian Space Force operates using this star system's automobile, Spire. Sal. No, no, no, Spire!
01:19:26
Speaker
Spire, yeah. It's probably hard for you to understand. I mean, in human terms, it could be described as someone who steals from the rich and gives to the poor. Hey, maybe think of it like a knight who sees someone with plenty and then gives that plenty to someone without plenty. But wouldn't the person without plenty then have plenty? Yes. So, the Onto Goblin Spire. Nice. Knight? Yes, yeah. Knight. It's a metaphor. For what? An Ataglobian Spire. Right.
01:19:56
Speaker
Then wouldn't the knight then have to go to the person who had nothing but now has plenty and take that plenty and give it back to the person who had plenty but now has nothing? Yes. So they'd end up right back where they started. Which is exactly why the Anthoglobie inspires every space captain's best friend. Welcome back. We're here with Brian Wigmore.
01:20:25
Speaker
I'm going to kick off the second half of the conversation by asking, how do you draw on the Arthurian myths for your own work, Brian? Well, Dan, I'm glad you asked. Good. We never know how. It's almost like we had that question lined up.
01:20:41
Speaker
Okay, so I'm writing, I'm currently writing a young adult series, series title is called Earthworms. And the first book is called The Green Stem Oracle. And in that, it's a contemporary set, sort of environmental fantasy. And in that, there's the concept of Arthur returning in order to save the land. That's sort of part of Mallory as well. And at the end of Mallory,
01:21:13
Speaker
So Mallory's text is called La Morte d'Arthur, the death of Arthur. But in fact, despite that being the title, it's not clear that the death of Arthur ever actually takes place. Because Mallory at the end says, he was, someone was buried, but it might have been someone else. And on the tombstone, it says, basically Arthur, the king who was and who will be in the future as well. So there's always been this idea of Arthur returning.
01:21:40
Speaker
And I've sort of taken that on as being in an environmental sense, that the energy of Arthur, if you like, as someone around whom other people can rally, might be used as a kind of an environmental sense to help save nature from the forces that are attacking it. So tell us a little bit more about earthworms.
01:22:05
Speaker
because this is a work in progress, isn't it? We're looking forward to it. I've read the manuscript for the first book and the second book, so it's well on its way to being completed. Yeah, I'm about to start the fourth book in possibly seven or maybe six. Have you read the manuscripts for the first? I've read the first two. First two. Okay, so tell us a little bit more about
01:22:33
Speaker
about the storyline and how it's drawing on the Arthurian mythos. Well it sort of features an environmental group who
01:22:44
Speaker
are magically adept and they're trying to save what I'm calling the land's energy matrix which is basically the set of sort of lay lines and sacred sites from being corrupted by a group of ne'er-do-wells who are trying to attack it in order to sort of deplete the
01:23:07
Speaker
the mood of the population, if you like, to induce a set of despair, a sense of despair, and so they can sort of take power. And it later turns out they're working for a supernatural force that wants to achieve much the same thing. And the idea of Arthur is brought in at the end of the first book.
01:23:25
Speaker
And it suggested that certain characters might embody elements of the Arthurian myth in order to provide an impetus for the fight against this sort of bad force. And that goes through several ups and downs. I won't say too much more about it at the moment, but it sort of draws on the themes of whether you can, to what extent you can adopt
01:23:53
Speaker
prior characters as your own energy if you like and make use of them or and what that means for your own identity and whether it's a good or a bad thing you know what the pitfalls of it are going to be and the strengths of it are going to be and to understand these images from previous myth are communal forces if you like that people can adopt. Well that's one of the points we mentioned isn't it in the first half that the Arthurian myth works as
01:24:21
Speaker
the myth for the nation or the country or the land, be a bit more vague about it. But it also works as the individual. So the individuals, I guess the characters in the earthworms can pick up the various, the mantle of that myth and revivify it. Yes, but that depends. Sometimes it's not necessarily a good thing or they invest too much of their ego in it and that then sort of precedes the downfall. So they have to learn to cooperate with it, if you like.
01:24:51
Speaker
And there are animal sidekicks, sort of, aren't there? Yeah. Which is a theme that runs through your books. It is. Yeah. So in Earthworms, once a character does something which is called opening, so it sort of becomes, has a kind of like a spiritual experience with regards to the natural world, they find that they can call on an animal, they can summon.
01:25:18
Speaker
And in the second book, they find that these animals can take them into this parallel existence called the worm words, where mythical characters exist in reality. But these animals, they don't talk unlike the sort of shamanic totems I use in my other series that I'm working on, which is the Fire State of the series.
01:25:41
Speaker
Well, now earthworms, I'm getting the sense that that's not spelt like the normal way we'd expect. It isn't, no. It's spelt worms, it's spelled with a Y, as in the dragon. Yes, okay, so that's a little clue, isn't it? And the worm words are spelt the same way. That's right, yeah. So yes, dragons and draconic creatures do feature as well.
01:26:02
Speaker
Okay, so are there any sort of thematic similarities between this and the firestealers? Both are very heavily ingrained in myth. They have a very strong mythological foundation, it seems to me. Yeah, so what I was doing with the firestealers, of which the first two have been published, that also has a kind of
01:26:32
Speaker
ecological or environmental bent but it's coming at it from a slightly different angle which is this world where the ideas of the sky god and the earth goddess have been deliberately split apart if you like and then made to fight each other so that's the basis on which the various cultures in the world have been based and the idea of the whole story is to bring these two together
01:26:59
Speaker
for your health of humanity and the world in general. And that's not, in earthworms, it's more straight, well, slightly more straightforward battle against forces which wish to degrade nature for their own ends.
01:27:17
Speaker
I mean, Dan and I both know you quite well from the times we've spent together on Chronicles and the meetups. And I know from when I first met you, you know, we have a lot in common with respect to things like interest of Avebury, that area, Silbury Hill, and all that, you know, that's very much
Influence of Landscapes on Writing
01:27:40
Speaker
It's not something you write about, but it's very much important in your writing that the stuff I've read of the the goddess project and the first two earthworms books, the sense of the land being
01:27:55
Speaker
So obviously having its own personality or its own character rather, but also this ethereal, you know that feel you get around sort of West Kennet, Longbarrow, Avebury or those sites, those ancient sites and the classical cheesefoot head, that sense of place.
01:28:18
Speaker
You might have to explain what Cheesefoot Head is to UK listeners. The word Cheesefoot doesn't sound very attractive, does it? Well, it's a condition you get. 26% of our listeners are from the United States, you know. Oh, well, Denmark. So they might not know. Cheesefoot is a condition you get when you eat too much rocker for. So, oh.
01:28:43
Speaker
Yes, it's a punch bowl in Hampshire, so it's a natural, I don't know how it's made, so don't ask me about that. Glacial activity, I think. It's glacial activity and it's a really amazing atmospheric place. I went there once with my sister a few Christmases ago, I think it was the 28th, around the 28th and it had been snowing and
01:29:08
Speaker
It was that time of day where, you know, it's about three, four in the afternoon when I was getting dark and it's such a strange liminal feeling to it. Yeah. And and this hair ran across the white snow and just ran as the first first and only hair I've ever seen went absolutely helpful ever. And then a deer and then a pheasant one after the other. And it was so
Ley Lines and Earth Energies
01:29:35
Speaker
symbolic, it seemed like, oh my God, this means something, you know, and it's just informed as well by the sense of the place, there is this energy, this atmosphere there. Yeah, it's a, so it's basically a hilltop, but looking down into this vast, sweeping cauldron of landscape. And yeah, those places just, they excite a kind of sense, yeah, that sense of meaning, I suppose you want there, you want them to mean something. Yeah.
01:30:04
Speaker
Yeah. Do these sorts of places, do they live on the ley lines and those sorts of what are taken to be networks of energy? The concept of ley lines has been a bit changed since Alfred Watkins first came up with it. He came up with this idea that there were straight lines linking sites of churches and so on that meant that marked ancient trackways.
01:30:33
Speaker
And in the probably in the 70s, I suppose people got hold of the idea that they actually were lines of psychic energy. And that's the that's what I've used in earthworms. I've gone with that kind of thing. But you don't name them to you don't like the St. Michael's Mount, you know, that one, it's not it's the St. Michael's ley line, you don't name it that do you?
01:30:53
Speaker
I haven't done anything with the St Michael's line in Earthworm's name. But I've got various ancient sites, like there's the Devil's Jumps features in two of the books, which is a site of a line of five barrows on the South Downs quite near here, though I've cheekily transplanted it to Oxfordshire. And there are various sites like the White Horse, Wayland, Smithey and so on that I use directly. And there's others that I've made up.
01:31:22
Speaker
Yeah, a lot of that is drawing on. I mean, I still have a feeling for those places. But when I was in my 20s, I get I got very caught up with those ideas. And they made a strong impression on me. Well, that was that book. Was it The Black Magician and the and the sort of Black Alchemist? Black Alchemist. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. These were so these were books written by someone called Andrew Collins. And his big thing was what he called psychic questing.
01:31:51
Speaker
where you could sort of attune yourself to a sort of like a kind of clairvoyance where you would uncover the answers to various mysteries about the landscape or things that were going on or where people were, black magicians were sort of doing things they ought not to be doing and disrupting the earth energies. And that's the kind of idea I've basically stolen for the earthworm stories.
01:32:21
Speaker
Well, it was also it's your love. I mean, when I first met you were talking about your big Sussex novel, which never was a very tightly kept secret and very legendary. That's the one thing I'm sort of hoping doesn't get subsumed into your other writing of the one day it becomes something you write.
Writing Challenges and Processes
01:32:42
Speaker
Separately possibly although that that that was the big Sussex novel or black magic on the Sussex downs as I call it was a spin-off from My first novel which I've recently had another look at And might well end up finishing at some point this red silence green song. No, that's in between actually This is something this is actually something that was set in Sussex and
01:33:07
Speaker
and again features earth energies to some extent, but it also merges it with ideas about Atlantis and the Old Testament view of God and the fairies, all kinds of stuff like that. Whether anything will come of it, I'm not sure, but I'm hoping that eventually something might.
01:33:32
Speaker
surely something's going to happen with respect to the mandala praxis. So perhaps you could give, because the fire stealers is, I hope you're not going to do a Robert Jordan on us is what we're going, what I'm going to say. And I've mentioned this before and everybody's eagerly waiting it because you've built up a loyal following and the fire stealers is a great series. And the mandala praxis, which is book three in the series,
01:33:59
Speaker
You're keeping us on tenterhooks. So how can you give can you give us a progress report on how? Okay, I have about 11 chapters written. So it's between the third and the quarter of the book. I have it all plotted out. But I'm not quite happy with the ending I have for it. I think I think it works in logical sense. But it doesn't quite have enough oomph. And every now and then I'll go back to it and
01:34:28
Speaker
try and hope that the inspiration will come to me for what needs to happen to really inspire me to basically write the whole thing. What are your writing processes like? Perhaps we could go into that.
01:34:45
Speaker
Yeah, because people have different ways of approaching writing. One of the things that we've had lots of authors on, we've had agents, publishers and people have had different ways of looking at the whole thing, the whole kit and the kaboodle from the craft aspect to the industrial practices and everything else.
01:35:06
Speaker
It becomes more and more apparent to me, as we talk to lots of different people, that there's no one correct answer. I mean, you can maybe pick out the commonalities across, let's say, case studies. So everybody's got their case study, what worked or works for them. But it's not necessarily going to work for everybody, but you can pick out certain common elements and you can maybe work your way towards achieving that. So, you know, tell us about how it works for you and maybe about the the publishing route as well. I mean, you and I had a very similar experience.
01:35:38
Speaker
Yeah, so there's that classic division between planners and panzers in terms of how you approach a novel and I think really most people fall somewhere between the two. So planner being well someone planning obviously in a panzer being somebody who writes by the seat of their pants basically discovering as they go. Yeah I need to know where I'm going to some extent or I need to have
01:36:04
Speaker
Something to aim for even if it even if I suspected something that will change by the time I get there and what I tend to do What I did for first two five students book specifically is I had a series of waypoints if you like Throughout the story and I work my way from one to another but Continuingly updating my plans as I went on to take account of what I just written and
01:36:34
Speaker
So if I wrote something that didn't quite fit with what I planned, I'd let it lie because usually it would suit the characters that I were writing about. But I'd then have to rework my plans onwards, which could be quite an involved process. Just a continuing updating, really.
01:36:57
Speaker
And does that take a while, does that add on more to say, because you see, I always thought you were a strict potter. And I thought that you, one of the delays was because you weren't happy with a plot and you like everything.
01:37:12
Speaker
you know, A, B, C, D, this is how I'm going. I didn't realise that you were then having to retcon or tinker with stuff you'd already written. Yeah, I think I'm more of a plotter than I am in that I can set out a plot and it would seem to me to be fairly to cover everything. And then I realise as I write that in fact, it
01:37:35
Speaker
it covered only 25% of everything. So there were large gaps missing. I sort of made assumptions about what things meant or how they were going to work. And I don't have to fill in the gaps and that would then change the plans again. Writing the third book in a series as well is quite difficult because you're having to fit in obviously with everything that's already happened.
01:37:58
Speaker
which hasn't really been a problem. What's been a challenge for the third book is trying to make sure that all the characters I've built up over the first two books have enough to do that. Yeah, I don't want to just in just busy work, they have to contribute to the ending of the entire story. I can't just leave them out. And it's it's that that's been the challenge really. And the climax of the third, the third book really needs to be
01:38:28
Speaker
bigger than the climax of the first or the second. They need to climax the entire series as well as the third book. Is the third book is the last in the series? Well, I'm thinking of it as the third book. I'm hoping it's going to be able to come in as one book. It's possible, I suppose, that it might need to be split into two, like the last film of any decent sized series these days.
01:38:55
Speaker
Well, when it's made into a movie, they'll split it into two anyway, so maybe you should just make it one book. Yeah, exactly. Well, it starts off with seven books, didn't it? Yeah. Oh, that's the idea. Well, the original idea was based around seven locations, so it made sense.
01:39:14
Speaker
to have seven books. But I fairly quickly realized that that wasn't going to work. It was just going to be too much. It wasn't necessary, really. It would make much more sense to have the story happen in a shorter frame. And also, in fact, the seven locations it was based on, in the end, I decided not to really use that scheme. So it's kind of like a grandiose scheme I came up with early on and then decided to abandon.
01:39:43
Speaker
As I said, the plan for the earthworms is for seven as well, and that's based on seven objects, which is easy to adhere to. But I might have two of those objects occur in the same book. But they're a lot shorter and simpler than the firestealers ones. When you started the firestealers, did you have
01:40:04
Speaker
Earthworms as an idea already coalescing, or did it come as part of the writing of Firestealer? I'm thinking about when you finished Earthworms, have you got, okay, and then this is gonna be my next big project, or is it gonna be, we'll see what happens. No, Earthworms came about completely independently of the Firestealers. This was back in early 2018.
01:40:33
Speaker
And I was browsing in more stones and I saw these nonsense products which spin off of Harry Potter sort of basically trying to get teenagers involved actual actual magic so they were basically magic sets for teenagers, but Harry Potter based and it occurred to me that
Environmental Themes in Storytelling
01:40:55
Speaker
if Harry Potter had been given that given that the Harry Potter series had caused so much interest in things like magic, if it had been about the environment instead, would it have generated as much interest in the environment as it had in magic? So I thought, well, maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't. But it's an you know, what is it? Are there any books like that around trying to do that? No,
01:41:25
Speaker
should I have a go at writing on myself? So I thought, well, you know, why not see what happens? If the bones of the story, but the Harry Potter, the magic is almost incidental. Although, you know, you could say that children, you know, he said children are kind of divine in a strange sense, because there's, you know, they sort of have everything about them, they're all potential, they could become anything.
01:41:50
Speaker
So there is that sense of children and magical, and that makes the basis of the story. But the bones of it, of it being the chosen one story, which is the same as Luke Skywalker or King Arthur or Christ or whatever it is, if the bones of the story are the same, then I don't think it matters about the cosmetic stuff that becomes
01:42:17
Speaker
the stuff that you see on the shop shelves. Isn't there a political element for you, Brian, in that anyway, because of your care for the environment you're investing in? Well, I mean, yeah, it would be fantastic if I was able to inspire any activism, if you like, in that direction. And I think I seem to remember at the time that it was just after the apartment school shootings in Florida, and there was a lot of exposure of the teenage activists, gun control activists that had come out of that.
01:42:47
Speaker
and so I think that was in my mind as well. But what actually inspired the story really was something that was happening quite close to here where there's a place quite close to here where I walk and a property company had bought up the farm on the other side of the road and they just bulldozed this row of hedges
01:43:09
Speaker
And it turned out for no reason because they didn't even need to use the land that the hedges wrong They'd sort of done it in order to say they could turn their vehicles, but it turned out that they could do something else with them instead and I developed this fantasy in my head of being able to
01:43:24
Speaker
magically make those vehicles break down or even burst into flames when they crossed a particular line and no one would know it was me that had done this.
01:43:40
Speaker
And I had this whole scenario play out of my head where they just kept driving up more vehicles to tow away the vehicles that broken down. Those would break down as well. And they get really frustrated and I'd be in the background like twirling my moustache and laughing. Essentially, you had a fantasy about littering the countryside with loads of JCBs. I'm afraid so, yeah. But in the end, they'd be covered with a huge mound of earth like Silbury Hill and then everyone would be happy.
01:44:03
Speaker
Oh, OK, fair enough. But then you then you're opening yourself up for a horror story about these zombie JCBs coming out of the earth to wreak revenge. Or the mound, the marble arch, because that's what it sounds like, the marble arch mound. Yeah, well, you know, if it inspires other people to write stories about zombie JCBs, then, you know, I'll count that. There's definitely a straighter video film to be made there. Yeah, and I'll insist it's issued only on VHS.
01:44:34
Speaker
Absolutely. Is that because Blu-ray? No, surely streaming services would have less of an environmental impact. Oh, probably. Oh, Chris, you've revealed. Depends on how big the server is. Depends on how big the server farm is. Yes, but it might be used for data mining as well at the same time. You don't see that there's no right answer to these things. No, there's no right answer to anything. Look, we've done done mine. You're going to have to cut it again. A proper, a proper ending to this.
01:45:05
Speaker
What is conversation? Well, eventually, but I'm thinking more about your creative output with earthworm seven books. Yes. Oh, no, that okay. They're going at full speed. I'm quite happy with how they're going. And what about I mean, I suppose we should mention that some of these are going to, you know, do you have a publishing model idea for them? Or, you know, what, what somebody might be thinking, right, where can I get hold of these?
01:45:34
Speaker
And they're not your friends, so they can't read them. I don't have a publishing strategy at the moment. I'm hoping that fairly soon. See, when I started them, I thought that, you know, young adult environmental fantasy would be a big thing pretty soon. It seems a no brainer to me, but it hasn't happened in the five years since. And as a
01:46:04
Speaker
a pretty much an unknown author. I think my best strategy would be to wait and see if anyone else publishes something fairly similar or starts the genre off if you like. There's the danger of that being a rather long wait. Yes, possibly. But I think as long as I'm still working on the series, I'm happy to do that because at least it will mean then that I'll have the whole thing finished.
01:46:36
Speaker
when that happens. I'm keeping my eye out so it might happen soon in which case I'll get going. Well apparently we're quite big in Denmark. If we were big in Sweden we might go to Greta Thunberg to guest on the podcast and then you could pitch to her.
01:46:59
Speaker
She definitely loved that. Just don't tell her about the JCBs you've dumped all over the country. I mean, someone, one of my more enthusiastic teenage readers suggested that its time might not be quite yet because
01:47:19
Speaker
young adults are sort of overloaded with crises at the moment. With doom and gloom. Even a story that has a happy ending to the end, which incorporates the environmental crisis might be shunned, as it were, in favour of escapism. I'm not sure how true that is. I tend to think that
01:47:42
Speaker
stories with, if it's grounded in mythology and we've already established that it is, then it can be, again, the environmental stuff, even though it's an essential part of the storyline, the story can also exist outside of that and exist as a story in and of itself.
01:48:02
Speaker
which it probably does because it's drawing on very ancient modes and themes in storytelling. But Brian wants to pitch it to young adult audiences. So therefore the content is, I would suspect a bit more, you have to be a bit more canny with how you handle it, you know, because it's a particular demographic he's pitching it to or he wants to read it. So it's not really about the
01:48:29
Speaker
the overarching archetype of the story, but actually the theme of the story. It does be. But I would counter that and say, well, look at Harry Potter or look at his dark materials as well. These are based on very ancient stories and very ancient structures. And they're the books that have got the most resonance with young readers and with adults as well.
01:48:58
Speaker
When we had Tade on last month, he was saying how much he loves his dark materials, and we both do as well. Harry Potter, the structures of that are ancient, very, very ancient. Personally, I think earthworms will be onto a winner as long as you can get somebody
01:49:17
Speaker
somebody you know who has the foresight to say yes because it's grounded in those ancient stories it has contemporary relevance but the the point of the Arthurian myth or one of the points of the Arthurian myth is that the land is always in crisis and you're always waiting for Arthur to return so it doesn't really matter it doesn't matter that that there may be of a specific
01:49:42
Speaker
crisis that is newsworthy in this specific point in time because the land is always in need of revivification. It's always it needs the next generation to revivify it because the old order has become corrupted or complacent or decadent or a combination of the above. That's always the story. It's always the story and so it takes that the chosen one to
01:50:11
Speaker
upend the order, but in the right way, not to become a corrupt version, a facsimile of what's come before, but to make the old order see right. So Luke Skywalker doesn't kill his dad. He makes him see that he was blind all the time.
01:50:33
Speaker
et cetera, et cetera. So Arthur is, he says at the end of the film, I didn't realize my soul was so empty until it was filled up by the truth of the Grail. That's the same thing. I think if you're basing your story on something that is very ancient and it's obviously been given a proper plot, let's say, not like the Arthurian opera plot, then
01:50:59
Speaker
I don't think you should limit it to the topical nature of the story. I think there's much more to it than that. And you're a clever writer and you're a brilliant writer.
01:51:15
Speaker
There is a topical element to it, but there's much more going on underneath. It's, you know, it's like all great books. They're like icebergs. You can see a bit on the top, but if you want to, you can dig down and you can just keep on digging and keep on digging and you'll mind truth after truth. And you'll find that there's a load of complexity there. And that's where the richness is because people want that. Even if they don't know, they want a book with deep thematic resonance. They do. That's what they want because all books
01:51:44
Speaker
essentially are retellings of old stories in some way, yours is a bit more explicit in that. I think it's got, I wouldn't have said that it's got any more or less chance of being published by trying to make it resonate with what's in the news.
Pitching Environmental Stories to Young Adults
01:52:01
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I don't think that's the point, though. Sorry, Brian, can I just tell you about your book? You can certainly stay there, so you carry on. Well, no, I was just going to say... Let us educate you about your books. I think what you're trying to do, Brian, you know, is to get some kind of
01:52:25
Speaker
Banner for these for young people to actually take an interest in the environment as the people who are going to be able to I'm not saying that's your mo you know your your your mandate, but You know from conversations. We've had I think
01:52:41
Speaker
that is such an important part of earthworms whether it's its genesis or what you or its legacy um but to say yeah i mean well everything Dan's just said about themes and stuff is fine but i don't think young adults think like that when they pick up a book i think they think about something that's interesting to them and i think that yeah i agree they don't think about it i think that's why it's important for them
01:53:03
Speaker
to for Brian, or well, if this is where you're doing your pitching, if you're pitching is if it's going to come up and become become a thing for teenagers soon, or whenever, then that is when you release it, not just throwing it at the worst, not the worst time, but at any time into the market. I think I think it does it does need Yeah, I do need to pick the right time. I mean, part of what it part of its inspiration was something I heard from
01:53:31
Speaker
I know some people who work in nature conservation charities, for example, and they'd say that it's quite easy to get younger kids interested in nature, but you tend to always lose them in the teenage years. So I wondered if it was possible. I don't think I could really write for younger kids, but I wondered if it was possible to try and write something that might recapture them with the kind of story that
01:53:57
Speaker
that has relationships and interpersonal stuff and is fast-paced and so on. But I think it does, rather than just throw it at the publishing industry, it probably does need a bit more care in its timing because we know that what publishing really likes is something that's already been successful but with a bit of a twist.
01:54:26
Speaker
Well, the next time we have an agent or a publisher on the podcast, that's a good question. We'll put a pin in that one. Yeah, actually I'm interested in what they think of that perception because I know quite a few people share it. It seems to be borne out by what's actually published, but is it actually true? Well, do you want to follow the trend or do you want to be the trend? But it's very difficult to be the trend, isn't it?
01:54:54
Speaker
If you someone has got to be. Well, yeah, but if you it would be easier if you're someone with already with an established following. And then maybe it's not because people because publishers don't like people to go off away from their current brand. Yeah, I mean, that would be easier. What it would be easier is if I was a celebrity. Well, why work on that then become an actor? And then I want I wonder if anyone's actually
01:55:20
Speaker
gone for a particular way of becoming famous as a means of then getting something published. It's less work than writing a book, isn't it? They write a book as well. But by the point you become famous, you get somebody else to write it for you. I think you're struck on something there. You're probably not the first person to strike on it, but it's an epiphany. All has become clear
01:55:49
Speaker
Assassination, that seems quite easy. There was silence in the land. Yeah, I'm just wondering if it's my mic. No. Are you there? Oh, yeah. Sorry. Because sometimes one of us hangs. We'll edit that bit out. Okay. And that bit.
01:56:16
Speaker
Um, I guess that is fine. We can edit all this out. It all comes out and watch. Is there anything else you want to talk about? In fact, I'll, I'll put that back in. Is there anything else you want to talk about Brian before we wrap up the episode? I don't think so. Okay. Well, shall we ask the, the usual questions being what they are? What are you reading at the moment?
01:56:45
Speaker
I'm reading a young adult book called Corbinic by Katherine Fisher, which is a modern sort of retelling actually of the Fisher King story.
Book Recommendations and Podcast Experiences
01:56:57
Speaker
Very good. So which aspect of it? So the one that you related about him going to the banquet? Yeah, so it's... Sorry, I didn't hear. Did you say this was a new book?
01:57:12
Speaker
No, no, it's published in 2002. And I've actually read it before, but it's well, two things actually put me in mind a bit. One was the whole Excalibur thing. But also I remember that its main character has the same first name, Cal, as the character of the my first novel that I've recently had another look at. Oh, no. Cal is the name of the main character in the novel I'm writing at the moment as well. Is it? That's bookie. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. OK. So it's basically he's
01:57:43
Speaker
boy and his late teens in North Wales who leaves his mother because she's too much work and she's an alcoholic with regular psychotic episodes and he goes to stay with his uncle but en route he has a bit of a weird episode where he gets off at the wrong train station and finds himself in the castle hotel which is basically an analogue of the Fisher King's castle.
01:58:09
Speaker
and he fails to ask the question about what's going on and he ends up at the stage at the moment he ends up with his uncle and he's weird things happening to him. I like Catherine Fisher, I've read a few books over the years, it's very well written. That sounds very cool actually. And the second question is what book would you recommend as required reading for our listeners? Ridley Walker.
01:58:37
Speaker
as not an author or a book name. Oh, it's a book name. This doesn't have to be Arthurian related. No, no, no, no, no. Ridding Walker by Russell Hoban is an absolutely fantastic book. It's set in a it's a post apocalyptic book set in Kent. And it's written in the first person by a young man who's had is a kind of like a shaman for his people.
01:59:05
Speaker
and it's written in a kind of like debased version of English which nonetheless is very poetic because it sort of combines some words and changes the meanings of others and it's got its own whole mythology. It's unique and a tour de force and
01:59:25
Speaker
Not everyone would get on with it. In fact, possibly the majority of readers who try it. Okay, well, you're probably not selling this required. It's brilliant. It is brilliant. It is as brilliant and idiosyncratic as Nicole Williams's performance as Merlin. Okay.
01:59:43
Speaker
That's all very well, well and good. But when I was, I guess, did on another podcast and I was asked what's required reading, I said The Goddess
Podcast Wrap-up and Farewell
01:59:54
Speaker
Project. So, you know, when you do these podcasts, you find out who your friends are, don't you?
02:00:00
Speaker
Oh yes. Terrible. Don't you mean Man of War? Yeah, that is. Ridley Walker. Yes, it's the war that I was going for there. Man of War, yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, it's gone. The moment's gone. And I think so's the episode. There goes the episode. Brian, thanks so much for joining us. It's been really, really wonderful. Your welcome. It's been far more enjoyable than I expected. It's nice to see you as well. It's been ages since we've done so.
02:00:28
Speaker
Yeah, because we meet quite well, we used to meet quite frequently and it's been less frequent the last couple of years. So we'll have to rectify that and make sure we can see you properly in the future. Yeah, that'd be good. Okay. Thanks again. Thank you. Bye.
02:00:59
Speaker
This episode of Crohn's Cast was brought to you by Dan Jones and Christopher Bean, with our special guest, Brian Wiggler. Additional content was provided by Damaris Brown, Brian Sexton, Jay Starloper and Paranoid Marvin. Special thanks to Brian Turner and the staff at Crohn's and thanks to you for listening. Don't forget to like, subscribe, rate and review our podcast and join the world's largest science fiction and fantasy community for free at sffcronicles.com.
02:01:29
Speaker
Join us next month when our guest will be the author Toby Frost and we'll discuss Mervyn Peake's seminal work, the first book of the Gormungast trilogy, Titus Grove.