The Mists of Avalon (1979)

This novel is much like the two settings it describes, the mythical/historical world of Camelot, and the mystical world of Avalon. The well known characters play out their roles more or less as you remember them from other writers, but the focus on the female characters and their experiences of these times led me into a seldom traveled land. I have read many of Ursula K. Leguin’s works, as well as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, but The Mists of Avalon is a far more complete and complex exploration of the heart of the Goddess. I thought that the lack of battles and combat and action would make the story slow, but at just the right times lightning strikes. Start reading this work and let Zimmer enchant you. ( )

One of the most well written novels probably of the 20th century. But once you learn a little about the author it immediately puts you on the fence and your morals kick in. I tried so hard to just enjoy the story and forget about her and husbands actions...…..but It was impossible. It just got in the way of the story. ( )

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3765102.html

One of those classic works of fantasy which I must have first read soon after it was published in 1983, and which is now tarnished by association with its author's personal history of child abuse.

The novel has some merits, but it has deeper flaws than may be initially apparent. It's great to take a traditionally male story - King Arthur, Lancelot, Galahad, etc etc - and tell it mainly from the point of view of the women in the story, in particular Morgaine who is very much the villain of the original legendarium - Arthur's half-sister, mother of their incestuously conceived son Mordred who eventually kills his own father. The book is a thousand pages long, but doesn't drag; we know what the ending is going to be, but the journey there is exciting and somewhat magical, with three different versions of Glastonbury coexisting in parallel strands of the same geography, two of them accessible only by the adept.

But. A lot of readers took to the portrayal of lovely paganism in contrast with rigid and blinkered Christianity, and sighed when at the end the Christians largely won. But the portrayal of Christianity is much darker than the reality of the time. The sexually repressive arm of recent Christianity has been transplanted by Bradley to the Dark Ages. Actual research on medieval Celtic Christianity shows that it was much more relaxed, including saints who actually performed abortions. The key baddie, the puritanical bigot bishop Patricius, is obviously meant to be St Patrick, who is supposedly buried at Glastonbury (though Downpatrick will disagree). But the real St Patrick seems to have been relatively relaxed about sex; he was much more upset about theft and murder. One of his two surviving works is a letter pleading for the freedom of enslaved kidnap victims. (You can read what you want into his autobiography's allusion to an otherwise unidentified sin committed when he was fifteen). Even in my teens, I felt that Bradley's portrayal of him was rather unfair.

On top of that, the paganism espoused by most of the key characters is actually rather repressive too. Arthur and Morgaine conceive Mordred in a drug-fuelled pagan ritual which they are given no choice about participating in. Avalon's women have no more choice about which men they are given to than Camelot's women do; the only difference is that the Lady of the Lake personally determines the fate of her subjects in Avalon, whereas patriarchal Camelot is more diffuse. (And, gulp, a mother figure deciding who the young people in her care will have sex with, some of them well below what we'd consider the age of consent today, is very creepy given what we now know about the writer.) Avalon also fetishises virginity more than the Christianity portrayed here. (See this really good analysis by Alexandra Lindstrom, from 2005, on these and other points.) I hope that those readers who developed an interest in paganism based on this book were alert to the negative nuances as well.

So, yes, interesting to return to it after many years, but its flaws have become more obvious with time. ( )

Ugh, Gwenhwyfar. You're really effing annoying.

Everything's too simple.

I'll stick to my guilty pleasure of the made-for-TV movie. :) ( )

women's viewpoint and Pagan perspective, sort of