Lev Grossman on his version of King Arthur in the Bright Sword
"For me that meant finding the aspects of Arthur's world, the world of 6th century Britain, that resonate with ours. And there are a lot. "
Lev Grossman penned the No. 1 bestselling Magicians trilogy, and he’s now back with The Bright Sword, an Arthurian legend-retelling. The literature world has gifted us many Arthurian legend-retelling recently The Bright Sword tells the story of a fallen Round Table, where survivors aren’t the heroes, but oddballs. Today, we are honoured to have Lev Grossman here to chat about why it is the right time for the world to meet The Bright Sword, and why he chose to shine a light on oddballs.
You have worked on this on and off for years. Why do you think now is the right time for the world to read The Bright Sword?
Almost the whole challenge of writing The Bright Sword was trying to produce a version of King Arthur that somehow met the present moment. For me that meant finding the aspects of Arthur’s world, the world of 6th century Britain, that resonate with ours. And there are a lot. It was a time of vast migrations, of refugees and immigrants seeking new homes. People were dealing with the aftermath of empire and histories of violence, just like we are; Arthur—the son of a Christian Roman king and a pagan Celtic duchess, the colonizer and the colonized—was right in the middle of all that.
This makes it sound like I’m trying to make a point with The Bright Sword, which I’m really not. It’s just supposed to be a fun compelling story. But it’s only going to be fun and compelling if it matters to us where we are right now.
Do you still remember the first time you learned about King Arthur? Which book was it and which part was the most fascinating to you?
It was almost certainly The Sword in the Stone, by T.H. White. Of course the part I remember loving was mostly the stuff about Arthur being transformed into various animals by Merlin. Which was supposed to be about Arthur learning important lessons about how to be a good king, but at the time I think I just liked the animals.
And when retelling the legend in The Bright Sword, was it easy to decide what you want to keep?
Not easy exactly, but I definitely had a vision to guide me. We’ve seen a lot of gritty, historically grounded Arthurs lately, and I knew I wanted to go the other way—I wanted to lean into the magic and romance of it all, the shining armor, the swordplay, the marvels, the angels. If it glowed or sparkled or had wings, I kept it.
In fact, how do you decide when to keep things historically accurate, and to blend in some fantasy?
It was probably more the other way around, writing a cracking good fantasy and then blending in historical elements to keep it grounded and real. My version of Arthur is basically the one we all know, the medieval one, the 12th century Arthur, which was never very faithful to Arthur’s early-medieval 6th century origins. 6th century Arthur didn’t have plate armor or castles or tournaments. But the 12th century writers either didn’t know or didn’t care.
But you need a lot of historical detail in there to make things feel real and solid, and in that way I tried to be faithful to the 12th century period as much as possible, except when it came to magic, or when there was something really shiny and cool that was slightly out-of-period. Like some of the armor and weapons—I gave a lot of the knights fancy 15th or 16th century armor, just because it’s so gorgeous.
The characters in The Bright Sword are all written beautifully. Why did you decide to present some of their backstories in separate chapters?
Partly I just wanted to use a traditional period device—I was trying to borrow from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. I think it connects the book to medieval storytelling traditions.
But also I wanted to have a lot of The Bright Sword take place in Arthur’s time, even though it’s nominally set after Arthur’s death. I wanted to spend some time reveling in the golden age of Arthur. I was inspired by Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven—I love the structure of that book, the way it’s a post-apocalyptic novel that moves back and forth between moments before and after the apocalypse.
And why is it so important that they need to be oddballs?
The legend of Arthur has been around a long time—1400 years, give or take. So if I was going to tell it again, I wanted to look for stories that hadn’t been told before, and that meant looking in the margins for the kinds of characters who don’t usually get to take center stage. Women, people of color, gay people, trans people, mentally ill people. These are voices we don’t usually get to hear from in Arthurian literature. It’s time!
Finally, most retellings these days are feminist retellings of classics, to the point that books “need” to be feminist retellings to be trending. How would you persuade readers to give The Bright Sword a chance?
I do actually think of The Bright Sword as a feminist retelling! Three of the main characters—Nimue, Guinevere, and Morgan le Fay—are women who are almost always depicted as either evil or weak or both. In this book they are neither.
But if I’m making a sales pitch, The Bright Sword does actually have a lot of trendy tropes. It’s a big found family book. There’s some friends to lovers, some enemies to lovers, some slow burn. And there’s lots of fairies! But most of all I think at heart it’s a post-apocalypse book. Most books about King Arthur end with his death; this one is about what happens after. It’s about a world where the unthinkable has happened—the center has failed, the sun has gone out, and everything has fallen apart. I wanted to look at how people live in that world. Because that world is our world.
The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman is out July 16. (Del Rey UK)
