The Mists of Avalon

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"... Morgan le Fay was not married, but put to school in a nunnery, where she became a great mistress of magic."

-Malory, Morte d'Arthur

ANY BOOK of this complexity drives its author to sources far too many to be listed in entirety. I should probably cite, first, my late grandfather, John Roscoe Conklin, who first gave me a battered old copy of the Sidney Lanier edition of the Tales of King Arthur, which I read so often that I virtually memorized the whole thing before I was ten years old. My imagination was also stirred by varied sources such as the illustrated weekly Tales of Prince Valiant; and in my fifteenth year I played hooky from school far oftener than anyone realized to hide in the library of the Department of Education in Albany, New York, reading my way through a ten-volume edition of James Frazer's The Golden Bough and a fifteen-volume set of books on comparative religions, including an enormous volume on the Druids and Celtic religions.

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