Sword at Sunset

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  Certain features I have retained from the traditional Arthurian fabric, because they have the atmosphere of truth. I have kept the original framework, or rather two interwrought frameworks: the Sin which carries with it its own retribution; the Brotherhood broken by the love between the leader’s woman and his closest friend. These have the inevitability and pitiless purity of outline that one finds in classical tragedy, and that belong to the ancient and innermost places of man. I have kept the theme, which seems to me to be implicit in the story, of the Sacred King, the Leader whose divine right, ultimately, is to die for the life of the people.

  Bedwyr, Cei and Gwalchmai are the earliest of all Arthur’s companions to be noted by name, and so I have retained them, giving the friend-and-lover’s part to Bedwyr, who is there both at the beginning and at the end, instead of to Lancelot, who is a later French importation. Arthur’s hound and his white horse I have kept also, both for their ritual significance and because the Arthur — or rather Artos — I found myself coming to know so well, was the kind of man who would have set great store by his dogs and his horses. When the Roman fort of Trimontium was excavated, the bones of a “perfectly formed dwarf girl” were found lying in a pit under those of nine horses. An unexplained find, to which, in Artos’s capture of the fortress and in the incident of “The People of the Hills,” I have attempted an explanation. So it goes on . . . Almost every part of the story, even to the unlikely linkup between Medraut and that mysterious Saxon with a British name, Cerdic the half-legendary founder of Wessex, has some kind of basis outside the author’s imagination.

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