The Sword in the Stone

On Friday, January 22, 2010, I wrote a post about my love of detective murder mysteries entitled “The Giant Rat of Sumatra” after an “alluded to” mystery that the biographer of the master detective, Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Watson never told.

Today I want to speak of another reading passion of mine, fantasy. I think that this passion began with the tales of knights and damsels in the court of King Arthur. As a child, I dreamed of being one of those knights who had squires, a court life and great quests. While based on a legendary British king, almost everything about Camelot was pure fantasy, drawn from the chronicles of Geoffrey of Monmouth, the songs of French troubadours, “Le Mort d’Arthur” by Sir Thomas Mallory, “The Idylls of the King” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Once and Future King by T.H. White and the musical, Camelot by Allen Jay Lerner and Frederick Lowe. In 1299, King Edward I of England had a wooden round table made and painted in the city of Winchester, so fascinated was he by the Arthurian legend. I had a set of plastic knights, spear men and bowmen in silver and gold that I played with all of the time when a child; and, as an adult, was disappointed not to find them when cleaning out my mother’s house after her death last year. Like every other child then, as well as today, I reveled in fantasy, in dreaming, and that dreaming probably formed the foundation of my present imagination.

Children today still have King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table to dream about. But they also have other fantasy stories as well. Like my childhood dreams, all children like to dream of being more powerful than they feel, and that one aspect of fantasy to me is the most powerful element of these stories. Whether it is physical strength, royal glory, mythic power or magic, this element of dream empowerment is the strong aphrodisiac of the genre. The young Arthur had it. The Pevensie children had it. Harry Potter has it. Percy Jackson has it. And, because of it, Arthur becomes a king, Peter and Edmund Pevensie become kings and Susan and Lucy Pevensie become queens, Harry Potter becomes a powerful wizard, and Percy Jackson, a demi-god and hero.

There seems to be another element in childhood fantasy that necessitates such powers. That element is “abandonment.” Arthur never knew his father or mother as they die while he is still an infant. The Pevensie children are sent away from their parents and into the countryside to avoid the bombs of World War II. Harry Potter’s mother and father are killed protecting him from the wrath of Lord Voldemort. And Percy Jackson doesn’t know that his absent father is the Greek god, Poseidon, until he is a teen; and, even then, rarely hears from him.

And then there is the quest. Arthur must first pull the sword, Excalibur, from the stone before he can create his society of honor and, quite honestly, Christian virtue. The Pevensie children must defeat the White Witch in order to earn Narnia, Harry Potter must defeat Voldemort before he and his world can be safe. And Percy Jackson must find and return Zeus’ lightning bolt before he is recognized as a hero.

I do not mean for this post to be a treatise on fantasy. Actually I am writing this post, as I wrote the one in January on the detective murder mystery, simply to say that I really love fantasy. I guess it is the child in me. I guess that it is the child in all of us. I know many adults that have read all of the Narnia books of C.S. Lewis, all of the Harry Potter books of J.K. Rowling, and all of the Percy Jackson books of Rick Riordan. These books, the products of fertile imaginations, await each reader like the sword in the stone awaited Arthur, who had to do nothing more than pull it out of its prison to enjoy its power. This summer, as I did when I was a child reading about King Arthur, I am reading the Percy Jackson novels. And I am loving every minute of it.