The Birth of King Arthur

Merlin and the Child Arthur, Illustration by Gustave Doré

And then the two

Dropt to the cove, and watch'd the great sea fall,

Wave after wave, each mightier than the last,

Till last, a ninth one, gathering half of the deep

And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged

Roaring, and all the wave was in a flame;

And down the wave and in the flame was brone

A naked babe, and rode to Merlin's feet,

Who stoopt and caught the baby, and cried, 'The King!

Here is an heir for Uther!'

Alfred Tennyson, 'The Coming of Arthur[ (Idylls of the King)

That's certainly an interesting telling of the mythical king's birth!  But going by his description, doesn't it make one wonder who his real parents were then?  Cause this certainly doesn't sound like a traditional human birthing scene... Any suggestions?

The Bellows – A Necessary Tool for Writers

Gustave Flaubert

Getting ready to record the audio version of my book, I regularly find myself reading my book out loud a little each day now. And lo and behold, despite having sent my manuscript (after many revisions of my own) to a professional editor, I’m noticing a few things here and there that I want to change—all details, mind you, but the story’s in the details, eh? (And I’m leaning more and more towards hiring someone to read it for me as my renderings of the Southern American and the Russian accents is quite atrocious!).

And this reminded me of a fact a French teacher of mine once told the class about famous author
Gustave Flaubert. Flaubert is known for his beautiful and variegated prose (think Madame Bovary). If anyone’s seen his original manuscripts, one will notice such art didn’t come easily but was rather the product of many rewrites and the use of his Gueuloir (aka Bellows).

Page from one of Flaubert's manuscripts

Flaubert used his Gueuloir to not just read his writing out loud, but to bellow it out!

“Les phrases mal écrites ne résistent pas à cette épreuve; elles oppressent la poitrine, gênent les
battements de coeur et se trouvent ainsi en dehors des conditions de la vie.”(1)

Yelling thus set his lungs to fire, but also allowed him to pinpoint any place in his text that didn’t sound right or flow properly.

Though I’m not necessarily saying to imitate him entirely in this matter (though I find the idea very
tempting as a payback for my upstairs neighbors regularly waking me up in the wee hours of the
morning), I do think reading your stories out loud will help you improve your writing.

Really, you should trust your musical ear!




(1) The poorly-written sentences do not resist this ordeal; they oppress the chest, disturb the heartbeat
and find themselves thus outside of the condition of life.

Source:
Le Gueuloir de Flaubert

Druids - Behind the Mask

Actually, from what I can tell from illustrations of the time, Myrddin looked more like a monk

In Welsh legends, the epitome of the Druid is Myrddin Wyllt (a contender for the role of Merlin in Arthurian legends), whose prophetic skills were tested with regards to this one boy’s death.  The boy was shown to Myrddin three times, each under a different guise, and each time Myrddin predicted a different death:

1.  Falling from a cliff

2.  Hanging

3.  Drowning

Turns out the boy later on fell from a cliff to land in a tree where he ended up hanging upside down with his head in the water until he died.

Myrddin didn’t just prophesy this boy’s triple death, though.  He also predicted he himself would die from (1) falling, (2) getting stabbed, and then (3) drowning.  Similarly to the boy of the legend, he was chased off a cliff, got impaled on a stake on his way down, then ended up head-first in a lake… where he drowned as well.

So, I don’t know if it was a way to commemorate these types of death but, contrary to my long-held belief that Druids were the embodiment of wisdom, harmonizing the laws of men with those of nature, turns out those blokes also had a keen taste for human sacrifice. 

To please the gods, they would kill their victims three different ways at once.  That means blow to the head, throat slit, and strangulation (in my humble opinion, the last two are kind of redundant), or any combo of three different deaths given at once (drowning or poison were also rather popular).

So yeah, this is mainly a reminder to myself not to romanticize the past—it was just as gruesome as it is now.  Just with a  little variance here and there…

The Lindow Man - a victim of this threefold death (you can see the hole in his head)

Sources:

The World of King Arthur

Wikipedia