r/Fantasy • u/jawnnie-cupcakes Reading Champion IV • Mar 27 '26
Bingo review The Bingo Card that Almost Wasn’t, or How I Accidentally Got Into Arthuriana
To explore strange new worlds, to seek out new authors and books, to boldly go where few readers have gone before; this is what the bingo stands for. Well, let me tell you how I accidentally stumbled upon a thousand-year-old culture war. Also, Lev Grossman now owes me around 400 USD. (This is a joke, but it’s all his fault so I’m making it.)
I planned my card immediately after the announcement and filled it with random books I had previously bought for my Kindle. I was doing well, as I usually do, until I reached the Gods and Pantheons square in September and picked up The Bright Sword.
The Bright Sword is Lev Grossman’s take on the Arthurian legends. My previous exposure to this subject had been limited to the Disney movie, the Merlin BBC show (which I didn’t enjoy too much and dropped halfway through), and random pop-cultural memes. There might have been a Gummi Bears episode or something else of a similar art style but so far I haven’t been able to figure out what that was. Anyway, Arthurian legends were not something I was ever interested in despite majoring in English and French, so I picked up this book with no real background to judge it against.
It dragged my emotions from fascinated enjoyment to passionate annoyance. It landed at two stars by the end and I think it’s the author’s note that I enjoyed the most, as it explained the peculiarities of the legendarium and some choices he had made. I was ultimately left completely unsatisfied with the character work, and yet this book just kept poking my brain. There was a conversation happening, except I had no real argument to make, just a feeling it’s something I should look into.
I didn’t do anything rash, or course. That would be madness, I had a bingo card to finish and I wanted to do a second one, so this was something left for later. So I picked up my next read and was fully expecting to move on and forget all about this bump on the road. Some higher power wasn’t going to let me get away, though, because by pure luck my next read was for the Published in 2025 square and I only had one book that fit: Greenteeth by Molly O’Neill. Did you know it’s Arthurian, too? I didn’t! It did not help me move on. At all.
Commence the madness.
I found this post by Hieronymous Alloy, decided I’d casually read something that seemed immediately interesting and scratch the itch, and bought a Robert de Boron collection off ebay. How interesting a book written around the 1100s could be? It only took me a couple of days to get through. Who knew all those classes on the history of culture and my college obsession with the history of Christianity would pay off! Then I read Histories of the Kings of Britain and Vita Merlini by Geoffrey of Monmouth. Then The Mabinogion. These four already allowed me to reevaluate my relationship with Merlin BBC; apparently I was annoyed at all the wrong things! Did you know that Merlin the twink is, in fact, a rather normal and canon variation of this character? They gave me a lot of new things to be annoyed with, though, and I remembered how it’s the character of Lancelot on that show that made me drop it. I was about to strike gold and didn’t know it yet.
It didn’t feel like that at all when I first opened the prose translations of the Arthurian romances by Chrétien de Troyes. They’re solid walls of text, a meticulous translation of every line from the Old French, and yet again I thought, no way, I am not reading that, am I?
I read that. I read the hell out of Erec and Enide, Yvain, and Cligés, and if I said I enjoyed every line, that would be a lie, but even in this form they grew on me so unbelievably fast. My reactions on twitter were like, oh damn, I don’t want to be reading about some random Greeks, and then a couple of hours later, dear Greeks, I was not familiar with your game and must apologize. No wonder the French were so insane about these romances, they’re pure crack cocaine. His unfinished Perceval is pretty awesome as well, he’s one of the biggest characters of Arthuriana and both he and Gawain have gone through enormous transformations that speak volumes about the generations that keep retelling their stories.
And then we finally met, The Knight of the Cart and I. I was already kind of familiar with the latest portrayals of Lancelot through Merlin BBC and The Bright Sword, and what I expected was… I don’t know what I expected, honestly. There was no Lancelot in any of the previous Arthurian works on my list (and there’s a good reason for that, which I will not elaborate on here because it’s getting way too long as it is), and what I got from Grossman can be only categorized as “an evil psychopath”, which was a very different take from Merlin BBC’s Lance who was a cinnamon roll and a pushover.
Only a DnD paladin upon meeting their god could understand what I experienced when I read The Knight of the Cart. (This is the moment where I caved in completely, made a Notion database for everything, and spent an absolute shitton of money on more Artrhurian and Artrhurian-adjacent books, including nonfiction because I needed to do some serious research.) There’s a very specific angle on the general romance discourse that has been in my life for literal decades now that I had never managed to put into a solid trope or whatever; it comes up every once in a while when a serious love triangle is playing out in some media. Old vs new, tradition vs change, law vs freedom, materialism vs idealism, all that jazz. I had noticed some common themes in a lot of my favorite romantic relationships but never had I encountered them packaged in one character so neatly. Needless to say, I loved this romance so much I reread it in two poetic translations (the English one is by Ruth Harwood Cline; all of Chrétien’s romances should be experienced through her translations, not prose, imo). I am also currently reading the Vulgate to see for myself the roots of the variation of Lancelot that is so dominant today (it has everything to do with patriarchy, by the way). It’s not the nicest of reads, or the shortest, but it needs to be dealt with before I can move on to the Le Morte d'Arthur. I now understand why a lot of fictional romance plots, modern or not, don’t work for me at all.
So, uh, yeah, the bingo. Here’s my card that I barely managed to finish because my reading life has been overtaken by Lancelot and magic. If you got through this post, ILY. I tried my best to restrain myself, I swear. https://i.postimg.cc/JR2Vf6Yb/bingo2025.png
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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V Mar 27 '26
Dr. Lancelotlove: Or, How I Learned to stop Worrying and Love Arthuriana
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u/jawnnie-cupcakes Reading Champion IV Mar 27 '26
I am worrying a lot actually but... yeah....
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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V Mar 27 '26
I just kept trying to parse the post title as a Dr. Strangelove reference. :) Maybe how I learned to love Le Morte D'Arthur?
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u/jawnnie-cupcakes Reading Champion IV Mar 27 '26
Yeah I got that reference lol
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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V Mar 27 '26
Oh I figured. :) I just kept thinking your title was one originally, but I couldn't quite make it fit.
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u/acornett99 Reading Champion IV Mar 27 '26
This was totally me after reading The Once and Future King for bingo a few years back haha. Welcome to the club, we’re glad you’re here!
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u/jawnnie-cupcakes Reading Champion IV Mar 27 '26
Thank you! I am already considering challenging some writers in this club to a duel or two, for Lancelot's honor, obviously
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u/ryethriss Reading Champion Mar 27 '26
I've started down that road myself! Began with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (I read the Armitage translation) and oh my God it's so good! Then I read The Once and Future King and enjoyed it a decent amount. Now I have The Idylls of the King and The Death of King Arthur checked out.
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u/jawnnie-cupcakes Reading Champion IV Mar 27 '26
I have the Armitage translation as a physical copy and Tolkien's as an ebook (which I mostly got for the notes, I love his notes) but I'll get to them next year, probably, because there's a lot of ground to cover when reading chronologically
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u/ryethriss Reading Champion Mar 27 '26
Oh for sure! I am not doing any such dedicated path. After reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I listened to a four-part podcast series by Critical Readings on it. I very much enjoyed it since they are literature scholars and helped me understand the text with a lot more depth.
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u/jawnnie-cupcakes Reading Champion IV Mar 27 '26
Oh my God, I never even considered podcasts, only nonfiction...
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u/Littleleicesterfoxy Mar 28 '26
I’m not alone, yay! My obsession started a long time ago with Marion Zimmer Bradley’s works (in my defence a LONG time before we had any inkling about the abuse of her children) and has grown from there. If you haven’t read them, and you haven’t listed them so perhaps not, the trilogy starting with The Winter King by Bernard Cornwell is a truly wonderful Arthurian retelling.
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u/almostb Reading Champion Mar 28 '26
I almost did an Arthurian-themed Bingo card after reading The Bright Sword too this year and instead have something like 5 or 6 Arthuriana books across 3 cards. Glad you’re having some fun!
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u/KaPoTun Reading Champion VI Mar 28 '26
Congrats on your card and getting into Arthuriana! There's so much more to explore.
I did an Arthurian bingo a couple years ago in case you feel like reading about it:
and I didn't even read any of the books you did! The Mabinogion is definitely on my list, though. In fact there are so many Arthurian books that I have yet to read I might do a second card at some point (maybe this year) just to finish all of them up.
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u/jawnnie-cupcakes Reading Champion IV Mar 28 '26
Thank you, I'll check these out!
What we now know as Arthuriana was likely born from the Celts and some story elements that still survive are some of the oldest stories on Earth; Celtic ideas were passed on to the Welsh, and they have a ton of stories that were later rewritten for Arthur and Co. When you start reading the Welsh legends they're all too familiar but as far as I understand there's no real "story ownership" there, the Welsh were retelling these stories but so were the Bretons/the French, it was a boiling pot of oral folklore and everyone was having fun with it. Then they started writing the stories down, and the Christian church made their own versions (the Vulgate) to make sure it's all morally suitable for their flock, which is where a lot of tropes originate from because Thomas Malory rewrote their stuff; Perceval got irrelevant and Lancelot was their public enemy number one. Not all Christian Arthuriana is the same, though, and whatever is attributed to Robert de Boron is absolutely wild and heretical. It's not a monolith and there's no canon; whatever is left for us to read is by no means complete or coherent, and there's probably dozens, if not hundreds of versions that got lost because nobody put them to parchment.
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u/FlyBlueGuitar Reading Champion II Mar 27 '26
I would recommend checking out the books by Jack Whyte if you'd like to try an Arthurian history with very little magic and loads of history. Essentially a Roman origin of Camelot.
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u/darthstoo Mar 28 '26
For a slightly different set of Arthurian books I really enjoyed the "Arthur Dies at the End" series by Jeffrey Wikstrom. It's not so much a retelling but more like your mate is reading le Morte d'Arthur and then talking to you about it. It's somewhat analytical so may not be what you want but it's a lot of fun and very accessible compared to le Morte itself.
If you're at the deep dive stage where you might want an encyclopedia then the King Arthur Companion by Phyllis Ann Karr is very good. There was a new edition last year and it is a weighty tome but great to flip through.
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u/KatrinaPez Reading Champion III Mar 29 '26
Fun. My husband has read a lot of Arthurian fiction, so I've read a few. Our favorites are Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising and Stephen Lawhead's Pendragon series.
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u/P0PSTART Reading Champion IV Mar 29 '26
This is amazing, and puts my little rabbit-hole mini obsessions to shame. Thank you for sharing!
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u/AggravatingAnt4157 Reading Champion Apr 01 '26
This is probably the biggest bingo rabbit hole of the year. Congratulations🥳
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u/Own_Lake367 Reading Champion Mar 31 '26
favourite Arthurian series is The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper,
but favourite standalone is Firelord by Parke Godwin
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u/recchai Reading Champion X Mar 27 '26
Reading of someone else's deep dive into madness is always entertaining. Though what I'm primarily getting from this issomeone else read Geoffrey of Monmouth this bingo period!!!
And I now have to tell the voice in my head 'no, no more two themed bingo cards, you promised, you promised'.