Avalon to Camelot interview (1986)

[hedgebird]

This interview by Raymond H. Thompson will be already familiar to many here, as it's been on the University of Rochester's Camelot Project website for years. It was first published in the Arthurian journal Avalon to Camelot, and was the seed of Thompson's 1999 book, Taliesin's Successors: Interviews with Authors of Modern Arthurian Literature, which you can read in full on site along with a great deal of other fascinating stuff.

This is a particularly rewarding interview for Sword at Sunset fans: it goes into the medieval and modern sources she drew on, the thinking behind some of her artistic decisions (like the Bedivere-Lancelot merger), and her experience of writing the book. There's also a little bit about her more traditional YA retellings, Tristan and Iseult and her King Arthur trilogy.

What do you guys think about Sutcliff's Arthuriana?

Comments

[dr_zook]

Thank you for the link. The interview made me look out for those mentioned books, for I haven't read them so far. :)

[hedgebird]

Isn't it great when one book leads to another?

[duskpeterson]

Her Arthurian novels were formative for me. I wrote an entire series that was inspired partly by them.

I enjoyed her Arthurian retellings too, and I don't often say that about retellings.

(Thank you for all the terrific postings you've been doing!)

[hedgebird]

Oh really! What's the series?

I was surprised how much I liked the retellings once I finally read them. It's pretty cool that we have both a straightforward, traditional take and a transformative, original take on the Arthurian mythos from her.

[duskpeterson]

The Three Lands, but the resemblance is only that I invented my own secondary-world version of a late-Roman setting. (Well, okay, I did swipe an Arthurian plotline for Law of Vengeance.)