Chris Gidlow will no doubt be familiar to many of you as one of the Tales of the Reaching Moon crew and a prime mover behind the splendid old Tales ‘Soviet Lunars’ model. What you may not know is that he has what sounds like one of the coolest jobs around, Events & Live Interpretation Manager of Historic Royal Palaces (though to me that does raise the question as to what other kinds of royal palace there are around) and has written a splendid book that I thought others on these lists might find equally fascinating.
Amazon kindly delivered ‘The Reign of King Arthur’ (Sutton, 2004) to me on Friday and I gladly devoured it over the weekend. It is a wonderful mix of the readable and the scholarly, as Chris unpicks the way the Arthurian legend evolved and the various depictions and versions, trying to work through them to identify the likely source of the myth, coming to some answer to that elusive question: who was Arthur? I’m not an Arthurian scholar, but this certainly seemed plausible and Chris develops his argument cogently and convincingly. Above all, it’s a damn fine read.
I could try to pull this on-topic by mentioning that there are obvious Gloranthan resonances to the way myths are living, evolving constructs rather than fixed memorials, etc, but this book doesn’t need it!
The publisher’s web site is www.suttonpublishing.co.uk; list price is £20/$35 but amazon sell it for £14/$24.46, respectively (although it is only due for release in the States in October).
All the best
Mark
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End of Glorantha Digest
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