Which makes sense because after all Peretur, the character at the centre of Spear, is Welsh. It’s set a hundred years earlier than Hild, in Wales rather than England, so instead of Hild’s sturdy Anglo-Saxon sentences I let the language off the leash, let it run as it wanted, and what it wanted was to be throughly Celtic: rhythmic and rippling and periphrastic. Think of Spear as a cousin of Hild, but with magic-not just Hild’s wild magic of the landscape, and the magic of love and the human heart, but the sword-swinging, monster-killing magic of myth and demigods. Words roared out, a torrent leaping and tumbling with sheer joy. So I set Menewood aside, opened a new document titled “Red,” and began. More to the point I knew it would be fun-something silvery and quick.
I opened the email intending to say no-my fingers were poised over the keyboard-when into my head dropped an image: half hidden by trees an exhausted figure in mended armour sitting on a bony gelding and holding a red spear. And I knew how to combine Arthurian legend with Welsh history and Irish myth-and lose all the nativist baggage. Then I got a second email about the anthology. I went back to researching Menewood, the sequel to Hild. So in late 2019 when I was asked to write a story for a ‘race-bent, queer-inclusive’ Arthurian anthology, I said no I didn’t think it could be done and still feel Arthurian.
Its nativist, class-ridden, ableist, manifest destiny is pretty much baked in. There’s a reason we’re not in these stories: the Matter of Britain is at heart a national origin story. What I didn’t love was never seeing people like me moving through that landscape: no crips and no queer people, no women who weren’t tropes, and zero people of colour. What I loved most about books like Mary Stewart’s The Crystal Cave and Rosemary Sutcliff’s Sword at Sunset was the setting, the landscape of Long Ago: the scent of the forest, mist on the moors. I dragged home every bit of Arthuriana I could find. I’ve loved the Matter of Britain since I got my first library card. What was it, and how does Spear offer it to reader? Griffith explains in this Big Idea. Knights and legends and the dream of the British Isles… but for author Nicola Griffith, something was missing.
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