I’ve heard the legend of King Arthur told many different ways over the years. Stephen R. Lawhead’s Pendragon Cycle was my high school gateway into Arthur’s world. Lawhead elevated Christian mystical themes from the source material. In college, I read Marion Zimmer Bradley’s feminist version of the saga, The Mists of Avalon. Next came T. H. White’s Once and Future King, which offered a meditation on power and political leadership. And then there was Lev Grossman’s cynical take, The Bright Sword, where the heroes are recast as petty antiheroes: think medieval Gen-Xers. The Arthur tales have the ability to re-inspire authors generation after generation. And every author remakes Arthur in their own image: from Christian to feminist, political to rebellious.

Malcolm Guite is the latest to try his hand a these legends, inspired to take up the tale:

And with the music came these words:
“Poet, take up the tale!
Take up the tale this land still keeps,
in earth and water magic sleeps,
the dryad sighs, the naiad weeps,
but you can lift the veil. (1)

Guite’s version of the tale is different from all the rest. To start with, it’s an epic ballad—a 300+ page poem! But don’t let that scare you off. Unlike some modern poetry, it’s meant to be read and understood. I read most of this poem out loud to myself just to hear the words sing.

The historic Arthur was set in a time when both Christian and pagan influences held sway on the isle of Avalon. Not unlike Lawhead (although very different in form), Guite draws masterfully on Christian themes such as Pentecost as he retells the story of Sir Galahad and the knights of the round table. For Guite, these are profoundly Christian stories:

At the heart of those early versions of the [Arthur] stories is the Holy Grail itself: the presence of Christ and His gospel, moving as an unbearably beautiful light through the mists and magic of pre-Christian Celtic Britain, drawing even the wizards and the faery folk towards Himself, baptising the imagination of our ancestors, fulfiling and disclosing the true meaning of our earliest stories. (315)

That phrase, “baptising the imagination,” was no doubt borrowed from C.S. Lewis who felt that his imagination was baptized after reading George MacDonald’s faery story, Phantastes. I suspect Guite’s Arthuriad will baptize the imagination of many readers today, inviting them to leave their sterile modernist world for the re-enchanted wonder of God’s creation.

Galahad and the Grail is but the first of four books in the Arthuriad, with The Coming of Arthur arriving this fall. I can hardly wait.

Guite, Malcolm. Galahad and the Grail. Illustrated by Stephen Crotts. Rabbit Room Press, 2026. Merlin’s Isle: An Arthuriad 1.