Balin and Columbine (A Children of the May Novella - Book 1.5b)

Afterword: Adapting Balin

Dear reader

Thank you for reading  Balin and Columbine, I do hope you enjoyed them. If you’ve been reading the other stories in the Children of the May series, doubly thank you!

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Right, how about the real afterword, eh?

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A few of you have expressed in an interest in how I go about using Arthurian sources in the Children of the May stories, so I thought I’d write this short piece about adapting material from Malory’s le Morte d’Arthur into Balin & Columbine. B&C is a particularly good example because Malory’s story of Sir Balin is relatively self-contained – Balin first appears at the start of book II and is dead by its end (so yes, sorry! He and Columbine kind of had to die, Malory said so) – but the method I applied here is similar to that I use for all the stories in the series.

In the afterword to Children of the May I mentioned that there were some points I was particularly keen to hit in the first book in the series. I wanted to tell the story of the slaughter of the May-children with stress laid on emotional truths as we currently understand them, and with increased emphases on female characters and characters drawn from lower down the social scale. I tried to boil these down to two principles: emotional truth and diversity, and use those to guide my approach to the sources I use. Arthurian sources, and in particular Malory, are ripe for this kind of treatment because they have a weirdness that’s very different to modern conventions of realistic narratives. (Though I’d like to stress again that this doesn’t mean that I think Malory or his predecessors were in any way bad writers, quite the opposite – they were simply working in a medieval genre that had little interest in the social and psychological realism that we take for granted nowadays.) These principles are still in play in B&C (for instance I’ve massively expanded the role of Colombe in the story, who becomes my Columbine – more on this below), but here I want to focus on one of the other challenges the legends pose to the modern adaptor: namely their narrative structure.

Some of the things the modern reader will notice as she reads into Malory are the episodic and often disconnected nature of the narratives, and how often the same story units are used. The episodic structure manifests itself in a seeming lack of consequences for some actions (such as the fact that Arthur’s drowning of the May-children is barely mentioned after that single chapter at the end of book I), in whole stories repeating themselves with very few differences, and in stories reaching big points of climax at, to modern eyes, odd points.

Among the story units that fascinated me was one that pops up in many of the jousts and tournaments in Malory: the story of the stranger-knight revealed. In this story one of the knights of the round table, most often Sir lancelot, will attend a joust carrying a shield bearing the arms of some other knight. Someone, often king Arthur, will marvel at the prowess of this stranger. Pretty much invariably, the knight in disguise will win the tournament and reveal himself to be lancelot, or Palomides or whoever, and great rejoicing follows. Every time I came across one of these episodes my modern brain nagged at their realism: these jousting tournaments last for days – would the knight never take off his helm? Would he never speak? Would Arthur not simply get used to the stranger being lancelot? Would they not recognise his fighting style?