Hello and welcome to this brief introduction to the work of Guy Gavriel-Kay, one of modem fantasy's best selling authors. I'm Catherine Oli. I'm a junior research fellow in mediaeval studies here at Oxford. I'm an enthusiastic reader of fantasy literature and of work in particular. Guy Gavriel-Kay is a Canadian born novelist known to many fans of Tolkien as one of the editors, along with Christopher Tolkien of the Simarillian, which was published after Tolkien's death.
So it's not surprising then that his first fantasy novels, High Fantasy trilogy called The Fiona of a Tapestry and have some very Tolkien esque elements. We find elves and dwarves, wizards and dragons and a high stakes battle between the forces of good and evil. The trilogy's antagonist, the unravelling of Rockoff Mellgren, is an unambiguous incarnation of all that is terrible. There are definite shades of more Gotham soured on in his characterisation and his dread mountain stronghold starker.
Battling against him, a five visitors from our own world who magically travelled to see another the first of all worlds, and they're joined forces with the high kingdom of Brendin and its allies to defeat, recalled Milgrom once and for all, but for all that he owes to Tolkien. K also wanted to go back to what he calls, quote, the roots of the Fantastic.
In an interview with The Guardian, he explains how, quote, I wanted to show you could go behind that idea behind Tolkien to the origins and work in new ways with similar material. That was part of the self-conscious element of why I was doing Narva. And so in writing the trilogy, Kate also draws heavily and directly on the same European mythology which informed the Lord of the Rings. The finale of a tapestry is, fittingly enough itself a tapestry of interwoven influences and motifs.
We find sacrifice on a tree reminiscent of Odin and No Smith, the binding and the escape of Radcliffe. Mellgren recalls the fate of Locky, another of the Norse gods who was bound by the ISEF only to be loosed at wrecked or wreck the end of the world. Then we have a cauldron of regeneration familiar from Celtic legend and the wild hunt, a common motif in both Germanic and Celtic folklore.
In a neat touch, K actually weaves in folklore itself in the form of an old children's rhyme, which turns out to hold the remnant of ancient knowledge, but most overt of all, Kayes mediaeval borrowings. Other figures of author Lancelot and Gwynneth here, all of whom appear as major characters in the series, along with more minor appearances by Tony Estin and even a version of Elaine, The Lady of Sherlock. K weaves the central love triangle of the Arthurian legend deeply into his work.
He takes a unique approach, however, in constructing his version of the legend around an often overlooked and controversial detail, namely King Arthur's slaughter of innocents. On May Day, in a failed effort to kill Mordred and thus avoid Camelot's ruin Cays, Arthur is the child slayer, a warrior haunted by his terrible actions and forced by the gods into an endless cycle of reincarnation, what he describes as a long unwinding dume in order to expiate his awful crime.
It's a very dark, very human take on the Arthur real legend. More interested in suffering than in glory and in the elegiac tone to which the doomed love triangle contributes. There is much, once again to remind us of Tolkien. But if Kay's early work is very traditional kind of high fantasy, then in my own opinion at least, he really comes into his own and finds his own voice with his later standalone novels.
His subsequent works after CNR that have much stronger and much more specific historical inspirations. A song far bon draws heavily on mediaeval French courts of love and also has overtones of the Alpen Gentium crusade. The Lions of Aronsohn takes us to an alternate version of the Iberian Peninsula during the Christian conquest,
taking inspiration from the legend, Tobel said. The last light of the Sun recalls England in the time of King Alfred, beset by Viking invaders and the Saren time Mosaica du ology takes us to surround him a clear parallel a byzantine him under the rule of Justinian and Theodora.
Kay's eye for historical and cultural detail is on Earth, and his surround him is a hotbed of debate regarding heresy and orthodoxy in the worship of yet recalling the many controversies regarding Christian doctrine, which the Emperor Justinian fought to resolve. Medical knowledge in the lines of ultrasound is partially derived from the ancient works of Galini as a nod to the historical Greek physician Gaylan.
That's not to say that his books are not also fantastical. There is always some element of the magical in his stories. Curses, fairies, ancient gods and unquiet spirits. But caves is magic to add depth and dimension to his worlds rather than taking it for his starting point. History with a quarter turn to the fantastic is how his work has famously been described.
History remains his primary inspiration. Indeed, so well researched a casebooks and so closely inspired by real world events that he sometimes seems not to rewrite history but to write around it, which can give his work quite a different shape to that of many fantasy novelists. And as part of the reason why he continues to write standalone novels rather than long multi volume cycles, often crediting his reader with a fair degree of historical knowledge.
Kaye shows little interest in hitting the predictable beats of the historical period. Choosing instead to focus on the smaller, more personal moments behind the scenes which shape and motivate those larger events. So let's take as an example, his novel Under Heaven, which is heavily inspired by China's Tang Dynasty and the events of the and Xi rebellion, which left millions dead and precipitated the collapse of much of the dynasty's Western empire.
K's attention in Under Heaven is focussed on the weeks leading up to a rebellion. He's painting a portrait of an empire at the height of its powers and yet sublimely unaware that its rise is over and it's teetering now on the edge of a tragic decline and fall. A golden age about to tumble into darkness. And he catches that moment. He explores the vagaries of fate which lead to such devastation.
The small details which made the rebellion a turning point in history rather than a mere footnote to other, more significant events. And in fact, he breaks into his narrative several times to muse explicitly on this theme. Almost the entirety of the rebellion itself, the years of upheaval that it begins, the victories, the losses, the alliances, the political manoeuvrings, all of that is condensed into an epilogue drawn so closely from real historical events.
For Quaye, the rebellion itself has no suspense, and thus he does not choose to dwell upon it. Once events become inevitable, he largely leaves them to be supplied by the imagination of the reader. I think if they had written Game of Thrones, it would probably be just one novel ending with the death of Ned Stark and that moment that the War of the Five Kings engulfed the Seven Kingdoms.
The nature of history is retrospective construction, and its many ironies is one of his chief thematic concerns across all of his works. Rather than building up suspense, Kay chooses instead to encourage reflection to look back with the tragic clarity of hindsight rather than to look forward with bated breath. There's also another, perhaps slightly more unusual theme which dominates his work. Case shows an abiding fascination throughout all of his novels with the nature and power of art.
A lot of K's main characters are artists of one kind or another. Often poets, in one case, a Mozart assist in another. A painter in another. A troupe of musicians. K is himself a poet as well as a novelist. And his fantasy works often include poetic quotations, which he he writes himself. And for further discussion you can see my tool converse in prose in.
The importance of aesthetics. The way in which art helps us to make sense of the world around us is something that Quaye continually highlights. So for me, one of the most moving scenes in all of his novels is when the Mozart assist lands that due to the adoption of a new iconoclastic doctrine, his great artwork, which he has only just begun on the ceiling of the great sanctuary in, surround him.
All work on this is to be halted. He he's told, and everything that he's done so far is to be taken down and destroyed. It's as if Michelangelo has been told that the Sistine Chapel is to be painted over and it's a powerful interrogation of the subjection of the aesthetic to the political. And I think it's Kay's ability to find power in these quiet moments, as well as in the more expected ones.
You know, the brash, heroic moments or the sweeping romantic moments that gives his work a really unique style and tone. Today, we're very familiar with the idea of historical fantasy. We accept even demand a degree of emotional and cultural realism in our novels. Shades of grey instead of the perfect nobility or the perfect malevolence of traditional high fantasy writing.
Yet Kay's first work after the finale of a trilogy of a novel called Tegana was actually rejected by his publishers for being too different to his previous trilogy, too far from the traditional fantasy. The book ultimately went to auction, and it was great success helping to pioneer the more ambivalent and nuanced kind of fantasy in vogue today. K's great success lies in his ability to blend the familiar and well loved elements of high fantasy with new innovations.
His evolution as a writer is also a marker of fantasy's evolution as a genre coming out from under the shadow of Tolkien and developing into the much more diverse and wide ranging literary field that we enjoy today. Thank you.