![]() ![]() The moral of the traditional story is clear: give a woman power, and she will ruin you. It's Morgaine, the dark fairy priestess who (unknowingly) sleeps with her half-brother Arthur in a pagan fertility ritual and gives birth to their evil son who will usurp Arthur's throne and destroy Camelot. The hero of this story is not King Arthur Sir Lancelot or their pious, blonde bombshell Queen Guinevere. The book is an epic retelling of the Arthurian legend narrated through the lens of its female characters, who were relegated to the margins of the story in previous iterations of the legend. Mists felt forbidden in every way a book can feel forbidden, and I relished it. In the morning, when we could choose to either attend mass or read a book from an approved reading list, I chose the latter, barely concealing Marion Zimmer Bradley's megalithic Mists of Avalon behind the cover of an "approved" book. I was thirteen years old and attending an Opus Dei Catholic school when I picked up a 900-page book about paganism. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |