AMY JEFFS - ARTHUR: A NEW LIFE
Amy will be in conversation discussing her new book Arthur: A New Life
Saturday 10th October
7pm
Assembly Room - Malmesbury Town Hall.
Tickets £10 or free when you pre-order the book ( Hardback RRP £30)
Arthur: A New Life mines the deepest roots of a story we think we all know: the legend of King Arthur. Many of the much-loved elements are included – the sword in the stone, the magical construction of Stonehenge, Guinevere his queen, the wounded Arthur spirited by Morgan to the Isle of Avalon – but readers will also meet tales from the Middle Ages’ lesser-known Arthurian sources. These old stories awaken a new Arthur: a larger-than-life warlord, a hero raised by fairies, a leader of the wild hunt, a ferocious monster-slayer, an Emperor of Rome. The familiar Arthurian canon of courtly knights and chivalric romance derives mostly from Thomas Malory’s 15th century Le Morte D’Arthur. For centuries before Malory, older, wilder stories were told and Amy Jeffs here revives this corpus of all but forgotten lore. Within these pages we meet demon lovers, werewolves, Arthur’s sister Anna, a giant cloaked in the beards of his slain foes, a Scottish army of dog-headed men, Greek fire and an Irish king transformed into a boar. In her lively and erudite commentaries Amy examines those sources and their transmission, as well as the uses medieval and later monarchs and power players made of them. Among other histories, she traces the fascinating Arthurian connections to Bronze Age daggers, hollow oak burials, the enterprising monks of Glastonbury Abbey, the folklore around an Ice Age lake drained by the Victorians, the Order of the Garter, a miracle at Edward the Confessor’s tomb and Henry VIII’s typically self-aggrandising restoration of Edward III’s Round Table.
Illustrated by Amy herself with thirty dramatic original linocuts.
AMY JEFFS - ARTHUR: A NEW LIFE
Amy will be in conversation discussing her new book Arthur: A New Life
Saturday 10th October
7pm
Assembly Room - Malmesbury Town Hall.
Tickets £10 or free when you pre-order the book ( Hardback RRP £30)
Arthur: A New Life mines the deepest roots of a story we think we all know: the legend of King Arthur. Many of the much-loved elements are included – the sword in the stone, the magical construction of Stonehenge, Guinevere his queen, the wounded Arthur spirited by Morgan to the Isle of Avalon – but readers will also meet tales from the Middle Ages’ lesser-known Arthurian sources. These old stories awaken a new Arthur: a larger-than-life warlord, a hero raised by fairies, a leader of the wild hunt, a ferocious monster-slayer, an Emperor of Rome. The familiar Arthurian canon of courtly knights and chivalric romance derives mostly from Thomas Malory’s 15th century Le Morte D’Arthur. For centuries before Malory, older, wilder stories were told and Amy Jeffs here revives this corpus of all but forgotten lore. Within these pages we meet demon lovers, werewolves, Arthur’s sister Anna, a giant cloaked in the beards of his slain foes, a Scottish army of dog-headed men, Greek fire and an Irish king transformed into a boar. In her lively and erudite commentaries Amy examines those sources and their transmission, as well as the uses medieval and later monarchs and power players made of them. Among other histories, she traces the fascinating Arthurian connections to Bronze Age daggers, hollow oak burials, the enterprising monks of Glastonbury Abbey, the folklore around an Ice Age lake drained by the Victorians, the Order of the Garter, a miracle at Edward the Confessor’s tomb and Henry VIII’s typically self-aggrandising restoration of Edward III’s Round Table.
Illustrated by Amy herself with thirty dramatic original linocuts.
