The Flower of Chivalry. Writers in their Landscape. Scott Telek by Steve Gladwin

PART TWO - The Flower of Chivalry and the new rights of women.

I'm pleased to still be conducting this series of interviews in the face of Corvid 19 and all its disruptions and tragedies. The concept of the wasteland has long been both powerful and popular in Arthurian literature, whether applied to the original source material, or in the warehouse full of novels and analysis there have been since. 

When I interviewed authors Kevin Crossley-Holland and John Matthews and storyteller Andy Harrop-Smith last year about their contrasting takes on all things Arthurian, I had no idea that Scott Telek was out there already publishing the first three books of his own massive undertaking, 'The Swithen', where the boyhood of Arthur only begins in book four. In case you didn't read the first part of the interview, Scott has already written and published Book Four of what he intends to be a twenty five novel series, He has given himself twenty more years to complete this endeavour. The fourth novel, The Flower of Chivalry, can be read on its own without the initial trilogy, something I reiterate in  my review of the book later. You will also find - should you have the nose of your average Arthurian bloodhound, the beginnings of the wasteland in this book, with the introduction of two brother knights.

As I write, the world's particular 'wasteland', has fallen upon it with a sudden stealth- if that doesn't sound too much of a contradiction in terms. Who doled out the 'dolorous stroke', if there was one, we may never know. But we are in need of both our Perceval - and need the right candidate again, to fill the siege perilous -  before long.

So, before returning to Scott, here, as promised is the second part of his biography.

Scott had some short stories published early on and has a few unpublished novels under his belt before he gave up attempting to get published in a rapidly changing industry. He started the well-received movie website Cinema de Merde, then took up oil painting and video making, starting the LGBTQ oral history documentary series Queer Profiles. Scott had begun reading Le Morte D'Arthur while in New York, and it took quite a while to finally finish it. At that point he started reading the older sources for it, thinking he would soon lose interest. He only grew more obsessed, however, and realizing that most people don;t know what's in the real legend, and that the story could benefit from being slowed down instead of sped up, he conceived of a grand plan to tell the most deluxe, cohesive version of the story in existence, while filling in the psychology and character development missing, and beef up the female characters so they are more than just symbols and accompaniments to the men, And thus The Swithen was born.

Before I read any of your books, Scott, a lot of the comments I read were about the searching insights you provided to the psychology of the characters and their inner dialogue. You do all that and more, so that we know these characters in the way you portray them in real depth, including that which would normally be hidden. You’ve said before that this is something which has never really been done before. Do you think this is overdue, then?

Well, I’d love to know which comments you’re talking about, but I'm glad someone out there is making them! I’m also not sure that I would claim that this has never been done before—at least in terms of psychology, because I don’t know that.

But as I said, the source literature, being from the Middle Ages, is very light on character and psychology, and they describe only about five emotions. So as you read about Merlin’s mother’s family being killed off, you think “What must she be thinking?” And there are just such delicious moments in the legends—I personally adore the whole episode in Book 2 where the man tries to trick Merlin—and again, you just think; “What must they be feeling? How would they mentally process that?” And also, part of the challenge for me as a writer is to take these unbelievable circumstances and imagine what the character would be thinking as they experience it, or to imagine what they must be going through in order to do what they do.

Trying the Perilous Seat results in a series of disastrous consequences.

So for example, in Book 3 you have this case where the man wants to try the Perilous Seat, and Uther lets him. Since I’ve decided I have to stay faithful to the legend, I can’t just drop that episode—it has to go in there, even though it’s kind of disconnected from anything else. Now also, Uther is about to lose his shit over Igraine, which is also something that is rather inexplicable and happens for no reason. So what I did in that case was imply that the incident with the Perilous Seat caused Uther to fall for Igraine… His failure with the seat sends him into a depression that he thinks only Igraine can pull him out of. I was also fascinated with the idea of placing a major depression back then, and I like how we readers recognize that this man is depressed, but the characters don’t understand it as we do. And the whole episode with Vortiger’s last day out in nature, that you were so complimentary about and I appreciated, came solely out of the wish to take a character who is a tyrant and end his story in an unexpected way. We know he dies and pays for his crimes, but what could happen to him in the meantime that would make it interesting and unexpected?

I will say, however, that as I start to read more and more Arthurian fiction to understand what’s out there, that most of them focus on the heroic aspects, the valiance and the triumph, and very few of them include the failure and loss, which is so much part of the literature. The whole thing is ultimately a tragedy, and I think one of the major themes is how the mistakes of one’s youth come back to haunt one in later life—Mordred being the most obvious example. The other thing they don’t do, because everyone is so busy being noble, is laugh and joke and have a good time. So I really strive to take these archetypes and make them as real as possible, which means dealing with darkness and mistakes, and also lightness and love and humour.

*The first three books, issued as ‘Merlin Creates Arthur’ and consisting of ‘Our man on Earth’, ‘The Sons of Constance’ and ‘The Void Place’, show a wide range of characters, many of them, such as Vortigern and Pendragon, previously pretty much neglected. But always in the background right from boyhood and in fact not yet anywhere near adulthood, is Merlin. Of all the brave things you do, Scott, I think the way you characterise Merlin, as someone who can choose to appear how he is, but still retains the uncomplicated and often unsympathetic attitudes of a young boy, is one of the most effective. For once he truly has a dual role. What made you decide to do that?

I actually did not have this conception of Merlin when I started. When I began, I was picturing him as the perfect, sage wizard that we usually see. But I was curious about one thing; if we start the tale with Merlin’s origin as an aborted plan by the devil, then that casts the entire story of Arthur as the result of that aborted plan. So that made me think about what that would mean.

Now, the sources are a little bit cagey about whether Merlin explicitly creates Arthur, or it just kind of happened, but I was fascinated, just for my own existential concerns, with the idea of this wizard creating this man as a sort of massive social engineering experiment, and then of course, what would it mean for Arthur to be this creation, and to be thrown out into the world for someone else’s purpose. This is where it’s all a bit sci-fi.

The random patterns of nature

But I’ll tell you a bit of the process of how this Merlin developed. What is “fact” in the sources is that Merlin can see all of history backward and forward, and that he needs to be away from all people sometimes. So in Book One I wanted to show how his mother influenced his sense of right and wrong, and for that reason I played up his arrogance and his insensitivity to individual suffering, because he sees history as a whole. In Book Two, there are scenes from the sources where he’s quite a dick—in an awesome way, of course—and I knew that we were heading into Book Three, where he does some very bad things.

The scene where Pendragon apologizes to him was invented by me, and the thing where Merlin admits that he is only ten years old at that time just came out, but by then I was intrigued by the idea that he thought of this idea to create Arthur when he was an infant, and with that the idea of knowledge received in his brain versus wisdom that comes from experience. In that way I was starting to think about young people today growing up with the internet, and how much does it matter to have knowledge plopped into your head versus wisdom gained through experience. I was also thinking about Mark Zuckerberg, who created Facebook when he was very young, and we (and hopefully he) are only starting to wake up to the vast consequences and implications of this thing he rashly created and foisted on society.

So when I have Merlin berate and really kind of abuse Uther at the end of Book Two, that was a key moment, because as I was writing that I was thinking; “Do I really want to take this there?” At the same time, Merlin still developing gives him a character arc and gives him a place to evolve to, making him a much more interesting character. 

But around then I started putting together an idea I had to tie the entire legend together—which is one of my big goals, to make the entire saga more unified and hang together more holistically. So what with Merlin and Nimue, and the Dolorous Stroke, and the Grail coming up, I started to see where Merlin being more closely tied to his Satanic side could really work for this. So when I went back to revise Book 1, I beefed up Merlin’s devilish appearance and added his attack on the midwife right after birth, because I really wanted us to see him as a devil, and after that I was fully committed to his being a very, very shaded character, who may not really know what he’s doing. In Book Five you will start to get my idea for the overarching idea for the series, and by the end of Book Six it will be completely in effect—and I hope people get into it! But for obvious reasons I don’t want to spoil it yet. Suffice to say that Merlin, like almost everyone else, has some harsh revelations to face, and is not going to get off easy.

The random patterns of nature - seaweed.

*Women too, are given a huge part in the first three books and we begin as you clearly mean to continue, with the entire first book concerning Meylinde,, as you call her, Merlin’s mother. She’s a wonderful character and we follow her plight all the way. As you say there’s barely a handful of lines written about her in the sources, but you’ve certainly redressed the balance.

That also was something not at all planned from the start, but one of the things I’m very happy about. I had always planned to flesh out the female characters and give their psychology equal weight—like, I just could not feel right if I allowed Guinevere to be as flighty and irresponsible as she is in the sources. But it began to occur to me that some female characters are very seriously under-served, and when I realized that Merlin’s mother doesn’t even receive a name, I could see that simply making her a weighty character becomes a progressive thing in itself. Another major character who never receives a name and really only gets one or two lines is Lady Ector, Arthur’s adoptive mother. And you will see that she is a very fleshed-out and important character in Book Four, and then she becomes one of these “free range” characters that drop out of the sources, and I then have full creative license to do whatever I want with her.

Now one of the things coming up is the Pentacostal Oath, which largely focuses on treating women better, and I am emphasizing that as a way of making this series have some contemporary resonance. So Book Four is titled The Flower of Chivalry, but you will see that it’s also meant as the flowering of chivalry, because we can see where Arthur starts to get the ideas that will flower into the Pentacostal Oath later.

The night time Toronto skyline, where the author is based.

All that said, one of the ways the Medieval sources are fascinating is that they largely focus on gender and power relationships, and I am definitely going to emphasize that. One of the things I really look forward to is fleshing out Arthur’s marriage with Guinevere, and the challenge of having that unfold over 17 novels. I want to give her adequate depth and for us to understand her affair with Lancelot without judging her unfairly. And also some of the other notable women, like Elaine of Astolat. I don’t always know how I'm going to do it, but that’s the challenge, and so far it’s been very rewarding.

With such a weight of potential ahead of you, and having already delivered so much, Scott, I was all too aware that this interview could have gone on for a long time longer. But that, as they say, is for another day. All that remains is for me to say thank you so much for being so generous with your time and responses to my questions.

It would also seem unfair to be given so much by Scott without him gaining something in return. Happily, I have just finished The Flower of Chivalry, which makes this a perfect time to review it.

Deals with the origins of the Pentecostal Oath

My Review of 'The Flower of Chivalry by Scott Telek.

Women! It's their stories which stand out for me when reading the first few books of Scott Telek's 'The Swithen', a massive Arthurian under-taking in twenty five novel-length stages. The fourth book in the series, 'The Flower of Chivalry' is no different in this respect from the first  or third, in being a world where the stories and point of view of the women dominate, in one or two cases even after they are dead. For this is a world of women silenced, marginalised and casually brutalised by husband and foe alike, a world where a brave woman who stands up to a man is quickly struck down and faces the ultimate betrayal for the male sex's betrayal of the female's - either to be burned at the stake as a witch or adulterer, or taken from her home after dark and buried alive. As I read Scott Telek's 'The Flower of Chivalry', I thought - not for the first time- that it was if Galadriel had unceremoniously wrested the history of middle earth from its creator and skewed it back from a women's perspective.

This author's revisionary pro feminine stance, is one of his trademarks and in the seeding of the idea of the Pentacostal Oath that he refers to in our interview, (for indeed where did all that Round Table chivalry originate), he enriches the bare bones of women's rights that have so long been absent from The Matter of Britain. Not content with inventing Merlin's brave revolutionary of a mother, Meylinde (the first book stands well and truly on its own in this respect alone), he now produces another strong female role-model in the uncomplaining and  previously unnoticed character Nerina, Lady Ector, who Arthur believes to be his mother. It is she, who unwittingly becomes the 'test case' of the need for the Pentecostal oath, long before it reaches the statute books.

The majority of the book - save for brief, appetite whetting, (and in the case of the grown-up queens Morgawse and Morgan, hilarious) visits to some of the characters we have met before and one or two new ones, alternates between the Hector's house and the landscape in which Arthur meets his friend Frog. Frog, a three feet tall sometimes fully amphibian/sometimes half amphibian is a creature cast out and tormented by society, who Arthur goes out of his way to befriend, despite the barely concealed disgust of his father and brother Kay. Frog, its fair to say, is a lot more than he seems, but there's more in the way of Frog fun and gasps of revelation for those of us who remember the end of Book Three, The Void Place. Frog and Arthur have lots of fun and the teaching and love they give unconditionally to each other is one of the great strengths of the book, and this always seeking and finding the humanity in people, is a laudable trait which the author develops and enriches book after book. If you want just magic, battle and bonking, then there are plenty more places to go. What Scott Telek continues to do in this series is to give us the real deal without stinting, and at the same time making new concepts and tangents flown off at, really work, and nowhere is this validated more than in his characterisation of Frog.

Arthur's foster brother Kay is here too of course, just as bullying, sour and uncompromising as he appears elsewhere, but a respect for Arthur grows as their story does, and we can already sense the strong right arm of the future king.

The book ends with the familiar scene if the sword in the stone, but what makes this interpretation stand out, is that finally we get a realistic version of the reactions from a pent-up crowd of some unknown kid of fourteen claiming to have done the impossible. The idea of a crowd turning has never felt more potent.

A word about the use of American language and expressions, which I'm aware some people will find grating, but I'm not one of them. It worked for Mark Twain, right!

Besides, it would, I guess, be a huge pain in the ass to try to take them out, or replace them - and d'you know, I've kinda gotten used to them.


Just time for a plug for next month's 'Writers in their Landscape', when appropriately enough I'm talking to Elen Caldecott about her wonderful and exciting and soon to be released YA novel 'The Short Knife', which is set around the same time in history.

And special thanks to Sue for giving up her spot so I could include all of this interview. Remember that you can find Scott's four books here.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=scott+telek&i=stripbooks&crid=24LX52GT7WDRE&sprefix=scott+telek%2Caps%2C144&ref=nb_sb_ss_fb_1_11

Thanks all.

.Steve Gladwin - Stories of Feeling and Being

Writer, Drama Practitioner, Storyteller and Blogger.

Creation and Story Enhancement/Screen writing.

Author of 'The Seven', 'Fragon Tales' and 'The Raven's Call'

01938 500728/01485007189/imagepoet7@gmail.com/mrwilliamsromance@gmail.com

https://www.storiesoffeelingandbeing.com/