Giving up the Grail

On arthurian appetites & creative thirst traps

The Knights of the Round Table with a vision of the Holy Grail, by Évrard d'Espinques, circa 1475, via Wikipedia Commons

My first “grown-up” literary love affair was with Arthurian legend. I spent my fifteenth summer lost in Camelot - questing my way through every version of the story I could find. I inhaled retellings and stumbled through Sir Thomas Malory’s 15th-century compendium of Arthurian stories, Le Morte D’Arthur. I watched every film and television adaptation I could get my hands on, escaped to medieval fairs in suburban Ohio on the weekends, ate breakfast, lunch and dinner seated at a Round Table of my own imagination.

My Arthurian appetite had been piqued years earlier: As an early reader, my first chapter books were instalments of The Magic Tree House, through which author Mary Pope Osborne reimagines the oft-maligned Arthurian sorceress, Morgan Le Fay, as a benign guardian of history and stories.

As I progressed to more advanced middle-grade fiction, I felt undeniably dra…