67 pages • 2 hours read
The Bright Sword: A Novel of King Arthur
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Part 1, Chapters 7-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “A War of Wonders”
Part 1, Chapter 7 Summary: “The Last Battle”
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of graphic violence, death, and rape.
The news of Arthur’s death plunges Collum into despair. The remaining knights of the Round Table tell Collum how Arthur died. Frankish (French) Lancelot du Lac, the most legendary of Arthur’s knights, slept with Queen Guinevere. When Arthur found out, he was forced to sentence Guinevere to death, as her act amounted to treason.
However, Arthur knew that Lancelot would rescue the queen. What he hadn’t predicted was that Lancelot would kill Sir Gawain’s brothers, Gaheris and Gareth, in the process. Gawain and Arthur gave chase to Lancelot, with Arthur installing as temporary king Mordred, his son out of wedlock with his own half-sister Morgause (Mordred is also the half-brother of Gawain, Gaheris, and Gareth). When Mordred declared his intention to permanently seize the throne, Arthur had to turn back. Mordred met Arthur in battle at Camlann and killed him. Mordred also died in the battle.
The remaining knights are conflicted about Lancelot’s role in the events. Constantine believes in Lancelot’s innocence, as does Collum, who has idolized the Lancelot of stories. As the knights argue, they are interrupted by Nimue, Merlin’s former apprentice who killed the old sorcerer. Nimue asks the knights to stop arguing among themselves and instead rally for a battle. Now that news of Arthur’s death is spreading, King Rience, a rebel king, is planning to march into Camelot.
Collum has a suggestion: Just as Arthur would ask God for a sign when he felt unsure, the Round Table should also seek a miracle. Bedivere agrees and pronounces Arthur’s usual words in such a situation. None of them will eat a bite until a great marvel appears. After an interminable period of waiting, Collum notices that the back wall of the Great Hall has vanished.
Part 1, Chapter 8 Summary: “The Tale of Sir Bedivere, Part III”
The narrative describes one of the greatest and most puzzling adventures that Arthur went on: chasing a mysterious Red Knight. The quest leads him to a barren land with a lonely, four-gated castle. Inside the castle are the Pagan brother and sister Elidir (the Red Knight) and Ystradel. The siblings want a miracle from Arthur: Years ago, their father, King Bran, was presented with the spear of Longinus, the holy relic that pierced Jesus’ side on the cross. Believing that the Holy Lance came to him for a reason, Bran picked it up. However, the spear turned on him and pierced his thighs. Since then, Bran has been wasting away, his wounds never healing. His kingdom has also become a wasteland. It is believed that a knight of goodness and purity will be able to heal Bran and the dying kingdom.
Arthur agrees to try. He goes upstairs where King Bran lies moaning in pain on his bed. On Bran’s door is written the paradox that the knight who fulfils this quest will not fulfill it. Arthur tends to Bran’s wounds tenderly, but they do not heal. As Arthur and Bedivere descend the stairs, Arthur hears Bran call out to him and goes back up. When he returns, he reveals that he has killed Bran at Bran’s request. The land will now heal. Ystradel spits at Arthur in disgust and calls him “Christian scum” (116).
Arthur and Bedivere leave. Arthur tells Bedivere that even as Bran begged for Arthur to kill him, he warned Arthur that God would punish him for the murder. Arthur wonders why God presents him with such terrible choices. Bedivere’s heart swells with love and pity for Arthur. Just then, with a crack, the land around them begins to stir alive, with buds blooming on trees. Arthur praises God as both merciful and terrible. The land is being made whole after all.
Part 1, Chapter 9 Summary: “The Green Knight”
Back in the present day of Camelot, Collum and the knights notice that instead of the back wall, there is now a moonlit forest, through which a rider on a horse approaches the knights. The knight is made of twigs and foliage, and his horse is a bent tree. The Green Knight tells the group that he has a secret for them, which he will only reveal if one among the party defeats him. Villiers is chosen to fight the Knight, who brutally stabs him to death.
A shocked Collum blames himself for Villiers’s death since it was his idea that led to the coming of the Green Knight. He volunteers to fight the Green Knight and defeats him using Aucassin’s rough fighting style. The Green Knight removes his helmet. A spray of foliage is his face, and his voice is from an animal that looks like a ferret or a polecat. The ferret reveals the Green Knight’s secret: Another member of the Round Table still lives. The Green Knight can lead the company to him.
Part 1, Chapter 10 Summary: “A New Sword”
After the miracle, the topic of conversation between the knights turns to Merlin. Nimue tells Collum that she put Merlin under a hill, which is where he belongs. Merlin is not the wise mentor everyone assumed him to be. The knights wonder who the next king of Britain will be. Arthur did not indicate an heir, but perhaps Sir Melehan, Mordred’s son, is the rightful claimant. The idea is shot down. Outside the Great Hall, Collum meets a court jester who turns out to be Sir Dagonet, the fool whom Arthur made a knight.
The next morning, Collum meets the Green Knight and the Round Table outside the castle. Constantine and Nimue are staying back to rally forces in case of an attack by King Rience. In a ritual that for now passes as an initiation into knighthood, Dinadan asks Collum if he will defend God, the women, and the lord of the land. As Collum shouts yes, Palomides strikes him on the ear and knocks him off his horse, declaring Collum “Sir Collum of the Out Isles” (148).
Part 1, Chapter 11 Summary: “The Tale of Sir Palomides”
Palomides is a prince of Baghdad, one of the most magnificent cities in the world. He first hears of Britain in the marketplace of the paper sellers during a chat with his friends. As the men describe Britain—a barbaric, cold land—in increasingly hyperbolic terms, a compulsion arises in Palomides. He decides then and there to go to England and see if what the men say is true. He plans to write a book about his adventures in England. However, when Palomides arrives at Arthur’s court, he is underwhelmed. The library at Camelot is much smaller than the great libraries of Baghdad and Constantinople, and its gardens are nothing in comparison to the pleasure gardens of Baghdad. Palomides decides to return to Baghdad after the necessary period of courtesy.
One day, a group of ladies from the court asks Palomides to accompany them for an outing. Palomides agrees. The women talk openly about Palomides’s good looks, believing that the Saracen—the British word for a Muslim, though there is no such thing as Islam at the time—does not understand Latin. Just then, three unruly men accost the women, threatening to rape them. Answering the men in Latin, Palomides slays two of them, sparing the life of the third. The prettiest of the women comes forward and wipes Palomides’s bleeding hand, injured in battle, with her sleeve. She is Lady Isolde, and Palomides falls in love with her then and there, abandoning his plan to return to Baghdad.
Part 1, Chapters 7-11 Analysis
This section illustrates the text’s use of the traditional quest. In classical and medieval literature, the quest works as an archetype for the hero’s journey. Through questing for a specific goal—often a religiously or spiritually significant object—the hero’s character is tested, leading to a transformation. In the Christian context, the quest also becomes a crucible for the hero’s purity and piety: Only the pure in body and soul can find the holy object.
The Bright Sword examines the quest archetype through a contemporary lens, raising questions about the true purpose of such a perilous adventure and adding a new dimension to The Reconstruction of Identity and Purpose in the Absence of Leadership. For instance, when Collum calls for a marvel—a divine quest that leads to answers—he gets one, but Villiers ends up dead. At this point, Collum feels “a pang of shame so hot it scald[s] his insides” (127). His call for a quest has already taken Villiers’s life, and the quest has not even yet begun, leading him to doubt the worth of the quest. Further, the quest is answered by Morgan, instead of God, suggesting how prayers for a quest can be heard by the wrong ears.
The figure of the Green Knight is another medieval allusion in the text, invoking one of the key figures from the tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The Green Knight’s murder of Villiers is described in graphic terms to show that war and death are never a romantic business, even though characters are said to die heroically in tales. After the Green Knight stabs Villiers to death, he sets his “foot on Villiers’s shoulder like it [i]s a log he’d just split” (126). Though Collum manages to defeat the Green Knight and get a definite adventure, he feels no sense of triumph, creating yet another important contrast between Collum’s experiences and those of legendary knights like Sir Gawain.
The ambiguity around the motif of the quest is developed throughout the narrative and can also be seen in King Arthur’s chase of the Red Knight. The Red Knight seeks out Arthur so that he can heal his father, but Arthur fails. Worse, he ends up killing the old king, leaving Elidir, the Red Knight, and his sister, Ystradel, bereft. Although the land recovers after the king dies, the success of Arthur’s adventure remains debatable, with Arthur even puzzling over the seemingly contradictory and ambivalent nature of God, who only heals the kingdom through the killing of the king.
Arthur and Bedivere’s experience in the castle also raises an important question about the fairness of such adventures and The Conflict Between Magic and Religion. Ystradel and Eldir note that their father, King Bran, came across the Holy Lance on a ship (See: Symbols & Motifs). Assuming that it was meant for him to lift, he touched it and was cursed. Being a Pagan, he could not be the perfect king worthy of the Lance. The siblings compare their father’s wounds to the wounds inflicted on Pagan culture by Christianity: The Pagans were fine until Christianity told them they were broken, and now they must wait to be civilized by Christianity much like their father must wait “for an eternity for some other Jesus-lover to come heal him” (115). Thus, they raise the question of who gets to determine what is holy and “civilized” and whether a divine quest is truly divine.
The story of Palomides illustrates a key feature of the novel’s literary style: The telling deliberately includes anachronism, blurring various eras of late classical and medieval history. The story is situated somewhere in the sixth century CE, but Palomides is described as a Muslim. This is an anachronism since the spread of Islam did not begin until the seventh century. Further, Palomides lives in Baghdad, a city that was founded in 762 CE. In the Afterword of the novel, Grossman notes that he purposefully blurs historical eras, with his Arthur being “a loose mash-up of a thousand-odd years of British history” (672). The mash-up style reflects the nature of stories and how they grow across time and cultures. Medieval Arthurian lore itself is filled with anachronism, placing a sixth-century character in a setting with armor and castles, both of which did not exist in their historical time (See: Background).
Another major anachronism is the idea of Britain as a country in the novel’s historical context. Though the name “Britain” did exist in the book’s sixth-century milieu, the British Isles were still a collection of kingdoms and tribes; the Roman province of Britannia encompassed two thirds of England, but the Romans left Britannia by 410 CE.
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