The Mists of Avalon

I loved this book! I found myself harboring pretty strong feelings about each and every one of the main characters (though if they were kind feelings is not quite so certain), and I was definitely wrapped up in the story. Bradley does a wonderful job writing the Arthurian legend from a new angle -- the woman's angle. Never before had I seen this story the way it's presented by Bradley. Women are in power, women are strong and willful and people listen to them... until Christianity comes through and patriarchal reasoning becomes the way of the land, pushing the more feminine pagan ways into the past (and further into the mist, becoming harder and harder to reach).

It's long and it's involving, but it is worth it in every regard. There show more are characters you come to love, and characters you come to hate -- I personally came to loathe Gwenhwyfar, and love Morgaine. I will definitely be rereading this. show less

I did love reading this book. The story of Arthur being told from the female characters around him was such a unique premise, the writing was really good and the characters were deep and well developed. The narrative was interesting and I was engaged the entire book.

Then I found out about the author's child abuse of her daughter and her whacked out views on children & sex and it made sense when paired with the sexualization of children in this story. It was a thing that stuck out while reading, how young the characters were when they had sexual encounters.

Le Nebbie di Avalon è uno dei libri più conosciuti del Ciclo di Avalon al punto che, ormai, nel parlare di Marion B. Zimmer è automatico correre con la mente a questo libro che io giudico un vero capolavoro.
Cronologicamente ultimo libro del fortunato Ciclo di Avalon è stato da molti letto come libro autoconclusivo traendone ugualmente una grande soddisfazione perché, con Marion B. Zimmer, ogni libro è un piccolo universo a sé stante da poter gustare con calma.
Le tematiche trattate sono state trattate, nel tempo, da moltissimi scrittori. Parliamo del Ciclo Bretone, della Spada di Excalibur, Re Artù, Morgana la Fata, Merlino, I cavalieri della Tavola Rotonda e i vecchi miti pagani che, a partire dal Medioevo hanno sempre più show more lasciato il passo, volenti o nolenti, all’avvento Chiesa.
Eppure, nonostante ciò, questo libro ha avuto, ed ha tutt’ora, un grandissimo successo al punto che per quasi un anno è rimasto in cima alle classifiche letterarie e a vendere, solo in Italia, mezzo milione di copie in pochi mesi.
Perché?
Perché finalmente dopo aver sentito narrare questi fatti dal punto di vista dei cavalieri, dei Re e dei Maghi abbiamo avuto il piacere di sentire l’intera storia dalla bocca di Morgana la Fata.
Perché è un romanzo di personaggi femminili, di Grandi “donne” come Morgana, Viviana e Morgause che hanno avuto la (s)fortuna di vivere un’epoca difficile ma che, in un modo o nell’altro, mettendo la loro vita in mano al Destino hanno continuato a seguire gli insegnamenti della Dea Madre ed a contribuire incessantemente agli eventi.
Perché lo stile della Zimmer è così curato, elegante e verosimile (seppur originale nel suo dare un’interpretazione tutta nuova ai fatti) che non avrebbe potuto che catturare le menti degli amanti del genere.
Si dice che la stessa scrittrice abbia impiegato quasi dieci anni per la stesura di questo romanzo fantasy avvalendosi di miti, leggende e documenti più o meno noti ai più.
Dopo aver letto questo libro, non posso che reputarlo uno dei più grandi libri fantasy del novecento da leggere e rileggere più volte e in grado di lasciarti nell'anima sempre qualcosa di nuovo. show less

I loved this book when I was younger, so I was curious to see what I would think of it now. What struck me most powerfully was that while this is commonly presented as a feminist retelling of the King Arthur myth, the women characters are not terribly attractive. Morgaine is the most appealing, but even she is cold, a neglectful mother, and a religious fanatic as surely as Gwenhyfar is, devoted to restoring Avalon's mysteries at any cost. Women, moreover, are portrayed as constantly opposed to one another on any number of grounds—petty sexual jealousy, religious differences, competition for the status of their menfolk. No two women in the book work together on any kind of long-term basis.

The most significant contribution this book show more makes to the Arthur legend is the idea of a competition between the Goddess worship of Avalon, represented by Morgaine, and narrow-minded, male-dominanted Christianity, represented by Gwenhyfar. They struggle for Arthur's soul on religious grounds, but Gwenhyfar's jealousy of Morgaine is also sexual, because, not knowing each other, the brother and sister once participated in a sexual religious ritual that produced a child. As Morgaine's plans are ruined, completely and utterly, and Arthur falls, Morgaine visits a convent, and there sees Christian women working in fellowship, learning to read and write. It's something we never saw on Avalon; though the priestesses seem to be a kind of sisterhood, the ones we know are always sending those they love best to do difficult, life-destroying tasks. I just don't buy this as a feminist work. It celebrates the power of women, sure, but to be feminist you also have to portray women as a positive force, and, of course, as good people. show less

Back in the mid-90's everyone was telling me how I simply HAD to read this book, yadda yadda yadda. Well I finally did. In 2018.

It's billed as the Arthurian legend told from the women's point of view. Neat idea. And it's fun in a "all the pagans pray in the moonlight and they're wise, gracious, and powerful, and the Christians are just repressive and stodgy and superstitious and uptight and boooo," kind of way, which is...pretty much what I expected to find, really. I can see why the book did so well when it did. It was a very popular mentality at the time; I remember when every prep school girl on the Upper East Side who had just seen "The Craft" thought she could become a sorceress by buying a pack of tarot cards and wearing a show more pentacle which she would hide from her parents. I get it though, you have to go the pagan route to tell the story this way, because, let's just be 100% honest here, Christianity back then (and today? eh? no further comment from me) wasn't really all that interested in hearing from women.

A LOT of liberties are taken with what the Druids supposedly preached and practiced because pretty much all of the truth about the old religion is gone, thanks to the Romans and their successors the Christians, so we have to fill in the gaps by 'inferring' where we can, and simply making stuff up where we can't. I also understand it's therefore very tempting to paint them with these rose-colored lenses of being all-knowing and wise; personally I suspect the reality is that they were a leeetle bit closer to being just as stupid as everybody else on the planet is (although it is a fact that they *were* miles ahead of the rest of the world in certain areas like women's rights; i.e. they thought they had some).

When it comes to re-interpretations of characters I've known for years, they were mostly handled very well, but I was seriously let down by her Guinevere (or Gwenhwyfar, in this book. I have mixed feelings about the rampant name-changing although I see why she did it.). I really don't like her. See, my first real exposure to the whole Arthur deal as a complete story was T.H. White's "The Once and Future King" which set a pretty high bar. And even though White doesn't devote nearly as many pages to her and her thoughts, with just a few strokes he paints a picture of a mature, thinking, complicated, and sympathetic woman in her own right, as much a victim of fate as any of the male characters, instead of simply being a vehicle for it. Bradley's Guinevere is exactly what people thought (or, for some, still think - again with the commentary) a woman was supposed to be: an overly pious idiot who can barely see past her own needlepoint (the fact that Bradley makes her nearsighted was an interesting touch) and doesn't even think it's her place to bother trying to understand what the men are talking about. Bradley's Gwen is also an agoraphobe, which speaks volumes: she's most comfortable in an enclosed space.

Ultimately what I respect and appreciate most about the book was that different point of view or no, she was true (or true enough) to the legend. Too often when someone takes on this story, they change a whole bunch of stuff to make it "their own." I guess authors need to feel like they can say I Made a Contribution and it makes them do something completely stupid. Not this time. show less

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3765102.html

One of those classic works of fantasy which I must have first read soon after it was published in 1983, and which is now tarnished by association with its author's personal history of child abuse.

The novel has some merits, but it has deeper flaws than may be initially apparent. It's great to take a traditionally male story - King Arthur, Lancelot, Galahad, etc etc - and tell it mainly from the point of view of the women in the story, in particular Morgaine who is very much the villain of the original legendarium - Arthur's half-sister, mother of their incestuously conceived son Mordred who eventually kills his own father. The book is a thousand pages long, but doesn't drag; we know what the show more ending is going to be, but the journey there is exciting and somewhat magical, with three different versions of Glastonbury coexisting in parallel strands of the same geography, two of them accessible only by the adept.

But. A lot of readers took to the portrayal of lovely paganism in contrast with rigid and blinkered Christianity, and sighed when at the end the Christians largely won. But the portrayal of Christianity is much darker than the reality of the time. The sexually repressive arm of recent Christianity has been transplanted by Bradley to the Dark Ages. Actual research on medieval Celtic Christianity shows that it was much more relaxed, including saints who actually performed abortions. The key baddie, the puritanical bigot bishop Patricius, is obviously meant to be St Patrick, who is supposedly buried at Glastonbury (though Downpatrick will disagree). But the real St Patrick seems to have been relatively relaxed about sex; he was much more upset about theft and murder. One of his two surviving works is a letter pleading for the freedom of enslaved kidnap victims. (You can read what you want into his autobiography's allusion to an otherwise unidentified sin committed when he was fifteen). Even in my teens, I felt that Bradley's portrayal of him was rather unfair.

On top of that, the paganism espoused by most of the key characters is actually rather repressive too. Arthur and Morgaine conceive Mordred in a drug-fuelled pagan ritual which they are given no choice about participating in. Avalon's women have no more choice about which men they are given to than Camelot's women do; the only difference is that the Lady of the Lake personally determines the fate of her subjects in Avalon, whereas patriarchal Camelot is more diffuse. (And, gulp, a mother figure deciding who the young people in her care will have sex with, some of them well below what we'd consider the age of consent today, is very creepy given what we now know about the writer.) Avalon also fetishises virginity more than the Christianity portrayed here. (See this really good analysis by Alexandra Lindstrom, from 2005, on these and other points.) I hope that those readers who developed an interest in paganism based on this book were alert to the negative nuances as well.

So, yes, interesting to return to it after many years, but its flaws have become more obvious with time. show less

Lines like the following near the end of the book would not resonate if they had not been paid for each step of the way.

'Morgaine,' he whispered. His eyes were bewildered and full of pain. 'Morgaine, was it all for nothing then, what we did, and all that we tried to do? Why did we fail?'

King Arthur in his final moments is bewildered, the bewilderment of the beast at the moment of slaughter. He thought he was beloved by the world only to watch as his kingdom crumbled and his life blood ebbed, all as if fated.

Bradley is able to tell this whole sweeping tale of Arthur's reign and to capture the pity of it not just for Arthur, but for any of us who live long enough to see and understand and love things that have been built over time show more crumble into ruin and dust. Arthur asks his question for all of us.It is hard not to share his bewilderment and loss in one's very being.

Bradley has helped me re-see the tale of Arthur and Camelot as an ur-tale for what humans attempt to build in this world and the great arc of all these attempts in which the seeds of destruction and oblivion that are sewn in the moments of creation. Humans are fated to sow, to reap, and to destroy, to destroy even those things most beautiful things. For while there are creators, there are also those who destroy because they must or because they have lost all sense of what is good and worth preserving, those who walk into the sweep of history when things are as good as they might be who only have destruction to offer.

In her epilogue, Bradley allows Morgaine to attempt to answer Arthur's question, and I find it hard to believe that Bradley herself could believe that it would be satisfying or convincing. Morgaine says, 'You held this land in peace for many years, so the Saxons did not destroy it. You held back the darkness for a whole generation, until they were civilized men, with learning, and music, and faith in God, who will fight to save something of the beauty of the times that are past."

For me, this is too much to be hoped for. Had Morgaine said only: "You held back the darkness for a whole generation," this might seem a fitting answer, an answer, that is, fit to what is within the realm of possibility for any generation. For any generation, a holding action against the darkness might well be the best that can be hoped for and achieved. And that has to be enough because that is all there is. show less