Dear reader

Thank you for reading  Balin and Columbine, I do hope you enjoyed them. If you’ve been reading the other stories in the Children of the May series, doubly thank you!

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Right, how about the real afterword, eh?

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A few of you have expressed in an interest in how I go about using Arthurian sources in the Children of the May stories, so I thought I’d write this short piece about adapting material from Malory’s le Morte d’Arthur into Balin & Columbine. B&C is a particularly good example because Malory’s story of Sir Balin is relatively self-contained – Balin first appears at the start of book II and is dead by its end (so yes, sorry! He and Columbine kind of had to die, Malory said so) – but the method I applied here is similar to that I use for all the stories in the series.

In the afterword to Children of the May I mentioned that there were some points I was particularly keen to hit in the first book in the series. I wanted to tell the story of the slaughter of the May-children with stress laid on emotional truths as we currently understand them, and with increased emphases on female characters and characters drawn from lower down the social scale. I tried to boil these down to two principles: emotional truth and diversity, and use those to guide my approach to the sources I use. Arthurian sources, and in particular Malory, are ripe for this kind of treatment because they have a weirdness that’s very different to modern conventions of realistic narratives. (Though I’d like to stress again that this doesn’t mean that I think Malory or his predecessors were in any way bad writers, quite the opposite – they were simply working in a medieval genre that had little interest in the social and psychological realism that we take for granted nowadays.) These principles are still in play in B&C (for instance I’ve massively expanded the role of Colombe in the story, who becomes my Columbine – more on this below), but here I want to focus on one of the other challenges the legends pose to the modern adaptor: namely their narrative structure.

Some of the things the modern reader will notice as she reads into Malory are the episodic and often disconnected nature of the narratives, and how often the same story units are used. The episodic structure manifests itself in a seeming lack of consequences for some actions (such as the fact that Arthur’s drowning of the May-children is barely mentioned after that single chapter at the end of book I), in whole stories repeating themselves with very few differences, and in stories reaching big points of climax at, to modern eyes, odd points.

Among the story units that fascinated me was one that pops up in many of the jousts and tournaments in Malory: the story of the stranger-knight revealed. In this story one of the knights of the round table, most often Sir lancelot, will attend a joust carrying a shield bearing the arms of some other knight. Someone, often king Arthur, will marvel at the prowess of this stranger. Pretty much invariably, the knight in disguise will win the tournament and reveal himself to be lancelot, or Palomides or whoever, and great rejoicing follows. Every time I came across one of these episodes my modern brain nagged at their realism: these jousting tournaments last for days – would the knight never take off his helm? Would he never speak? Would Arthur not simply get used to the stranger being lancelot? Would they not recognise his fighting style?

Whenever I start asking questions like that of Malory, I realise I have an opportunity to try and make the story work within modern narrative conventions – and that was the largest challenge I set myself in Balin & Columbine: I wanted make the story of the stranger-knight revealed believable and as emotionally powerful as I could. If I’ve done my job properly the climactic joust between Balin and Columbine carries an emotional weight that you kind of have to add for yourself in the versions of the tale in Malory.

Book II of Malory is a really useful place to look in order to understand Malory’s narrative strategies, because it replicates the shape of the whole Morte d’Arthur in twenty-nine short chapters. It begins with a prophecy that pays off only at the very end of the book, and its middle section is filled with many episodes (short stories) that are only connected only by the starring knight, in this case Sir Balin. Here are some of the key episodes in Book II, in the order in which they appear, which, not-entirely coincidentally, are mainly those that I squished together into Balin & Columbine.

·           The book begins with a woman, a servant of the great lady lile of Avelion, visiting Camelot. This servant carries a magical sword that can only be drawn by a single virtuous knight. All of Arthur’s barons and knights try to draw the sword, but it turns out that only Balin, a poor knight of Northumberland, currently a prisoner at Camelot, can draw the sword from its sheath. The unnamed woman demands the sword back, and when Balin will not return it, she warns him that he will slay the person who he loves most with the blade (the epigraph of Balin & Columbine is taken from the unnamed servant’s speech at this point). lile of Avelion’s servant departs. Balin keeps the sword.

·           One of Malory’s ladies of the lake (there are several) turns up at Camelot. She demands Balin’s head because he killed her brother. Because lile of Avelion caused the death of the Lady of the Lake’s father, he is also contaminated by ownership of the magical sword he took from Lile’s maid. Balin makes the counter-claim that the lady of the lake slew his mother. Balin beheads the lady, for which crime Arthur banishes him from Camelot. Merlin reveals that the unnamed servant with the sword wishes to use Balin to revenge her lover, who was killed by her (the servant’s) brother. (A bit of a tangled web, huh?)

·           Arthur sends Sir lanceor, an Irish knight, after Balin, but Balin kills him. lanceor’s lady-love then turns up, and promptly kills herself in grief. Balin’s brother Balan arrives, and the twins ride off to raise king Rience’s siege of Castle Terrabil. Meanwhile, king Mark of Cornwall builds a tomb over lanceor and his love (who is revealed at this point to have been called Colombe). Merlin encounters Balin, and prophesies that because of his failure to save Colombe, the knight will strike ‘a stroke most dolorous that ever man struck’. At this point Balan gives his brother the name ‘knight with Two Swords’.

·           Balin and Balan win back Arthur’s favour by defeating king Rience, and then there are a couple of chapters in which Arthur defeats king lot of Orkney in battle, and Morgan le Fay steals Excalibur and gives it to Sir Accolon (natch).

·           At a tournament of Arthur’s, an invisible knight called Sir garlon slays Sir Herlews le Berbeus, a friend of Balin’s, and the king orders the knight with two Swords to revenge his friend. Another unnamed woman accompanies Balin on this quest, which takes him first to a castle where inhabitants use the woman’s blood to heal a sick woman, and then on to a feast of king Pellam’s, where Sir Garlon the invisible knight is hiding. Balin kills Garlon, and then fights king Pellam. During his fight with Pellam, Balin loses his sword, but finds a spear in one of Pellam’s chambers. He uses this spear, which is revealed to be the one with which the Roman longius pierced jesus’ side (brought to England by Evelake, just as Garnish tells the tale to Balin and Columbine). The stroke Balin gives Pellam with the spear is the dolorous stroke prophesied by Merlin. Pellam’s castle collapses around them, and neither Pellam nor his people will be healed for twelve years.

·           Balin rides on and encounters a poor man’s son named Garnish of the Mount, whom he helps to slay an unfaithful maiden. Garnish then kills himself.

·           Balin rides on to another castle where he meets an old man and some maidens who warn him that he must fight an unnamed knight before he can go any further. They give him a new shield with which to fight, though he then meets another woman who warns him he should fight with his own shield so he can be recognised. Balin and the knight at the next castle joust, and only after they have given each other mortal wounds do they reveal themselves: it turns out that the other knight is Balan, and the brothers have slain each other, fulfilling the unnamed servant’s prophecy at the very start of the book (‘with this sword you shall slay the best friend you have…’). Merlin arrives to bury the brothers in one tomb, and sends Balin’s magical sword, which will later be drawn by Sir Galahad, to Camelot in a millstone.

Bits of that are pretty familiar, eh? There’s very little in Balin & Columbine that doesn’t have its starting point in Malory.

Okay, so as I mentioned above, my challenge is to adapt Malory using modern narrative conventions. I begin simply by reading (or now re-reading) the stories. I’m particularly searching out i) unique things in the stories, and ii) repetitive elements. Malory’s story of Balin contains both.

On the unique side, we have the servant woman carrying the sword (a woman with a sword is very much a rarity in Malory), blood magic, an invisible knight, the collapse of Pellam’s castle (no other castles collapse in the whole of the Morte), and the brothers killing each other in the stranger-knight duel (folk rarely die in those stranger duels in Malory).

On the repetitive side, we have the all the mysterious, often unnamed women (known to Arthurian scholars as ‘fair unknowns’), the sword that can only be drawn by a special person (the basis for one of my favourite running gags in the Children of the May stories), and the stranger duel itself.

Once I’ve identified the elements I’m interested in using, there then follow three processes. These take place largely in my head, and generally at the same time in fits and starts (one of them streaking ahead before the others catch up), but for ease of explanation I’m going to talk about them as if they take place in order: i) I look for elements that can be combined and condensed, ii) I move units of the story around so that they look like a modern adventure story, and iii) I look to integrate the story with Children of the May as a whole.

I’ll take these three categories in turn, giving some examples of what I’ve done to Malory’s book II to adapt it into Balin and Columbine.

Here are three examples of the elements I combined:

i) I took all of the fair unknowns in the story of Sir Balin and made them a single figure, Columbine, using a version of the name of lanceor’s love

ii) I condensed all the murder victims in Malory’s version of the story down to just two: Balan and Lile of Avelion (who I renamed Lily of Vellion to avoid confusion with Avalon, which in my version of the tales is a separate place). This obviously meant that I’d dispensed with Balan being the stranger Balin would fight at the close of the story, but as per my goal of increasing the role of female characters in the stories, I already knew that Balin and Columbine would face each other in that final duel. It also condensed the number of murderers down to two, and by making Balan and Lily lovers, I was able to unite Balin and Columbine’s quests quite naturally, and provide a new explanation for why only Balin was able to draw the Dolorous Stroke (i.e. despite that neither of them would admit it even to themselves, Balin and Columbine have been in love ever since they first glimpsed each other in the forests of Vellion. Thus, with Balan and Lily gone, they become the truest lovers in Britain (though I guess Mordred and Melwas might contest this point)). I selected the Lady of Lake (here Nemone, Drift’s youngest sister), and Sir Garlon as the murderers. I also did things like make Lily the girl with whom Garnish was in unrequited love (and I think he was genuinely in love with her, despite his greed and ambition), which again streamlined the story.

iii) I took both prophecies in Malory’s book II – Lile’s servant’s about the sword, and Merlin’s about the dolorous stroke – and combined them in the sword I called the Dolorous Stroke. Because I’d linked the sword to Merlin’s prophecy I had also linked it to the Spear of Longius, and the eventual collapse of King Pellam’s castle. For good measure I added the blood magic of book II into the mix (to be fair, I’d already stolen that element – which only appears in Malory’s Book II that I can remember – for the climax of Children of the May). The link between the sword and the spear helped me to think through Merlin’s motivation in first attempting to involve himself with Lily and Balan (but arriving too late, foiled by Sir Garlon and Nemone’s vicious envy), and then with Columbine and her adventure.

So those are some examples of how I went about combining elements.

Here are some of the ways I shifted and extended elements of Malory’s story:

i) I kept lots of the characters who die early in Malory alive until the climax of the story (i.e. the Lady of the Lake gets dead in chapter 28 rather than chapter 4).  This helps to build to a single climax in which many of the individual storylines are resolved.

ii) I extended the use of blood magic so that it was important from the moment Garlon killed Balan and Nemone killed Lily, though I don’t reveal that to you the reader until late on

iii) I moved the striking of the dolorous stroke and the collapse of Pellam’s castle from the middle of the story to the end

So yes, as you can see, all the time I’m squidging things together, and shaping them until they feel like a single narrative in modern conventions.

The next stage of adaptation (although I’ll stress again: these stages don’t happen in order – they take place gradually in my head at the same time – just last night I had what I think is a really good idea involving adding something from Ides of the May to make a scene in the last of Drift’s books more emotionally powerful) is making Balin and Columbine fit with the ongoing Children of the May story. I have to be a bit careful here, as elements and characters first introduced in Balin and Columbine are very important in later books in the series, but, stepping carefully to avoid spoilers...

My goals with these side-tales like Prince Accolon and Balin and Columbine are two-fold: i) to tell good adventure stories, and ii) to dovetail with the rest of the series in a way that enriches the whole story for those who read all the books. The first is pretty self-explanatory, and the second boils down to one thing: offering fresh perspectives on events and characters in Drift’s trilogy. Here are three examples of how I’ve tried to do that in Balin and Columbine:

i) I took the opportunity to expand on the characters of the main antagonists of Drift’s second two books, who we only glimpsed in Children of the May, in particular Arthur and Merlin

ii) I took the opportunity to get into the heads of Bellina and Elia by giving them chapters in their points-of-view

iii) I played with Columbine’s perceptions of the events of Chidren of the May as Elia tells them to her, and foreshadow some plotlines that are followed up in Ides of the May (for instance, look out for Palomides when (if) (when) he reappears in the next book, and for the story of what happens when the May-children’s supporters ‘go north’ for Samhain).

So, those are the three aspects of my approach in adapting these stories: compression, restructuring and integration. But I’d like to close out this afterword where I began, with the stranger-duel, because this was by far my most complex plotting challenge in the story. Indeed, by the time I was two thirds of the way through my first draft of B&C, I still hadn’t figured out quite how I was going to make it so that Balin and Columbine would convincingly fail to recognise each other in that last battle.

It took me forever to work out how to keep Balin and Columbine from recognising each other. For an awfully long time I failed to notice that Sir Garlon’s invisible armour would be quite helpful in making the dramatic irony in the duel work, and even longer to see that I would need to swap the Dolorous Stroke back from Balin to Columbine after she dropped it in the forest. Luckily, however, once I’d figured out the plot mechanics (who would have the Dolorous Stroke, which armour each of them would be wearing) it became apparent that I needed to add an extra scene, which became Elia and Balin’s attempt to steal the Spear of Longius, which had the additional benefit of giving Elia and Bellina something substantial to do in the story, rather than simply appearing in cameo. I’m not one for planning before I start writing, particularly – my policy is that as long as I’ve got a strong ending (and I think ‘the truest lovers and in Britain killing each other in a duel, each believing their opponent to be the person they want to revenge a loved one upon is a strong ending), but this one was so tough to plot out that it ended up reshaping the last half of the book. In the end, however, I think the story is the better for it. I hope you do too.

Though I was very sad to see Balin and Columbine go. I liked writing them an awful lot.

So, to conclude, the way I set about adapting Malory in Balin & Columbine, and the other Children of the May books is by applying psychological and social realism, and modern conventions of narrative structure to these very old, often strange and absolutely magnificent tales. It involves a bit of squishing, and a bit of shaping.

Thanks again for reading. I’ll talk a little bit about where the characters of the May-children themselves come from in the afterword to Ides of the May.

Much love,

SjM

August 2014

P. S. Ides of the May is cuirrently serialising here on Wattpad, or you can download the whole book now on Amazon, iBook.s, Smashwords and other e-book retailers...