The Mists of Avalon [Paperback]

Even readers who don't normally enjoy Arthurian legends will love this version, a retelling from the point of view of the women behind the throne. Morgaine (more commonly known as Morgan Le Fay) and Gwenhwyfar (a Welsh spelling of Guinevere) struggle for power, using Arthur as a way to score points and promote their respective worldviews. The Mists of Avalon's Camelot politics and intrigue take place at a time when Christianity is taking over the island-nation of Britain; Christianity vs. Faery, and God vs. Goddess are dominant themes.

Young and old alike will enjoy this magical Arthurian reinvention by science fiction and fantasy veteran Marion Zimmer Bradley. --Bonnie Bouman

"[A] monumental reimagining of the Arthurian legends . . . Reading it is a deeply moving and at times uncanny experience. . . . An impressive achievement."
--The New York Times Book Review

"Marion Zimmer Bradley has brilliantly and innovatively turned the myth inside out. . . . add[ing] a whole new dimension to our mythic history."
--San Francisco Chronicle

"Gripping . . . Superbly realized . . . A worthy addition to almost a thousand years of Arthurian tradition."
--The Cleveland Plain Dealer


From the Hardcover edition.

A Literary Guild Featured Alternate
Here is the magical legend of King Arthur, vividly retold through the eyes and lives of the women who wielded power from behind the throne. A spellbinding novel, an extraordinary literary achievement, THE MISTS OF AVALON will stay with you for a long time to come....

I love this book. Plain and simple: It's the absolute best retelling of the Arthurian legend I've ever read. Over the years, I've given copies to everyone close to me. I haven't reread it in years, but I must still talk about it, because when I was in Ireland and my husband commented to my 8-year-old daughter (who hasn't read it...yet!) that there are no snakes in Ireland, she piped up that the snakes that were supposedly driven out of Ireland by Saint Patrick were actually the Druid priests, whose wrists were encircled with snake tattoos. And that it's just a natural phenomenon that there are no native Irish snakes. And thus begins another generation of Mists of Avalon believers!
                        --Shelly Shapiro, Executive Editor

"[A] monumental reimagining of the Arthurian legends . . . Reading it is a deeply moving and at times uncanny experience. . . . An impressive achievement."
--The New York Times Book Review

"Marion Zimmer Bradley has brilliantly and innovatively turned the myth inside out. . . . add[ing] a whole new dimension to our mythic history."
--San Francisco Chronicle

"Gripping . . . Superbly realized . . . A worthy addition to almost a thousand years of Arthurian tradition."
--The Cleveland Plain Dealer
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Marion Zimmer Bradley began her distinguished book publishing career in 1961 with her first novel, The Door Through Space. The following year she wrote the first book in her hugely popular Darkover series, Sword of Aldones, which soon became a Hugo Award nominee. Bradley's novel The Forbidden Tower was also nominated for a Hugo, and The Heritage of Hastur was nominated for an esteemed Nebula Award.

The Mists of Avalon was the single most successful novel of Bradley's career. It won the 1984 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel and has been among the top five trade paperback books on Locus's bestseller list for years.

Ms. Bradley died in 1999.


From the Hardcover edition.

Even in high summer, Tintagel was a haunted place; Igraine, Lady
of Duke Gorlois, looked out over the sea from the headland. As
she stared into the fogs and mists, she wondered how she would
ever know when the night and day were of equal length, so that
she could keep the Feast of the New Year. This year the spring
storms had been unusually violent; night and day the crash of
the sea had resounded over the castle until no man or woman
within could sleep, and even the hounds whimpered mournfully.

Tintagel . . . there were still those who believed the castle had been
raised, on the crags at the far end of the long causeway into the sea,
by the magic of the ancient folk of Ys. Duke Gorlois laughed at this and
said that if he had any of their magic, he would have used it to keep
the sea from encroaching, year by year, upon the shoreline. In the four
years since she had come here as Gorlois's bride, Igraine had seen land,
good land, crumble into the Cornish sea. Long arms of black rock, sharp
and craggy, extended into the ocean from the coast. When the sun shone,
it could be fair and brilliant, the sky and water as brilliant as the
jewels Gorlois had heaped on her on the day when she told him she bore
his first child. But Igraine had never liked wearing them. The jewel
which hung now at her throat had been given her in Avalon: a moonstone
which sometimes reflected the blue brilliance of sky and sea; but in the
fog, today, even the jewel looked shadowed.

In the fog, sounds carried a long way. It seemed to Igraine, as she
stood looking from the causeway back toward the mainland, that she could
hear footfalls of horses and mules, and the sound of voices-human
voices, here in isolated Tintagel, where nothing lived but goats and
sheep, and the herdsmen and their dogs, and the ladies of the castle
with a few serving women and a few old men to guard them.

Slowly, Igraine turned and went back toward the castle. As always,
standing in its shadow, she felt dwarfed by the loom of these ancient
stones at the end of the long causeway which stretched into the sea. The
herdsmen believed that the castle had been built by the Ancient Ones
from the lost lands of Lyonnesse and Ys; on a clear day, so the
fishermen said, their old castles could be seen far out under the water.
But to Igraine they looked like towers of rock, ancient mountains and
hills drowned by the ever encroaching sea that nibbled away, even now,
at the very crags below the castle. Here at the end of the world, where
the sea ate endlessly at the land, it was easy to believe in drowned
lands to the west; there were tales of a great fire mountain which had
exploded, far to the south, and engulfed a great land there. Igraine
never knew whether she believed those tales or not.

Yes; surely she could hear voices in the fog. It could not be savage
raiders from over the sea, or from the wild shores of Erin. The time was
long past when she needed to startle at a strange sound or a shadow. It
was not her husband, the Duke; he was far away to the North, fighting
Saxons at the side of Ambrosius Aurelianus, High King of Britain; he
would have sent word if he intended to return.

And she need not fear. If the riders were hostile, the guards and
soldiers in the fort at the landward end of the causeway, stationed
there by Duke Gorlois to guard his wife and child, would have stopped
them. It would take an army to cut through them. And who would send an
army against Tintagel?

There was a time-Igraine remembered without bitterness, moving slowly
into the castle yard-when she would have known who rode toward her
castle. The thought held little sadness, now. Since Morgaine's birth she
no longer even wept for her home. And Gorlois was kind to her. He had
soothed her through her early fear and hatred, had given her jewels and
beautiful things, trophies of war, had surrounded her with ladies to
wait upon her, and treated her always as his equal, except in councils
of war. She could have asked no more, unless she had married a man of
the Tribes. And in this she had been given no choice. A daughter of the
Holy Isle must do as was best for her people, whether it meant going to
death in sacrifice, or laying down her maidenhood in the Sacred
Marriage, or marrying where it was thought meet to cement alliances;
this Igraine had done, marrying a Romanized Duke of Cornwall, a citizen
who lived, even though Rome was gone from all of Britain, in Roman
fashion.

She shrugged the cloak from her shoulders; inside the court it was
warmer, out of the biting wind. And there, as the fog swirled and
cleared, for a moment a figure stood before her, materialized out of the
fog and mist: her half-sister, Viviane, the Lady of the Lake, the Lady
of the Holy Isle.

"Sister!" The words wavered, and Igraine knew she had not cried them
aloud, but only whispered, her hands flying to her breast. "Do I truly
see you here?"

The face was reproachful, and the words seemed to blow away in the sound
of the wind beyond the walls.

Have you given up the Sight, Igraine? Of your free will?

Stung by the injustice of that, Igraine retorted, "It was you who
decreed that I must marry Gorlois . . ." but the form of her sister had
wavered into shadows, was not there, had never been there. Igraine
blinked; the brief apparition was gone. She pulled the cloak around her
body, for she was cold, ice cold; she knew the vision had drawn its
force from the warmth and life of her own body. She thought, I didn't
know I could still see in that way, I was sure I could not . . . and
then she shivered, knowing that Father Columba would consider this the
work of the Devil, and she should confess it to him. True, here at the
end of the world the priests were lax, but an unconfessed vision would
surely be treated as a thing unholy.

She frowned; why should she treat a visit from her own sister as the
work of the Devil? Father Columba could say what he wished; perhaps his
God was wiser than he was. Which, Igraine thought, suppressing a giggle,
would not be very difficult. Perhaps Father Columba had become a priest
of Christ because no college of Druids would have had a man so stupid
among their ranks. The Christ God seemed not to care whether a priest
was stupid or not, so long as he could mumble their mass, and read and
write a little. She, Igraine herself, had more clerkly skills than
Father Columba, and spoke better Latin when she wished. Igraine did not
think of herself as well educated; she had not had the hardihood to
study the deeper wisdom of the Old Religion, or to go into the Mysteries
any further than was absolutely necessary for a daughter of the Holy
Isle. Nevertheless, although she was ignorant in any Temple of the
Mysteries, she could pass among the Romanized barbarians as a
well-educated lady.

In the small room off the court where there was sun on fine days, her
younger sister, Morgause, thirteen years old and budding, wearing a
loose house robe of undyed wool and her old frowsy cloak about her
shoulders, was spinning listlessly with a drop spindle, taking up her
uneven yarn on a wobbly reel. On the floor by the fire, Morgaine was
rolling an old spindle around for a ball, watching the erratic patterns
the uneven cylinder made, knocking it this way and that with chubby
fingers.

"Haven't I done enough spinning?" Morgause complained. "My fingers ache!
Why must I spin, spin, spin all the time, as if I were a waiting-woman?"

"Every lady must learn to spin," rebuked Igraine as she knew she ought
to do, "and your thread is a disgrace, now thick, now thin. . . . Your
fingers will lose their weariness as you accustom them to the work.
Aching fingers are a sign that you have been lazy, since they are not
hardened to their task." She took the reel and spindle from Morgause and
twirled it with careless ease; the uneven yarn, under her experienced
fingers, smoothed out into a thread of perfectly even thickness. "Look,
one could weave this yarn without snagging the shuttle . . ." and
suddenly she tired of behaving as she ought. "But you may put the
spindle away now; guests will be here before midafternoon."

Morgause stared at her. "I heard nothing," she said, "nor any rider with
a message!"

"That does not surprise me," Igraine said, "for there was no rider. It
was a Sending. Viviane is upon her way here, and the Merlin is with
her." She had not known that last until she said it. "So you may take
Morgaine to her nurse, and go and put on your holiday robe, the one dyed
with saffron."

Morgause put away the spindle with alacrity, but paused to stare at
Igraine. "My saffron gown? For my sister?"

Igraine corrected her, sharply. "Not for our sister, Morgause, but for
the Lady of the Holy Isle, and for the Messenger of the Gods."

Morgause looked down at the patterned floor. She was a tall, sturdy
girl, just beginning to lengthen and ripen into womanhood; her thick
hair was reddish like Igraine's own, and there were splotches of
freckles on her skin, no matter how carefully she soaked it in
buttermilk and begged the herbwife for washes and simples for it.
Already at thirteen she was as tall as Igraine, and someday would be
taller. She picked up Morgaine with an ill grace and carried her away.
Igraine called after her, "Tell Nurse to put a holiday gown on the
child, and then you may bring her down; Viviane has not seen her."

Morgause said something ill-tempered to the effect that she didn...

All the books in the Mists of Avalon series retell of King Arthur's efforts to unite Britain against the Saxon invasion; what's unique, however, is that Bradley's versions are told from the perspective of powerful women characters. Text that invites audio interpretation, Davina Porter's extraordinary narration, and the author's recent publication of the "prequel" to this cult classic all make this production attractive. The conversational quality of the story, along with its vivid images and compelling drama, invites an audio version. Key to this program's success is the skill and versatility of Davina Porter, who flawlessly interprets a large cast of characters. Her voice conveys moods, from anger and menace, to laughter and song, with a facility that seems effortless. The long-standing popularity of this series and Bradley's more recent publication of The Forest House will draw considerable attention to a truly remarkable production. S.K. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.