1) Wanted everyone to know that tv_talk will be having a week where we'll be gathering recs for TV shows you enjoy. The Rec Fest will run from January 12th-18th. Visit our post for more details and come help people find new things to watch!

2) I finally contributed something to starwars100. Unfortunately I'm not much of a fiction writer and drabbles seemed the most I could do. Even so I generally have had no ideas for the prompts or time in a given week to ponder them. I still have some ideas for Star Wars meta that I have yet to get to.

3) It's been a long time since I purchased any cologne as I only wear it when I'm going out and that's maybe twice a week. When I saw a sale at our big box store of buy one get one 50% off, I decided to restock since my current bottle only has a few months left in it. First, wow has it gotten expensive. Nothing like a rarely purchased item making clear how much inflation has occurred (and not just in these past few years).

But the absurd part was trying to buy it at all. They were in those clear theft-deterrent boxes, but put in upside down so that there wasn't enough room to scan the barcode. As I was going through self-checkout the overseer told me I'd need to go to customer service to get them opened.

This I did, but the device they had wasn't working so she went to a closed lane and tried that. And tried and tried. Then she went to another employee who then started trying (since she had to go back to her counter for other customers). Finally after some 10 tries, that employee called the manager who didn't want to come up to help out until she told him I'd already paid for the perfume.

Ponder that for a moment, that they'd rather lose the sale of an expensive item (that must have a big margin) than spend time trying to open their theft-proof boxes. More like purchase proof.

In the end, just as the manager arrived she managed to get both boxes open, after which I then had to go back to customer service to ring them up. And when I got home and got the perfume out of its packaging I realized it has shrunk since the last time I bought it. Won't be doing any of that again anytime soon.

4) I'm on my last few re-read books, this time Sword at Sunset. I remember the last time I read it that I was quite impressed with how Sutcliff seemed to identify what Arthur was probably like and how unimpressive (to us) the living conditions and the like were then. No golden castles or silk gowns, and a man obsessed with battle strategy and horses over leading a kingdom or being married. It seemed very true to the historical period.

That said my one gripe is that she decided to introduce the whole "child by incest" plot. I went along with her argument that the Guenevere and close friend betrayal probably had truth to it (in this case Bedivere since Lancelot was indeed a later addition). It's a fairly common sort of incident to have develop. But for such a grounded, non-magical story, the whole meeting and seduction introduced a woo-woo element that was out of place, and it was probably used as a convenience to have Arthur behave in self-destructive ways.

I was sorry that, having jettisoned so much that was added later she didn't instead follow the story strand, possibly historical, that posited that Arthur indeed had children, two sons who grew to adulthood but who were sadly lost before they could succeed him. To do so would have created a much more original story with different kinds of sorrows. And since historicity was a guiding principle, there was no need to make Medraut an enemy when there's no evidence he was anything but someone at the battle and possibly even under Arthur's command.

Something else I found interesting is that in both Sword and Firelord (discussed below), Bedivere or Lancelot are described as being average or even ugly physically, whereas Arthur is said to be handsome. This seemed an odd choice, since Arthur had many things going for him already and didn't need to be physically attractive. What was also interesting about the two books is that there was a charming harper in each, Bedivere in Sword but Trystan in Firelord so that even the nature of the relationship with Guenevere was different for both.

In the end I realized that I admired what was done with Sword more than I enjoyed it as a story. It was an interesting read, but in the end not an emotionally captivating one.

5) Firelord had been my favorite of the Arthurian stories I read over the years, but I hadn't re-read it for a very long time. I wondered if it would hold up. For the most part it did, having all the heart I found lacking in Sword.

That said Firelord relies heavily on its well drawn characters because the bits and pieces of events it presents skips over a lot and the actual issues of ruling are talked about more than they're seen. However a book could be written about many of the characters who appear, as they're all distinct and are made interesting. By contrast many of the characters in Sword never get much development throughout a fairly long book.

But it's quite a mish mash of stuff. There's no magic anywhere in the story other than the introduction of "Merlin" who doesn't seem to be necessary, and it adds an element of the supernatural that is otherwise absent. That said, the reasoning for Arthur's time with the Prydn also seems somewhat forced and inexplicable unless one assumes Arthur is a god incarnate of whom Merlin is an element.

The book also doesn't seem to stay very true to the period. On the one hand, the idea of a land populated by former Romanized aristocrats whose way of life is disappearing to be replaced by British tribalism as much as Saxon incursions comes across fairly clearly. On the other Gwen's role and that of the Church seem to be from a different period, with Gwen much ahead in time and the Church farther behind in influence.

In fact Gwen and Arthur struck me very much as coming straight out of The Lion in Winter in terms of their dynamic, and Gwen as a foremother of Eleanor. As such it didn't surprise me that she gets her own book as part of a trilogy.

Even though both Sword and Firelord use the same framing, that of Arthur speaking on his deathbed to a monk, from the very beginning Arthur's foreknowledge is scattered throughout the text, leading to a variety of small reveals. In a way this distracts from the lack of overall throughline, since when the hinted-at scenes eventually come, they serve to make the plot seem more coherent than it really is.

There's a lot of sentimentality in Firelord and in many ways I think this is what makes it so readable, as well as the distinct characters. Many a reader of an Arthurian tale is probably also sentimental about the characters, otherwise there would be little reason to read multiple versions of the same story. The text gives the reader a lot that sticks with them.