Nikolai Tolstoy, ‘The Coming of the King: The First Book of Merlin’ (1988)

 

Nikolai Tolstoy’s The Coming of the King (1988) is the first volume in a projected but uncompleted trilogy, a quasi-Arthurian fantasy, larding densely and sometimes estranging Norse and Celtic elements into a peripatetic, rather unstructured whole. Tolstoy's is an unfamiliar version of the traditional story. In this telling Merlin postdates Arthur, and the king whose coming is adverted in the book’s title is his descendent Maelgun. Much of the book concerns hallucinatory spirit-journeys Merlin, more shaman than wizard, undertakes into the otherworld.

There’s a lot of unleavened research into Celtic and Norse mythology and culture dumped into this novel: untranslated names and concepts, archaic flourishes of prose. Merlin is trained by the Salmon of Lyn Liw. The story stops to retell various famous stories. For instance, Beowulf gets rewritten in toto, reworked into prose: ‘dread mother in her underwater lair, stabbing her with a wondrous sword he found hanging upon its stony wall, and hacking off her head which he bore by the hair all bloody back to Hrothgar’s hall at Heorot’ [580] and the like.

There’s also a lot of Bad Sex Award style writing: ‘then is every thought bent towards bed and boudoir … to our snug trysting place’. I hadn't thought of boudoir as a particularly Anglo-Saxon piece of terminology, but I could be wrong. Perhaps it's what Boudicca was named after. Here’s Merlin excitedly boinking Gwenddydd: ‘I draw you to me even by utterance of your name: Gwenddydd, Gwenddydd!’ Not quite as euphonious a name as Nabokov's Lo-li-ta, but you go with what you got, I suppose. And what is it that ‘quickens the blood within my veins and the seed within my loins?’ It is ‘the beam that shone upon me from the scented warmth of your white breasts.’ [410] Luminous breasts. Neat. And here's Merlin boinking Angharat:

Then does my trouserful of wantonness make play with his eager jerking: a long night’s roaming across smooth soft plains, twin rounded hills, white slopes for wandering; and at last the choice warm, wet cavern whose ferny entrance awaits the stiff ram-headed serpent’s gentle entrance. Do you recall what followed, my Angharat of the golden hair, that evening when our fingers met by chance about the goblet’s stem at king Rhydderch’s feasting? Long ages of the earth have passed between us since the night that followed, but it is not I who can forget each move and moan and murmur of our brief meeting. [394]

In other news, ‘Trouserful of Wantonness’ is the name of my new band.