or almost 30 years, Robert Holdstock has been steadily building a body of fantasy work that has earned him the respect of his peers. He became a full-time writer in 1975, worked under various pseudonyms (Richard Kirk, Robert Faulcon, Ken Blake, Robert Black and Chris Carlson), churning out popular fiction that seldom reflected what would come after he completed Mythago Wood in 1983.
That book, a fantastic blend of Celtic lore skewed with a contemporary sensibility, garnered him the 1985 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel and inspired him to delve deeper into the forest of his dreams. Lavondyss, which continued the Mythago Cycle, won him the British Fantasy Award in the following year, and the popularity of the series continues. In France, the series (La Forét des Mythagos) was recently awarded their Grand Prix de L'Imaginaire. His novella with Garry Kilworth, "The Ragthorn," won a 1992 World Fantasy Award. He's also written nonfiction with Malcom Edwards and collaborated, as an editor, with Christopher Evans and Christopher Priest.
David Langford (Supernatural Fiction Writers, edited by Richard Blieler, Scribners) noted that Holdstock "is at the height of his powers, stimulated to great creativity by this novel's fusion of one era's history with another's myth".
Holdstock shared his thoughts with Science Fiction Weekly regarding his reinterpretation of Merlin and Greek myth in his Merlin Codex series, which began in earnest with Celtika and now continues to blossom in The Iron Grail, which has already won the Czech Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Award.
What influenced the development of the Merlin Codex series and The Iron Grail, in particular?
Holdstock: Ever since I began the Mythago books, I have been building a private world of mythology and legend, and there are several crossovers between the two series of novels, deliberate crossovers, deliberate hints at a connection. The obvious example is the presence of the 10 mysterious, prehistoric masks from Lavondyss. When I wrote Lavondyss, I allowed my mind to drift as far back and as deeply into the unconscious as I dared, with some startling and revelatory results. I went a little crazy in the mid-'80s exploring so deeply, and I daren't do it again; but in The Iron Grail there are moments when I engage with Merlin, the narrator, and step into the same "mythic time" that I explored in the earlier book. And Merlin travels through "hollowings," those "ways under the world" that I introduced in The Hollowing. Urcsumug, the man-boar first hero, appears in the third Codex—still being written—and there are other references that draw the ages and the ideas together.
But what else inspires you?
Holdstock: It's hard to know what influences and what "affects." My childlike sense of humor is always perked up by a dip into the comic strip Asterix The Gaul. The historical writings of Robert Graves inspire me. The Mabinogion, a collection of early Welsh Celtic tales, is a fascinating stimulus to the imagination, as are the Ulster Tales, the stories of Irish Celtic heroes, so brilliantly reinterpreted by Randy Lee Eickhoff. I have a library of books on pre-Christian Britain and Europe, but nothing influences quite as much as just visiting the remains, ruins and sites of the past, the caves of the Paleolithic, the hill forts of the Iron Age, and the enigmatic stones and earth banks and sanctuary sites of the Bronze Age. The land and its memories are the greatest influence on a writer like me.
I had also read a book by Peter Beresford Ellis, Celt and Greek. It was the Greeks who first described and recorded the northern people we think of as "Celtic," and it's clear that the early kingdoms were very refined and very aristocratic. What came as a surprise, reading the book, was that an enormous military expedition had been undertaken by several Celtic clans into Greece itself, with the sole objective of raiding the oracle at Delphi. Mystery surrounds the expedition: It lent itself as a perfect climax for the story I wanted to tell.
How important is mythology and legend in contemporary society?
Holdstock: Hugely important. Old stories for young minds. The characters are engaging, the moral situations both simple and familiar, the settings exotic, the culture acceptably strange. Fantasy with coherence and cultural significance. Once you have the legend embedded in the mind, the historical context and the mythological context become a source of growing interest. Old myths were formed from growing consciousness; old myths still, in my instinctive judgment, inform the hungry minds of children. Once, myths explained the unknown to minds bounded by space and horizons. Now, they help establish the sense of time and boost curiosity. And you don't have to accept the moral lesson that usually comes with the package. But the stories set the stage for an internal debate.
So what drew you to redefine Jason and Medea?
Holdstock: I'm not sure that I've redefined Jason. He's a mercenary, aging, lustful, life-longing, the father to two sons, and after sinking into despair at the death of his sons, he grabs the chance of a new life with vigor. He's just an ordinary man. Medea is enigmatic. I was struck by how confused she is, by how easily she runs from her father in Colchis, how easily she kills her brother to throw her father off the chase, how out of time she seems in the classics. She struck me as a "not belonging" person, and so I could relate her to the same timelessness as Merlin in my work.
I know you're working on the third volume in this series. How many books are you planning, and what other projects are you working on?
Holdstock: I've set this series of novels up as The Merlin Codex, which gives me the freedom to write about any of the events in the 10,000-plus years of the young/old boy's life. The third novel—working title: The Broken Kings—is certainly set in the same time frame as Celtika and Iron Grail, and includes familiar characters. It is not, however, a concluding volume to the story advanced in those two books.
Do you tend to work on only one project at a time?
Holdstock: Years ago, I worked on two or three projects at once: usually a major novel and a minor one—under a pseudonym—and short stories. But I've never found it easy to "multitask" when it comes to writing. All stories, in my case, need constant attention, constant focus, and it is too easy to find yourself drawing on one idea to satisfy the needs of another. Right now, as I finish Merlin 3, I am incubating a Mythago novel and a thriller.
Is your concept of time similar to Merlin's?
Holdstock: I'm afraid I experience the passage of the days like everyone else, and they're passing far too fast! But time has always had a deep fascination for me: deep time in particular. Even when I was 10 years old, and writing my first stories, I remember trying to get my head round the immense span of time during which the Earth was lifeless, then covered with primitive life, then with such creatures as dinosaurs. I tried to imagine the endless number of days, weeks and years, millennia during which there was no sound but raw, prehistoric nature. And the far future held a similar fascination. Indeed, it still does. Why I like working with Merlin as a narrator is that, through the character, I can indulge myself in the concept of existing in many times at the same time. It's a treat, a sense of excitement, a vicarious experience, but made a touch more real for engaging with it every day, all day.
What's the most challenging aspect of writing fantasy with classical roots?
Holdstock: One part of the answer to this is the obvious point that you need to have read widely in the area of those "classical roots." I regularly read Graves' Greek myths, and scan other books that discuss the past, the belief systems, and worship systems of the past. And their heroes, of course, divine, semi-divine, and divinely UN-divine. That's why I like Jason, am fond of Heracles, am intrigued by Gilgamesh and Enkidu, some of the Trojans. Forgotten Trojans.
It's also important not to distort the classical view in a dumb way. You've asked another question about reinterpreting Medea and Jason. That's exactly it: reinterpretation. It's the human part of the heroes and characters that can be played with. It isn't, for example, necessary to assume that Medea loved Jason before coming to hate him. She could have been using him; she could have been under a different spell; she could have been a creation of the gods; she could have been a living corpse, functioning under the influence of Nemesis. But she could not have been from Sirius! Or the future.
Know your classics, know the history and landscape: reinterpret.
Are there any legends today comparable to Merlin or the mythological deities of Greek lore?
Holdstock: There are many "Quiet Healers." The late Mother Teresa springs to mind. Rupert Murdock is Odin, The Destroyer, physically weakened, indifferent to the consequences of his actions, supported by crazed demons, knowingly doomed, but determined to leave a legacy of wreckage on the face of the earth. There are many Dionysian figures in the world, drinking merrily from the cup of ignorance, though George Bush baffles me: I'm not aware of any mythological character who stares so intently into the Well of Despond and sees only oil and a bright future. Narcissus reins supreme in the arts, of course. Pandora is checking the combination on her global lock. Leviathon swims in warming seas. Hermes, the bright messenger, has shrunk the globe. But there is no archetypal Queller of Beasts to stem the feeding frenzy that has resulted.
So how does mythology differ from legend in the Holdstock world?
Holdstock: Obviously, I draw heavily on established myth and legend. But I think I use it in "parallel" form. That's the best I can describe it. As if we are in a world slightly different from our own, and everything is familiar, but nothing quite right. So my Iron Age horsemen ride big horses, and have High Kings instead of tribal chieftains. And they are wiser than the reality.
Years ago, when I wrote Mythago Wood, I realized I was establishing a personal "mythology." It included unknown heroes, forgotten legends, snippets of known myths that have never been recorded. I developed this carefully through the whole cycle of books—so, for example, you have Green Men in both summer and winter form, Trickster in various manifestations, and a whole legend relating to the Tower of Babel—and I have deliberately crossed-over these references—familiar, yet not recorded—into everything I do. The 10 masks in Lavondyss, the 10 "first legends," are perhaps the most significant.
Characters in my books step into the tale I'm telling out of their own stories. The mythological backgrounds from which they come are likely to be close to those we know. But the recognizable characters—and those I've invented—are always shaped by the mind that has created them. They are, quite literally, old form/new desire.
Who are your heroes in contemporary society?
Holdstock: I don't subscribe to the hero ethic, though I have no difficulty writing about the ethic in an historical framework. There are quiet heroes everywhere. We'll never know who they are. If peace is ever established in the Near East, it will have been brokered by very dedicated, very selfless men and women behind the scenes.
Do you ever see yourself as a hero?
Holdstock: Only to my cat. And to each and every nephew and niece between the ages of 1 and 2, the "years of adoring eyes," after which my weaknesses become only too apparent.
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