The Crystal Cave

by Pa Rock

Reader

Mary Stewart wrote The Crystal Cave, the first novel in her four-book collection on the legend of King Arthur, in 1970, and by sometime around the end of that decade I had read the entire set.   Rereading those beautiful works has long been on my book “bucket list,” and now, forty long years later, I have at last I have begun that process.  

Lady Stewart tells her tales of Arthurian Britain through the voice of Merlin, the young King’s cousin and mentor.  The first book, The Crystal Cave, gives the backstory of Merlin as envisioned by the author.   Stewart’s Merlin was born to a Welsh princess and an unknown father, and, as the book opens, was a young bastard prince living in the servant’s wing of his grandfather’s castle in south Wales.  Merlin listens to the gossip of the servants and frequents a crawlspace beneath the palace where he hears occasional bits of conversation from his royal family.  He is quite comfortable living his life on the fringe of the palace society.

One of the ways that Merlin entertains himself as a youngster is to sneak away from the palace and go for long rides up into the hills.  One day he chances upon a cave that, although empty when he finds it, is obviously someone’s home.  While he is looking around, he discovers an anteroom in the shape of a globe that is covered, floor to ceiling, in sharp crystals.  After stumbling into the room and being mesmerized by the reflected, flickering lights from his candle, he is interrupted as the cave’s occupant, an older man named Galapas, returns and calls him out of the crystal room.

Merlin spends the next five years secretly traveling back and forth to the cave where Galapas endeavors to teach him about plants and medicines - and mathematics, and engineering skills.  Galapas also shows him the how the crystal room in the cave has the power to produce visions.  It is through one of these visions that Merlin witnesses a crisis unfolding back at his grandfather’s palace.  He rushes home, becomes involved in the chaos that is occurring, and winds up fleeing into the night where he is captured by a pair of rogues and bound as a hostage on a ship headed to Brittany (France).

And in Brittany his life begins to take shape.  Merlin meets his father and sets about helping to plan the unification of Britain under one king.

Not being a poet, I lack the words to describe just how beautiful the images are that Mary Stewart creates in telling this tale.  It is a sumptuous work and a joy to read.  I look forward to rereading the next three volumes as well and then passing the set along to whichever of my grandchildren appears to be the most open to the enchantments that life has to offer.

The Crystal Caveis a wonderful work of myth and fiction. It will not disappoint.