The Hollow Hills - Mary Stewart [199]
In The Crystal Cave I based my story mainly on the "history" related by Geoffrey of Monmouth, [1] which is the basis of the later and mainly mediaeval tales of "Arthur and his Court," but I set the action against the fifth-century Romano-British background, which is the real setting for all that we know of the Arthurian Fact. [2] We have no fixed dates, but I have followed some authorities who postulate 470 A.D. or thereabouts as the date of Arthur's birth. The story of The Hollow Hills covers the hidden years between that date and the raising of the young Arthur to be war-leader (dux bellorum) or, as legend has had it for more than a thousand years, King of Britain. What I would like to trace here are the threads I have woven to make this story of a period of Arthur's life which tradition barely touches, and history touches not at all.
That Arthur existed seems certain. We cannot say even that much for certain about Merlin. "Merlin the magician," as we know him, is a composite figure built almost entirely out of song and legend; but here again one feels that for such a legend to persist through the centuries, some man of power must have existed, with gifts that seemed miraculous to his own times. He first appears in legend as a youth, even then possessed of strange powers. On this story as related by Geoffrey of Monmouth I have built an imaginary character who seemed to me to grow out of and epitomize the time of confusion and seeking that we call the Dark Ages. Geoffrey Ashe, in his brilliant book From Caesar to Arthur [3], describes this "multiplicity of vision":
When Christianity prevailed and Celtic paganism crumbled into mythology, a great deal of this sort of thing was carried over. Water and islands retained their magic. Lake-sprites flitted to and fro, heroes travelled in strange boats. The haunted hills became fairy-hills, belonging to vivid fairy folk hardly to be paralleled among other nations. Where barrows existed they often fitted this role. Unseen realms intersected the visible, and there were secret means of communication and access. The fairies and the heroes, the ex-gods and the demigods, jostled the spirits of the dead in kaleidoscopic confusion...Everything grew ambiguous. Thus, long after the triumph of Christianity, there continued to be fairy-hills; but even those which were not barrows might be regarded as havens for disembodied souls...There were saints of whom miracles were reported; but similar miracles, not long since, might have been the business of fully identifiable gods. There were glass castles where a hero might lie an age entranced; there were blissful fairylands to be reached by water or by cave-passageways...Journeys and enchantments, combats and imprisonments -- theme by theme -- the Celtic imagination articulated itself in story. Yet any given episode might be taken as fact or imagination or religious allegory or all three at once.
Merlin, the narrator of The Hollow Hills, the "enchanter" and healer gifted with the Sight, is able to move in and out of the different worlds at will. And as Merlin's legend is linked with the caves of glass, the invisible towers, the hollow hills where he now sleeps for all time, so I have seen him as the link between the worlds; the instrument by which, as he says, "all the kings become one King, and all the gods one God." For this he abnegates his own will and his desire for normal manhood. The hollow hills are the physical point of entry between this world and the Otherworld, and Merlin is their human counterpart, the meeting point for the interlocking worlds of men, gods, beasts and twilight spirits.
One meeting of the real and the fantasy worlds can be seen in the figure of Maximus. Magnus Maximus, the soldier with the dream of empire, was a fact; he commanded at Segontium until the time when he crossed to Gaul in his vain bid for power. "Macsen Wledig" is a legend, one of