Mere Orthodoxy November 9, 2026 10 min signal 2026-11-09

21st century Inklings: Malcolm Guite's Arthurian cycle

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Malcolm Guite, Galahad and the Grail. Rabbit Room Press, 2026. $34.99. 372 pp.

Malcolm Guite, The Coming of Arthur. Rabbit Room Press, 2026. $34.99. 372 pp.

In an age of AI slop and shortened attention spans, Malcolm Guite’s epic poetry about King Arthur is nothing short of miraculous. Somehow, this professor-poet-priest (who, by the way, looks a bit like a Hobbit) has hewn from ancient sources a modern classic, a series of galloping English ballads celebrating faithfulness, courage, and self-sacrificial love.

I almost cannot believe it exists.

Guite started his four-volume cycle with Galahad and the Grail, recounting a young knight’s quest to liberate the Fisher King and restore the land. The second, out in November 2026, jumps back in time and tells of Arthur’s attempt to unify Britain. While Galahad and the Grail reads like an adventure tale—the red-cross knight travelling a forest and over mountains to rescue the world from the powers of darkness—The Coming of Arthur is a soberer reflection on the proper education of a prince, the need for a just political order, and the consequences, to both man and land, of rash disobedience. (The remaining two installments are scheduled for publication in 2027 and 2028.)

Guite takes up these legends in the spirit of the Inklings. Following in the footsteps of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, Guite makes timely the timeless, drawing new life from ancient stories.

Why retell Arthurian legends? Because the old stories are wiser than we are, Guite is fond of saying. As C. S. Lewis famously wrote, every age has its own blind spots. Echoing the contemporary outlook, modern books tend only to confirm our biases. “The only palliative,” Lewis prescribed, “is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds” by “reading old books.” Whether for the wisdom they offer or simply because they do not share our assumptions, old books are part and parcel of an education that aims at freedom.

In Galahad and Arthur, Guite has given us new old books. These are not translations. They are not summaries of the classics, such as children are forced to read in some schools—what Winston Churchill called “pemmican” (essentially dried spam, flavorless survival food that hardly nourishes the soul). Nor is the language pummeled to a pulp in the name of readability, such as the twaddle churned out by artificial intelligence. Instead, Guite reimagines the wisdom of the old stories for a modern audience, all in gorgeous verse. Indeed, in Guite’s second book, an elven poet says to Arthur:

I take what’s beautiful and true

and by my art I make it new,

till that great Bard whose Word is true

makes all things new again.

Such is the sacred responsibility of the artist—one Guite has taken seriously. Faithful to the legends, Guite brings forward their Christian themes in a way modern audiences can hear—baptizing the “magical Celtic inheritance” of the British Isles with “the light of the gospel” in simple, beautiful poetry.

Creation Care

One way Guite channels the spirit of the legends, while reimagining them for modern readers, is by emphasizing the knight’s chivalric responsibility to commune with creation and care for it.

In The Coming of Arthur, for example, the wizard Merlin notices the boy’s love of trees and teaches him how to hear “their ancient speech.” Under Merlin’s direction, Arthur can hear an oak tree singing to him, encouraging him to have the patience of an acorn, to remain rooted in the ground, and to “remember us amidst your victories. The lord of men must be the friend of trees.” Returning another evening, Merlin transfigures himself and Arthur into owls. Gazing with nocturnal eyes at “a hundred million stars,” Merlin asks Arthur to see the magnificence of the heavenly bodies—and to see that the great Poet placed the same order within the human heart. “Mankind is Creation’s crown,” he says. Thus does Guite urge Christian men (and women), not to return to a pre-Christian worship of the natural world, but to observe God’s fingerprints on all of creation.

Our role as image bearers of the creator, ambassadors of the king, demands that we rule, not dominate, creation for his glory. In Galahad and the Grail, as the red-cross knight rides his jet-black steed “through forests waste and wild,” he hears the sorrowful song of a naiad, the spirit of a babbling stream in human form. I have been poisoned, she sings to Galahad, by a knight who was once like you. He “won my heart and hand” and then turned cruel, despoiling “his lady and his land.” The corrupted knight harnessed her power, she says, “to serve his greed and lust. His engines churn the limpid burn and turn life back to dust.”

While the wasteland motif is, of course, common to the ancient legends, Guite depicts the knight’s corruption in definitively modern terms. As Francis Bacon would have recognized, the knight attempted to conquer nature in order to satisfy his greed for more. Rather than stewarding God’s created order, the knight sought to master nature, by scientific knowledge and technological means, in order to live longer and more comfortably. Similarly did Machiavelli liken lady fortune to a violent river who must be dammed by “virtuous” men. “It is better to be impetuous than cautious,” Machiavelli wrote, “because fortune is a woman; and it is necessary, if one wants to hold her down, to beat her and strike her down.”

But, for Guite, this advice not only violates the chivalric code of honor; it also leads to death. Rescuing the naiad, Galahad challenges and defeats the knight-turned-necromancer only to find that the man of flesh and blood had become a machine:

Beneath the mask of hardened steel

no human face remained,

just springs and bolts and cogs and wheels

all rusty, worn and stained.

Having revealed the true end of the tyrant, Galahad reflects:

…where he set his mind and heart

His soul flowed in their wake

For sometimes we ourselves become

The idols that we make.

Guite masterfully connects the wasteland motif with the modern attempt to conquer nature, not only amplifying the spirit of the legend but also responding to Bacon and Machiavelli. In this manner, it is a new old book, an ancient story written anew, with centuries of hindsight.

Modern disenchantment and portals to other worlds

In the second book in the series, Guite places Arthur’s coming-of-age story within “the tale all Britons know” as told by the great mytho-histories of Homer’s Iliad, Virgil’s Aeneid, and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century Historia. Surviving the fall of Troy (so the legend goes), Brut sailed across “the savage seas” to found a new kingdom on the “enchanted isle” of Albion. For generations, his royal line ruled the united British Isles until King Leir left the throne “without a son and heir,” plunging the Britons into tribal chaos and inviting the Saxons to invade, “bloodthirsty pagans in their ships, with oaths and curses on their lips.”

Arthur’s birth to King Uther presents the opportunity for reunification. But, fearful for the infant’s life, Merlin hides Arthur away with kind Ector, to be raised as a foster son alongside Ector’s own son. Instructing Ector to keep Arthur’s identity a secret, Merlin advises:

…when the two lads come of age

let Arthur be his brother’s page

for we have learned from saint and sage

those who would rule must serve.

This second book in the series is grittier than the first. But unlike the many petty lords wrestling for power, those who “think that might is right,” Arthur learns to serve his brother as a preparation for kingship.

As in the old Arthurian legends, Guite’s tales take place in liminal spaces, “along a porous border between the realm of Faerie and the kingdoms of mortal men,” he explains in an appendix. He weaves together the tactile and the numinous. Reading the prelude of The Coming of Arthur, one can almost feel the wind blowing cold on Cornwall’s coast as it “flings the freezing rain” against Tintagel, the historic castle perched “above the crags.” When Ector takes Arthur on a winter’s journey from Devon, “deep in the warm South West” of Britain, to bustling London town for holiday celebrations and games, it’s a grueling trip through wind and snow. When an alliance of rebellious lords rejects Arthur’s claim to the throne and lay siege to his castle, Arthur refuses to “skulk within this tower, like [a] rat[] within a cage,” and rides out to meet them, Excalibur drawn.

But the map of Britain is “overlaid” with strange, yet familiar, worlds. On a midsummer night, Merlin escorts Arthur into the woods, where a grey stone, “set there in ancient days,” seems to turn to mist and then open as a gate to the land of Elves, right before Arthur’s bewildered eyes. Ordinary landmarks become portals to fantastical realms—as Anodos discovers Fairy Land in an old desk drawer (in George MacDonald’s Phantastes) or the Pevensie children stumble into Narnia through the back of a wardrobe. As Merlin says,

…there are worlds, more wondrous worlds,

Than ever you can think

And there are worlds inside of worlds,

And every world is linked.

The cynic in me is tempted to say that all this sounds like a quaint children’s story. Portals to magical realms is the stuff of graphic novels and board games, not real life, where the price of gasoline, my family’s social calendar, and deadlines at work dominate my attention. Life is immediate and material, no?

In a recent podcast interview, Guite said that his aim is to recover the imagination as a truth-bearing faculty. The modern world is not disenchanted, he added. We are disenchanted to it. “What we really have to do” is not reenchant the world but “un-disenchant ourselves.”

Guite’s poetry aims to reenchant the imagination of a generation led to believe that the world is purely material, merely transactional.

In The Coming of Arthur, an elf lord hints to Arthur that their two worlds were at one time in closer contact, before the human world “grew dim” by some “dire calamity.” Men “wait a King to set them free,” he says. As C. S. Lewis supposed in the first book of his Ransom trilogy, perhaps the earth went radio silent when humankind rebelled against its creator and king; the human condition is to see through a glass darkly. Following Lewis, Guite asks us to consider whether there are other worlds beyond our sight, a trillion-trillion galaxies blocked by light pollution. Perhaps modernity has not killed mystery, only blinded us to it. As a friend recently reflected, what if we've mistaken a quiet God for a noisy life?

Like Merlin, Guites hopes to help us listen to the wisdom of the still, quiet voice in the woods; to give us an owl’s eyesight that we might see the multitudes of stars; to encourage us to defend the good in an inhuman age. Sometimes “lowly things men hardly see are more than what they seem.”

Guite wields the magic of the Inklings for the twenty-first century. There is wisdom in old stories. We just need someone to help us hear it.

One final word: to get the benefits of this tonic, please take as directed. In an introduction, Guite asks readers to enjoy these stories. Read them aloud, preferably with friends or family. They are best “heard in the ear and tasted on the tongue,” he writes. (Or listen to the audiobook, read by Guite, for a similarly immersive experience.) Go slowly; don’t rush. This is a feast to be celebrated, not medicine to be endured. (Plus the original artwork by Stephen Crotts is breathtaking.) These are the first Arthurian legends in verse form since Alfred, Lord Tennyson, but don’t be intimidated: the poetry is plain and simple, surprisingly easy to follow.

Will you take up the tale?

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Joseph K. Griffith II

Joseph K. Griffith II is the William Blackstone Professor of Law & Society at the Ashbrook Center and an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Ashland University.

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