Everyone knows the name of King Arthur’s sword Excalibur. Not as many remember that he also had a spear called, of all names likely to inspire fear in his enemies, just “Ron.” Nicola Griffith’s neo-Arthurian romance Spear is not about that esteemed lance, nor is it exactly about Arthur. Originally conceived as a short story contribution to a new anthology of Arthurian retellings featuring diverse characters, Spear seems to have grown in the telling, and locates King Arthur in an early Middle Ages drawn with a vividness of historical detail that depends on, for example, the early medieval diffusion of the new technology of the stirrup throughout the British Isles. Simultaneously, Griffith has interwoven Celtic legend with the narrative and suffused it with magic throughout, with the result that book can feel like a more mythological spinoff from Hild, Griffith’s historical novel set in seventh-century Northumbria during the conversion of the early English to Christianity. The author in fact explains in an extensive afterword that she wrote Spear during a brief break from completing the sequel to Hild, and was drawn back to a similar setting in the early Middle Ages despite the range of different possible Arthurian temporalities from which she might have chosen otherwise. But there is no late medieval pomp or much courtly French influence here: even her Lancelot is no longer French but Asturian. (What’s the Asturian for “C’est moi”?) As we can discern from the Welsh orthography of the character names—Gwenhwyfar, Myrddyn, Cei—and the care put into evoking a range of Welsh landscapes, Griffith conjures a committedly Celtic Arthur, such that it makes perfect sense for some of the Tuath Dé to have blown over from Ireland into Arthur’s storyworld. In its fusion of early Irish, Welsh, and later Continental source material—indeed an intricate mapping of one onto the other—Spear proves clever, surprising, and even strikingly original, a descriptor I wouldn’t use lightly of Arthurian literature. Of course, there are still some of the comforts of recognition and repetition—oh, there is the abrasive Sir Kay, behaving how we expect Sir Kay to behave—but Griffith also manages to do something new with an old story, that driving impulse of so much actual medieval storytelling, which in Chaucer’s words so often sought “newe corn” in “old feldes” (The Parliament of Fowls 22-23).

If the novel has one major shortcoming, I suppose it would be that, as a narrative and as an evocation of a richer fantasy world it can finally only hint at, Spear can feel somewhat slight in the end, especially if our basis for comparison is Griffith’s own sprawling Hild, or an Arthurian compilation on the scale of Malory’s Morte Darthur or T. H. White’s Once and Future King. These latter two are not really the appropriate texts to compare with Spear, however: instead, this short novel fits very comfortably into a tradition of more compact Arthurian romances such as those by Chrétien de Troyes or others in the Welsh tradition. Yes, there are kings and gods in Spear, but this is no epic: it’s one woman’s story. Readers approaching it in this spirit will find it less likely to disappoint, and may judge it less potentially plodding and more narratively nimble than a hefty first volume of a trilogy such as Hild.

Griffith’s Arthur is a post-Roman Welsh king beset (offstage) by Germanic tribes who could therefore fit more or less comfortably into the account of Arthur given in sources such as Geoffrey of Monmouth’s fanciful 12th-century History of the Kings of Britain. He is also not the center of the narrative by any means, and as a personality is distant, cold, not quite human. And despite the narrative’s spatiotemporal specificity, anchored in early medieval Wales, Griffith takes care to gesture towards a multiethnic and otherwise diverse medieval Britain, full of plenty of, as she puts it in her Author’s Note, “[c]rips, queers, women and other genders, and people of colour”: “We are here now; we were there then. So we are in this story.” Griffith has done her homework, and is perfectly correct to argue that “historical accuracy also meant this could not be a story of only straight, white, nondisabled men,” even if it has only been in the past few years that medieval studies as a discipline has begun to work harder to counteract the prevailing popular view of medieval Europe—and particularly Britain—as monolithically white. (See for example the recent special issue of Literature Compass: “Race Before Race: Premodern Critical Race Studies”.) For one, brown-skinned Lancelot (Llanza) walks with a limp—“as much a part of him as breathing”—yet remains unmatched in combat on horseback, a detail that contains in itself an understated but powerful disability narrative that I’d suspect responds to T. H. White’s own framing of Lancelot as “Ill-Made Knight.” Similarly, still just as “Welsh” as any of the rest of them, Bedwyr/Bedivere owes his “gleaming dark skin” to ancestors came from Africa during the Roman period. In the Middle Ages, Arthurian literature quickly became a kind of early global literature itself, traveling across wide waterways and continents, and Griffith reminds us that the Roman Empire with its own tremendous reach made its British extension a more cosmopolitan place than most modern Arthurian adaptations imagine.

In the simplest terms, one could describe Spear as the story of a crossdressing queer woman with a supernatural gift in combat who yearns to become a knight of King Arthur’s court, but who is frustrated in the attempt until she can find a way to somehow achieve the quest of the Holy Grail. Nevertheless, to summarize the novel in this way and reduce it to those familiar elements risks misleading a prospective reader entirely. Griffith’s central character Peretur bears less resemblance to an Alanna of Tortall, and at first has much more in common with Grendel and Grendel’s mother, living in a cave on the margins of the world: “In the wild waste, a girl, growing.” With no human contact save her mother’s often disordered stories of the Tuath Dé and their magical gifts, the young Peretur begins to yearn for that Arthurian quintessence, “adventure,” especially after she observes from afar the new homesteads appearing in her valley that bring “real people, not from stories” into her narrow world. Peretur eventually departs from her safe but limited cocoon of myth to enter that world of real people, and indeed a world of realism, only to discover greater depths to the mythic fabric of that reality. There is much more to this story than it at first appears, and depths to the mysterious call that Peretur feels urging her to join Arthur’s court at Caer Leon, a call having less to do with a king than with a lake, and with another woman.

Peretur is of course herself a genderbent Perceval, and it is also far from coincidental that Griffith has chosen the medieval Perceval story in particular to inflect with so much Celtic mythology: versions of this local figure not only appear frequently in early Welsh sources, but the character remains associated with Wales even in later traditions, often referred to as “Perceval of Wales.” And yet Perceval could be a particularly difficult character for a modern writer to adapt to the sensibilities of the novel and our expectations for glimpses into the interiority of Arthur’s knights, which we rarely experience in medieval literature. In many stories Perceval is also famously a character who knows nothing, almost a personification of naivete. For instance, during one of the most memorable scenes in Chrétien’s foundational Grail romance Perceval, the title character, depicted as a sort of rustic bumpkin at first totally ignorant of the court or arms but possessed of an effortless ability to match with the best of Arthur’s knights, becomes lost in contemplation of three drops of goose blood against a snowy background. Absorbed in his thought, he ignores the two knights of Arthur’s court—one of them being Kay—who attempt to speak with him, and who then challenge and attack him to recompense him for his rudeness. Perceval defeats both knights in combat laughably easily, offhandedly breaking Kay’s collarbone in a few short lines of verse. Éric Rohmer’s mesmerizing French New Wave film Perceval le Gallois (1978) adapts this scene and others with seriocomic grace, using a self-conscious theatrical absurdity to bring to life this charmingly ignorant rustic who mistakes Arthur’s retainers for angels, and yet demonstrates an almost supernatural power to overcome the best of them without even trying. Griffith’s Peretur shares something of this ignorance and an even greater measure of this at first inexplicable power: “It had never occurred to her that anything in the world might be a danger to her.” She is aware of her own power over first animals and then men without understanding its source, but that power takes the form not of ignorance but is literally a kind of understanding in itself: even when armed with a humble hunting spear, Peretur can sense exactly what her opponent in battle will try to do, and turn aside any attack with ease, next exploiting every weakness she so uncannily perceives. Without knowing why, Peretur knows, and wins, and wins.

Unlike Chrétien’s enigmatic romance, the narrative in Spear thus becomes a journey to greater and greater understanding: of self, others, the past, the world. Peretur does experience considerable disorientation as she learns to navigate the human world and slowly acquires a better understanding of what sets her apart from others, but I was struck by the fact that what never disorients or confuses her is her own queerness: she understands the nature and indeed the naturalness of her own attraction to women from her youth in the wilderness. As such, the same-sex love (and lust) in the novel are handled in a disarmingly straightforward manner, as in Hild utterly convincing readers that queer people not only could but did exist those many centuries distant, even if our vocabularies and taxonomies of desire may have differed: “I would have you. I would have you now.” Likewise with the implied polyamorous arrangement among the three legs of that famous royal Arthurian love triangle, which Peretur and Griffith apprehend as a perfectly normal amorous arrangement, in our time or this one: “And brothers share. And so.” I would also add that, while women writers like Griffith have contributed to Arthuriana in large numbers for many decades, by contrast Hollywood’s many narratives of Arthur remain highly masculinist in emphasis, and certainly overwhelmingly straight, making this casually queer Arthur a welcome addition to the neo-Arthurian canon. By contrast, for instance, Tamar Boyadjian has written on “The Missed Queerness of The Green Knight Adaptation,” suggesting that the queerness implicit in the medieval source text in question has been enervated rather than by the otherwise intriguing recent film adaptation. Although there is much in Spear that is purely the stuff of myth and fantasy, the queerness of the past is as grounded in reality as those newly arrived stirrups.

Arthurian literature remains perennially popular but for that very reason can present a challenge to authors making a first foray into the field: how to make a story stand out when people have been retelling it for centuries upon centuries, and with such increasing frequency in the past one? As early as the fifteenth century, William Caxton, in the epilogue to his printing of Ramon Llull’s Book of Chivalry, could already marvel that the stories of Arthur and his knights “occupy so many large volumes” that they seem “a world, or as a thing incredible to believe.” Even so, in this brief but unique piece of Celtic Arthurian syncretism, Griffith has found her own way to prove that, just like the iterated histories of their myth-haunted past that Peretur’s mother relates to her, “the stories are never the same.”