Thought for the Evening: The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin
In 1987, Stephen R. Lawhead published Taliesin, the first book in The Pendragon Cycle, closely followed by Merlin in 1988 and Arthur in 1989. Later he followed this up with Pendragon (1994), Grail (1997), and the rather different Avalon (1999), and more recently has added Aurelia (2025), which is the only one in the cycle I haven't read. The first trilogy is truly excellent; growing up, I read them a lot. The style of them was particular interesting -- Lawhead interwove the myth of Atlantis, various stylized versions of Celtic myths, Arthurian legend, and a sort of vaguely Celticized Evangelical Christianity into something that was quite fresh and new.
I was interested, then, to watch the recent streaming series, The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin, which is based on Taliesin and Merlin. I can recommend it quite highly. It is imperfect. It really does not do justice to the excellent story of Taliesin, rushing through it, but its recent success on Amazon Prime makes it reasonably likely there will be a second season, and one hopes that they can at least get more of it in flashbacks. Taliesin is not a household name the way Merlin is, so it's not surprising that they put the focus on Merlin. Still, they would have done better, perhaps, to have given Taliesin a bit more time, even if putting the emphasis on the second book. The rushing doesn't do any favors to the more complicated story in Merlin, either; putting two books into seven episodes is asking a lot of seven episodes. Nonetheless, while parts might be a bit puzzling to people who have never read the books, as an adaptation works quite well.
The series does occasionally show its very limited budget. Of course, since we're talking television, the very limited budget is said to be about $50 million. Nonetheless, I kept comparing it to The Rings of Power, whose first season cost that amount for each episode, and yet, with very occasional exceptions, The Pendragon Cycle looks better. The limited budget required them to find places to shoot, make sets with which the actors had to interact, and actually do something with the outdoors. It all seems quite right, in ways that the undoubtedly more expensive backgrounds of The Rings of Power never have. We also get more action -- sometimes stylized, to be sure, but there are actually things going on that give interest to the scenes.
In adapting the books, perhaps the biggest problem that has to be solved is the music. Taliesin is the greatest bard in the history of the island of Britain, with Merlin having some of the same talent. Music is central to what they do. The books can cheat on this -- we don't need the music, we don't even get the song, we just get prose versions of the stories that were told. The series, I think, probably solves the best way it can without requiring extraordinary musical genius -- the bards sing, but the magic is carried by the reactions. In one scene, Taliesin is singing at a banquet before a strange court, where his people have come as refugees. The song is nothing special in itself, but it's just a platform; what happens is that Taliesin's people start singing along, and King Avallach, to whom they have come begging, who comes from a civilization so advanced that in comparison to it these people are primitive savages, looks around and (in an excellent bit of subtle acting by Daniel Fathers) realizes that this is exactly what his dying people need. That is a good, solid way to do the magic of music on screen.
Because there are so many characters, being pulled in from two different books, the actors don't always have a full time to shine, but I liked most of what I saw. (Pelleas seems unfortunately a bit of a non-entity, but I think this is more of a not-enough-time-for-development problem, rather than an acting problem.) That Atlanteans are all rather magnetic -- which makes it further disappointing that we don't get more of them in their own right -- Rose Reid as Charis, Daniel Fathers as Avallach, and Emree Franklin as Morgian. (Since Morgian is the primary antagonist of Merlin, and the one person of whom Merlin is truly afraid, I expect we will get more of her if the series gets a second season.) The three key characters for the parts of the story that make it into the series are Charis, Taliesin (played by James Arden), and Merlin (played by Tom Sharp), and all three of them work quite well. I also liked Myles Clohessey's interpretation of Uther as suspicious and grouchy but extremely practical.
If you liked the books, you'll mostly like the series. If you haven't read the books, it is worthwhile, as well, although the series will occasionally require you to connect dots that it does not itself explicitly connect because it is only seven episodes long. However, it's no worse than you'd likely get in a movie version, and the series in any case more than makes up for it in other ways.
Various Links of Interest
* Christian B. Wagner, On the Use of Typology in Apologetics
* E. J. Hutchinson, A Review of The Odyssey, Translated by Daniel Mendelsohn, at "New Verse Review: A Journal of Lyric and Narrative Poetry"
* Brian Kemple, Semiotics, at the Encyclopedia of Catholic Theology
* Victor Tamburini, Saying (Nothing) and Conversational Implicatures (PDF)
* James Chastek, Predogstination, A fragment., at "Just Thomism"
* Dan Hitchens, The Making of Roger Scruton, at "First Things"
* Josh Hawthorne, How and Where AI Intelligence Actually Comes From, at "Thinking Out Loud"
* Bill Vallicella, Semantic Engines, Consciousness, Intentionality, and Understanding, at "Maverick Philosopher"
* Brett Mullins looks at the first issue of Mind.
* Nik Prassas, Is Brideshead Revisited the 20th Century's Greatest Novel? at "The Republic of Letters"
* Francisco Fernflores, The Equivalence of Mass and Energy, at the SEP
Currently Reading
Clark Ashton Smith, Zothique: The Final Cycle
Thomas Joseph White, OP, Principles of Catholic Theology: Book 1, On the Nature of Theology
Bernard Lonergan, Verbum
Lara Alcock, How to Think about Abstract Algebra
In Audiobook
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (as read by Rob Inglis)
Jim Butcher, Changes (as read by James Marsters)