Uther Pendragon was to reign for fifteen more years, and during those years he saw nothing of his son Arthur. Before the child was born Merlin sought out the King and spoke with him. “Sir, ye must purvey you for the nourishing of your child.” “As thou wilt,” said the King, “be it.” So on the night of his birth the child Arthur was carried down to the postern gate of Tintagel and delivered into the hands of Merlin, who took him to the castle of Sir Ector, a faithful knight. There Merlin had the child christened, and named him Arthur, and Sir Ector's wife took him as her foster son.
All through Uther's reign the country was sorely troubled by the Saxons and the Scots from Ireland. The two Saxon leaders whom the King had imprisoned managed to escape from London and fled thence to Germany, where they gathered a great army which struck terror throughout the kingdom. Uther himself was stricken with a grievous malady, and appointed Lot of Lothian, who was betrothed to his daughter Morgause, as his chief captain. But as often as Lot put the enemy to flight, they came back in even greater strength, and the country was laid waste. Finally Uther, though sorely ill, gathered his barons together and told them that he himself must lead the armies, so a litter was made for him, and he was carried in it at the head of his army against the enemy. When the Saxon leaders learned that the British King had taken the field against them in a litter, they disdained him, saying that he was half-dead already, and it would not become them to fight him. But Uther, with a return of his old strength, laughed and called out: “They call me the half-dead king, and so indeed I was. But I would rather conquer them in this wise, than be conquered by them and live in shame.” So the army of the Britons defeated the Saxons. But the King's malady increased, and the woes of the kingdom. Finally, when the King lay close to death, Merlin appeared and approached him in the sight of all the lords and bade him acknowledge his son Arthur as the new King. Which he did, and afterwards died, and was buried by the side of his brother Aurelius Ambrosius within the Giants' Dance.
After his death the lords of Britain came together to find their new King. No one knew where Arthur was kept, or where Merlin was to be found, but they thought the King would be recognized by a sign. So Merlin had a great sword fashioned, and fixed it by his magic art into a great stone shaped like an altar, with an anvil of steel in it, and floated the stone on water to a great church in London, and set it up there in the churchyard. There were gold letters on the sword which said: "Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil, is rightwise king born of all England." So a great feast was made, and at the feast all the lords came to try who could pull the sword from the stone. Among them came Sir Ector, and Kay his son, with Arthur, who had neither sword nor blazon, following as a squire. When they came to the jousting Sir Kay, who had forgotten his sword, sent Arthur back to look for it. But when Arthur returned to the house where they were lodging, everyone was gone and the doors were locked, so in impatience he rode to the churchyard, and drew the sword from the stone, and took it to Sir Kay. Then of course the sword was recognized, but even when Arthur showed that he alone of all men could pull it from the stone, there were those who cried out against him, saying it was great shame to them and to the realm to accept as king a boy of no high blood born, and that fresh trial must be made at Candlemas. So at Candlemas all the greatest in the land came together, and then again at Pentecost, but none of them could pull the sword from the stone, save only Arthur. But still some of the lords were angry and would not accept him, until in the end the common people cried out: "We will have Arthur unto our king, we will put him no more in delay, for we all see that it is God's will that he shall be our king, and who that holdeth against it, we will slay him." So Arthur was accepted by the people, high and low, and all men rich and poor kneeled to him and begged his mercy because they had delayed him so long, and he forgave them.
Then Merlin told them all who Arthur was, and that he was no bastard, but begotten truly by King Uther upon Ygraine, three hours after the death of her husband the Duke. So they raised to be king Arthur the young.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
Like its predecessor, The Crystal Cave, this novel is a work of the imagination, though firmly based in both history and legend. Not perhaps equally in both: so little is known about Britain in the fifth century A.D. (the beginning of the “Dark Ages”) that one is almost as dependent on tradition and conjecture as on fact. I for one like to think that where tradition is so persistent — and as immortal and self-perpetuating as the stories of the Arthurian Legend — there must be a grain of fact behind even the strangest of the tales which have gathered round the meager central facts of Arthur's existence. It is exciting to interpret these sometimes weird and often nonsensical legends into a story which has some sort of coherence as human experience and imaginative truth. I have tried with The Hollow Hills to write a story which stands on its own, without reference to its forerunner, The Crystal Cave, or even to whatever explanatory notes follow here. Indeed, I only add these notes for the benefit of those readers whose interest may go beyond the novel itself, but who are not familiar enough with the ramifications of the Arthurian Legend to follow the thinking behind some parts of my story. It may give them pleasure to trace for themselves the seeds of certain ideas and the origins of certain references.
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.