Essay Questions

Why is the word “Childslayer” used to summon the presence of King Arthur?

When Kim summons Arthur to her realm, the power she possesses to pull off this nifty trick is said to reside in nothing “but the name she knew, terrible and merciless.” When recalling the many Arthurian legends, one can immediately conceive of any number of words that might have been invested with the power to bring him across time and space. “Camelot,” “Round Table,” and “Excalibur” is just the most obvious. The least obvious almost certainly has to be “Childslayer” because the portrait of chivalric heroism associated with Arthur by most people definitely does not typically include his having killed a single child, much less multiple children. One of the lesser-known stories about Arthur is his Herod-like position in what is typically referred to as the Mayday Massacre. During this event, a number of innocent infants died as a result of Arthur’s fear of a prophetic vision by Merlin telling of Arthur’s downfall at the hands of a baby born on that day. Despite the massacre, one of the babies born that day manages to survive. That baby is Mordred, Arthur’s own nephew, who will eventually be the agent of Camelot’s decline and fall.

To what does the title of this book refer and by what alternative titles might the book have been called?

Perhaps surprisingly, the precise phrase “the wandering fire” pops up less than five times over the course of the novel. The most significant of these occasions is when it is explicitly described: “the wandering fire was the ring Kim wore.” This explicit explanation of the title is foreshadowed much earlier when the very same ring is termed “the Warstone” and identified as the source of Kim’s power. But that is not the only name by which powerful ring is known. Very early in the narrative, Kim is described as “holding the Baelrath before her, she saw, in the very center of the monument, a figure standing on the altar stone.” Kim is described as holding this ring “quiescently” as she uses the power of the name “Childslayer” to summon King Arthur. The inert quality of the ring at this moment is suggestive of its power being limited or, at least, dependent, while known only as Warstone or Baelrath. It will not until some time afterward that she comes to identify the ring also as the Wandering Fire and this revelation comes only as a result of the words of a prophecy foretelling of the day “When the wandering fire strikes the heart of stone.”

Who is Darien, the very significant character that is introduced in this middle entry in The Fionavar Tapestry trilogy?

The initial entry in the series ends with a character pregnant by rape. Surprisingly, she decides to deliver the infant and names him Darien before handing him over to another couple to raise. Darien’s conception complicated by the violent force against the mother is further complicated by the consequence of his childhood. The consequence is that this aspect of his maturation is unnaturally swift. Although born early in the book, before its conclusion he will have become a young man despite the chronological passage of time not nearly reflecting the rapidity of his development. Darien becomes representative of a significant allowance made for long-form serial storytelling. Although he does not appear at all in the book which introduces the central core group of protagonists, he will become increasingly central to the overall narrative trek of the trilogy with this entry and the sequel. It is a quirk of storytelling structure that for some reason usually does not work nearly as well in a standalone novel in which someone who will turn out to be a major character is suddenly introduced midway into the story.