#guy gavriel kay

[illustratus]

#julien delval #art #fantasy art #fantasy #architecture #fortress #bridges #walls #temples #temple #waterfalls #waterfall #lantern #lanterns #bridge #wall #castle #tree #trees #city #guards #mythical #guy gavriel kay #night #stars #sky #palace

[christophernolan]

Lord of Emperors | Guy Gavriel Kay

#I love this man’s writing to much I’ve read so many books and his remain unmatched #truly magnificent #guy gavriel kay #books #book quotes #quotes #literature #lit #lord of emperors #saratine mosaic

[retroscifiart]

Art by John Howe for A Song For Arbonne by Guy Gavriel Kay, 1993

#john howe #guy gavriel kay

[earhartsease]

so we're listening to the audiobooks of the Fionavar Tapestry, a fantasy trilogy from the 80s by the canadian author Guy Gavriel Kay

and surprisingly, the narrator is english rather than the expected north american

and even more surprisingly, and delightfully, when we first meet the elves (the lios-alfar), he give them soft welsh accents and that's a perfect and weirdly magical decision - like imagine if Michael Sheen were a small and beautiful elf (okay he is so there we go)

the story revolves around five young canadians who get drawn to another world (Fionavar) and so the narrator give them vague north american accents but the rest of the characters are not - it's early days so we don't know how far he'll go with the other characters, but so far the only dwarf sounds vaguely serbian, and it's a bit weird but in some ways predictable that the "lower classes" of humans (in the country of Brennin at least) have cockney accents

anyway we'll keep you posted as further accent choices unfurl

we have a complex relationship with these books - in some ways they're like if somebody took all the most emotional aspects of all the european myths and shoved them into one narrative and it gets more than a bit overcrowded at times - but also it's a hugely cathartic story in so many ways, an opportunity for much therapeutic ugly sobbing

#guy gavriel kay #the fionavar tapestry #audiobooks #accents

[dukeofriven]

Y’All Should Actually Read Barthes (Or: Why Your ‘Rings Of Power’ Critique Is Bad)

I think what really gets under my skin about the many, many lousy critiques about Rings of Power[1] on Tumblr dot Com and Reddit[2] that I see out there is that, firstly, they frequently seem to come from people who don’t seem to realize that their understanding and memories about Tolkien are shaped far, far, far more by the Peter Jackson movies (which were hardly ‘canon-compliant’) than they are by the original text. Second and more crucially, I think, is that everyone really wants to get pissed about canon that Tolkien never actually codified. Here’s what I mean: Tolkien didn’t ‘write’ the Silmarillion. He wrote a whole bunch of essays, letters, notes, scraps of ideas, poems, plot outlines, and ramblings, some of which he earmarked for a project he one day planned to compile as something called The Silmarillion. Then he made a slight error in his scheme by dropping dead. So his son Christopher Tolkien and his pal Guy Gavriel Kay stared at this enormous pile of stuff that went back decades, pulled out some of the bits they thought were most polished, did their best to link them into some kind of narrative, edited the crap out of it, added punctuation, and published a book they called The Silmarillion after JRR’s planned, but never completed idea. And was what was in The Silmarillion everything JRR planned to be in the final volume? Not necessarily. In many cases, not remotely, but Christopher Tolkien and Kay tried to take the stuff that was most polished, even if it was thirty year old material that Tolkien had changed his mind fifteen more times on, because the old stuff often had a clarity of completion that the later revisions did not. They usually took the stuff that complete sentences over the stuff with sentence fragments, even if the latter was more ‘fresh.’ Because they realized that The Silmarillion was more a simulacrum of Tolkien’s ideas than anything definitive, Christopher then put out The Unfinished Tales, which contained some more of Tolkien’s ideas: spme that had made it in other versions into The Silmarillion, some that had not. And since the very large pile of notes and scribblings and essays and letters and old recipes didn’t seem any noticeably smaller, he then spent thirteen years publishing The History of Middle Earth, comedically large tomes stuffed to the brim with Tolkien ideas, variations, variants, and late night side-table Kleenex notes. And then they kept putting out more books. And more. And then Christopher made the same silly mistake of dropping dead too! But other people put out even more books, with even more untouched material. There’s a new book coming out in November and JRR Tolkien’s been dead for fifty years! None of this was published under JRR’s aegis. And let me tell you, JRR Tolkien had a pretty weighty aegis: the man was famous for berating his publishers for edits and corrections. Part of the reason he never got around to completing a definitive Silmarillion was the fact that the man never wanted to publish something with which was not completely satisfied. Everything that has come out after his death, compiled with all the love and care in the world, is nevertheless pretty damning evidence that Tolkien was rarely satisfied. What we know about old JRR is that he changed his mind again and again, and we can’t know that on his death bed, his last thought wasn’t some brilliant revelation that finally made the One Ring work in the context of Sauron’s timeline in the Second Age. If he did, he didn’t get a chance scribble it on a napkin for his son to later try and make sense of. And so we will never really know what his true canon decision on, say, elven pregnancy was: sometimes he thought it should take about 108 years. Sometimes only 9 years. He would change his mind, or change his math, again and again.. So when you talk about the ‘canon’ of Tolkien, it’s important to remember that even if you’re just speaking about ‘definitive’ works, you’re left with those published with his approval in his lifetime. namely The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, and The Road Goes Ever On songbook with Donald Swann. Even with those four books there’s complexity: what version of The Hobbit are you talking about? The original? Or the one he rewrote after he changed his mind about the entire nature of the ring Bilbo found in a cave and decided that actually it was the most important piece of jewelry in existence. Honestly, given world enough and time Tolkien probably would have made a third edition of The Hobbit because those two ‘canonical’ books, The Hobbit and it’s ‘sequel’ Lord of the Rings, don’t even fit together very well, as poor Peter Jackson learned to his sorrow and our pain with his wretched, tonally disjunct Hobbit films. It’s funny, because everyone on here loves talking about Roland Barthes’ Death of the Author. Almost none of you have ever read it, but it sure is a thing that’s a super important, inviolable concept... until we talk about an author the internet isn’t mad at, and suddenly the author’s word is inviolable and all adaptation choices are wrong. I don’t know how to get this across any clearer: anyone who has ever dug deep into Tolkien’s lore knows that speaking of things like ‘canon,’ ‘definitive,’ ‘authoritative,’ and all similar adjectives is often a fool’s errand. Tolkien left us with a lot of ideas about the second age, but very little in the way of clarity, much less ‘this is the true thing unchanging.’ Even the ‘authoritative’ timeline of the Appendices in LOTR is stuff he was changed in the writings he did in the years after. So I am begging you. Please. Please stop giving the Akallabêth a level of authoritative definition that even its compiler admitted it did not possess. Until you can prove to me you brought the shade of JRR Tolkien back from beyond the Veil to speak True Authorial Intent,[3] I am going to treat your recourse to ‘but the canon’ with the level of exasperation it deserves. --------------------------

[1] Besides the general problem on this website that everyone’s heard of critical theory and almost nobody’s ever read any. [2] There are plenty of valid critiques to be made, especially about pacing and awkward racial optics, but it’s really not the unhinged shit I’m seeing, as usual. [3] Let’s be honest: in the fifty years since he shuffled off his mortal coil, the shade of Tolkien will unquestionably return with a ghostly second pile of essays, letters, notes, scraps of ideas, poems, plot outlines, and ramblings, and they won’t be remotely definitive either. And we’re all going to be super disgruntled when the ghost insists that the only good adaptation is his work is Khraniteli.

#rings of power #tolkien #jrr tolkien #The Hobbit #The Lord of The Rings #Akallabêth #Christopher Tolkien #the silmarillion #Guy Gavriel Kay #rop #LOTR #Khraniteli #Barthes #Peter Jackson

[earlgraytay]

Oh hot dang!

I am very hot and cold with Guy Gavriel Kay- I really loved the Sarantine Mosaic duology (it's one of my favourite adult fantasy stories), liked Tigana and Under Heaven well enough, was meh on Ysabel, and outright DNF'ed A Song For Arbonne.

But I picked up Children of Earth and Sky hoping it'd be in the former category and it's in the same universe as The Sarantine Mosaic. So that's exciting!

In less exciting news, my Goodreads account got deleted, essentially- I was using Facebook to log in and I don't even remember what my FB email address was. :(

So I made a new account and contacted Customer Support about it.

#the things i choose to read #guy gavriel kay #the earl's boring life

[pagemelt]

evergreen Jehane take from The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay

#booklr #quotes #guy gavriel kay

[haveyoureadthisfantasybook]

vote YES if you have finished the entire book.

vote NO if you have not finished the entire book.

(faq · submit a book)

#fantasy #books #Guy Gavriel Kay #The Summer Tree #The Fionavar Tapestry #poll #result: no #l: English

[7narwen]

Map for Russian edition of All the Seas of the World by Guy Gavriel Kay

#cartography #fantasy maps #book maps #fantasymap #maps #guy gavriel kay

[poorshadowspaintedqueens]

(Slightly Late) 2023 Fic Roundup Post

Like it says on the tin, about 24 hours late, but I wanted to wait until Yuletide reveals were up, since 3/4 of my fic output happened in the last two weeks of December.

Due to a case of writer's block that I just couldn't shake for most of the year, I finished only four fics in 2023 and made barely any progress on any WIPs. That being said, I did manage to write about 15k words of a separate book project that I am horrendously behind on, so there's that. Hopefully I can do more of both this year.

One standalone fic written for a Valentine's Day exchange:

The heart is an organ of fire (House of the Dragon, M) - How Rhaenyra Targaryen arrived at her sister-in-law’s funeral with one husband and left with another. Written for @crossingwinter.

***

And three for Yuletide:

A Wedding in Firenta for @iberiandoctor (Guy Gavriel Kay, A Brightness Long Ago) - “Was our last encounter at the Sardi wedding? Piero’s older son, in Firenta?” “Were you there? I forget.” The other man smiled. “No, you don’t,” he said.

Over the past year, I have been trying to catch up on various authors who have written new things that I missed. Thus, I ended up reading three new-to-me books by one of my all-time favourite authors, Guy Gavriel Kay. I had only read the first in the series when @iberiandoctor's prompt turned up on the Yuletide list and I took it on impulse, hoping to make myself write something. And I succeeded, go me!

***

The New Galatea for @edwardianspinsteraunt (My Fair Lady) - Eliza Doolittle departs. Henry Higgins tries to move on. Freddy Eynsford-Hill succeeds.

Every now and again, my brain tells me I want to do something with My Fair Lady. I don't know how old I was when I first saw it, but I have incredibly clear memories of dancing around as a 3-4 year old singing "Wouldn't It Be Loverly," and feeling very close to Eliza at least as far as her love for chocolates was concerned. But the ending never sat well with me. Higgins got off too easy. And while I wanted to write an enormous reworking that grappled with an Eliza whose family came from India and thus added another layer of complexity to the class dynamics already at work, I didn't have time for that, so I stuck to fixing the ending and restricted myself to a few oblique hints.

***

Pandora's Mirror for@chthonic-cassandra (Penny Dreadful) - Hecate Poole’s history was one of betrayal and blood, but her end, at least, would be her own.

I have been long overdue for a rewatch of Penny Dreadful and came across this prompt before I had time to start it. I am now 3 episodes into Season 2 and already have a small list of things I wish I'd done slightly differently in the fic, but I'm very pleased with how it turned out given how long it had been since I'd last watched the show. Hecate is one of those characters who spends a lot of time on the sidelines, at least in the first half of S2, before her own internal conflicts come to the fore, and I really enjoyed exploring what her history might have looked like.

#yuletide #fanfiction #house of the dragon #my fair lady #penny dreadful #guy gavriel kay

[the-hearth-and-the-wild]

We like to believe, or pretend, we know what we are doing in our lives. It can be a lie. Winds blow, waves carry us, rain drenches a man caught in the open at night, lightning shatters the sky and sometimes his heart, thunder crashes into him bringing the awareness he will die. We stand up, as best we can under that. We move forward as best we can, hoping for light, kindness, mercy, for ourselves and those we love.

Guy Gavriel Kay, A Brightness Long Ago

#book quotes #guy gavriel kay #a brightness long ago #books and libraries #fantasy quotes #books and reading #literature #life quotes

[illustratus]

#julien delval #fantasy art #fantasy #art #guy gavriel kay #landscape #romantic #castle #knights #tree #bridge #moon #sky #clouds #night #evening #oak tree #oak #oak trees #trees #mythical #mythology #chivalry #knight #magic #castles #full moon #moonlight #moonlit #illustration

[christophernolan]

I sound like a broken record but I’ve to say this AGAIN, Guy Gavriel Kay’s writing is so good. It’s so poetic and melancholy. It’s beautiful. I’d recommend his books to anyone who loves to read tragically beautiful stories.

#guy gavriel kay #currently reading yet ANOTHER one of his books #I’m obsessed #the summer tree

[lizziestudieshistory]

26.10.2022 - It's half term, so I (supposedly) have more free time this week! It's a relief I've run myself ragged over the last 2 months and I need the break. Today is a "lazy" day, I've got a friend coming over for an afternoon of reading, watching the series finale of House of the Dragon, and general catching up as I haven't seen him since I started my new course.

Currently reading: Lord of Emperors by Guy Gavriel Kay (actually reading it properly this time, I promise!); The Mapmakers by Tamzin Merchant; The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien (I have no excuse...)

#studyblr #gradblr #books #reading #bookblr #the silmarillion #j.r.r. tolkien #annotating books #the mapmakers #tamzin merchant #lord of emperors #guy gavriel kay #cw food

[elenajohansenreads]

Books I Read in 2024

#16 - A Brightness Long Ago, by Guy Gavriel Kay

Rating: 4.5/5 stars

I loved it, and I'm glad I took my time with it (about three weeks, reading lighter stuff concurrently at times.) I wouldn't recommend this to readers entirely new to Kay's body of work, despite thinking it's an extremely beautiful and thoughtful example of it; I still think Tigana is his best novel, and the highest-value combination of approachable and rewarding to an unfamiliar audience. This novel is deliberately slow, and intensely reflective, and at times startlingly fourth-wall breaking. 

The conceit is an aging narrator looking back to his small role in a web of political intrigue during his younger years. He is the protagonist, certainly, but not the hero, as I don't even think this book has a Hero figure in it. The cast of characters that builds outward from him is rich and varied despite the relatively limited scope (some Kay books have far more POV characters than this!) and depending on your taste, some of them could certainly be more interesting, ultimately, than the protagonist. But this is where Kay's atypical structural composition shines; the narrator is the central thread of this tapestry but nowhere near the strongest, brightest, or most important. He is the narrator, rather than any of the other characters, because he is the one best positioned by events to tell the whole story. 

I look forward to reading this again down the road, perhaps after I've also reread the other novels set in this cohesive alternate world; for example, it was a nice touch to revisit, briefly, the shrine with the mosaic that was so important to the Sarantium duology. I only read it once, years ago, but that location was memorable enough to recall clearly all this time later, so I look forward to discovering other connections I've missed.

#booklr #book review #favorite authors #guy gavriel kay

[ardent-reflections]

There are no wrong turnings. Only paths we had not known we were meant to walk.

Guy Gavriel Kay

#guy gavriel kay #literature #spilled thoughts #poetry #lit #quotes #love quotes #poems and quotes #poem #words