That Once There Was. . . and Is a Camelot

Is it true? That’s the thrilling question in any story about the legends of yore. Stories in which characters discover that there is fire behind the smoke of legends typically come in two varieties. In one kind, people from our time are transported back to the days of the legend. Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is an example. In the other, the legends are shown to be true because some figure involved in them is depicted as either still alive or traveling forward in time to our world. C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength is an example of the latter. Because of the peril involved in that story, Merlin is awakened!