1KHO 856: The Opposite of AI Slop | Malcolm Guite, Galahad and the Grail

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Here's your report.

**Ginny** (0:01)
Oh, thanks, Jane. I wish I could hire someone just like you.

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**Ginny** (0:21)
You're irreplaceable, Jane, but another you would be great.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:24)
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**Ginny** (0:35)
We are diving in to an area of life, actually, I'm not super familiar with. I was thinking back as I read this new book I have and it's poetry, it's talking about Galahad. I was like, I have some touch points with this, but I don't know with my schooling experience, I think I missed a whole lot. So there is this brand new book out called Galahad and the Grail with phenomenal illustrations. Also, it's all in poetry.
So the author who has done so much, so many books, music as well. You can find him on YouTube reading all of the classics, Malcolm Guite, welcome.

**Malcolm Guite** (1:17)
Hello, very nice to be with you Ginny. I'm glad to be on your podcast. I'm all in favor of hours spent out playing in woods and by streams. That's how I grew up. So I'm glad to see there are people trying to help that make happen now.

**Ginny** (1:33)
Yes, it's definitely a big change that's happened in society where kids are inside so much more. But I was thinking back through my own educational journey, and I felt like I had a pretty good education, but I do think I missed a lot of the classics in literature growing up. And so I just was curious about your story growing up. Were you exposed to a lot of this literature in your youth?

**Malcolm Guite** (1:59)
Yeah, I was.
I mean, of course, you know, I'm English rather than American, so obviously I guess maybe some of the more distinctive English stories. Well, I'm actually only half English. My mother was Scottish and my father is English. And I have to say that it's from my mother that a lot of the poetry side of me comes and the love of story and storytelling. And in a way, I'm coming back into storytelling now, which is something that started with my mother. So I know for a lot of people like their first touch of the Arthur stories. So there's no official authorized version of Arthur. There's lots of different medieval sources. And there have been many retellings over the centuries, and everybody does it slightly their own way. And that's fine. But I know for a lot of people, their first touch of Arthur is maybe Disney's The Sword in the Stone or something like that, which is all very well. But it is a little bit kind of flat and cartoony.
I was very lucky that my mom knew these stories. And when I was really quite little, she would tell them to me. And she didn't read them from a book. She would sit down with me and just tell me the story. And she told it. I now realize she was actually, she had studied medieval history. And obviously, I didn't know that as an eight-year-old. But when later on, when I was a student at university and I was reading, say, for example, Satonimus Mallory, which is the main source of, you know, in the 15th century, the Mort Data, massive, massive book.
I suddenly realized that the way my mother was telling me the stories was much closer to these original mysterious, you know, sacramental medieval ways of telling it than to some modern, you know, just smite them and smash them on a fair horse kind of story. There was much more of beauty and, and as I say, a kind of sense of the sacred, ringing and singing through the secular, you know. So my mother told me these stories and I was fascinated by them. And so I kind of grew up with them and then eventually I read, I think Roger Lancelin Greene's Retelling for Children, it was published in the fifties of the last century. It's beautifully done and still in print, I think, called simply called King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table. And as I say, then eventually I went and read them. But my mum was not only a great storyteller, she had a huge fund of poetry and she would just, she would suddenly, you know, lift her voice or her teller into the speaking or chanting of poetry, just in the most natural way. So when I say she gave me a lot of poetry, I don't mean she sat me a corner and a corner has said, now, this is poetry, it's good for you, you've got to have 10 minutes before playtime. It wasn't like that at all. It was just ringing out of her.