A bevy of collared doves is coo-cooing away outside the window by my head in the spare room at the Guites’. The late Eastertide sun is up over England far too early for this jet-lagged Southern boy. After giving up on trying to will myself back to sleep, I notice a tall wardrobe and begin to seriously consider looking into whether it leads anywhere. Before long, there’s a gentle knock from the hallway. Malcolm, robed in his dressing gown, gives a quiet good morning nod and leaves a steaming cup and saucer on a small table by the door. Tea in bed is a very civilized way of easing into the day.

After breakfast, we have another spell in the library. Despite only having listened to him read a few chapters from Galahad and the Grail, I barrage the poor man with one question after another. I want to dive in and work out everything from the cover design to the t-shirts, but this is only the beginning. I still haven’t even read the book.

As I prepare to get on my way, we exchange gifts. I leave Malcolm with one of the engravings Simon Brett gave me: Galahad, newly knighted and armed for his pursuit of the Grail. The gift he sends me with isn’t a single thing. It is both a summons to wide adventure and a particular window for focused attention. He knows better than to give a wayfarer a map—where’s the fun in that? Besides, the object of this Quest is too elusive to be fixed on a chart. He’s giving me landmarks to seek, questions to ask of hermits and saints, signs to watch for in the midnight sky. Into the leaves of this manuscript I must press the flowers of Albion, smear pipe ashes and splashes of ale, and sketch out the contours of Camelot. He’s sending me out with a poem, and charging me to return with a book.

I’m traveling north for a gathering with friends in Derbyshire today, but my first stop is in Leicester where I hope to visit the graves of some of my ancestors that I’ve managed to track down.

A deacon at St. Mary’s de Castro Church greets me as I wander into the stone sanctuary. I tell him the names of my relatives, and follow him eastward through the nave. I see a sculptured relief picturing early followers of Jesus gathered for the Jewish feast of Shavuot, celebrated in Christianity as the Feast of Pentecost. This festival remembers the giving of the law by the flaming presence of God at Sinai. In the image, the Holy Spirit descends as a dove, radiating tongue-like flames above each person. The ancient fire once seen on the heights of Sinai was coming to burn within each of their hearts.

The deacon shows me to the alter. Buried here, where King Richard III used to receive communion, are my 11th great-grandparents on my mother’s side. When I’ve paid my respects, the deacon tells me about a recent uptick of young people and families coming to the church. He says they are looking for tradition, for a sense of something enduring in time of rapid change. He looks back toward the altar and then looks me in the eye. “Your family members are part of a thousand year heritage that is still living here today.”

Afternoon sunlight filters through colorful images of saints in gothic windows, spilling down around me. The flame that came upon that group of Middle Eastern Jews in the first century has made its way down the centuries and across many waters. It illuminated the paths of my people here in England, and it goes before their descendants, including my young girls.

In Derbyshire, I join friends on the grounds of a 19th century mansion house for a quirky conference called Hutchmoot, inspired by the creative communion of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and the other Oxford Inklings. After an evening of stories and songs, a handful of us have made our way out to the twilight of the garden green with pints and poetry to share. I read a bit from the beginning of Malcolm’s Galahad draft:

And then he sensed the Holy One,
so present in the mass,
was present in the growing trees
and in the lowly grass.
The voice that spoke to him in dreams
spoke also in the flowing streams,
for sometimes Heaven shines and gleams
even in things that pass.

There’s a change in the sky. Out over the sheep field, a silken sheen glides across the dome of the night. We set our things aside and wander out beyond the electric lights. The colors of the aurora have come to dance before our stunned silence, tongues of fuchsia flame above our heads.

I travel with a smaller group of pals after Hutchmoot to the northernmost reaches of Britain at John o’ Groats in Scotland. We’ve spent the week at Freswick Castle, wandering along cliffs, spotting seals and puffins, and making sketches of ruins. Our final day here has fallen on the Feast of Pentecost, known as Whitsun in Britain. A priest in our group celebrates Communion with us. We finish the day’s activities with a service of compline, or evening prayer, down in a candlelit vault of the Viking-era foundation of the castle.

Our host, Murray, brings up a scuttle of coal for the stone hearth in the great hall. Pipes are lit and drams of fine single malt are passed around. I take Malcolm’s draft from my satchel, and turn to the passage where Arthur and his knights have gathered for their annual Round Table reunion on Pentecost. “‘Twas Whitsun dusk at Camelot. Freshets and torches burned, and stewards kindled kindly flames…” Is life imitating poetry, or the other way round?

In the story, golden words appear upon the empty chair called the “Siege Perilous,” setting in motion the coming of Galahad and the quest to discover the meaning of the Holy Grail. I read:

Four hundred years and fifty
since the passion of our Lord,
four hundred years and fifty
since the victory of the Word.
four hundred fifty winters
since he came to heal the world,
the chosen knight will come at last,
the siege will be fulfilled.

“It is this day!” cried Lancelot.
“This feast of Pentecost.
Four hundred years and fifty
since he ransomed all the lost.

As I read through the book for the first time, images begin to glimmer into my imagination. One crucial question for the task before me is one of setting. What time period should I look to for inspiration? Malcolm largely follows the plot structure of Thomas Malory, whose compilation of Arthurian stories came to be published as Le Morte d’Arthur in the late 1400s. While these tales understand Arthur to be a 5th-6th century figure, neither Malory or Malcolm are going for the kind of “security camera footage” historicity some modern readers expect. In their tellings, the armor, buildings, and customs largely describe a late Middle Ages setting. But beyond surface details, a deeper question is moving underneath all the tales surrounding Arthur. What kind of flowering might come when the Middle Eastern news of Resurrection takes root within the peoples of Albion’s shores?

The Arthurian stories thematically inquire of this hinge moment in the resonant and spectacular ways that myths do. As a visual artist, I’ve got to bring my questions in the form of pictures. We’ve all seen Camelot’s warriors depicted as late Medieval knights. But I’m fascinated with what the breadcrumbs and artifacts from this earlier transition in history might show us about the meaning at the heart of the legend.

I read on, surrounded inside these castle walls by companions who have beheld the fire in the sky with me. “Four hundred years and fifty…” This Pentecost night has given me the first key to unlocking my own imagining of Camelot. Could the unburied light of what we’ve called “The Dark Ages” help me illuminate the pages of this epic?

Order Galahad and the Grail and The Coming of Arthur here

So. I have crossed the ocean to Shakespeare’s “precious stone set in a silver sea” for the first time. I’ve white-knuckled my way out of London in a rental car to Stonehenge, and then on to Marlborough, where I’m staying for the night with the celebrated wood engraver Simon Brett. We’re sat in a patch of light angling through an arched hedge in his back garden. There is birdsong and a whistling kettle just inside. Simon’s eighty year-old hands, which have wrought untold scores of pictures in wood and ink, rest on his cane. He seems perfectly content not to clutter the spring silence with smalltalk, but perks up when his sister brings us tea and the apparently unusual indulgence of a small slice of cake. “What brings you to England?” he finally asks.

I tell him about the recently-retired Cambridge chaplain who has asked me to come visit and talk with him about illustrating a new poetic telling of the stories of King Arthur and Merlin and the Grail. When we’ve had our tea, I follow him inside where he pulls down a heavy volume from the shelf. The Romances of King Arthur, signed and numbered in the Golden Age of British illustration by the artist Arthur Rackham. He smiles silently as I reverently leaf through the pages. When I close the book, he slaps his hands on his knees and struggles up on his cane. “Well then, shall I take you to the Tomb of Merlin?”

Fortuitously, a neolithic mound named Merlin’s Barrow stands just outside the art building at the college where Simon once taught. The county of Wiltshire is dotted with similar monuments, sentinels from a misty other-time, onto which later generations couldn’t help but attach their own stories. Out past Silbury Hill, I follow him into the ancient and mysterious standing stone circle of Avebury. Though his sister is worried about him keeping his footing, I swear he might throw down the cane and start flying. An old man, but a boy again in the land of faerie.

Next morning, we spend some time in his studio. On his work bench is an in-progress self portrait. He tells me that with Parkinson’s, his hands will no longer produce the same marks they once did, but that he’s learning to work with what he has.

He shows me all the boxwood blocks into which he has engraved his vision of the story of the Holy Grail for the Folio Society. He asks me if there is any print among all of his pieces that I would like to have. Humbled, I tell him I would treasure any of them. He stoops down by his iron Albion hand press to a map drawer, retrieving an impression of his block depicting the Pietà. Mary cradles her dead son and Joseph of Arimathea washes his wounds and collects the blood of Christ in a vessel. In later legends, it is this Joseph who bears the Grail to Britain when he and other followers establish the church at Glastonbury.

As I prepare to say goodbye, I see one last image from Simon: a grieving Mary Magdalene reaching out to the Gardener as she realizes who he is on Easter morning. Behind the figure of Christ is an arched hedge, identical to the one I can see just through the window in the back garden. Are there any more old men like this, who still receive the flowering gift of the world as children do, knowing the Gardener’s presence in their own back yard?

From Marlborough, I travel clear across England to a tiny village near the north coast of East Anglia, where in a hole in a ground there lived a hobbit. OK, not exactly a hole in the ground, but almost definitely some character from Middle Earth.

Years ago, my friend Kirk would gently break up the pre-service coffee time each week at church by reading a poem from Malcolm Guite as a way of quieting the congregation for the start of the liturgy. Since then, Guite’s work has deepened my view of the world around me, and what it means to work for its good as an artist. Malcolm says, “Whatever you come across in the world, don’t just ask what it is, ask what it means. And for that you need your imagination.”

Guite wrote to me after seeing a fan art portrait I made of him. I’d heard a rumor he was beginning work on an Arthur book, so I snuck in the sword in the stone with hopes that it might pique his interest. It seemed to work. In his note, he invited me to come meet him and hear more about his project.

Parked in front of a terraced house, a black Royal Enfield Interceptor waits on its kickstand with the presence of a horse ready for its rider to go a-Maying. Normally in these situations, it is Gandalf who knocks at the door of some unsuspecting younger person. But today, the wizard has bid the uninitiated come to his chambers. I knock and hear a shuffling inside as the door swings wide. “Ah good, you’ve made it. Come in, come away in,” he exclaims.

Soon, he’s harnessed his dog and we’re off to a forest track in the neighborhood. He tells me he often strays this way to hear from the Muse. We come to a bench made of a fallen tree, and he produces for me a spare pipe from his tweed pocket as he lights his own. Bluebells glimmer in the understory, and all the trees of England seem to lean in and listen as he puffs out a smoke ring and begins to recite.

As I walked out one morning
All in the soft fine rain
It seemed as though a silver veil
Was shining over hill and vale
As though some lovely long-lost spell
Had made all new again…

Back at the house, Dr. Maggie Guite has laid out an early dinner for us. We buzz around the Grail stories in our table conversation. She and Malcolm are both steeped in these formational British tales, and perhaps there is a mutual freshness that comes with expounding upon them to someone who knows nearly nothing. When we’re washing up the dishes, I ask Maggie what she makes of Malcolm’s growing beloved status among a certain set of bookish Americans. “I suppose it falls to someone to laugh about it,” she says dryly. But the unmistakable sense of warmth and support that comes from decades of marriage and partnership is richly evident between them.

As Maggie sets off for evening commitments, Malcolm takes me to the first of several pubs, this one set on a cliff edge overlooking the North Sea. Wearing his fisherman’s cap and lifting a pint of local bitter into the sea breeze, he has lapsed into what must be an almost unseemly level of enthusiasm by English standards, characterized by a slight grin. Eyes fixed on the sundering sea, he sounds out lines from John Masefield, “I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied…”

The next pub has a placard at the front which reads, “We don’t have Wi-Fi. Talk to each other.” After draughts are pulled directly from tapped casks on a rack behind the tiny bar, Malcolm begins to recite something else. Like the trees earlier, the handful of patrons hush their voices and lean towards us to hear what the bushy-bearded local poet is murmuring.

When we’ve tasted from a goodly number of casks in the village, we meander back to the house and upstairs to the cozy little study that has become YouTube famous. Malcolm pulls various items from his shelves: an ancient edition of Paradise Lost, his old copy of MacDonald’s Phantastes with a frontispiece featuring Sir Galahad, a letter from C.S. Lewis to Maggie’s father during his time as student at Oxford.

At last, he settles into his wingback chair and I find a comfortable place on the rug between stacks of books. He pours us both a dram of an Islay single malt and gathers up a tattered bundle of pages. It’s the current draft of his own version of the Quest of the Holy Grail. He explains that it will be situated within a four-volume epic poem telling the days of the Round Table as a rhyming, read-aloud ballad. The sun lowers into the wine-dark sea, and he reads late into the night.

He knows I am mostly unfamiliar with the stories he is beginning to tell me. I make a sketch of him as he reads on. In his characters, I recognize pangs and longings I have known, and sense the presence of the un-tombed Gardener moving towards them. I can tell this is going to be meaningful to some people out there, and I wonder why he’s willing to work with me instead of someone who is further along. But especially as a father, I have also known the distinct thrill of watching a younger person’s steps as they grow into something. I suspect Malcolm’s years as a teacher and counselor to young people have built out this capacious largesse which is humble enough to participate in the reciprocal delight of learning.

I lean into my sketchbook and begin to scribble things out, hanging on every word.

Order Galahad and the Grail and The Coming of Arthur here.