The Hollow Hills

The Hollow Hills Review

The Hollow Hills is the second volume of Mary Stewart’s Merlin trilogy and covers the period of Arthur’s childhood — from his birth and concealment at Tintagel through his upbringing in the household of Ector, his training and education, and his discovery of the sword Excalibur. It is a quieter novel than The Crystal Cave, less structurally adventurous, but it maintains Stewart’s extraordinary commitment to historical groundedness and psychological complexity.

The central relationship of the novel is between Merlin and Arthur — not a simple mentor-pupil relationship but something more complicated and more affecting. Merlin cannot be fully present in Arthur’s life without endangering the secrecy that keeps the boy safe, and so he watches from a distance, appears at crucial moments, and must trust that the formation he cannot control will produce the High King that Britain needs. The emotional texture of this — the love of a guardian who must remain partially hidden, who sees the child he watches over grow up without being able to acknowledge his role — is rendered with a specificity that most Arthurian fiction doesn’t attempt.

The historical atmosphere continues from the first novel. Stewart’s post-Roman Britain is a specific place at a specific moment — not timeless mythological landscape but a region where the remnants of Roman administration are failing, where Saxon pressure is increasing, and where the question of who can hold the island together is one with real political content. Arthur’s destiny is not simply heroic but strategic: Britain needs not a legendary king but a capable general and political leader.

The Excalibur sequence is the novel’s set-piece, and Stewart handles it with the same commitment to grounding the supernatural in the natural that characterizes the whole trilogy.

Merlin as Narrator and the Reinvention of the Legend

The defining choice of Stewart’s Merlin trilogy is to tell the Arthurian story in Merlin’s own voice, and The Hollow Hills deepens what that choice makes possible. Stewart’s Merlin is not the white-bearded wizard of cartoon and pantomime but an engineer, healer, scholar, and statesman — a man whose “magic” is largely the product of superior knowledge, careful planning, and a rare, unsettling gift of true Sight that even he does not fully control. By narrating Arthur’s hidden childhood from this rational, melancholy perspective, Stewart rescues the legend from pure fantasy and reimagines it as the plausible biography of a Dark Age leader. The supernatural is never denied, but it is always disciplined by the texture of fifth-century reality: the failing Roman roads, the contested loyalties of petty kings, the looming Saxon threat. This is what gives the trilogy its enduring authority — it reads less like myth retold than like history recovered.

Stewart’s Achievement in Arthurian Fiction

Mary Stewart came to the Merlin novels after establishing herself as one of Britain’s most successful authors of romantic suspense, and the move into historical fiction proved the most lasting work of her career. The Crystal Cave (1970), The Hollow Hills (1973), and The Last Enchantment (1979) — later joined by The Wicked Day and a final volume, The Prince and the Pilgrim — together form one of the most admired modern treatments of the Matter of Britain, frequently ranked alongside T. H. White’s The Once and Future King and Rosemary Sutcliff’s historical novels. Stewart drew heavily on Geoffrey of Monmouth and the medieval chroniclers while grounding her version in the archaeology and landscape of post-Roman Britain. The Hollow Hills, the bridge volume covering the years between Arthur’s birth and his accession, is essential to that achievement: it is here that the boy is shaped and the sword found, setting the stage for the kingship to come.

Who Should Read It

The Hollow Hills rewards readers who love historical fiction that takes its period seriously and Arthurian retellings that favor human psychology over spectacle. It can be read with pleasure by anyone, but it gains enormously from being read in sequence after The Crystal Cave, since the emotional weight of Merlin’s distant guardianship depends on the relationship established in the first book. Readers drawn to mentor-and-pupil stories, to the romance of Dark Age Britain, or to intelligent fantasy that keeps its magic restrained and earned will find Stewart’s trilogy among the genre’s finest. Those seeking fast-paced action or a heavily supernatural Arthur may find this middle volume too contemplative — but for the right reader, its quiet intensity is exactly the point.

The Sword and the Symbol

The discovery of Excalibur is the emotional and structural climax of The Hollow Hills, and it shows Stewart’s method at its finest. In her telling, the sword is no mere magical artifact dropped from the sky; it has a tangible provenance — an ancient blade with Roman and older associations, concealed and guarded until the right moment — and Merlin orchestrates its revelation with the care of a man staging a piece of political theater he knows the future requires. The scene works on two levels at once: as a genuinely thrilling set-piece, and as a meditation on how legitimacy is manufactured, how a fractured land is given a king it can believe in. Stewart understands that the legend’s power lies precisely in the meeting of the practical and the numinous, and she refuses to collapse one into the other. The boy who draws the sword is being made into a symbol, and Merlin, watching, knows both the necessity and the cost of that transformation. It is in moments like this that the trilogy earns its reputation, balancing historical plausibility against the deep mythic resonance that has kept the Arthurian story alive for fifteen centuries, and leaving the reader eager for the concluding volume, The Last Enchantment.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 4.2/5 — The second Merlin novel maintains Stewart’s extraordinary standard — the Arthur-Merlin relationship is rendered with more emotional complexity than any other treatment of the legend, and the historical atmosphere remains impeccable.

Reading Guides

• Where to Start with Mary Stewart