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.