The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart

[lightreads]

Fiction. First in her famous Merlin series. It's funny -- somehow I managed to miss this one until now, though I had a pretty solid grounding in genre classics. So I'm reading this and it's fine, whatever, interesting here and there, but mostly old hat. Until I realize that actually this is the prototype on which so much of the current canon is based, and from that lens it's really quite fascinating. I think my favorite element thus far is when she toys with this question of greatness. Merlin, after all, is by his own admission little more than a vessel for the will of the gods, and so in a real sense he is a nobody.
And who is the hero: the man with a God in his head, or the one following him with nothing but his sword and his plain, human courage?