She’s warm, and thoughtful, and her rapport with Galaad is very intriguing.

For she is perfectly happy without it – her fear is in the temptation of going back, when she really doesn’t need to. And though her reaction to the apple, and the youth and eternal life it offers, is fear, there’s a sense that her fear is not misplaced.

The Grand Quests are over now, not because she’s been left behind but because she left them behind. It’s peaceful, but not the stifling sort of peace many elderly characters are forced to endure in literature: it’s a kind of doneness that’s comforting to someone so secure in herself. In her world, even the visits from the magical Galaad become cyclical and everyday, and she approaches them with the same evenhandedness that she does her whole life. Though Gaiman goes to great lengths to show how typical and boring her life seems from the outside, he also takes great care with the peace and security with which she approaches it. Whitaker buys the Holy Grail at a second-hand shop, and is visited three times by one of the Knights of the Round Table, Sir Galaad, who would like to reclaim it. :There was a moment, then, when it all came back to her – how it was to be young to have a firm, slim body that would do whatever she wanted it to do to run down a country lane for the simple unladylike act of running to have men smile at her just because she was herself and happy about it.” It’s about growing old, about the mundane vs the fantastic, and about perception.

Like a lot of Gaiman’s work, it’s about love. The second tale fron Neil Gaiman‘s collection of short stories, Smoke and Mirrors, is multifaceted as well as entertaining.

Chivalry by neil gaiman