To the Chapel Perilous

This is fantasy. More than that, it's a fantasy about a fable, overlaid with humour. Mitchison's 1955 novel creates a journey encompassing intrigue and broken expectations in which the simple plot, of the search for the Holy Grail, is underpinned by the understated, unresolved and ambiguous relationship between the two journalists who tell it. In his 1999 Introduction to the first reprint of this novel from 1955 - a year of the Cold War that began with the Baghdad Pact and ended with the official start of the Vietnam War - Raymond H. Thompson described Naomi Mitchison's contribution to the Arthurian tradition as 'not only a comic masterpiece, but a guidebook into spiritual growth'. She achieves this by drawing on her own experience as a journalist to explore the fantastic events surrounding King Arthur and the Holy Grail through the eyes of two young reporters - on competing newspapers, with mid-twentieth century values and skills - as they follow the breaking stories and conflicting accounts of the grail quest. Michael Amey, who writes the Introduction to this new edition, points out that her approach was not universally liked by her fellow writers. Tolkien for one objected to her introduction of 'a curious and disturbing blend' of journalists and 'dwarfs with photographic apparatus'. Amey himself argues that To the Chapel Perilous is in name and fact a 'call to adventure' in which Mitchison sets out 'to tell a story of how stories are told'.

UK Delivery:

• Free delivery on all orders of £10 or more.
• £1.49 delivery fee on orders below £10.
• UK orders are shipped via Royal Mail 2nd Class.

International Delivery:

• Flat rate delivery charges vary by country.

Dispatch and Delivery Times:

• All orders are shipped from our warehouse in Northampton, UK within 48 hours of receipt during working hours.
• UK mainland orders typically arrive within 3-5 working days via Royal Mail 2nd Class.
• International estimated delivery times:
• Europe & Channel Islands: 7 to 10 working days
• USA: 7 to 15 working days
• Rest of the World: 9 to 21 working days

View our full delivery infomation here.