Alfred Sant’s take on the Knights of the Round Table

Author: Alfred Sant

Publications: Quinque Publications / 2022

Pages: 259pp

The limitations of online translation. I had read the whole book and still could not get a proper understanding of what “Fieres Safran” was meant to mean.

I understood “fieres” meant a knight and the context regarded the Knights of the Round Table. But “Safran”?

The online translation websites I found, including Google Translate, were less than helpful. They had never heard of “fieres” and translated “safran” as derived from saffron.

It was only when I dug further and retrieved a press release from earlier this year that the penny dropped. This book is “The Story of the Knight in Yellow “.

This book is the 25th book by the author who somehow found time to be a prime minister, a leader of a party and a member of the European Parliament – or maybe it was the other way round.

This book is also the only one in the list I could see reworking the popular legend of the Knights of the Round Table.

The fraternity of the Round Table is being broken up. Camelot is losing its Knights who have been ordered to find and retrieve the precious dish used by Christ at the Last Supper which has gone missing.

Markald, the hero of this tale, focuses his search to the south of Camelot whereas all the others focus on the north.

South of Camelot our hero crosses dense vegetation and fierce storms, loses his faithful steed and at the end finds himself on two islands, Melite, and Gaulos, two ancient names for Malta and Gozo.

Gaulos is the most neglected and depopulated of the two but it is here that Markald has to battle against the insidious and dangerous Kalebs who bewitches her victims. It is here too that the relic from Christ’s Last Supper was to be found.

Sant’s prose style is easy to read and the story is relatively straightforward. And, as said, one deduces the meaning of strange words like ‘fieres’ from the context.