When a disheveled young woman walks into King Arthur’s court and demands justice, declaring she has been brutally violated by a knight of the Round Table, Arthur vows that the culprit will be tracked down and punished. But young Gildas of Cornwall, now squire to the king’s nephew Sir Gareth, has his own problems: His beloved Lady Rosemounde has been betrothed by her father to another knight. When Rosemounde’s new fiancé turns out to be the knight accused of the vicious crime, Rosemounde begs Gildas for help. He must enlist the aid of his old mentor, Merlin, in order to prove the innocence of the man he feels has stolen the affections of his only love.
Queen Guinevere, trying to head off a rush to judgment, secures a promise from the king to let her be arbiter in the accused knight’s case and sends the young man on a quest to discover what women most desire. The Knight’s Riddle is a fast-paced mystery in King Arthur’s mythic court of Camelot, set (like the original Arthurian romances) in the high Middle Ages, and narrated by the young squire Gildas, whose knightly ambitions revolve solely around his love of the beautiful Rosemounde.
About the author
Jay Ruud is a retired professor of medieval literature at the University of Central Arkansas. Ruud is the author of The Merlin Mysteries: Fatal Feast; The Knight’s Riddle; The Bleak and Empty Sea; Lost in the Quagmire; Knight of the Cart; and To the Great Deep. He’s also written scholarly books, including an Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature (2006), A Critical Companion to Dante (2008), and A Critical Companion to Tolkien (2011), as well as the first full-length study of Chaucer’s short poems, ‘Many a Song and Many a Leccherous Lay’: Tradition and Individuality in Chaucer Lyric Poetry (1992), a book that was reissued by Routledge in October 2019 after 27 years. He taught at UCA and chaired the English department for 13 years, prior to which he was Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Northern State University in Aberdeen, South Dakota. He has a Ph.D. in Medieval Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Encircle Publications has published Jay’s newest series, The Robin Hood Mysteries, Sleuth of Sherwood (June 2022), Ghoul of Sherwood (December 2022), and book three, Treasure of Sherwood, will be published in June 2024.
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