Lin Carter's Khymyrium

[𝘗rincess 𝘵uvstarr]

From Wiki:

Another unfinished project was Carter's self-proclaimed magnum opus, an epic literary fantasy entitled Khymyrium, or, to give it its full title, Khymyrium: The City of the Hundred Kings, from the Coming of Aviathar the Lion to the Passing of Spheridion the Doomed. It was intended to take the genre in a new direction by resurrecting the fantastic medieval chronicle history of the sort exemplified by Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae and Saxo Grammaticus's Gesta Danorum. It was also to present a new invented system of magic called "Enstarrment", which from Carter's description somewhat resembles the system of magical luck investment later devised by Emma Bull and Will Shetterly for their "Liavek" series of shared world anthologies. Carter claimed to have begun the work about 1959, and published three excerpts from it as separate short stories during his lifetime – "Azlon" in The Young Magicians (1969), "The Mantichore" in Beyond the Gates of Dream (also 1969) and "The Sword of Power" in New Worlds for Old (1971). A fourth episode was published posthumously in Fungi #17, a 1998 fanzine. His most comprehensive account of the project appeared in Imaginary Worlds: the Art of Fantasy in 1973. While he continued to make claims for its excellence throughout his lifetime, the complete novel never appeared. Part of the problem was that Carter was forcing himself to write the novel in a formal style more like that of William Morris and quite unlike his own.

Has anyone read these fragments? Does anyone have any information on this? Was it just an idle dream?

[helrunar]

Lin Carter was a superb editor and wrote some really dandy forewords and epilogues to his anthologies or edited volumes. As a creative writer, he ranged the gamut from vigorous mediocrity to committed sort-of pastiche. But he does have his fans.

I doubt the "magnum opus" got very far beyond the published fragments. He was very busy and then suddenly, as middle age advanced, he became very ill. I feel sad reading about his final years because his "Adult Fantasy" series for Ballantine Books was such a bright light during my teenaged years back in the 1970s.

Hel.

[𝘗rincess 𝘵uvstarr]

"So he came up from Sardinak the City of the Sea, as had been prophesied, to the place whereat the Jander greeteth the rolling flood of Eryphon and joineth in the last league of her long journey to the Sundering Sea."

The Young Magicians is available on Internet Archive. Azlon is in it and is only 13 pages long, and is in three sections.

1. He Cometh Unto the Keep of Gondomir
2. Of His Entering-In, And of His Seeming
3. He Joineth Them at Table and Meeteth the Lords

It's written in a fake, unrealistic medieval style. I can see why it would take time and effort to do, he probably had to work every sentence consciously. It's a laboursome style.

Link here if you are bold enough to borrow it:

archive.org/details/youngmagicians0000unse

[𝘗rincess 𝘵uvstarr]

All the names in The Young Magicians are well known now and readily available online, but in a pre-Internet age collections like this must have been treasure troves to Fantasy fans.
helruner says Carter's "Adult Fantasy" series was a bright light in his teenage years; what collections did other people on here read when young, that got them hooked on Fantasy in their formative years?