Legend The Arthurian

Legend: The Arthurian Tarot
Anna-Marie Ferguson (Lewellyn Worldwide, 1995)

Review
Let me make this clear. This deck is my tarot-related True Love (TM). It lives next to the front door, because in an emergency I want to make sure it can leave the house with me.

So as you can imagine, this will not an entirely unbiased review. Though in my defence I'm susceptible to both watercolour and Arthurian myth anyway, so this deck was always going to appeal to me.

All right, I'll concede that over the years the pale colour scheme has faded further (Nimue's nose appears to have gone AWOL), and yes, newbies to tarot would learn bad habits from learning to read the bottom of the cards rather than the top. To this day I think of the Queen of Pentacles as "Which...oh, Ygraine!"

And yes, I'm not sure why the Pentacles are now Shields and the Wands have been renamed to Spears, but this is frankly a minor (sorry!) quibble. The sheer beauty of each and every card is astonishing. And it's not a bimbo deck either- the Three of Swords depict a broken hearted Palomides sobbing at a fountain, in a perfect representation of the card's meaning. The Pages are actually Celtic animals, but it's a minor deviation from the rest of the deck. Slightly more dubious is the idea of making Card 15 The Horned One, but that's about as fluffy as the deck goes.

And for the Arthurian scholars, they can enjoy seeing Dindrane as the Queen of Spears, or Evalach's Shield as the Ace. The research that's gone into this deck is remarkable.

Experienced readers, collectors, scholars, watercolour artists- there's a lot of people who would derive a great deal of enjoyment from this deck.