Those Who Fought against the Falling of the Dark

Grobius Shortling's List of King Arthur Books and other related subjects.
[Note: Please view the Revised Version of this web site.]

Durovernum (Canterbury): An artist's rendering of the town, with its prominent amphitheatre, in Roman times and after the Saxon invasion. (© Canterbury Roman Museum -- my photo, so forgive the flash reflections). This scenario is rather drastic, considering that St. Augustine was to appear there not much later and establish the C of E. One has to assume that 'town' life disappeared for a generation or so, but that people laid low and hung on throughout the bad times and eventually moved back. The stout Roman walls were still intact, and there was plenty of building material among the rubble. London survived the fall of the empire in a similar way and even preserved a middle class in the sense of merchants trading with Gaul during the worst of times -- even the barbarians liked foreign wine and gewgaws for their women.

Categories: Realistic King Arthur | Fantastic King Arthur | Other Historical Novels | Non-Arthurian Heroes | Oddball Stuff

The Historical King Arthur

• Novels
  • Rosemary Sutcliffe: The Sword at Sunset. One of the earliest and best attempts to interpret the King Arthur legends in historical context. This blew my mind when I was about 15 years old and remains the standard of comparison. The military aspects are particularly well done. *****
  • Catherine Christian: The Pendragon. Doesn't reach the heights of the Sutcliffe book, but it's pretty good.
  • Thomas Berger: Arthur Rex. Another one of this type. Well-written, but not particularly memorable. This stays pretty close to the Mallory line, with Lancelot, King Pellinore, etc.
  • Victor Canning: The Crimson Chalice. A spy novelist tries his hand at a 'historical' King Arthur book. I'm sure it engrossed me at the time, but I don't remember anything about it.
  • Jack Whyte: The Camulod Chronicles: The Skystone / The Singing Sword / The Eagle's Brood. First three volumes of a massive, rambling, multi-generational telling of the tale of Camelot starting with two Roman soldiers (Arthur's and Merlin's ancestors) with a vision for establishing an enclave against the barbarians; this is a good, solidly historical 'what might have been', although it tends to be episodic. The later books are narrated by Merlin in his old age after everything has fallen apart. (It looks as though there are several more volumes in the works, starting with The Saxon Shore, which barely brings King Arthur into adulthood; this is getting rather tedious.)
  • Parke Godwin: Firelord / Beloved Exile / The Last Rainbow. King Arthur, Guenevere, and St. Patrick, respectively. Semi-historical, semi-romantic. Good reading.
  • Henry Treece: The Celtic Tetralogy. Pseudo-history, but well done: The Golden Strangers (Stone Age), The Dark Island (Bronze Age Druids), Red Queen, White Queen (Boadicea and the Romans), and The Great Captains (King Arthur and his contemporaries). These are very barbaric books, in the sense of a lot of bloodshed, cruelty, and superstition, and there is very little of 'Rome' in them. Life-style is squalid, on the edge of starvation most of the time, people old by the time they are thirty. A Hobbesian viewpoint of life in these times as being 'nasty, brutish, and short'. Maybe it was this way, but I hate to think it. Still, the author's main characters rise above this and show some sort of human dignity.
  • Bernard Cornwell: The Warlord Chronicles. By the author of the "Sharpe's Rifles" series about the Napoleonic Wars -- you know this will be good if you are into military/cultural/ripping yarn stuff (like Hornblower or Aubrey/Maturin). A major trilogy in the works -- vol 1 The Winter King (vols. 2 & 3 are Enemy of God and Excalibur). This falls into the 'realism' school, but runs the Romantic gamut by including Lancelot, Galahad, etc. The author justifies throwing in the French element with a wonderful mid-section over the fall of Ynes Trebes (later to be Mont St. Michel in France), under King Ban and his sons L & G, the first totally bad and the latter totally good. Arthur was under oath to defend Brittany, but because of trouble in Britain was not able to send more than a token force under his deputy (and the narrator of this series) Derfil*. Book starts off emphasizing the total squalor and barbarism of this degenerate Roman society, but then builds up to the Defenders against the Dark theme -- and that is especially well done with the Brittany episode. And Merlin comes back into it in one of his best portrayals as a character in the fiction of this subject. I have only finished the first two volumes (the third is still in hard cover), but this will be a classic. It's published by Penguin, but for some reason is not yet available in the US. *Oddly enough, Derfil turns out to be the illegitimate son of the Saxon King Aelle.
    
    The rendering of the tale of King Mark of Cornwall, his son Tristan, and Mark's child bride Iseult from Ireland is heartbreaking. Absolutely barbaric. And it really casts a bad light on our hero King Arthur. (But nobody now claims that he was perfect.)
  
  
• Histories
  • Nora Chadwick: The Celts. To understand the background for this Celtic twilight that King Arthur represents, both for the 'Welsh' and for the romanticists who dwell on the culture of Roman Britain, you should really read this book for a scholarly but capsulated view of that ethnic group (not necessarily a race), from its Stone Age Indo-European steppe origins up until about the year 1000 at its final gasp in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland [does NOT address the issues of modern Celts, e.g., Ulster, thank God]. Excellent.
  • Geoffrey Ashe: A Guidebook to Arthurian Britain. Very fine list of actual archeological sites from the period, with connections to the saga.
  • Geoffrey Ashe (editor): The Quest for Arthur's Britain. Wonderful collection of historical essays. *****
  • Leslie Alcock: Arthur's Britain. Pure archeology and the like, without any romance; great scholarly compendium if you are into that sort of thing. *****
  • Michael Wood: In Search of the Dark Ages. Nice, glib chapters about various aspects of this period (a typical 'in search of' or 'discovering' book).

Categories

The Fantasy King Arthur

• Novels
  • Roger Lancelyn Green: King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table. The original Mallory stories retold; you need this (if you are ignorant) as a basis for everything else.
  • David Drake: The Dragon Lord. A Swords and Sorcery version of the legend. Good stuff, and a nice change (Harlan Ellison loved it). *****
  • T.H. White: The Once and Future King. Not my favorite (too 'cute'), sorry.... I found all that stuff about Merlin turning into a fish tiresome although beautifully written. The anachronisms (cricket metaphors, etc.) are egregious and irritating, although rather witty.
  • Mary Stewart: The Crystal Cave / The Hollow Hills / The Last Enchantment. The Merlin trilogy -- a classic. *****
  • Mary Stewart: The Wicked Day / The Prince and the Pilgrim. More King Arthur -- the 'true' story of Mordred, and a story outside the mainstream of the cycle.
  • Nikolai Tolstoy: The Coming of the King. The saga of Merlin (and yes, this is a descendent of Count Leo Tolstoy). This book came out in 1989, and was supposed to be the first of a series, but I haven't seen any others. Absolutely awesome. *****
  • Vera Chapman: The King's Demosel / King Arthur's Daughter / The Green Knight. Romances: "bewitches the reader with its richly woven tapestry of knights, temptresses, and magicians." OK...
  • Gillian Bradshaw: Hawk of May / Kingdom of Summer / In Winter's Shadow. Gawain's (Gwalchmai's) story; entertaining romance.
  • Stephen R. Lawhead: Taliesin / Merlin / Arthur. Excellent trilogy, with Atlantis thrown in as a bonus. (Pendragon and Grail were written to expand the trilogy, but cover much of the same ground -- overlapping overkill.)
  • Dee Morrison Meaney: Iseult. The story of Tristan and Iseult. Dragons and other good stuff.
  
  
• Histories
  • Joy Chant: The High Kings. More material on Arthur's contemporaries -- kinglets, legendary and partly real (Vortigern, for example) going back to older Celtic times.

Categories

Historical Novels about the Dark Ages

• Novels
  • Alfred Duggan: The Little Emperors. Macsen Wledig (Maximus) and other usurpers in those troublous times. The Spanish legionary general Maximus, traitor to the Roman Empire, and a self-proclaimed emperor, is still a hero to the Welsh.
  • John James: Votan / Not for All the Gold in Ireland / Men Went to Cattræth. First two involve the adventures of the adventurer Photinus the Greek, who fools those silly Germans into believing he is Woden; the last is a wonderful rendition of the famous fight described by the poet Aneirin, the battle of Catterick, where a small band of Britons were demolished by the Northumbrian Saxons -- Mel Gibson, take note: this would make a great movie. It is only a 222-page book, but I'm going to stick my neck out and say it's one of the best books of this kind ever written. It has the basic Celtic Iron-Age mentality down cold. *****
  • Rudyard Kipling: Puck of Pook's Hill. A set of short stories in a framework, a bunch of children who live near the Pevensey (Anderida) marshes having encountered Puck who allows them to interview three people from the past -- a Norman Knight, a Roman Legionary, and a Medieval stone carver. The middle stories about Hadrian's Wall, the Picts, and the would-be emperor Maximus are the main relevance to this web page. God, what a great story-teller Kipling was! The tale of the legionary Parnesius, and his defence of the Wall against the Winged Hats, is one of the best and most instructive renditions of this period in history, done in less than 60 pages. There are touches of The Man Who Would Be King and Kim in these tales, and those are stories EVERYBODY should read. [One of my favorite movies of all time is John Huston's "The Man Who Would Be King," with Sean Connery and Michael Caine, they don't make 'em better than this.] ****
  
  
• Later Dark Ages (Saxon period)
  
  I want to devote a little space to the Anglo-Saxons, who were the villains in King Arthur's day, but were in turn victimized by the Vikings. The Celts do not have a monopoly on futile heroism. In fact, the Northumbrian Saxons assimilated so well into the old Brigantes tribal structure (that is where our term 'Brigands' comes from) that they can barely be distinguished from Celts -- hence your Geordie, Lowland Scots, and Border Country culture, which has hardly changed since Roman times. From that marvellous bitch-queen Cartimandua, through the reigns of Urien of Rheged and King Oswiu of Northumbria, there was an unbroken history of treachery on a grand scale -- great stuff!
  
  For more about the Germanic Tribes of Dark Age Europe, click on my web page Saxons and Siegried.
  
  
  • Beowulf: Pretty heavy going, especially if you have to translate it from Anglo-Saxon as I had to do in graduate school. On the other hand, there are some true poetic passages in it that haven't been done justice to in the many translations. If I can find it in the boxes in the cellar, I will post on the Internet the passage about the dark tarn where Grendel's mother hangs out. With a sufficiently bardic voice and a good phonetic memory, you could wow the world at a party or bar.
  • John Gardner: Grendel. An autobiographical essay: a very quirky but moving story about the monster of Beowulf. From Grendel's point of view. Does not really belong on this web page, but it needs mentioning before it is forgotten -- a 20th-century classic of, I guess, existentialism. Parke Godwin has done a very good Beowulf book too; I have listed this on my Vikings page, since it places it in the context of the Continental Saxons before they invaded Britain.
  • Dee Morrison Meaney: An Unkindness of Ravens / Death of the Raven. Good book, with Vikings and magic. Very romantic.
  • Lolah Burford: The Vision of Stephen. A fantasy novel for teenagers that is really quite moving.
  • Gordon Honeycombe: Dragon under the Hill. This was listed on one of my mystery pages, even though it's not a mystery; it is just one of the finest horror stories (in a subtle way) that I have ever read. The setting is contemporary, but on the island of Lindisfarne, with the essential plot element being the protagonist's compulsion to relive events that occurred back when the Vikings sacked the monastery. An engrossing story. *****
  • Alfred Duggan: The King of Athelney. Alfred the Great; interesting.
  • Parke Godwin: (this guy is all over the place) A Memory of Lions. A nice little romance (and rather violent) about the Norman Conquest.
  • Hope Muntz: The Golden Warrior. Along with Hemingway, etc. (as expected), my professor in college in an advanced writing seminar [Andrew Lytle, who achieved a degree of fame as a Southern writer of the heroic, Agrarian school] made this book required reading. Odd choice, but he was right. This is truly one of the all-time classic historical novels, written in the spirit of the old chronicles, all about Harold Godwinson (King Harold of the Battle of Hastings). It is superb. How can you not fall in love with a woman named Edith Swan-neck? Even Winston Churchill went out of his way to praise this book. ***** (more on this...)
  • George MacDonald Fraser: The Steel Bonnets. From the author of the incomparable Flashman series, a history (not a novel) of the Border folk: he starts out by looking at people like Richard Nixon, Neil Armstrong, Billy Graham, and LBJ, and saying any one of those faces would look at home on one of those perpetual northern cattle raids. These are the people who settled America (along with the Scotch-Irish) back when the frontier was the Appalachians. A much-neglected subset of the British scene who deserve more recognition as an ethnic group, or more properly ethos, that is regarded with great disfavor now as being hardly politically correct. These are Walter Scott people (Marmion, etc.) -- and he is an author sadly neglected now (forget Ivanhoe and his standard list) who is definitely worth reading. If you can claim an Armstrong or a Johnston or an Elliot, Bell, Little, Maxwell, Scott or Kerr among your ancestors, you should be proud (I am a little bit of a Little, of course, so there!). Note: There is an excellent curse against the Border Reivers that was delivered by the Archbishop of Glasgow; I copied this from Fraser and posted it to the Internet at Curse. *****

Categories

Other Heroes (Robin Hood, etc.)

• Novels
  • Parke Godwin: Sherwood / Robin and the King. Robin Hood and Maid Marion. Romanticized, but dependable as Godwin's books are.
  • Nicholas Chase: Locksley. The historical Robin Hood, sort of. Grim.
  • Dorothy Dunnett: King Hereafter. The true story of Macbeth, a much-maligned personage. Awesome book, but heavy going. Emphasises the Norse element.
  • James Goldman: Myself as Witness. The wicked King John's autobiography (he wasn't such a bad person after all?). Not a Dark Age character, but I like subversive books like this.

Categories

Odd Books in This Area

• Novels
  • Tim Powers: The Drawing of the Dark. The fate of European civilization as the Ottoman Turks besiege Vienna depends on the preservation of a magical brewery where dark beer is made. Wonderful book! *****
  • John M. Ford: The Dragon Waiting. I have to quote the blurb in full:

    In a snowbound inn high in the Alps, four people have met who will alter fate: a noble Byzantine mercenary; a beautiful Florentine woman physician; an ageless Welsh wizard; and a German vampire. In a world ruled by sorcery, war, treachery, and passion, they have joined forces against the serpentine evil rising to vanquish a young Plantagenet prince--who now has been marked for a glorious new destiny as England's King Richard III.

    How can one resist a thing like this?
  • Jack Vance: Lyonesse. One of a trilogy or so, by a master of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and even Mystery stories. This is somewhat skewed to the theme of this page, but if you have never had the pleasure of reading Jack Vance, try it out (if it's in print any more) -- in fact READ JACK VANCE, anything he wrote! The subject of this series is at least in the Celtic vein and hence relates to this web page.
  • Miscellaneous: Poul Anderson (and his wife Karen) also started a similar series (don't know if it was finished, since I only have the 1st volume); he also is of the Jack Vance grouping, although lacking the sense of humor and irony that Vance specializes in.
    [Mar 1998: Persistence pays -- found the one-volume omnibus edition of The King of Ys and will report on it in more detail after wading through its 1100 or so pages. I've gotten about 300 pages into it but it is not a subway or bus book you can read in one hand and stuff in your pocket. From what I've read so far, the Characters are very good, real and decent people, with nice inter-reactions, especially between the hero and his nine wives. The historical explication is excellent.]
    [Note (Sept 1998): I finished this a while back and didn't get back to updating this web page. The story bears out its promise and can be regarded as a masterpiece. The core of the story, characterwise, is the relationship between the king and his daughter. It goes a bit beyond Lear and Cordelia! Historically, this book slots right into the Arthurian theme, although Arthur isn't mentioned. Highly recommended *****]
    You might also want to check out Harry Harrison's Hammer & the Cross trilogy [Pagan England vs. Catholic Europe, an alternate world history of the Dark Ages, a la "Connecticut Yankee" technology vs the developing feudal system, i.e. communism/fascism -- you know whose side you're on, I hope].

Categories

King Arthur Links on the Internet

• The Cardiff Arthurian's Links Page
  Very comprehensive; this page is really all you need to link to anything about King Arthur
• The Cardiff Arthurian Society
  Bingo, first hit on an Internet search, gets you right into it
• King Arthur and Cuneglasus
  Check it out if you are interested in an obscure historical view (as I am)
• Arthurian Bibliography
  Books and Legends (pretty extensive)
• The Labyrinth
  Georgetown University's massive website project for Medieval Studies (looks good; must check it out further)
• Odin's Castle
  A massive and ambitious web site that covers all of human history in all the various rooms in the castle. You'll want to check out the King's Chamber for the King Arthur stuff, but have fun browsing the rest of the site
• King Arthur's Ring
  Be sure to check out this web ring for further King Arthur links. It is lower down on this page. (You will find many of the same links as these there -- this is a small but dedicated Internet community)
• The Saxon Shore The web ring owner's site. Nice
• Early British Kingdoms
  This is really excellent. Did you ever wonder where Rheged was? Dumnonia? Brycheiniog? Bernicia? Who was King Cole [bad question, because he isn't mentioned]?

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APOLOGIA

After some more diligent searching on the Web a couple of days after publishing this King Arthur page, I discovered a humongous amount of material on the subject, which I haven't had the time yet to browse through, and to sift out the cardboard warrior set. There is a LOT of Arthurian matter out there in webspace, and at this point I'm not prepared to delve into it too deeply, which is why I would appreciate some E-MAIL from anybody who is into the historical background of the "Dark Ages" as it applied to post-Roman Britain and can supply me with some shortcuts! The fantasy aspects are out there for me to discover for myself (mainly in books). For me the Internet sources I'm looking for address historical characters like Urien of Rheged, the nascent kingdoms of Northumbria (Deira and Bernicia), Dalriada in Argyle, Strathclyde, the survival of Eboracum, the massacre at Anderida, the final overthrow of Hadrian's Wall, the 'true' facts about the Votadini (Edinburgers), etc. -- in other words, scholarly stuff without stiffness or emphasis on economics, agriculture, societal degeneracy, or whatever.** Rousing historical events, with the heroes fighting for the lost cause against evil politicians and barbarian terrorists -- that's my meat! If that's a bit psycho, well, that's why I confine that interest to the Dark Ages on that kind of thing. Serbian or Palestinian causes in the modern-day world turn me off entirely.

** And I found one such site! Click on the image.

A bit of preaching here, if you don't mind (if you do, then don't read this). The original Pictish and Saxon and whatever raids against Roman Britain (and Civilization as We Know It) were basically piratical, such as always crop up in history when an establishment has become weak and vulnerable. It's not an invasion from outer space -- these people, like all effective predators, as in the inner city, KNOW their victims and their weaknesses. This Romano-British society was ripe for the plucking, so it was plucked (not that any decent person would condone this, however liberal they might be). Later on, the Germanic tribes, being forced out of their Continental lands by Huns and other terrors from the steppes, mostly by a domino effect -- Mongols push Huns into Hungary, Thuringians or whatever they were in Hungary then push out into Germany, Germans flee/push into Holland and Gaul, Frisians and Jutlanders and other English Channel folks invade the flatlands of eastern Britain, already weakened by the failure of Roman power because of other catastrophes in the break-up of the empire, and then indulge in a bit of "Ethnic Cleansing" -- horrible term, but it's what happens when you take over a country -- viz. look what the Americans did to the native North American Indians). It is all a constantly repeated and depressing story through all of human existence. [How did you think the 'noble' Celts ever got established in the British Isles? The Celts/Druids didn't build Stonehenge: What happened to the people that did? You can make the usual (cynical) assumption and probably be right.]

So why does King Arthur appeal to the human spirit? Because, dammit, no matter how great the invaders finally become, no matter how good their basic ethnic qualities turn out to be in the long run, what they did initially was to steal the lands and destroy the culture of the previous inhabitants, very barbarically. THIS SORT OF THING CANNOT BE STOPPED -- IT'S HUMAN NATURE. Paradoxically, all people appreciate "the worm turns" stories, defend "family values" and "our god-given hard-earned rights." Tell that to the judge, if you can find one. What attracts our spirit -- and the same spirit lives among corrupt humans in street gangs and the Mafia -- is the noble upholding of the ideals against crushing and ultimately undefeatable odds. It's the resistance that counts, hence DEFENDERS AGAINST THE FALLING OF THE DARK!