Tuesday Talk with Helen Hollick : My King Arthur's women and children

I was highly honoured to learn that a wonderful lady is writing her university thesis based around my Pendragon's Banner Trilogy. Honoured, flattered, and I must admit, awed - in my opinion, she has taken on a mammoth task. But she loves the books (again I am highly flattered) so is, I think, enjoying herself.

© original drawing Amani G.

Several months ago I went up to London to meet her (over a wonderful lunch) and I don't think we stopped talking. My only problem was that as I wrote the trilogy over twenty-five years ago (I was accepted for publication by William Heinemann UK in April 1993 - a week after my 40th birthday,) so not having read it through for quite a few years, I could not remember all of it. I am tempted to read it again - but I know I'll then want to fiddle, and after all these years in print, fiddling is probably not a good idea. 

However, I did tell my new friend all I could, and promised to answer, to the best of my ability, any further questions that cropped up.

About the Trilogy:

#1 The Kingmaking  #2 Pendragon's Banner  #3 Shadow Of The King.

The 'tagline' is: 

The Boy - who became the Man

Who became the King

Who became the Legend

My Arthur is set firmly in the mid fifth century Post Roman era. The Legions have left and Britain is in chaos, a free-for-all. May the best, and strongest, survive. 

My Gwenhwyfar (Guinevere) is a fiesty red-head Celtic born and bred. There is to be no 'love-triangle' for her. She admires Arthur, comes to love him (and has the occasional volatile fight with him!) but she is way too sensible to throw away her pride, her position, her status and everything in between on a Lancelot type character.

I must add here: I have no patience or liking for the later Medieval knights in armour / holy grail stories of Arthur. Can't stand them. Also, confession, Zimmer Bradley's novel annoyed me. Her Guinevere was so irritating. Many readers loved the book, although alas, the author has now also fallen from favour.  The one nod I will give to the book - it annoyed me so much it made me determined to write my own.

The early tales, though, of a war lord who has to fight to gain his kingdom, and queen, and fight even harder to keep them - ah that is a different matter entirely!

Much of my version is based on the research and ideas of Geoffrey Ashe, for no other reason than I liked his suggestions. (Let's face one fact here - Arthur is NOT FACT. There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever to prove that he did, actually, exist. Very probably he is a composite of several - even many - people). We are talking fiction here - and we all have our own ideas and beliefs and squabble like mad with anyone who dares disagree with us. 

Anyway: my Arthur is flawed. He is a pagan, not the Christian 'good king' of latter tales (told I am certain to encourage men to go on Crusade). My Arthur has affairs, is not always kind,  is occasionally violent. He is a warlord - such men were not the goody-two-shoes type. Sorry to disappoint!) You will not find Lancelot, the Holy Grail, turreted castles, white Samite or ladies wielding dangerous swords in lakes, between the covers of my novels. Nor will you find Merlin. Again, so sorry to disappoint, but he didn't exist either.

However, there's plenty to make up for all these missing figures!

Morgause is the lover of Uthr, Arthur's father - and through jealousy, she loathes Arthur. Figures of 'fact' are included - King Vortigern, (although this may be a title - something like 'High King', not a personal name),  his son Vortimer, Ambrosious, Gildas, the first Gwynedd and North Welsh princes... as Geoffrey Ashe suggested, Arthur initially marries Vortigern's daughter Winifred by his Saxon wife, Rowena, daughter of Hengest. The marriage is a disaster. Their son is Cerdic... the founder of the West Saxon kingdom.

Winifred is a spiteful bitch (I thoroughly enjoyed writing her and Morgause - they are so deliciously horrible!) 

You will also meet Cei and Bedwyr, and some more familiar - pre-Medieval tales names.

So, back to my friend and her thesis: One  recent email question was:

"The more I think I've 'finished' your trilogy, the more I feel I'm only skimming the surface and that there is much more to see. I've come across sources that place Morgaine/Morgause's first appearance in literature in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Vita Merlini (1150) and Historia Regum Britannia (1136) respectively rather than in the earlier Welsh legends. The Arthur/Morgaine incest story doesn't appear until Mort Artu (early 13th century).  Can you point me in the right direction and correct me if I'm wrong.

 "Another question is regarding the children in the novels. The amount of detail you've included recreating their childhoods is both unique and amazing. However, a number of them have very unhappy childhoods (almost all children except Gwenhwyfar and her children, as far as I can tell):  Arthur and Morgaine were abused by Morgause; Winnifred was unloved by her family; Cerdic is over-indulged, but not loved, and in turn, is eventually hated by his son; and Cadwy is scorned by Ambrosius.  I was wondering about the social context of the stories - was there anything that would have affected the way you wrote the children's stories?

"Your characters are fascinating and so real, I feel that I want to know everything about them and how they came about.  Honestly, it takes an incredible talent to create 'people' rather than fictional characters."

(Blush - but isn't that last sentence a nice thing to say?)

My answer went something like this: (Warning, may contain spoilers)

Yes you are quite right about the Morgause/Morgaine/Lady of the Lake character appearing later than I set my trilogy, [5th/6th Century] but Mordred/Medraut is there in the older legends and his back-story fitted with a Morgaine character. I also wanted him to be on Arthur’s side at the end, so had to develop him towards that aim. I also wanted to use Glastonbury Tor in its pre-Christian setting – but without the magical side, so again Morgaine fitted... and Morgause was such a delightfully horrible character to write, she had to stay in! I also felt their underlying characters fitted well into the pre-Medieval tales... so I used them as mother and daughter, but in my own imaginative way.

The children. Hmmm you make an interesting point, one I hadn’t consciously thought about. Gwenhwyfar’s three boys - Llachue, Gwydre and Amr, were very much loved by Arthur and Gwenhwyfar, but they had to die because they never appeared as adults in any of the early stories or Welsh legends. They were mentioned though: a son who died in battle, one killed by his father (Arthur the soldier) and one killed by a boar. As an author of fiction these brief  'facts'  needed to be interpreted and incorporated into my version of the story of Arthur. While writing the scenes of the deaths of these three  children, I sobbed for hours. Especially one scene which I imagined while on holiday camping near the River Wye when my own daughter was only about four or five years old.

I needed a reason for Medraut/Mordred, as an adult, to go to join Arthur, and I wanted to be completely different to the usual, familiar, tales. Morgaine, his mother,  did love the boy, but poor girl, because of the abuse by her horrid mother when she was a child, she was quite mentally unstable by the time we get to her and Arthur being in Avalon in ‘France’. Had Medraut survived Camlaan I think he would have been a good chap. I liked him. Morgaine was devoted to Arthur because he was the first person in her entire life to be kind to her. She never forgot his smile, and never stopped loving him. Of course, she - nor Arthur - had any idea that they were half-brother and sister until it was too late.

For Cadwy, son of Ambrosius Aurelianus, I needed a reason for him to turn from Ambrosius to Arthur, plus their relationship was an ideal ‘plot mechanism’ to get across the difference between Ambrosius v Arthur’s ideals, the former, a staunch Roman, certain that Rome would return to Britain, the latter as certain Rome was finished and treaties had to be made with the incomer Anglo-Saxons. Opposing views, which caused great conflict.

Ditto Cerdic – I had to make his preference for supporting the Saxons believable. What triggered his character for me was that his name is British, yet he led what was to become the West Saxons. Who was he? A son of Arthur was an obvious conclusion.

And to any social reasoning? No nothing really. I originally started writing the books in the mid 1970s, so I would have been in my early 20s. I started writing the trilogy properly (i.e with a determination to write a novel and get it finished) in 1985 when my daughter was three and had started playgroup. A 'now or never' situation.

So why create these unhappy children? I do not think I wrote this consciously (apart from Morgaine).  I was a lonely child, very shy and very lacking in self-confidence, had very few friends, and preferred the company of imaginative friends from the pages of books. I think my extreme short sight was the reason behind all this. When you cannot see you make enormous blunders, which means people laugh at you. Better to stay quiet and unnoticed in the background, nose stuck firm in a book where the people within do not mock you. 

Perhaps it is interesting that my pirate character, Jesamiah Acorne from my Sea Witch Voyages series also had a dreadful childhood - but just as with Arthur, as an adult he is self-confident, competent and well, a Hero. 

I will admit to making my characters confident and self-assured because I am not!

Die Krönung Pendragons: Pendragon-Trilogie: Band 1 (Pendragons Banner-Trilogie) or The Kingmaking in German, published by SadWolf Verlag ... click here for Amazon Germany - or for my page on an Amazon near you click here 

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What are your views about Arthur's women? Do leave a comment below! 

< previous article Smugglers - Rogues or Romantic Heroes? ... next: What Pirates Needed... >

Tuesday Talk with Helen Hollick: Smugglers? Romantic rebels? Or despicable thieves?

I have recently completed a commisioned non-fiction book about smugglers and smuggling (I think it will be called Smugglers the Fact and the Fiction) and will, (I hope) be published some time in 2018.

Meanwhile I'll occasionally be posting a few tit-bits here on Tuesday Talk  to whet your appetite... 

the other twenty are ... elsewhere! LOL

Five and twenty ponies, 

Trotting through the dark – 

Brandy for the Parson, 'Baccy for the Clerk.

Laces for a lady; letters for a spy,

Watch the wall my darling while the Gentlemen go by! 

(From A Smuggler's Song Rudyard Kipling)

‘Gentlemen’? Were smugglers  of the past (seventeenth - nineteenth century in this case) really gentlemen? It depends on your opinion, view, and which side of the fence you are sitting on. 

Samuel Johnson, in his Dictionary of the English Language, published 1755,  described a smuggler as: ‘A wretch who, in defiance of justice and the laws, imports or exports goods as either contraband or without payment of the customs.’ Obviously, he was not impressed by the Gentlemen Free Trade.

On the other hand, Adam Smith, an eighteenth century economist and supporter of Free Trade,  said: ‘The smuggler is a person who, though no doubt blameable for violating the laws of his country, is frequently incapable of violating those of natural justice, and would have been in every respect an excellent citizen had not the laws of his country made that a crime which nature never meant to be so.’

That might be OK, but some smugglers, especially those of the large, organised gangs, were not innocent of violence, torture and murder.

A skirmish with smugglers 1853.
A painting by Vasily Hudiakov.

There is a romantic idea that surrounds these bygone-age smugglers. We tend to shrug aside the fact that they were, all of them, from fisherman to country gent, lawbreakers. Except, how many of us occasionally break the law by speeding that little bit more than the restrictions, or pay the gardener or handyman in cash to avoid the extra Value Added Tax? Minor things, but to smugglers bringing in their kegs of brandy, or packets of tobacco, their misdemeanour were equally as minor.

Smuggling. The word produces an image of a moonlit night, a tall ship at anchor  in a wind-ruffled bay, and men wearing three-cornered hats making their swift, but silent, way along remote West Country lanes that zigzag between high banks and thick, foxglove and cow parsley-strewn hedgerows.

The men are leading pack ponies tied nose-to-tail, hooves muffled by sacking. On their backs casks of brandy or kegs of tobacco… But is that how smuggling really did happen?

In reality, smuggling was - is - the illegal importation of goods, be they mercantile, narcotic substances, migrating people, or secret information. The motivation being to avoid paying tax and to make a hefty profit, the latter being the ultimate goal. The smugglers of the past would argue different regarding the legality. They bought and paid for the goods which they smuggled into England; these were not stolen items. Contraband was transported, carried and delivered at the smugglers’ own expense, in their own time. Leaving aside that small matter of not paying import tax, there was nothing illegal about it. The items they smuggled were in high demand by the majority of people, many of whom could not afford the official cost of purchase. The smugglers’ maintained that to refuse to pay government duties on prohibited goods was justified because of a person’s right to buy or sell with the freedom of choice, unrestricted by law, and that ‘freedom of choice’ should not be a crime. 

A 'Tubman'
© Mia Pelletier

After all, the only victim suffering from the effects of smuggling (leaving out that unsavoury aspect of violence) was the government. Few of us would lose much sleep about that small fact!

Unfortunately, rogues and ruffians often corrupt the bending of the law to extremes of  criminality to suit their own mind. What started with the relatively harmless smuggling of everyday items by a few villagers and quiet-minded fisher-folk, was swept aside by the gred of the organised gangs who had no qualms against fighting bloody battles, torturing and murdering those who opposed them. 

So, alas, somewhat like the pirates, most smugglers were not the derring-do romantic rebels we see portrayed in fiction or on the TV and movie screen. 

© Helen Hollick

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