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his king arthur trilogy is a lot of fun because he went back and read a lot of the super-obscure welsh/celtic sources (and scholars who 'reconstructed' the same) and based his mythos in them. his scholarship in that area is genuinely pretty impressive for a pop historical fiction novelist a lot of other medievalists, and esp. arthurians, really dislike him though
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Oct 30, 2016 16:54
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i'd like to know how he even came to Derfel. derfel cadarn is a genuine historical/folkloric character, but he's hugely obscure even as far as welsh arthurian scholarship goes. e: even derfel's name is crazily well-researched. iirc it's glossed in the books as meaning something like 'pertaining to a druid'. irl it means something close to 'pertaining to an oak [tree]' (der, 'oak', fel, 'as', lit. 'as [an] oak'), and there's a classic etymology which derives 'druid' from the words for 'oak knowledge', thus you could actually make a case for derfel's name meaning that this is probably interesting to no one else but i think it's cool and anyway my point is cornwell goes deep into some seriously obscure lore just to accurately colour in the background stuff that most people don't even notice chernobyl kinsman fucked around with this message at 03:10 on Oct 31, 2016 |
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Oct 31, 2016 03:03
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