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May 9, 2024 19:42
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- StrixNebulosa
- Feb 14, 2012
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You cheated not only the game, but yourself.
But most of all, you cheated BABA
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I'm gonna do a post on the grandaddy of historical fiction, Bernard Cornwell. I love Cornwell, I've read tons of his books, and he is eminently readable and tries to set characters in the worlds in which they live. No other HF author, in my opinion, is able to create a sense of setting, history, and texture of the place and people he is writing about, while maintaining a good pace and story. He is most famous for his series of novels about Richard Sharpe, and man who rises from private to officer in the British Army during the Napoleonic Wars. This was also turned into a massively popular BBC TV movie series, starring Sean Bean in his first major role. I've only read a couple of these, because 19th c. warfare isn't really my bag, I'm more of a medievalist.
The Warlord Chronicles -
Probably his second most famous series, this is a trilogy that imagines what a historically accurate Arthurian legend would look like. Normally when we see stuff about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, they are dressed in full plate armor astride fully caprisioned destriers galloping about from this castle to the next. That's massively ahistorical however, and there's really only a very small window of time in which there could've been a King Arthur lost to history: subroman Britain. He plays with the stories here, and if you know anything about how the various arthurian legends developed over time, especially once the French court got a hold of them in the 12thc., it will add a richness to the books as some of the changes to the characters reflect changes in the legend. In this telling, Britain is a ghostly land, its people splintered, its religion destroyed by the Romans. The remaining Britons are now under siege from the Saxons, who bring violence but, even worse, Christianity. So while our Arthur is the epitome of a Christian king, Cornwall's Arthur is a pagan. The story is told through the eyes of Derfel (that is to say St. Derfel) who is now a retired old monk. The series is great, it gets into the tension around the expansion of Christianity, the beliefs and practices of the pagan peoples of Britain, and the legacy of Roman Britain. He;s not trying to claim this is what must've happened, just if there was a King Arthur, this is the only perioid in which he could've lived and how that might differ from our popular perception of Arthur due to the cultures, politics, and technology of the time. Unlike the Sharpe series of the Saxon Stories series, this one is a self-contained story, and it's where I'd recommend someone starts with Cornwell.
The Saxon Stories -
This is the one the excellent Netflix series The Last Kingdom is based on. We follow Uhtred of Bebbanburg, an earl's son who is captured and raised by norsemen during the Danish conquest of Britain. The framing is almost identical to the Warlord Chronicles, we are told this story from the perspective of Uhtred as an old man, writing about his adventures, triumphs, and failures. He becomes the close confidant of Alfred the Great, and aids him in his efforts to defeat the rampaging Danes and secure the kingdom of Wessex (though he has dreams of uniting all the realm under one English King). This one is a bit more sprawling, there are 13 novels in this one, and he gets away from the central conflict quite a bit as Uhtred goes off on his own in some books. I've only read the first five or six of these, but the first three are solid as hell.
The Grail Quest -
A tetralogy that beings with Harlequin (or the Archer's Tale if you're in America) following a yeoman archer as he participates in some of the most important battles of the early parts of the 100 Years War. I don't want to get into the grail stuff much because that would spoil quite a bit, but the historical hooks for these are a look at how the English longbowman operated on the battlefields of France.
ugh, all of these sound fantastic and I can't decide which one to buy first.
Have you read David Drake's The Dragon Lord? It's more fantasy, but it's also my favorite take on King Arthur - not as a king, but as a man living in a world abandoned by the Romans.
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Mar 1, 2024 17:34
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Feb 29, 2024 18:00
