Mount Badon / Caer Faddon (part 2)
Mount Badon, if it exists at all, should appear on the map somewhere. But where? There are many, many possibilities. First of all, we should note where Mount Badon is not. For all that Geoffrey of Monmouth embellished and expanded the Arthurian legend, he did history a disservice in supposing that King Arthur ruled all of England, Scotland and Wales. Geoffrey wrote his book under the patronage of Robert of Gloucester, who was trying to justify the rule of England by his half-sister, Maud. Thus, because Maud had roots in Normandy, so did Arthur; because Maud was hoping to rule all of Great Britain, so did Arthur; because Maud’s power base was in and around Gloucester, so was Arthur’s. Yet even in the twelfth century, for one king to control all of Great Britain by force of arms was extremely difficult. Read more…
Rain (again)
The weather is one of those things that everyone talks about, whether it’s good, bad, or indifferent. In the sunnier parts of the world (such as Redlands, California), people would mention the weather only if we had any, as in “we’re having some weather, aren’t we?” It was as if the normal ‘weather’, which was sunny and hot, wasn’t weather at all. Given that the 18 months we lived there we had 5 inches of rain, you can see why they might think that way. At the same time, having grown up in Western Washington and lived in Britain, weather in those places is more a matter of discussing it only when it is not raining. My husband and I have been wandering around the Olympic National Forest this week. Just up the road is Forks, Washington (of Twilight fame). Read more…
Twilight of Avalon Video
Anna Elliott, who posted on this blog not long ago, has just released a video for her book Twilight of Avalon, the first in a trilogy. The next book, Dark Moon of Avalon will appear in May 2010. In the meantime, enjoy her video and buy her book! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpj6WItY_Qc Twilight of Avalon: She is a healer, a storyteller, a warrior, and a queen without a throne. In the shadow of King Arthur’s Britain, one woman knows the truth that could save a kingdom from the hands of a tyrant… Ancient grudges, old wounds, and the quest for power rule in the newly widowed Queen Isolde’s court. Hardly a generation after the downfall of Camelot, Isolde grieves for her slain husband, King Constantine, a man she secretly knows to have been murdered by the scheming Lord Marche — the man who Read more…
Wisdom Teeth
Although within fiction and movies, there is a sense that hygiene was poor and few people lived into adulthood with all their teeth intact, people did care for their teeth in the Middle Ages. Herbs and mouthwashes existed that allowed people to do so: http://www.gallowglass.org/jadwiga/herbs/teeth.html At the same time, it is certainly true that tooth extraction was extremely common, and probably one of the few means of dealing with a rotten tooth. http://www.ada.org/public/resources/history/timeline_midlage.asppeople If people didn’t care for their teeth, they lost them, as the following image clearly indicates (copyright to the British Library Board). I’ve been rereading Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael series. These books are a joy to read, if only because Peters is a master of her craft and it is enjoyable to note how beautifully she strings words together. But she also writes about an area of the Read more…
Medieval Days of the week 1100-1500 AD
I just discoverd a web page (http://www.medievalgenealogy.org.uk/cal/medcal.shtml) where some hearty soul has calculated the dates/days of the week from 1100-1500 AD. Thus, for the book I’m writing now, I discovered that 11 December 1282 was a Friday. It was also the 3rd day before the Ides, which was a Roman way of figuring the days. The Roman calendar was originally based on the first three phases of the moon, with days counted backwards from lunar phases. The new moon was the day of the Kalends, the moon’s first quarter was the day of the Nones, and the Ides fell on the day of the full moon. (Thus, Julius Caesar was murdered on the Ides of March, or March 15) December 11th was the Feast day St. Damasus, who commissioned the translation of the Bible from Greek to Latin in 366 AD. Read more…
Writing Historical Fantasy: A Magical Balance
Today, Anna Elliott, the author of the wonderful Twilight of Avalon (Touchstone: May 2009) is here to talk about blending history and fantasy when writing historical fiction. Welcome, Anna! —— Ever since I wrote Twilight of Avalon, based on the Trystan and Isolde legend in the larger cycle of Arthurian tales, I’ve often been asked for thoughts on the enduring appeal of the King Arthur story. Why should that legend, perhaps more than any other in Western culture, have captured our imaginations for more than a millennium, have engendered countless retellings and reworkings of the old tale? The answers are legion, of course. But for me, the unique enchantment of the Arthurian legends lies in their blend of fantasy and history. The world of the legends is a recognizably historical one, part of our own past. Many scholars have explored the Read more…
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