HE NEARLY COMPENSATES FOR CHRETIEN:

Jack Whyte's Blog

There is no more enjoyable series of historical fiction novels than Mr. Whyte's Camulod Chronicles, which begins in Roman Britain with the forging of Excalibur and continues on to tell the story of Merlyn and Camelot and to set the scene for the coming of Arthur in the most literary fashion since TH White's very different version. If you're trying to find a good book for a guy this Holiday Season (maybe a guy who enjoys Patrick O'Brian), get him started on this series and he'll be most grateful.

Here's an interview with the author, Great Scott (Linda Richards, January Magazine)

I'd always been fascinated by the legend and I'd always been angry that no one had been able to tell me how this happened, without saying: Oh, it's magic, you know. And I had never believed that there was any more magic in the world then than there is today. But I believe in legend. My old great grand uncle in Britain who died when he was 95 would have looked at a DVD disc today and the caliber of movie that came from the TV as magic: he would not have believed it. I believe that magic is the word that we apply to phenomena that we have not yet experienced or come to understand. So I believe that Merlin, the magician, his magic is vested primarily and almost uniquely in the fact that -- in a time when the entire area was going illiterate, he was well educated and had a fund of knowledge and information and the natural kind of elevation and dignity that education gives a man and was in a leadership position where people looked up to him and thought: That must be magic!

So I knew how this was done. I believed -- and still believe -- it was the first and greatest PR stunt in the history of Britain. I'd been trying to figure it out for years and thought: OK, if it was done this way -- if this was a public relations gimmick -- how, where and by whom? I knew that whoever did it had to do it in a public venue that was big enough to accommodate a large crowd of people and that what he did was so spectacular -- whatever it was -- that he appeared to produce a sword out of a stone. And he did it in front of so many people that they all turned to each other and said: Did you see that? Did you see what that guy did? And they were so amazed by it and talked about it so much that we still talk about it today.

So how could that have been done? Where? Then one day, in 1977, I was talking to a buddy of mine who had the same tastes in reading and literature. We had both just read Mallory again. We were kicking it around and I said: You know, things aren't always what they appear to be. I remember when I was a kid in grade one, something happened.

I told him about this thing that had happened to me when I was a little boy. I went to a Catholic school. At the end of the War, towards the end of grade one, we had two visiting priests come around to our village. They were doing what was called a mission to sort of just get people stimulated intellectually and spiritually about their religion. They played good cop/bad cop. And their names -- though I was six years old -- their names were Father Teasdale and Father Lumsley-Holmes. They were both Englishmen, which made them very alien in Scotland in those days. Father Teasdale was the good guy and Father Lumsley-Holmes with the double-barreled name was very much the hellfire and damnation.

One morning Father Teasdale walked into our classroom with a wee attaché case and he said: I'll bet none of you can guess what's in this case? And we all said: No sir! But he said: Come on, try and guess. He let us all pick it up by the handle and lift it up to the table. He said: You don't know, do you? And we said: nope. So he said: Well, I'll show you. And he opened up the case. And inside the case was a block of stone; tall and gray and carved. And he lifted it out of the case by two silk loops. He put it on top of the desk and he said: this is an altar stone. Since the earliest days of the Christian church, before people built permanent churches, wandering bishops would carry their own stone with them. And recessed into it in a little recess here, are buried the bones or the relics of some very holy person. A saint. And at the back of it, there's this little hole into which is clicked the crucifix. And the altar stone is sanctified. So a missionary priest could be in Africa in the Congo -- mind you, we're talking 1946 -- can walk into a hut in any village, put this stone on any table in the hut. The stone is sanctified. The table becomes an altar. The hut becomes a church. Then he just takes the cross and he puts it in the hole in the stone.

I'm telling my buddy about this. And all of a sudden I thought: Holy s[moke], that's how they did it! And I saw this image of a table in the great theater, which is a big Roman theater, St. Albans in England which we know in the fifth century it could hold 7000 people seated. And it was used as a church.

So imagine 7000 people sitting there in Lent or at Advent when all the altars and everything are draped in purple and you see the stone. You see the table with a purple apron around it -- concealing it. In the back is the cross, where they expect to see the cross. This is Good Friday. Church is in the morning. And into this convocation come all the bishops of Britain -- and there was a lot of them -- and they bring forward this young man Arthur who has developed a new mobile force the like of which has never been seen in Camelot before; with saddles and stirrups. And the church is being wiped out because the invasions are just escalating every day and Christian priests were easy pickings. The bishops conjoined to crown this young man as their king and, in return, he swears to dedicate his military might to the preservation of the Faith. Right up to the days of Queen Elizabeth, the monarchs of Britain have been called "Defenders of the Faith."

So, he swears an oath and the bishops call for a sign that he's blessed. He's got his hands on the crucifix on the altar and he swears the oath. They ask for a sign from heaven and he reverses his grip. And out of the altar stone he pulls this sword: because the blade of the sword has been hidden behind the apron of the altar. All they've done is increased the size of the hole in the altar stone and punched it right down through the table top, slipped the sword into it, covered it with a cloth and people look at it and see an altar with a cross on it: which is what they expect to see. So he grabs it and pulls it out. The purple cloth that he's holding over the hilt falls back down over his wrist, the blade stretches up into the air and everybody in the place says: Holy Christ! There's the sword in the stone.

Now, that was 1977. And I knew. I knew it was right. I knew at least that it was a feasible physical explanation of how it could have happened without magic. But as the people were watching it, it would have been magic. Because this sword is a prototype weapon. They've never seen one like it before because up to that point in history, the sword that conquered the world was a Roman short sword. But as soon as you take a soldier and put him up on a big horse, your short sword is useless. You have to get a long sword. And you can't just double the length of the short sword, because it bends and it breaks. So somebody had to go to the trouble of studying this to find a new way to make a long sword with a tempered blade. That sword, I believe, was Excalibur.

That's what I talk about in my books. My books are about how all the various elements that have come to us 1600 years later as the Arthurian Legend, were all put in place. So that stories are about the man who made the sword Excalibur, the guy who built the fortress that we have come to call Camelot and the guy who built the mobile cavalry force that we call the Knights of the Round table. All of that stuff.

If anyone would have told me in 1977 that in the year 2000 -- 23 years later -- I would still be telling the same story and would have already written five novels and have another one out and two more in the pot, first of all I wouldn't have believed them. And, second of all, I would have run away: I would have never started. [Laughs]

If he knew what he was getting into by starting a blog he'd run faster and further.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 19, 2003 9:34 AM