Mr. Cornwell After reading many of your books I took up the Arthur Books. The first thing i noticed was that you maintain the same detail level you did with the Sharpe series, or Redcoat. How was it possible? And how much of the Arthur Books is fictional and how much of it is real? I understand it is not a short answer question, but yet i would like to have an idea of how much of Derfel's world is real, Yours sincerely Joao Aguiar
I'd like to think that much of Derfel's world is 'real' in the sense that early sixth century Britain was brutal, riven by civil war and religious strife, and, by our standards, horribly primitive. I guess I'm saying I hope the background is right, but that said we really do know almost nothing about the characters of the period and the events they lived through. About the only fact that historians accept is that there was a battle of Mount Badon and that it was won by the native Britons against the invading Saxons, but no one knows where it took place or who the leader was on the British side. It's very unfashionable to talk about the 'dark ages', but I think that term does apply to the Arthurian period, not because they were unenlightened, but because the record is so thin. We just don't know. We can make assumptions, we can expand on the few thin clues, but most of it is guesswork - historians don't even agree whether there was a man we call Arthur, let alone the rest of them. So what I tried to do was take the legends and put them back into a realistic setting, but I confess the magic kept leaking into the story whether I wanted it or not!