WILLOWS - myth and folklore. by Sharon Tregenza

 

WILLOWS - myth and folklore in my WIP.

I needed a wood for my WIP. It's a very important part of the story so the trees had to be full of mystery, and character - I chose willows. With their graceful drooping branches, that look like strings of leaves, the smallest breeze will set the whole tree in motion - the sound of their gentle shhhh and whisper created the perfect atmosphere.

The research proved even more fascinating than I'd hoped and gave me more ideas for plot twists and character development. I discovered that in Celtic folklore the grey willow tree is known as the 'Tree of Enchantment' and that the word 'wiccan' meant those who bend and manipulate. So the willow became a symbol of sorcery.

There's even a 'Willow Tree Zodiac'

* Ruled by: the 5th Lunar Month

* Dates: 15th April - 12th May

* Ogham Letter: Saille (S)

* Ruling Planet: Moon

* Ruling Elements: Water

People born under the willow sign are said to be instinctual, patient, loyal and as they are knowledgable about a great many topics, they are the go-to friend for advice. Ruled by the moon willow signs are in touch with their psychic side too. I used these characteristics to develop the grandfather in my book and also to enhance important situations.

The strong bond between my main character and his grandfather was shown in their shared love of creating willow animals. Willow trees are flexible, the branches can be manipulated without snapping which makes it a popular wood for weaving and wickerwork. It's even possible to create living sculptures this way. 

 

The willow dragon Aiden and his grandfather create becomes a significant part of the plot.

There's a lot more to the myth and magic of willows and I think, like most of us do, I often get lost in the joy of the research. 

The first draft is with the publisher now so hopefully the willows will create their magic for me too. 😊

 

Merlin Creates Arthur. Writers in their Landscape with Scott Telek by Steve Gladwin

  Part One - Why and How?

Just one strange and atmospheric thing - a frozen lake gives off mist in warm weather.

Just recently, The Flower of Chivalry, the fourth volume in Scott Telek's epic series, (even by the standard of epic series), 'The Swithen', was published. Scott intends to produce the rest of his twenty five volume series of stories on what has become called 'The Matter of Britain', the stories of King Arthur and his knights, in the next twenty years and judging from the quality of books one to four, he will make it with ease. My interview with Scott is wide-ranging and barely touches on landscape in covering everything else. It is also in two parts, and the second, shorter part will follow in a week's time. I'm already become a bit of an evangelist for The Swithen, which incidentally is an Anglo-Saxon term for land that has been left to re-generate - and am unashamedly using this blog to spread the word. Scott also provided a short biography, the first part of which we begin with here. You will find the second part of this at the beginning of part two on April 23rd, and the all important details of how to buy both the separate books and volumes 1-3 in one, (the way I read it, and which I recommend) at the bottom here.

Scott's Biography - Part One - Background and Travels

Scott lived in Detroit, Michigan, where he had a very nice neighborhood existence until he turned 8. At that point his family moved out to a much more rural place in Michigan, which happened to have 55 acres of forest and meadow behind it. Scott spent the majority of his years from 10-18 wandering in there with his dog, which is where he developed his love of nature. Scott always loved reading, and studied English literature and Psychology at university. At 30, Scott moved to New York City. It was the place he had always dreamed of living, but was quickly changing from the place he thought it was. Eventually Scott moved to Chicago, and a few years later married his partner (to whom The Flower of Chivalry is dedicated) and settled in Toronto, Canada. There, Scott is much closer to the nature and hiking that he loves, as well as being around generally more humane people. 

Scott, in the last month or so, you and I have been corresponding quite a bit, and its pretty much that and reading the first three books that led me to interview you for this blog. I’d like to begin by referring back to something you said when I previously asked you whether writing this massive version of King Arthur was something you’d always wanted to do. How did it all come about?

I periodically get it in my head to explore a certain topic, and I decided that I wanted to know the real story of King Arthur. So I got Le Morte D’Arthur, and was reading it off and on for a year while commuting on the New York subway. The first thing that totally shocked me is when Merlin is trapped by Nimue, and I kept thinking “Okay, he’ll come back at some point…” and when he didn’t, that’s when I realized that there’s a lot in the legend that I didn’t know. By the time I finished it, I was fairly obsessed, and then I started to go back and read the earlier sources, like the Prose Merlin and then the Vulgate/Post-Vulgate. And I thought; “Okay, I’ll probably lose interest after reading these.” But I didn’t, I just became more obsessed.

The first book deals with Merlin's conception and birth from his brave and resourceful mother Meylinde.

When I read the story of Merlin’s mother, I thought one, people don’t know this story, and two, this is a great little self-contained thriller. And so are some of the other little episodes, like the Malegant story later on. And what really intrigued me is to wonder “What must these people be thinking and feeling while these extraordinary events are going on?” Because the Middle English sources don’t write about emotions or psychology in depth—or much at all—and I thought an interesting place existed to explore that. And I thought it would make a fascinating challenge as a writer to constrain myself to staying faithful to the story, and to have to make it work within that.

Your reply at the time surprised me, because what I think you were saying was that was more as if it was in a line of a series of big projects you periodically took on, albeit one you had developed a particular interest in. Is that a fair description?

What I said was that up until then I had explored numerous other creative outlets, like video making and oil painting, but I would only stay with them for a few years and then move on to something else, so none of them ever really flourished. So I thought, if I embark on this series, this is going to be my big project, and I’m going to focus on this one thing. And I knew that if I stayed with it, it will be my life’s work, which I was also okay with. So that’s what I meant. And in the meantime I have thought “Oh, I’d like to start making these videos, or do these art pieces,” but now I say, “No, you just continue to focus on your book series, and stick to that.”

Let’s now fit that into the context of the sort of thing you read or have read. Are you a lover of fantasy, or history, or a little of both?

Neither, actually. I have to say I hate the kind of fantasy writing such as Mary Stewart does, with all the “Fie on thee, foul enchantress!” stuff. You can tell that my writing is much more plain, and I really just want them to sound like real people. History… I have to say that this series has made me get more into it, but I am not a history guy.

What I am into is literature. I love the Arthurian literature, and you could say that what I’m doing is a massive interpretation of the existing literature. I'm also, I discover, very much into folklore, and this series also fits into that. Reading the unexpurgated Grimm’s fairy tales, one before bed each night, was one of the great reading experiences of my life.

What I see in these books—not that I am comparing myself with any of these writers—is the influence of extensive reading of Henry James in terms of describing states of mind and psychology. I love noir crime fiction and pulp writer Jim Thompson very much shows up in the sudden, brutal violence. And then I definitely see Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, another of my greatest reading experiences, just because it’s lightly literary while also just being so pulpy and fun. I would say that novel encapsulates exactly what I'm going for… it’s light literature, but I also really want it to be fun and give you all those classic King Arthur thrills.

So, you’ve decided to tackle this, you’ve done all the research, you have – as you’ve said – decided to take the whole story from the available source material and fill in the gaps creatively yourself. It sounds like you’ve got the best of both worlds there?

Yes, because in a way I have always felt that I am better at elaborating something that exists rather than inventing from whole cloth, and this works perfectly that way. Having some constraints works for me creatively, because then there’s an element of a puzzle to it, a challenge for myself to make it work. Also, working with a time-tested story, I know that it’s good. I don’t have as much of that self-doubt that comes when you’ve created something all yourself, and you start to think maybe it’s all just stupid. I know this is good, and I can build on its strengths to make it better.

But I’ve also found as I start to head into the main thrust of the story—meaning that now Arthur is born we mostly have a set of characters that will be with us for a while, as opposed to the first three books—that this opens up unexpected creative avenues. For example, there are a number of characters who simply drop out of the source material, like Arthur’s adoptive dad Sir Ector, or King Rion (AKA Reince), and for me, that means I can do anything I want to with them. I can also make up earlier periods for characters who come into the story later—like Percival’s mother.

The other thing I didn’t really think of when I started, but is coming clear to me now, is that I will have this entire society of intertwined characters, most of whom we’ll be following from birth to death, which is really an unprecedented opportunity for a writer. It also just works out that, since the Arthurian legend is really about life itself, this project allows me a great framework to overlay my own existential fascinations on, so it has turned out to offer me much more creative satisfaction than I imagined when I embarked on it.

The sons in question are Pendragon and Uther - but they have to get rid of the sitting King Vortiger first.

*Talk to us a little about the process of doing something like this. I mean three books are out and the fourth, the first time we really meet Arthur, will be with us soon. Do you have a series of wall charts, or a big floor?

I have two Excel spreadsheets, one that has a sheet for each book that I can jot notes into when I think of them, and sheets for notes on each character, my physical descriptions of each character, the names of new characters, and stuff like that. So that one pretty much has everything, and I make new sheets whenever I think of something.

Then I have another one, which is the main one I’m using lately to lay out the series as a whole. This is just one sheet with all the characters down the side, and each projected book going across. And I put in the major events for each character, when they enter the story and when they die, and this helps me know where any specific person is at any one time, and what’s happening with the other characters at that time, so I can start to group events thematically when I have some leeway, and that’s how I laid out the series and came to the total of 25 novels.

This is also really helpful for tracking back for characters that are not yet in the story. For example, I plan to write some childhood scenes for Guinevere, so we can start to see how her character was formed, and this helps me track back and say “Okay, if she meets Arthur here, then she would have been about thirteen back here, and she would have been about eight here…” and that helps, because I want to also include what went down with the False Guinevere when they were children, so that when she shows up later in the story we’ll have experienced the history, not just have heard about it.

This series of interviews is chiefly on landscape about what inspiration it has for an author, and how he or she goes about creating it themselves. So, I’m going to ask you – especially as someone from the other side of the pond – about the landscapes have inspired your work and why?

I have been in the English countryside a few times, spent a week in Cornwall and a week in Scotland, and I definitely call on those visits as I am writing. A real experience of a green field full of rabbits in Dover appears in Book 4. I also sometimes look at pictures of England, Wales and Scotland as I'm writing, especially if it’s referring to a real place, like Dinas Emrys. Then sometimes I have to throw it out and say, “Well, maybe it changed in the meantime,” because I was looking at topographical maps of Stonehenge, and finally had to say; “Damn it, I need it to be hilly!”

Forests like this one in Ontario, help to inspire the series more 'English' forests.

Very formative for me is that, after living in Detroit until I was eight, we moved to an area that had 55 acres of undeveloped meadow and forest behind it, and I spent many days, for years, just wandering through there with my dog, and I know this general love of being in nature sprang from that, and definitely informs the novels. When you hear Merlin or Arthur say he was “just out looking at the plants and bugs” that’s what that’s referring to.

Luckily also my partner is very much into nature and hiking, and now that I live in Canada there is abundant wildness and forest everywhere, and I can name several instances and landscapes that appear directly in the books. There is a beach with rounded black-and-red rocks sitting upon yellow sand in a lake that appears in Book 4, and that is a real place here in Ontario.

I am also definitely trying to play up the presence of nature in the novels. For one because thematically we are going to start seeing more of nature vs civilization, and also Paganism vs Christianity, but also just because… these people are out in nature. Historical writers tend to focus on how dirty everything was, but they were also out in nature and closer to animals—and much more at the mercy of nature—so I really wanted that to be a major force in the books. It’s also just pleasant to think about, the simple life out in the fields and forests, and on a very basic level I simply want these novels to be a pleasant and lovely escape into a beautiful and intriguing world.

A collapsed viewing platform. For Scott, this illustrates the rise of nature against the plans of human kind.

The stories of King Arthur and his knights have had many versions since the original source material of the likes of Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Mabinogi stories.  Have the sources been hard work, or a joy?

Oh, I adore them. That’s really the inspiration, because the original sources have such a weirdness and unique tone that I think gets lost the further one gets away from them. Most Arthurian fiction strays from the sources, and in doing so, they often lose what makes it so great and powerful in the first place. What I really aim for is to retain the tone of Malory or the Vulgate Cycle, just flesh it out so it can be read as a novel.

Something that is very important in the original stories and perhaps especially the ones of the Grail Quest, is the idea of an inner landscape which on the outside is represented by the signs and symbols, the rule of three, the grail procession, the colours of the knights and their pavilions. Is that something you reflect in the work that you’ve done, or are planning? Do you believe that there is hidden meaning, maybe some of the clues to our own grail quest?

Your question caused some reflection in me, because I wouldn’t think of myself as being on any sort of grail quest… that is, I don’t think I have some sort of big goal in mind that I’m working toward, except maybe to one day be able to live off my writing and no longer having to be at the mercy of the workplace. But for me I have never been that goal directed—which is perhaps also why I also haven’t achieved that much monetary success, haha—but for me, the whole thing (i.e. life) is about the journey, and seeing what comes to you.

For whatever reason, I find that I can't think too much about monetary success when it comes to my writing, or I get bogged down and it becomes impossible for me to create. When I started this, I decided that I was going to keep at it and just keep adding to it even if none of the books sold, and just think of the whole thing as a form of folk art. Like a quilt. So it's very important to me to keep the focus on creating art for its own sake, and because I enjoy it and want to make something good, rather than expecting any great reward. And it's funny, this made it into the upcoming book, when the Lady of the Lake appears and she says that her people make beautiful things, but it's important that they do it only for the sake of creation, rather than to sell or make money, because in that way it stays pure.

All that said, I’ve been happy with the sales of the books—I’m just thrilled that people are reading and getting into what I’m writing—but if they did bring monetary success, that would be fine, too! So I guess the Holy Grail for me would be to be able to live off of them and do nothing but write.

Something magical can be created from just a simple phenomena like water.

As for the colors and symbols you mention, I am slowly learning about them as I start to explore Celtic and Medieval British symbolism and folklore. Up until recently, I was still trying to get through the 9-volume Vulgate and Post-Vulgate versions of the legend, which I felt I needed to finish. That said, I am already working certain images and symbols into the books that (I hope) will remain fairly subtle until you start to see them over several novels. We are, ultimately, talking about one huge novel in 25 parts, so there are many things that I’m working in that won’t become apparent until later. As for the grail quest itself, I plan three whole novels for it, and look forward to the challenge of portraying the bizarre world in which the knights find themselves.

Well, Scott this has already been fascinating and I look forward to hearing more. In the meantime, this is the perfect chance to tell our readers that all your books are available both as actual books and in the kindle version I read. Here a quick link to Amazon, where you should be able to find all of them. You'll also notice quite a few from your previous life as a film blogger, Scott.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=scott+telek&i=stripbooks&ref=nb_sb_noss

And thank you for letting us explore the landscape and story of The Swithen with us.

Thanks. I've really enjoyed, it.

-- 

.Steve Gladwin - Stories of Feeling and Being

Writer, Drama Practitioner, Storyteller and Blogger.

Creation and Story Enhancement/Screen writing.

Author of 'The Seven', 'Fragon Tales' and 'The Raven's Call'

01938 500728/01485007189/imagepoet7@gmail.com/mrwilliamsromance@gmail.com

https://www.storiesoffeelingandbeing.com/

The Old King Arthur by Steve Gladwin

Among my first real experiences of King Arthur was as a teenager literally falling off a cinema seat in Grimsby. What were me and my friend laughing ourselves daft about? Why, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, of course.

Naturally I knew more about King Arthur and his knights than soldiers with outrageous fake moustaches and French accents to match, or the noise of horses gleefully provided by coconuts and a black knight who refuses to give up even when he’s had all four limbs cut off.

What I didn’t realise at the time was that, comedy aside, there was an awful lot of authenticity in the Python’s version of King Arthur and a great deal of of intellect behind it, Terry Jones himself being a medievalist.

But there was something else about the film behind all that laughter, and that was perhaps the glimmer of a far more ancient and intriguing Arthur who I hadn’t yet had chance to hear or read about. It would be nice to say that the film inspired me to begin my Arthurian studies from then on and pursue them faithfully ever since.

Unfortunately I was a teenager and certain hormones took over for a number of years. Then, when I was in my mid thirties and on the cusp of becoming a pagan, a curious thing happened. I remember reading and enjoying Roger Lancelyn Green’s version of Arthur but having this flash of insight at the same time which more or less said, ‘leave this for now, or you may never know the end of it.’

Merlin from The Camelot Oracle. Original artwork by Will Worthington

A few years later I read two books which changed my life and particularly my spiritual outlook. I bought them both, conveniently enough in Glastonbury, living in Somerset as I did at the time The first, Philip Carr-Gomm's wonderful book The Druid Way, got me into being a druid pagan for the best part of twenty years and the second – very different – was a book of stories of the sort I’d never encountered. Here was a different Arthur, that really ancient one who I’d caught only glimpses of in the ancient Welsh stories of the Mabinogion. With him were ancient versions of many of the other characters I’d come to know and put away for all these years, characters with more ancient sounding Welsh and Irish names, fierce battles, mysterious world woods and enigmatic gods and goddesses.

The book was The Song of Taliesin by John Matthews and I’m very pleased to say that John has agreed to be my interview for this blog and to talk extensively about his new children’s book about this 'older' version of Arthur, The Sword of Ice and Fire.

I first met John by fax in 1998, when he responded enthusiastically to my request to adapt The Song of Taliesin for the stage. At our first meeting in Oxford, with my director Stuart, John and I briefly moved around each other like slightly wary stags, while John’s wife Caitlin made a delicious lemon cake and served it warm with hazelnut flavoured coffee. Out of such unwonted luxuries are true alliances and enduring friendships made. John and I collaborated on the original stage show of The Song of Taliesin and he later supported the recording of the double CD version in 2009.

I’ve had many talks with John about the books that he truly wants to write and the almost impossibility of him being able to do any of it in this life time with a word load which is constantly being filled up just when that so tempting corner of space has appeared. I know, and I’m sure John will tell you here, that he, with the vast knowledge he has of the stories and myths of these lands and especially ‘a particular’ Arthur who has perhaps rather been forgotten, has a mountain of material and ideas ready to spin into literary gold.

King Arthur by Will Worthington (Camelot Oracle)

So that’s where I’d like to start, but first of all John, I really appreciate you agreeing to talk to readers of An Awfully Big Blog Adventure about your new children’s book, The Sword of Ice and Fire, and your own history and interest in this kind of material.

It's my pleasure, Steve. 

.

 And I have to say before we begin the interview, that I've just finished the book, which I asked for for my birthday, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and the ideas and characters you are 're-introducing' to people in particular, and as we'll find, they may not be the ones everyone expects.

So the first thing I want to do, John, is to follow up on that ‘rather been forgotten’ comment. I know you and I and a great many others share a passionate enthusiasm for the sort of material you wrote about in books like The Song of Taliesin and The Song of Arthur and you are now hoping will reach new audiences with The Sword of Ice and Fire, but we’re still quite a small percentage, aren’t we, in even knowing about the version of Arthur you’re writing about in this book? I mean why do you think that is, and do you perhaps think it’s time for a reappraisal or revival of this material?

I don’t really think that appreciation for the Arthurian legends has ever really gone away. I think if you stopped many people in the street and asked them what they knew about Arthur you might be surprised at how much. It may just be the obvious things, like the Sword in the Stone, the quest for the Grail, the love story of Lancelot and Guinevere and the magic of Merlin, but the idea of Arthur never really stopped being a matter of interest. There have been innumerable films and TV shows about Arthur, and I have no doubt that there will be more to come. Some will be really terrible, others will be not so bad, and maybe eventually there will be a really good one -perhaps as good as John Boorman’s great epic Excalibur, which inspired me enormously. The amount of fiction, short stories, poetry, plays, and an even more vast collection of books which set out to identify a real person called Arthur, seems to get more every year. I belong to the International Arthurian Society, which has members all over the world and produces a list of new publications every year – publications numbering in the hundreds. So Arthur is hardly forgotten. But I do indeed feel that it is time for a new look at the great myths behind the stories, so I’m setting out to produce something that you might think as a modern version of the Morte D’Arthur, the great medieval romance which is still probably the best book on the subject anyone’s written.

The most obvious question to ask you is how did this enthusiasm of yours for the Matter of Britain and King Arthur begin? How did you become so passionately dedicated to this over such a number of years and make it your life’s work.

I seem to have been interested by Arthur as long as I can remember. I know I had a children’s version of Malory when I was very young, but it was the discovery of T.H. White’s wonderful quartet The Once and Future King, which became the basis for the musical Camelot, that really got me started as a teenager. I knew when I’d read that book that this was the subject I wanted to write about, and I really haven’t stopped since. Most of my life I’ve explored the legends and the background to the myths in non-fiction terms, but I’ve always wanted to write a “big” Arthurian novel and that’s what I’ve been working on for the last 40 years. Unfortunately, time and having to make a living have meant that I had to put this on the back burner over the years, but I’ve never stopped tinkering with it, adding ideas and scenes, and hundreds of pages of notes exist. I’m hoping that after I finish the quartet of Red Dragon Rising I’ll be on to move on to finish the big book.

Published by Greystones Press

Now, children or adults who pick up the book with certain expectations about the figure of Arthur are in for a surprise, as well as a treat. Can you tell us - without too many spoilers of course - what sort of things to expect, perhaps especially a few of the characters we might meet who we haven’t encountered in other Arthur stories.

I’ve tried to stick with the tradition of Arthur as far as I can – but I really wanted to extend it, to open it out, to show readers just how big it really can be. There’s certainly no shortage of Arthurian legends to draw upon, but I went further into the realm of Celtic mythology, particularly the Mabinogion, that wonderful Welsh Medieval collection of tales - so you will find, for instance, in this first book, the character of Mabon, a kind of young God, who gets kidnapped and has to be rescued by Arthur, helped by some rather unusual beings, who are part animal, part bird, part human. Then there are the Nine. These are nine mysterious, otherworldly women who will in due course be shown to have a huge part to play in the whole story of Arthur’s life. So there will be one or two surprises, and some characters that people won’t know about or won’t be so familiar with.

Do you have any particular favourite authors who provided inspiration for these books and why? Maybe there are others you don’t so much care for?

I have a lot of Arthurian writers whom I love – all the way from Malory in the 15th century to present authors such as T. H. White, Kevin Crossley-Holland, A. A. Attanasio, Henry Treece, and especially the great Rosemary Sutcliff, whom I had the pleasure of getting to know years ago, and whose books remain great influences on me. Her adult novel, Sword at Sunset, is still, I think, the best novel of Arthur that anyone’s written to date; while her children’s books, retelling the story, gives a wonderful inclusiveness to the epic of Arthur. Much as I love T.H. White, who wrote the only other novel I’m aware of that deals with the childhood of Arthur, The Sword in the Stone, I found the humour with which this is written somewhat dated and perhaps occasionally seeming to trivialise the story. I wanted to tell how Merlin prepared Arthur to be the king he would become – and that’s what I set out to do in these four books.

I’m keen to ask you about the other three books, each of which involve the particular quest Arthur has to undergo for each particular hallow? Can you explain what a ‘Hallow’ is and how they weave through the books?

Sword of ice and Fire is conceived of as one of a set of four, the overall title being Red Dragon Rising. These will follow the early years of Arthur from around the age of 10 to that of young adult. Each of the four books will focus on Arthur’s quest for four magical objects. These are called Hallows, which simply means ‘sacred things’. It’s a theme that runs through all of the huge panoply of Arthurian legend and literature. The most obvious and familiar of these would be the Grail, though in this instance I’m looking more towards the ancient Celtic and pre-Celtic traditions, where the standard idea of a cup or chalice is replaced by that of a great cauldron. In the first book I knew right from the beginning that the object of Arthur’s interest in this instance had to be the Sword–because what is Arthur without a magical sword! However I didn’t just want to go for the familiar Sword in the Stone story, which has been pretty much covered by everybody from Thomas Malory to Kevin Crossley-Holland – instead I went back to the idea of a magical weapon that would combine elements of fire and ice – the fire of the earth, the ice of deep space, combined to create an object that is deeply tied into the history of the land itself. So that’s what Arthur is looking for in this first volume. In the next volume he’ll be looking for the Cauldron of Light and Shadow, and this will take him to some rather unusual places.

What characters can we look forward to seeing in future books? I’m wondering if there might be a role for a certain Primary Chief Bard?

You’ll find quite a few familiar characters in the first book: Merlin of course; Kay, Arthur’s adoptive brother; his foster father Sir Hector, and so on. There’s also an important role for a figure known as the Green Knight, though here he appears in a rather different guise to that with which most readers would be familiar from the medieval poem. What I tried to do was draw upon the whole spectrum of the Arthurian legends, which I studied for many years, and to put them into context of an entire world, here called Albion, which is the mythical name for Britain, and to use as many of the characters from those original legends as possible. This means I can put in less familiar figures such as the Nine otherworldly women who ruled over the mystical realm of Avalon, where we find Arthur at the beginning of the book, living in a rather strange castle where positively anything can happen – and does. I intend to put as many of the characters, both known and unknown, into the books, as I can and you’ll be pleased to know that there is indeed a role for a Primary Chief Bard in Book Two.

Sir Bercilak - The Green Knight by Will Worthington

John, this book isn’t your first venture into writing for children and over the years you’ve written a fair few. Would you care to talk about some of those – I know for example that the predecessor of the young Arthur series was one about a boy adventurer called Henry Hunter. Can you tell us about him?

I’ve written several children’s books in the past, including collections of folk and faerie tales, and two previous novels aimed at middle range readers and younger, featuring a character called Henry Hunter, who uses old-fashioned detective skills, reads books rather than using the Internet, and has adventures which take him into the realm of the supernatural. The first of these, Henry Hunter and the Beast of Snagov, is a take on the Dracula myth, and the second, Henry Hunter and the Accursed Pirates, features some undead pirates and a rather famous villain known as Blackbeard. I enjoyed writing these immensely and have several more planned, but Red Dragon Rising comes first.

Finally John, you obviously think its important for us to have these stories of King Arthur out there. What do you hope children in particular will gain by reading The Sword of Ice and Fire and the rest of the series?

I’m writing these books not just for children, but for any age group interested in myth, and the one thing I wanted them to come away with was a deeper understanding of these ancient tales which underlie so much of the culture of this country. Just about everyone has heard of King Arthur, and most people could tell you a couple of the stories - but there is so much more to them. There’s a whole world of Arthurian mystery, magic and drama, and eventually I want to cover the whole story. In fact the Red Dragon Rising sequence is really only the beginning of a much larger project. I’ve been working on a huge Arthurian novel called Broceliande (that’s the name of the Arthurian forest that features in many of the stories, as well as being a real place in Brittany) which will follow the life of Arthur from the moment when he becomes king to his vanishing into the underworld. Bits of this went into my two collections of stories, The Song of Taliesin and The Song of Arthur, the former of which became the subject of a dramatised version adapted by you - and which I love. I think anyone who becomes familiar with the stories will learn about honour, truth, the search for a better way of life, the desire to make a better world. I know these seem like huge ideas to put into a story like this, but the Arthurian legends are huge, their scope is almost beyond anything we can imagine today - as big as Tolkien’s Middle Earth, the universe of Star Wars, and the mirror world of J.K. Rowling – all of which borrowed heavily from these older tales. I am very happy that Greystones Press, a small but brilliant local publisher, took these on. I look forward to completing the other three - book 2 is already on the way.

Well I'm sure I speak for all readers of this blog, when I wish you all the best with the rest of the series and hope that you finally get the chance to complete that epic of yours. Thanks, John, for talking to abba.

Thanks, Steve and I shall certainly do my best.

Details of all the books John mentioned as follows

Sword of Ice and Fire, (Greystones Press, 2018)

Henry Hunter and the Best of Snagov  (Templar Fiction, 2015)

Henry Hunter and the Cursed Pirates   (Templar Fiction, 2016)

The Song of Taliesin (Quest Books, 2001)

The Song of Arthur (Quest Books, 2002)

Song of Taliesin Audio Drama - Double CD - with Steve Gladwin, Jem Dick and Sharon Jacksties 

Plus if you liked the images from The Camelot Oracle by John and Will Worthington, there are also copies.

All the above available from Hallowquest.org.uk, Amazon.co.uk  & Amazon.Com .

Steve Gladwin is a writer and screenwriter, author of The Seven and The Raven's Call and co-writer and story editor of the Fragon series.