Unsolicited, a friend loaned me three books by Bernard Cornwell: "The Winter King", "Enemy of God", and "Excalibur". They are set around 480AD, a couple generations after the Romans left, when the Saxons were still invading. So far no one has done anything overtly magical and I guess they could be considered "historical fiction"*. But I'm getting ahead of myself. The buggers are around 400-500 pages each and I have a hard enough time keeping up on professional reading and my periodicals, so they sat on the shelf for months. Finally, last weekend, I didn't feel like reading 100+ pages on "information warfare" or a couple hundred pages on cool, trendy, upscale things to do in Portland Oregon, so I thought I'd read a couple pages. At first I thought I'd be OK, because the book started with 5-6 pages of impossible to pronounce Celtic names and short blurbs on who was who and where was where. "OK," I figured, "if I need to wade through this to keep track of what's going on, this'll be a pretty short venture." Not so, and I burned through the first book, finishing it up last night. It's very interesting and engaging and a neat take on the Arthur legend. It goes with some of the modern theories, where Arthur wasn't a king, but a warlord--possibly "Arturus", the "Bear". But because it is about entertainment, not hypothetical history, the main characters are all there: Morgan, Modred, Lancelot, Galahad, Merlin, Guinevere, and a few others--but totally different than you "remember". There is no shining castle Camelot and no lances and plate armor. It's nothing like the 1980 "Excalibur" (which I enjoyed, nonetheless). So anyways, I'm behind on my magazines and WAAAY behind on my studies, but guess what is the first thing I'm going to dig into this weekend. You guessed it. *When I say "I guess", it is because the first time I was exposed to "historical fiction" was "The Killer Angels", by Michael Sharra, which covers the Battle of Gettysburg, represents the battle quite accurately, and has all real people as the "characters." The only thing fictional about it is that the author represents the thoughts, words, hopes, and fears of the main "characters", which he, obviously, wasn't privy to.
Those three books are my favorite treatment of the Arthurian mythos. If you liked those, you'd probably also like his series set in the time of Alfred the Great, during the Danelaw.
