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Jack Whyte's Arthurian Odyssey

© Paula E. Kirman

For over the past decade, Jack Whyte has been an author with a mission. A bona fide King Arthur buff, he set out to explain the central mystery of the legend -- the sword in the stone -- and succeeded.

Yet, five large novels later, some questions still remained. Fans wanted to know more about King Arthur's background. To address these issues, Whyte wrote Uther (Penguin/Viking; hardcover; $32.99; ISBN 0-670-871621), another large novel with a lot of adventure and historical research. A stand-alone volume, Whyte addresses the world beyond Camelod and explores how Uther, King Artur's father, wooed the wife of his worst enemy.

Whyte was born in Scotland and has lived in Canada since 1967, working as an actor, musician, advertising executive, and, of course, a writer.

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Paula: What is it about the Arthurian legends that intrigue you to write about them so often and create such works of length and intricacy?

Jack: The series proper is called The Dream of Eagles. It's actually if you step back and look at it from a vastly distant viewpoint it is one enormous novel which I wrote because I started out knowing the ending. I had the final scene of the sorcerer metamorphosis in my head. What I did not know was how far back I would have to go to find the beginning of the story and it just grew almost serendipitously. If anyone had told me when I started writing in 1977 it would be five big novels before I reached that scene I probably never would have started.

Paula: It sounds like it started to take on a life of its own.

Jack: It got to the point where friends who hadn't seen me in months or years would come to my house and were almost afraid to ask me, "Are you still screwing around down in the basement with that thing." It was 12 years late r in 1989 and I had three complete novels and manuscripts and I hadn't even considered approaching a publisher because the terror is you might take it to a publisher after three complete manuscripts and be told this is rubbish. I just had a story that I had to tell; it was inside me and it had to come out and so I wrote it with almost literally no thought of publishing it. Once I had decided to publish an amazing number of people came crawling out from under rocks and said "You can't do that. Who do you think you are, to emerge from the basement with here complete manuscripts and think you're going to get published?" So I though, OK, if I am going to get 100 million rejections then I am going to start at the top of the mountain and roll down, so I eventually approached Penguin Viking and they bought it.

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