Jack Whyte's Arthurian Odyssey

Why Arthur? Because I had been fascinated all my life with the Arthurian legend and I'd also been fascinated by the history of Roman Britain which lasted for 460 years, which is longer than the English speaking people have been in North America. I read everything I could get a hold of, and much later I realized if King Arthur lived, which I happen to believe he did, there's only a 50-60 year window in the entire history of Britain when it could have happened and it was at the end of the Roman occupation. So my two interests suddenly came together and blended. The one thing that had always terminally affected me, which just made me very angry, was that no one who had written a story of King Arthur in any capacity had ever been able to give a logical, feasible, explanation for the central mystery of the legend which is how did the sword get into the stone and how was the kid able to pull it out, without magic? One day in 1977 I realized how it was done - I knew the answer; there was no magic involved. It was the biggest and first public relations coup in imperial British history and so I set out to write the story of that final scene.

I had to take us back four generations. The legend tells us nothing about King Arthur's parentage other than his father was Uther and his mother was a woman called Ygraine. But each of us have two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents 16 great-great-great grandparents. I was looking for a beginning of the story and I found it at the beginning of the dissolution of Roman Britain when everything started to turn into chaos and anarchy.

Go To Page: 1 2