Jack Whyte's Arthurian Odyssey, Part Two
© Paula E. Kirman
Jack: The series is finished with the drawing of the sword from the stone because I was never really interested in going beyond that point. After he drew the sword from the stone he became the King of Britain and everyone knows what happened after that. People are asking me what my view is on the life and death of King Arthur and the dissolution of the round table, so I have contracted to write a mini-series which will be called The Golden Eagle which will take up where The Dream of Eagles left off and complete the saga with the life, loves and death of King Arthur.
Paula: What sorts of research do you do to write these novels?
Jack: Eclectic and peripatetic, predicated upon 30 years of intense research without even knowing I was doing research. And entire boyhood and manhood steeped in the lore with which I am dealing with. Then when I started writing the story I very rapidly discovered that I was not omniscient and there were some things I didn't know and so I had to go and do a little bit of research and here I am 23 years later still doing a little bit of research when I need to.
Paula: Why did you decide to use the form of the historical novel, implying that you are fictionalizing certain elements of the story, instead of writing straight, historical kinds of books about the legend?
Jack: That is what I thought I had done, I really did [laughing]. I've had a lot of people say to me in not so many words, "aren't you ashamed of yourself for stripping all the magic away from King Arthur and the Arthurian legend." My response is, in one form or another, is that I'm not stripping any of the magic away. What I'm stripping away are the things which have accumulated over the past 1500 years that have been obscuring the view of what really happened, the real magic at the center of the legend, and that legend consists of the fact that a group of ordinary people in a very extraordinary time, a time that they regarded as the end of the world, gathered together and used their own God given talents and abilities to overcome these insuperable activities and they did it so spectacularly that their achievements had become legendary. Because people do not trust their own storytelling abilities, even today when we tell a story we embellish it because we have to be that riveting to our audience. If you do that for 1500 years you end up with a story that is completely unrecognizable. That's why I have gone to such great pain to have my historical background as accurate as 30 years of research can make it.
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