About a decade before Bernard Cornwell began writing his Saxon Stories books, which Netflix would adapt as The Last Kingdom, he wrote The Warlord Chronicles, a three-book seires now more widely known as The Winter Knight, after the name of the first book. In this series, he took on the holy grail of adventure stories by trying to muddle through the legend of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.
Just about everyone knows of at least one version of the legend of King Arthur. Historians are unsure if Arthur was a king or even a real person, but according to a sixth century historian named Gildus, there was a warrior named Ambrosius Aurelianus who fought the Saxons in post-Roman Britain in the last fifth and early sixth centuries.
Cornwell's tale of Arthur is a more realistic one than we usually see in print or onscreen.
What makes Bernard Cornwell's King Arthur books different?
Cornwell used a similar narrative style to tell his Arthur tale as he did in The Last Kingdom books. The story is told from the first person viewpoint of a warrior who participates in historical events and is writing his memoirs as an old man.
In The Last Kingdom, Uhtred is writing his story from the comforts of his castle in Bebbanburg, while The Winter King is being written by an old monk by the name of Derfel Gadarn, who was a warrior in Arthur's day.
Like Uhtred, Derfel is a person with a dual background. Uhtred was born Christian but raised Saxon, and he is forever torn between his duty to a Christian king and his Saxon family. Derfel was born Saxon but raised as a Briton, though he doesn't split his loyalties between the two. He's firmly on the side of the Britons and Arthur.
The events in The Winter King take place about 400 years before the events of The Last Kingdom. It tells a story of life in Britain after three-and-a-half centuries of Roman occupation. Cornwell pays homage to the myths by stripping them bare, making them human and relatable.
The Romans left Britain in 410, leaving behind little more than Christianity. Even after 350 years, they didn't leave behind much in the way of long-lasting DNA. They also didn't leave behind their knowledge and skill for architecture, or for working with stone. Britain returned back to where it was before it was conquered by Rome, with petty kings fighting among each other for small bits of land they considered their kingdoms.
The Winter King series strikes for realism, with dribbles of more familiar legend sprinkled in. This was a time where Christianity was trying to overcome the vestiges of old druidic religions and gods. It hadn't won over the population yet, but the inevitability of it is made clear throughout the books. Derfel, an enthusiastic and practicing pagan earlier in life, is writing his memoirs as a Christian monk in his dotage.
Cornwell constructs a plausible scenario explaining how the nuggets of Arthurian legend were planted. Derfel is writing his life story down for a local queen, and that queen, a romantic soul, is having those transcripts, written in Saxon by Derfel, translated into Latin. Her scribe is flowering up his work to placate his queen so it fits her romantic idea of what happened. Hence, realistic elements of the Arthur story become mythic.
History and historical fiction
The Winter King is not only a story of two religions — one new and foreign, the other ancient and familiar — but also of a story of survival for native Britains. With the withdrawal of Rome, a vacuum was created. The Saxons, Angles, and Jutlanders filled that void, sending boatload after boatload of people to the British shores. Those people needed land for their crops, animals, and families, and their warriors were more than ready to take it from the locals.
Cornwell's tale is about the effort to save the last bit of native Britain. The Saxons are pushing west, occupying the lands the Romans had populated, but ever wanting more. Most of the Brits left were pushed into the southwest corner of the island; eventually these peoples pushed into Wales and Cornwall.
Cornwell humanizes many charaters from the Arthurian legend, stripping away their mythical trappings and providing a realistic twist to their personalities and lives. Lancelot, Galahad, Gawain, Tristan, Mordred, Guinevere, and, of course, Merlin are given real faces and personalies far from what we're used to.
The Winter Knight series provides one of the more realistic versions of the legend of Arthur you will find. Maybe the only one better is Jack Whyte's version told in a nine-book series known as the Camulod series. Whyte attacks the legend of Arthur in the same way Cornwell does: by paying homage to the legend while trying to strip away the romantic notion that accompanies those myths. If you enjoy Arthur stories, you won't go wrong with either of these efforts.
As always with Cornwell, The Winter King books contain violence; few describe battlefields better. But there is also humor, and love, and tragedy, and all of the everyday emotions.
Whether Arthur was real or the figment of aggregate imaginations over time, Cornwell gives him life and humanity in these books. He strips away the legend and leaves a plausible, flawed man that very well could have been real. The Winter King books are actually being adapted as a TV show by MGM+. There's one season out now, but to get the best version of the story, the books are the way to go.
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