G.R. Grove, author of The Druid's Son (October 8-26)

Please welcome G.R. Grove (gwernin), chatting to discuss her new book The Druid's Son. Have fun!

Good morning. Unlike most authors on these threads, I've been on LibraryThing for a long time, having originally joined in September 2005 as gwernin to catalog my reference books. However, I'll be on this thread for the next two weeks chatting about my four historical novels, and especially the newest one, The Druid's Son.

The Druid's Son is set between 60 and 82 AD in what is today northwest Wales, after the Roman army overran the island of Anglesey, the principal stronghold of the Druids. The actual information we have about this time and place, and about the Druids in general, could be summarized in a short paragraph, so I had to do a lot of research and a lot of creative thinking for this book. Like my earlier Storyteller books, it also straddles the boundary between historical fiction and fantasy, and I think should appeal to readers of both genres.

I'll have a lot more to say about The Druid's Son, Druids, and the writing of speculative historical fiction during the next two weeks. In the meantime, some of my earlier posts on these topics can be found on my Storyteller series thread, and The Druid's Son has just had its first LibraryThing review here.

Hey, gwernin! Like that you've offered to do this author chat, I've found previous chats with a couple authors really rewarding.

Of course, I've been active in the Storyteller threads you noted above, but I want to point out to any new readers an aspect of the books I've really enjoyed, and maybe tease out some new thoughts from you. Namely, the new book, The Druid's Son, is set significantly earlier than your first three books. Those first three are characterized by a really strong sense of place, and from all evidence and discussion from others, are as accurate as can be expected given the state of knowledge we have from the archaeological record, surviving written records from the time (both literary and more mundane), and contributions from historians over the ages.

I'm curious, though: did you do anything different to establish that sense of place given the new novel is set so much earlier than the others, yet for most of us readers, they are all equally ancient? I'm thinking as a way to distinguish one feel of "ancient history" from the other, given that some locations are featured in more than one book, yet separated by a generation or more. Or put another way: were you surprised by what emerged as you wrote about place in this new book?

Good points, elenchus. First, given that the protagonists in both stories travel through many of the same places (Wales is, after all, a small country), it's interesting how few really important locations they share, and how few of those (really only two) would have looked the same, or almost the same, in both periods. Between The Druid's Son (60-82 AD) and Storyteller (beginning in 550 AD) lie 500 years and almost the entirety of Roman Britain. Ancient history for Togi (the protagonist of The Druid's Son) was the bronze age, the time of the builders of the chambered tombs and stone circles which are so much a part of his life and landscape. Ancient history for Gwernin (the narrator of the Storyteller series, with whom I share my username) was Togi's time, and the subsequent Roman occupation in whose ruins he was born and lives. The cultural layering is different in the two books, but I hope the sense of place, and of deep time, is equally powerful. As to how they seem to readers - you'll have to answer that question when you finish the book! I don't think I was surprised by what emerged - but it was definitely an interesting process of discovery.

The mountains themselves would not change much, I presume, over those 500 years (slate and other mining on a much smaller scale than in the last 500 years), but the rivers, coasts and vegetation might have.

I had not though about deep time in the context of your novels - place was the aspect that I noticed. I will think about as I read the new book.

As I grow older and watch my sons grow, I feel events I remember slipping into history, yet my grandfather could have met someone who remembered the news from the battle of Waterloo, time slowly slipping from shallow to deep

A quick announcement. We will hold a group read of The Druid's Son after the author chat. It will begin two weeks from today, on October 22. I'll post a link later on. Hope some people who take part here can join us.

Gwernin - I'm wondering what led you to write about these times and places. How did you end up first in the dark ages of NW Wales, and now, with the latest book, in the Roman era? What about Wales, specifically, attracted you?

#7 it must be the welsh-cakes!

5: No, the mountains wouldn't have changed much, but the coasts certainly would have in some places. One example can be seen on the lower left side of this map, just below the label Glaslyn Pass, where in Togi's day (and Gwernin's too of course) the flat valley which today lies behind the Cob embankment was still a tidal estuary. The north Wales valleys were also probably much more forested before Edward I arrived.

6> Glad you mentioned that, Dan. I'll set the thread up sometime this week.

7, 8> No, it wasn't just the Welsh cakes ;-) The short answer is that I've always been interested in ancient and medieval Britain, especially after I started reading Rosemary Sutcliff's books in my teens. I also have some Welsh ancestry on my father's side of the family. When I got involved with the SCA in 1994 I decided to take a Welsh persona, using the name of a 14th century Welsh poet. As I read more about early Welsh history, and began learning the language, one thing led to quite a few others...

Incidentally, I've posted the first chapter of The Druid's Son as a sample here.

I'm glad to see you here, gwernin, and thanks to Jeremy for sending the comment to let me know this thread was going on - this isn't a group I ordinarily watch.

You mention your books as 'straddling the border' between historical fiction and fantasy, which I think is quite accurate for those I've read (and I like to think that our discussion in Hobnob a few years ago has something to do with your embracing the idea that they can be characterized as fantasy by some people without losing the historical fiction audience)! Is this a balance that you're deliberately trying to strike, or are you just writing the story you want to write and letting readers worry about genre classification?

I also have some Welsh ancestry on the paternal side, though I latched onto it because I'm pleased to, and not for any obvious manifestation of it in my family. I've tentatively picked out Welsh influences, primarily in reading and popular music, as a way to learn about it. There's not nearly the Welsh presence here in the US Midwest as there is from Irish or Scottish or English tradition, that I've noticed. I speculate that the Welsh hold a place in British culture akin to that of Appalachian culture in the US: a proud, even defiant identity largely cast as buffoons by the larger culture. Not sure if it's a valid comparison, but it draws me.

Food is a pretty strong pull from cultural heritage! I've not had any welsh-cakes, perhaps I'd do well to try my hand at them. I've also developed a weak spot for Welsh rarebit, but I hesitate to post that: would anyone venture to say how "genuinely" Welsh that dish is?

12> Hi lorax, nice to see you here, too. And yes, our discussion on the subject of where that border lies did make me more comfortable with the double classification. I think the phrase I used earlier this morning, "speculative historical fiction", is actually a good description of what I'm doing, or trying to do. It's not so much a case of writing the story I want to write, as it is of writing the story I want to tell in the way it wants to be told. Since I'm writing about Druids this time, the story includes more magical elements which I know you would classify as fantasy - and you have persuaded me that this is not a bad thing.

13> I think the Welsh presence in the Midwest is possibly greater than you realize, judging from the number of people I've met from that region who attend Cymdeithas Madog's yearly Welsh language course. The Scots and the Irish just tend to be more visible. Your reading of the English attitude toward the Welsh, however, is pretty much spot on, as can be seen any time an article about things Welsh appears on one of the British newspaper sites.

Regarding food - Welsh cakes are quite pleasant when made properly; they're a sort of small, slightly sweet griddle cake usually containing currents. I think the origin of the "Welsh rarebit" is a sort of toasted cheese on bread concoction, called "caws pobi" in Welsh. It occurs in that form in Welsh Fare, which is a good reference if you can find a copy.

15> "What did the Romans ever do for us?" brought us raisins for a sweeter welsh-cake! (I am something of an addict - I live about 50km from the welsh border, but one of my local supermarkets sometimes sells them). I wonder how old they are? probably not a very meaningful question as various similar items will have been cooked for thousands of years

16> In their current form, involving bread wheat and raisins, I would guess they are probably Medieval or later, at least in Wales. In Gwernin's time, wheat bread would have been a food for the nobility, not the poor farmers. However, as you say, flat griddle-baked cakes of some kind probably go back thousands of years.

Gwernin - I would like to hear more about this fantasy/historical fiction balance...or should I say the fiction/fact balance, or however you look at it. Well, how do you look at it?

18> I think you have two topics there:

1) fantasy vs historical fiction = where do you draw the line in classifying a book

2) fiction vs fact = percentage of the story line / characters / background details which is invented vs percentage which is known / documentable

I think the determination in item 1 has to do with the presence or absence in the story of actions / occurrences / abilities not currently explainable by the physical sciences, e.g. magic, telepathy, intervention by gods / spirits, etc. The fiction vs fact ratio, on the the other hand, has more to do with the amount of information available about the story's setting and the intentions of the author.

But it's getting late, and I might change my mind in the morning...

It was late!

When it comes to the Druid and their religion in these time periods...Is much known about it?

20> We know very little about the Druids, and most of what we think we know may not be true. Our principal source is Julius Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic War, but the objectivity and accuracy of his statements have been questioned by scholars, and anyway he is writing about Druids in Gaul, not Britain, one hundred years before my story. A few other classical authors mention Gallic Druids, but most of them seem to be reworking an earlier source for their own purposes. Tacitus mentions British Druids in passing, but with no detail. The early Irish material mentions Druids, but usually as magicians or seers, or as evil heathens there to be overcome by the various saints. I did a lot of reading on archaeology and comparative Indo-European religion, but the fiction to fact ratio in this story (as defined in 19) is of necessity extremely high, at least as far as the Druids are concerned.

So the short answer is "no".

Here's a link to some of my sources.

No Druidic rituals or writings of any kind? That's is sad.

Given your impressive level of research and attention to detail, what drew you to a period about which so little is known?

24> Good question. Let us say serendipity, or possibly awen (poetic inspiration). Last year I was working on the fourth Storyteller book, which takes Gwernin to Ireland (which meant I had to go to Ireland twice for research...). Briefly, he hears a story about a wise old Druid who was the son of one of the Druids who were on Anglesey when the Romans conquered it. I found the character of the Druid interesting, and wondered how he got to be that sort of person. Also I wanted Gwernin to find out more about him, and decided that would be easier if I knew the Druid's story myself. So here we are... To be fair, there's a good bit of information available about the Roman army and Roman Britain, so it was easy to be fairly accurate about that part of the story. It's just the subject of the Druids which is such an enticing mystery.

Let me publicise my ignorance with a question: is the lack of archaeological or literary evidence from the Druids themselves primarily an accident of history (the right circumstances didn't surface for written records or a preserved burial to survive so we could find it -- or at least not yet); or, is it that there probably were no written records by the Druids or the communities they served, so we're not likely ever to find any?

Clearly cave drawings and other written records have been found for the right time period, but I'm guessing just not among this group of people. And I guess the hard evidence around standing stones or hill mounds haven't revealed anything we can connect to Druids?

Seems amazing there's such a hole in the archaeological record! And yet Druids so clearly have captured the imagination of modern readers. Perhaps precisely because there's so little to go on.

Regarding literary evidence: we are told (by Caesar) that the Druids taught their religious doctrines orally, but used writing for the conduct of their everyday business. So it is possible that some of the later sort of material might exist; the problem would be connecting it with the Druids. This also applies to the fairly abundant archaeological evidence in Gaul for native religious practices - we have a good idea that some things were done (human sacrifice, for example); we are told by the classical sources that the Druids did this sort of thing; but there's no direct link. A good recent book on this topic is Miranda Aldhouse-Green's Caesar's Druids.

Regarding the reuse of Bronze Age and earlier monuments, I am not aware of any literary evidence linking these sites with the Druids. I find it difficult to believe, however, that some of them were not used in some way.

And I would agree that the Druids have captured the popular imagination precisely because there is so little known about them. What does seem likely, however, is that they were suppressed by the Romans (before the arrival of Christianity) not because of their religious practices, but because they may have formed the core of a native resistance to the Romanization of the newly-conquered territories.

A little more information about the planned group read of The Druid's Son. I'm currently running a Member Giveaway for ten e-book copies, which will close on October 24. However, I'll also be giving away free e-book copies to the first ten people who post on the group read organizing thread. More details soon...

Hi, Gwernin. I've been reading your books since you began publishing them, and have them all that I can get via Amazon or Barnes and Noble. However, I somehow missed this one - did not know about it at all, and I can't find it on Amazon or B&N. Is it available in paper - I prefer paper - or in epub format from somewhere? Please let us know where it can be obtained. Links on the LT site don't seem to help me.

Hi arethusarose, this one isn't out in paperback yet, but it will be soon. In the meantime, the epub format is available at Smashwords. The paperback will be available on Lulu.com sometime this month, and should be on Amazon etc before Christmas.

Gwernin - I agree with lorax, the details that make up the background behind the story are simply fantastic. The geography and time period details are are carefully worked out, I picture you pouring over maps.

I would like to look into Caesar's Druids, but it's not so easy to find a copy. Are there any other works you can recommend that might enrich the group read of The Druid's Son?

Looking up Druids in my local library I find a lot of pretty bad looking fiction. I did find several interesting titles, including

Non-fiction:
Druids : a very short introduction / Barry Cunliffe
The Britons / Christopher A. Snyder.
War, women, and Druids : eyewitness reports and early accounts of the ancient Celts / by Philip Freeman.
Historical atlas of the Celtic world / Angus Konstam
Heroes of the dawn : Celtic myth
The Druids / Stuart Piggott.
The Celts : the people who came out of the darkness / Gerhard Herm.

Fiction
An acceptable time / Madeleine L'Engle.
various by Marion Zimmer Bradley (Mists of Avalon, which I've read, and The Forest House)
Druids / Morgan Llywelyn

Amazon and Book Depository both list Caesar's Druids, but it's not inexpensive. Barry Cunliffe's Druids : a very short introduction might provide some helpful background in a smaller package (touchstone doesn't work, but it's on his page) .

And yes, I do a lot of poring over maps at certain points in the process.

Ah - we were typing simultaneously. Piggott is a recognized authority, but he's more interested in the later Druidic revivals than in the early or paleodruids. He also doesn't seem to like his subject matter much. Freeman, on the other hand, possibly likes it too much. Cunliffe I've already mentioned. I'm not familiar with the other non-fiction titles. I haven't read the fiction ones, either, but would take them all with a very large teaspoon of salt, especially Bradley.

Great info. I've liked Cunliffe in the past, might try to look over his book before the group read.

Another question I have. I've noticed your books are very male centric. Woman are typically secondary characters or sometimes less than that (the mother in The Druid's Son, for instance). I'm interested in any aspect of this you might want to answer, but my specific question - Is this done with intent, or just do these stories just kind of evolve in this way?

36: People have mentioned this to me before. I think it's just a realistic reflection of the society of the time: men traveled and fought, women raised children and did more domestic crafts. The one is not more valuable than the other; it's just that my viewpoint characters - bards and now druids - would have been men. You will see a stronger female character toward the end of The Druid's Son, and also in Gwernin's next book.

(I speak, by the way, as a woman who followed a non-traditional career path in geology, mining engineering, and database support before retiring to write ;-)

Thanks. I think it also is affected by your choices of starting your stories with young boys or young unattached men. This separates them quite a bit from much of the activities and influences of woman. As the characters get older, it makes sense that the woman would become more influential.

I think I'm the only one asking questions...

I have more...

The last trilogy jumped back 500 years, and dwells a bit on those standing stones... How drawn are you to those? What are the chances that a future book will go back farther in time?

Keep askin', dchaikin! You've raised one or two that I was wondering about, and several which didn't occur to me.

I'm realising, too, that as I've not yet read the book, many things I'd usually ask about will probably arise during the group read.

After manually entering my ARC for The Druid's Son, I noticed it's included in a series named Druid's Son Trilogy. Though your next book, I believe, is The Fallen Stones and returns to Gwernin for a second trilogy in the Storyteller Series, am I right in thinking you've sketched out a further 2 books with Togi?

If so, I'm curious whether you anticipate the Gwernin and Togi stories overlapping. Not literally, but perhaps intertwining in the sense that ancestors of each meet or cross paths, or the actions of one set of characters end up affecting the other set of characters. Normally I'd think that was too much planning for your style of writing, but I recall your admission that the prompt for The Druid's Son came from your own curiosity about a Druid Gwernin learned about ... and wondered how far that link would carry you.

38: I have no plans to go earlier than first century CE, partly because I have enough work planned with Gwernin's books and the inevitable continuation of the Druid's Son book to keep me busy for years, and partly because to go any earlier in the British Isles would put me wholly into mythological (as opposed to historical) time. That said, I can see vignettes from earlier times occurring as inclusions (in the geological sense) in the two settings I've already established.

I do like standing stones, though.

40: Yes, I've labeled the Druid's Son as book #1 in a trilogy, partly because Celtophiles tend to think in threes, and partly because I haven't explored nearly as much of the protagonist's life as I had intended. And I'm sure some connections will develop, if only because the Druid's Son book(s) provide(s) more background for Gwernin's stories. That, after all, was one reason for writing the current book. (Is everyone confused now?)

Not confusing at all, and I look forward to whatever comes out next. But I'm not yet convinced the stones won't draw you much closer.

44: But I'm not yet convinced the stones won't draw you much closer

Inevitable, I should think.

I also am fascinated by standing stones and similar creations, and I'm still in awe that so little is known definitively about the connection between them and druids! If it truly is simply Caesar's word the druids included them in their rituals, well ... how many times has scholarship revealed that some given we've "always known" about a people or culture can be traced back to a mistake, misinterpretation, or outright lie?

It's awe-some, in another way I suppose, that conceivably there is no connection whatsoever between druids and Stonehenge, but we so much want to believe there is.

It's that gap between established fact and our imagination, I suppose, that is so compelling.

45: So far as I'm aware, Caesar said nothing about standing stones. The connection between Druids and Stonehenge appears to be a 17th-18th century idea. I do think that in some cases the Druids might have reused older sites for the same reasons their original builders were attracted to them, but the physical evidence is scanty to absent.

Ah: thanks for the correction re: Caesar's writings, I was mis-remembering your earlier posts 21 and 27.

You did state you're not aware of any direct evidence for Druid use of Bronze Age monuments, so I suppose my main point is stronger than I stated it: the link between Druids and megaliths is a modern and imaginative one, not a link grounded in evidence.

I'll be setting up the group read page in the next day or two (been busy this week with final proofreading).

I've started a thread for the group read. Dan and others, feel free to add any organizing comments that occur to you.

And a little poll:

Gwernin - I've been mostly off LT for several days. I'll check out the group read thread today. I finished The Druid's Son and loved the notes on how the story relates to fact at the end. I have some questions after reading that, but I may save them for the The Druid's Son Group read.

As for questions here: You mentioned somewhere on LT before that at some point you were a storyteller yourself. Can you tell us more about your experiences as a storyteller? How much, if any, does that experience affect your writing?

I started storytelling about seventeen years ago when I joined the SCA, and have continued intermittently since. Some of the interior stories in the Storyteller books are tales I tell myself, so I know what it's like to stand up in a crowded feast hall, and be listened to - or not. It's also made me more aware of the different patterns and registers of language used in written as opposed to spoken tales. Repetition, for example, is an important part of the storyteller's art - it's part of the patterning of the oral performance which helps guide the listening audience through the tale - but it has to be used sparingly, if at all, in the written narrative.

Very interesting about the repetition. I thought the book Storyteller left a very strong sense of oral story telling to it. Of course it is first person and the narrator, our storyteller, gave this impression. This effect seems be reduced with each succeeding novel. The Druids Son is third person, and I don't think we ever "meet" the narrator. Any comment on that?

I think part of the reason for the very strong sense of a story being told in the first book, Storyteller, is because of the short self-contained nature of the first chapters (which were originally written as monthly serials). The second and third books (Flight of the Hawk and The Ash Spear), in contrast, were written as novels. The interior place-connected stories in Flight of the Hawk are still an important part of the narrative; less so in The Ash Spear, which is in many ways a coming-of-age novel about the narrator, Gwernin.

The Druid's Son, on the other hand, is conventional third person restricted viewpoint, seen mostly from Togi's point of view, and much more plot-driven than the Gwernin books. It will be interesting going back to work on the next Gwernin book (provisionally titled The Fallen Stones) after this.

>54 dchaikin:

I've just started The Druid's Son and am intrigued by the observation we never meet the narrator! Perhaps following convention of the third person restricted viewpoint, but hard not to speculate upon -- given the link between it and the Storyteller series. Was it anything more than the conventional voice of a story in print, gwernin? Though even that choice would stress the oral tradition behind storytelling.

Amusing that we can "listen" to a story in a book and not really wonder about the provenance of it, or the personality of the person relating it. I suppose that is behind so much of the trickery of metafiction, though. A literal look at a metaphor so commonplace we've lost sight of it as metaphor, and find it clever when a postmodern author reminds us of it.

Apologies for not replying sooner - I lost internet connectivity last night and only got it back about an hour ago. Something to do with the high winds here in Denver, I think...

Anyway, unlike the Storyteller books, I don't think there is really a specific narrator in The Druid's Son - just the conventional third person restricted, mostly invisible, narrator's voice. It's me, if you like. Interesting that you raise that point, though - something to think about for future books.

You may have noticed, btw, that some of the framing material I had discussed last year didn't make the final cut. In the end, the story seemed stronger without it. Part of it will show up in the next Gwernin book, though.

Well, that brings up another question...that narrator-as-you part. How much similarity is there between gwernin the author and Gwernin Kyuarwyd the storyteller?

I'm still in the early going of the new book, and your use of the term geas prompted a reflection: some authors incorporate scads of new vocabulary (often terms in another language) to set the tone of the novel, yet for the most part, you don't.

Certainly we're familiar with the trope of the invented language, so popular since Tolkien, but it can work well with real or historic languages. For that matter, there is a literary tradition in the 19th century and before, in which quotations or dialogue are provided verbatim in other languages, sometimes multiple. It makes me jealous of the reader who can easily digest English, French, Latin, and Greek! (Perhaps that was mostly a conceit of the author, though, as it doesn't happen much these days without a translation provided for each passage.)

Did you ever consider using a healthy heaping of Welsh in your novels? And what do you think the relative advantages (and challenges) are, from a literary standpoint, when not writing that way?

58: Good question, but I'm not sure what a good answer would be. Assuming that we're talking about narrative voice, I think you can make your own distinctions by comparing the Storyteller books with The Druid's Son - but then you also have Gwernin's narrative voice vs his storytelling voice... In other respects, I'd say there is some overlap - I've done some of the things Gwernin describes and seen many of the places he's been - but not really a lot. Don't know if that answers your question.

59: To deal with the Storyteller books first, I think there are a couple of things going on here. In all three of them to date, I do use a sprinkling of Welsh terms - mostly endearments such as cariad and words which had specific legal meanings in Medieval Wales such as galanas and sarhad. I don't use more Welsh, although I easily could, partly because I think it might confuse most readers and interfere with their enjoyment of the story, and partly because Gwernin is supposed to be speaking Welsh anyway (Primitive / Old Welsh or perhaps Insular Celtic at that), so it makes no sense to include passages of Modern Welsh in his speech or narration. Things get more complicated when he interacts with the Picts or Saxons, and in the latter case I do actually include some Old English dialogue.

In the new book, on the other hand, there is very little use of other languages - the few examples I can think of being geas, awen, and imbas, which all have what one might call technical meanings not easily translated into English, the Welsh word teulu for a king's retinue or war-band, which is really a Medieval usage, and a few words of Latin toward the end of the book. In this case the languages actually being spoken would have probably been some form of Insular Celtic in Wales, classical Latin among the Roman contingent, and whatever the parent of Old Irish was (no records for this period, and I'm not enough of a linguist to even make a guess). The original languages not being an option, it never occurred to me to use their modern relatives - it would seem as strange to me as having the Roman Army speak Italian.

There are, as you say, advantages and disadvantages to both approaches. My own preference is to only use enough foreign words or phrases to lightly flavor the literary soup, and to convey the sense of strangeness in other ways instead - in Gwernin's case by the use of Welsh grammatical constructions in English. But it's an interesting discussion, and I might play with the idea a bit more in the next three Gwernin books.

#61 This is one of the most interesting posts here, this thought about how to "flavor the literary soup" with the words and constructions from these languages. It makes me wonder about the well of language you are drawing from. It also heightens my awareness of the how these bits and pieces affect your books' atmospheres.

62: Looking back at elenchus' post again, I think the use of foreign or invented words and phrases can be a shortcut method of introducing a feeling of strangeness into the story, especially if the writer doesn't actually speak the language in question. I prefer to get that effect more subtly, if possible, by working with the ways of thinking behind the words. In English I might say, "I have a cat," but in the Celtic languages the phrasing would be, "There is a cat with me"; in English, "I am afraid," but in the Celtic languages, "There is a fear on me." There are also ideas or ways of behaving in all the books which seem entirely natural and proper to Gwernin and Togi but which may seem strange, to say the least, to us. A very central concept in The Druid's Son, for example, is that of sacrifice, and what it meant in pre-Christian European religions (or modern paganism, for that matter). I won't go into that further now, but it's something to keep in mind for the group read.

63: hence the use of Wenglish in the valleys (eg Talk Tidy). My late father-in-law grew up English speaking in the valleys, and learned Welsh later (I strongly remeber him talking to his secretary on the phone in Welsh, but with odd English phrases embedded: in one call the only bits I understood were "University of Wales fellowships" and "jam sandwiches"). I certainly noticed your effective use of these forms, gwernin.

And I have always loved, loved the Welsh sentence construction using English words. I think I posted in another thread the other example of this that is so impressive to me is Philip Kerr's Berlin Noir in which he uses German grammar but with English words (more sparingly, as that could get awkward really quick); and more frequently, literal-translations of German idiom into English.

I find that such an effective, non-intrusive, yet accurate rendering of the flavour of another language. Really one of my favourite literary devices I've ever come across.

>61 gwernin:

I believe you use another Welsh term for the King's band as he comes collecting tribute. Can't recall it and don't have the manuscript in front of me, but I was mulling this very idea of how much Welsh to use, and saw that last night or the night before.

ETA The term I recalled is rath (missing diacritical), when Togi leaves with the bard. And of course, you use the Celtic month-names, and place names (but there'd be no other choice in those instances, I suppose?).

It also occurred to me that if pursuing the idea of embedding more Welsh in the narrative, you would be faced with the question of whether to use the modern Welsh or the archaic, etc. Your point about it being silly, putting modern terms in the mouth of your characters, is a good one!

I should say, I've always found your choice effective. It's only when we have chats like these that I "look" at the text more critically, and even wonder about your choices at all! All the more reason to have these online seminars.

Follow-up question: have you ever considered translating your stories into Modern Welsh? I believe several of the poems from Storyteller originated with your storytelling, and you translated those into English when used in the books.

ETA all sorts of things: I'm typing when I should be working, so it's a clandestine affair.

64: Yes, Welsh has absorbed a fair number of English words over the centuries, but continues to have its way with them grammatically and orthographically. And I gather the English spoken in the valleys still has a lot of the Welsh grammatical structure - Wenglish indeed.

66: rath is actually a Gaelic term for a certain kind of fortified compound, analogous to llys (which I use often in the Storyteller books. I don't remember using any other word than teulu for the war-band.

Translating the books into Modern Welsh would be quite an undertaking, and I'm not sure my written Welsh is good enough, but it would be a wonderful thing. The poetry was all written in English, although modeled on the Old Welsh poetry attributed to Taliesin and Aneirin. I have written a little poetry in Modern Welsh, and one example is on tregwernin.com.

Names - personal, geographical, etc - are another interesting subject. Most of the British personal names in The Druid's Son are actually Gaulish, from Davis Ellis Evans' Gaulish Personal Names, although a couple, such as Togidubnos, are 1st century British. The Irish names I borrowed from the later king lists in The Kingship and Landscape of Tara.

Are Gaulish most likely to be historically accurate, as compared to anything Welsh? Or is that just it: no written accounts of common old Welsh names for the time? I would have thought there would be some in songs, but perhaps there are not enough in the songs committed to writing.

Had you not specified, I'd have continued to assume they were Old Welsh.

The point of records raises another question: knowing which years were good and which poor harvests. Did you select those to fit your story, or did you fit the story to some record you may have read, indicating the case for the years? These are not merely colour commentary in your story, given the link between tribute to the Red Crests, and the harvest bounty (or lack), and the willingness of the tribes to revolt before tribute was done.

Here I assume you found out what you could, but felt free to alter the historical record to fit your tale. But I read also how you integrated the Celtic calendar to your narrative, and recall from another thread the pains you took to make that accurate. So I wonder how it went with the harvest record!

Looking back on >70 elenchus:, I realise a key issue: the advent of Wales and so, Welsh culture, as opposed to British. The book mentions specific tribes, each of which I was totally unfamiliar. I suppose I should have substituted "British" for "Welsh" in my question.

Just back from a long day at a local pagan festival, talking to friends and selling a few books. So...

70: We have no written records for Britain and Ireland in the first century CE other than what the Romans left us. I used mostly Gaulish names because that's what we have, although Evans includes a few British names (from Roman sources) as well. The earliest British / Welsh poetry dates from Gwernin's period, and is more concerned with contemporary events that with ancient history. But I think the Gaulish names I used are probably a reasonable approximation for Togi's period.

Moving on to the question of weather and harvests - I am not aware of any surviving records for Britain in Togi's period equivalent to the later Medieval chronicles; in this case I simply filled the gap with invention for the purposes of my story. It does seem likely that weather conditions in Europe at that time had begun their slow decline from the Roman warm period maximum, but local disasters could always occur even in generally good years.

71: "Welsh" is, as you say, a much later concept, and the word itself takes its origin from a Saxon term. In the first century CE I doubt local allegiances went much beyond the tribal level, and below that, the blood kindred. Such national, "British", consciousness as there was would have been created by the Roman invasion itself.

Life imitates art... http://balkancelts.wordpress.com/2012/10/20/the-druids-ring/

I've been doing catch-up reading here and my very favorite entry is "Just back from a long day at a local pagan festival" ~~~ Where else but LT would such a notation be found!

74: Call it research? ;-)

On the BBC web-site recently was an article on how GPS and computers are changing our view of places and journeys: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19908848

I have known North Wales very much with the aid of maps, which must be a very different feel to the "known routes, local guides, and journey stories" that is my impression of navigation in Gwernin's times - conveyed well in your books :).

How do you think about places and journeys?

Personally I am very much a map-oriented person, partly due to my many years as a geologist; the idea of using GPS is still strange to me. I've tried, though, in the books to explore the idea of navigating a strange landscape with only verbal instructions, or perhaps a crude sketch map at best - especially in the new book, as you know! I think there would have often have been paths to follow, more well-worn along popular routes. My field experience has been that following animal tracks will often also get you where you want to go with the least effort - although what's a good path for a deer, for example, is not always passable for a human unable to leap five foot obstacles! Sight lines and easily recognized landmarks would also play their parts, and many single standing stones in moorland landscapes may have been put there for that purpose. The sort of awareness of the landscape required of a traveler in Gwernin's day, and still required for those who leave the beaten path, is very different from that required of most of us on our daily rounds or journeys.

Another announcement: The Druid's Son group read kicks off tomorrow. The thread is up, HERE. If you want to join us or just follow the thread, stop by and post so we know.

Author chats usually last one or two weeks, but this one was set up for three, so I'll still answer any questions posted here through Friday.