Hwæt! That’s how Anglo-Saxon scops (Saxon poets) summoned the warriors, drinking and feasting in the king’s mead hall, to listen to the tale they were about to sing. It was how JRR Tolkien began his lectures on Beowulf to Oxford undergraduates a millennium and a half later. And it was how I, the child of Sri Lankan and Italian immigrants, ended up writing about 7th-century Northumbria over the last decade and a half.
I am the author of over 12 books, mostly with Catholic historical themes. Being a Catholic writer with a fascination with the Dark Ages hasn’t been the easiest of literary voc-ations. We live in a very different publishing world from when editors welcomed novels and biographies by Catholic writers such as Evelyn Waugh (his biography of Edmund Campion is still in print), Ronnie Knox and GK Chesterton. Most Catholic magazines have ignored my work for years.
I began to write when I took the road north from Seahouses in Northumberland and saw, for the first time, Bamburgh Castle squatting atop a huge outcrop of the Great Whin Sill, commanding land and earth and sky. A Lond-oner born, I confess to having had the usual lack of interest in the rest of the country, and particularly anywhere in the north.
But my wife’s sister was married to an archaeologist who was excavating at Bamburgh Castle and, in the end, I ran out of excuses not to visit. So in 2002, with our baby boy, we drove north and, taking the road along the coast, I realised that the cliché was based on reality: when sufficiently astonished, your jaw will hang open.
Talking to Paul, my archaeologist brother-in-law, I learned that he had been asked to write a book about their findings but he had not had the time. “I’m a writer, you’ve got the knowledge, let’s write it together,” I said. So, we did. In writing the first of our three books, Northumbria, The Lost Kingdom, about the area’s early history and archaeology, I realised that the story of its three greatest kings, Edwin, Oswald and Oswiu, made an extra- ordinary natural drama which, so far as I could tell, no one had yet told. So I did.
In a trilogy of three historical novels, covering these three kings of Northumbria, I imagined how these kings were crucial in transforming the petty fiefdoms of warlords into enduring kingdoms and how they were key in converting the pagan Anglo-Saxons to Christianity by fostering the work of missionaries, first from Rome and then from Ireland. It was a story of hope, betrayal, downfall, renewal and redemption. And being a Catholic as well as a writer, I had a crucial advantage in telling it: I can understand the mind of the believer.
Here’s a secret about historical fiction. Most of it is rubbish. Of course, that’s true of most art but books are literature, after all; surely that means they will last? We writers like to tell ourselves stories about the enduring value of our work but these are merely fictions to help us overlook the fact that the work is under-appreciated and worse paid. But the vast majority of books are forgotten with their writer – just visit any second-hand bookshop to view the graves of paper dreams.
However, when I say historical fiction is rubbish, it is because it is poor in a very specific way. Take the books with some manly-looking chap on the cover, armour-clad and wielding a sword. It’s the male equivalent of chick lit. It’s 21st-century wish fulfilment, where the guy gets the girl while chopping up baddies with his sword, all served up with a patina of history to suggest the story has greater depths. It’s the same with the more feminine versions of historical fiction, although with these the cover will probably feature a completely modern-looking woman wearing a Georgian dress.
In both male and female versions, the failure of modern historical fiction lies in transplanting modern beliefs and sensibilities into the past and passing these off as normal for the time. Georgian women were not proto-feminists. Anglo-Saxon warriors did not espouse scepticism about God or the gods. Marriage was both more sacred and more business-like. To pretend otherwise is to commit the great perjury of historical fiction: to write of the past and make them just like us.
No. The past is both stranger and closer than we imagine. Take Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac. I remember reading commentaries stating that his willingness to kill his son demons- trated his total commitment to carrying out God’s will. That may be so, but recent archaeo- logical research on Semitic polytheism has conclusively demonstrated the horrifying prevalence of child sacrifice. It was this world in which Abraham lived. In that context, it came as no surprise to Abraham that God want- ed the blood of his son: that was what the gods required. The surprise in the story of Abraham and Isaac is not the demand for child sacrifice but the fact that God stopped the sacrifice before it could be completed. Abraham was just going along with what the wider culture did.
The challenge for writers of historical fiction is to take historical people, people such as Abraham, about to sacrifice his son, or Cuthbert, wading out into the North Sea up to his neck and remaining there until dawn while singing psalms, and make their actions believable and understandable to readers for whom this would be unimaginable. Some thinkers have argued that the gap between historical eras is so profound that a true appreciation of the motives and actions of people in the past is impossible. We can only view the past through a 21st-century lens, magnifying the areas most congenial, ignoring those that are least accessible. I disagree. While the differences are profound, they are in principle no more profound than those separating different cultures in today’s world, and genuine understanding is pos- sible among these, based upon the fundamental human/divine likeness that shapes us all.
However, most writers of historical fiction, with an eye to markets and publishers, simply dress 21st-century people in period clothing and put them on horseback. Nowhere is this disconnection from a genuine engagement with the past more obvious than in the treatment of religion. Atheism is modern. Even among the Norse, who often regarded their gods with the suspicion due to a race of supernatural bullies, there was no idea of a world without Powers. These were Powers that had to be placated and appeased but no one thought they did not exist. In contrast, I have lost count of the number of historical fiction nov- els I have read where the hero dismisses God or the gods as illusions. This is done as a sop to the writer – so that he or she does not have to engage in any serious manner with the religion of the time – and the reader, who is presumed to be agnostic and sceptical.
And this is where the believing writer of historical fiction has a genuine advantage. While still strange, I can begin to understand why Cuthbert should so mortify his flesh, or Bede think it vital that Christians all celebrate Easter on the same day, or Alfred devote a third of his day to prayer. The challenge becomes embedding this understanding into the bones of the story so that the reader, whatever his own belief, understands the actions of early-medieval believers as being true within the context of their time and culture.
Historical fiction, at its best, allows us to enter imaginatively into the world of the past and live there, for a while, under the rules and rubrics of that time and not our own. It does this by finding the points of contact between different eras, and using these to anchor the story, while building upon this foundation a structure that allows the reader to understand the time as a product of its context: another solution to the never-ending problem of how to live as mortal beings with a soul that signs towards an uncertain immortality.
I hope to have done that.
Edoardo Albert’s books include Edwin: High King of Britain, Oswald: Return of the King and London, A Spiritual History.
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.