Although it is billed as, “a story of Arthur”, Bernard Cornwell’s The Winter King is more of a biography about the chronicle’s narrator, Derfel Cadarn, than the fabled 5th Century monarch. He is a monk writing a memoir under the suspicious eye of Brother Samsum, who seeks to erase Arthur’s achievements from Britain’s history. Although he regales the monastery’s patron, the Queen Igraine, with a romanticized legend around the late lord, he is also compiling a second, more frank account of his decades as a historical witness following Rome’s retreat from the British Isles. Derfel’s tale is not one of courtly manners and knightly honor, but of unceasing warfare between kingdoms, relentless foreign invasions, and intense religious conflict. It feels like a revisionist 1970s Western, where the streets are steeped in mud and blood, and where human motivations are defined by three emotions: Lust, savagery and greed. With the deployment of the first-person voice Cornwell skillfully adds a layer of complexity to the carnage and depravity.
Derfel provides limited insight into the thoughts and actions of key players in Cornwell’s fabricated history. After having been saved by Merlin, who feels that the narrator has been blessed by the “old Gods” for having survived a Saxon “death pit” as a child, Derfel gains the trust of the Grand Wizard’s protégé (and teenage mistress), Nimou, as well as her perspective into the theological premises of Druidism and magic. Later, after choosing the warrior’s path (with plentiful digressions on killing with broadswords and breaking down shield walls), our not-so-venerable Bede discovers the nature of Dark ages realpolitik through the machinations of Arthur, Lancelot, and other kings and generals. Through these connections, Derfel stitches together a serpentine tapestry of religious cults, shifting allegiances and fractious treaties, weaving a complex world in which Arthur, as a fighter and politician, operates with considerable acumen when he isn’t overcome with his inherent selfishness and recklessness.
Through Arthur’s moments with Derfel, and through his actions with other leaders, we sense not only the power relations of Post Romana Britain, but the cohesion of a civil society and warcraft. Arthur, when concerned over the mercenary murders of Welsh miners by prince Mordred’s guardian Owain, tells the narrator that, since the food and armory that makes soldiering possible results from civilian labor, a soldiers duty should secure the lives and livelihoods of the vassals. Being of lowly origins and seeking status through military spoils, Arthur’s speech partly serves as an admonishment of Derfel’s commanding lord, but it also constitutes a move to gain the narrator’s trust and loyalty in an upcoming scheme to usurp the position of royal guardian from a previously appointed designee. Intent is shrouded in deception on all fronts, a theme that Cornwell sustains throughout the narrative.
By allowing Derfel to play confidant to various power players throughout the course of the narrative, The Winter King’s first person voice paradoxically reveals the limitations of Derfel’s perspective of events being described in the chronicle unfolded. During one of his asides to the reader, he admits that when Arthur’s challenged Owain, he omitted the fact that Arthur’s entrance to that fateful duel was a calculated move, and not some spontaneous event as described earlier in the narrative. The warlord was, in fact, waiting for an opportune moment to catch his rival off guard so as to gain a better strategic position. Time, and a deeper understanding of his commander’s tactical virtuosity, gives the older Derfel a better grasp of events, but these, as he explains, were not within the purview of his knowledge when the events transpired. The framing device allows for a dialogue between past and present, where experience lends a better understanding of how events transpired, but acknowledging that said events, narrated objectively through omniscient narration, lack an essential urgency in conveying the “ownage” of the conflict.
Through this admission, Derfel confesses that his truth is couched in dramatic form, a romance if you will. As we see in his dealings with Nimou and Merlin, they too view power not in humanistic, Machiavellian terms (and Arthur and the various Kings do) but in the guise of theatrical narrative, which, in the parlance of the time, is experienced as magic. Nimou’s initial horrific appearance before the Silurian King Gundleus scourges Merlin’s lair, fully naked with bats flapping away while tied her hair beads, temporarily halts the conqueror’s aim to expose the wizard’s secrets for his own amusement. This foreshadows the final battle, in which the deployment of wolves springing from the forests establishes a temporary advantage to Arthur and his defenders. For Nimou and Merlin, this sense of unpredictability inhabits the spirit of the Old Gods, and is embedded in the nature of understanding human instinct. To lose this sense of theatricality is to lose the attention of the Gods, and to thus delay their return to reclaim their lands and redeem their fallen state.
The actions undertaken by Arthur, Merlin, and their allies and enemies, beget consequences and regrets, none of which can be reconciled to the philosophy of Druidism, and thus Christianity takes hold in the future to provide solace and introspection to the survivors. Throughout the tale Derfel often interjects a judgement on his bloodlust and actions with frequent, “God, forgive me’s” and other acknowledgements of his sins. His disdain for the church in his fighting days doesn’t entirely vanish, but as the chronicle continues in two succeeding volumes, the course of these lives veers into tragedy, and in modern religion he finds solace for his losses and betrayals. This particular book is the equivalent of Henry V in Shakespeare’s Yorkist histories, and while it doesn’t necessarily reach the literary heights of Elizabethan drama, The Winter King an exciting read, and in mixing grounded historical speculation with dramatic panache, it presents epic changes over time with the sorrows and ecstasies of the human heart.