Christianity – Blood and Porridge

March 10, 2025

Bernard Cornwell’s (still the) King

© Penguin Books

A while ago on this blog, I enthusiastically reviewed Bernard Cornwell’s The Winter King (1995), the first volume of his Warlord Chronicles. These books are his take on the King Arthur legend, which he tells in a manner closer to the reality of the Dark Ages than most other interpretations of the legend. As a gift last Christmas, my partner kindly bought me the second and third volumes of the Warlord Chronicles, Enemy of God (1996) and Excalibur (1997). Here are my thoughts on Enemy of God, which I’ve recently finished reading.

Enemy of God’s framing device is the same as The Winter King’s. In the sixth century, an elderly monk called Derfel is writing down the history of King Arthur at the behest of the young Queen Igraine, who’s obsessed with the Arthurian tales she’s heard. As a young man Derfel knew Arthur and became one of his most trusted warriors. A theme in the books is the tension between messy reality and fanciful legend. Derfel’s version of events frequently disappoints Igraine, accustomed to hearing much more romanticised stories about the king. At one point she tells him, “There are scullions who know how to tell a tale better than you!” Derfel fatalistically assumes that Igraine, later, will doctor his writings and make them more compatible with the legend.

The Winter King ended with Arthur triumphing at the Battle of Lugg Vale, a contest brought about by his own foolishness in backing out of an arranged marriage to Princess Ceinwyn of Powys, which massively offended her father, and wedding instead the more alluring but also more calculating Guinevere. Enemy of God continues Arthur and Derfel’s story by detailing three more major events in their lives.

Firstly, Derfel takes part in Merlin’s ongoing quest to retrieve some relics that according to legend were given to the ancient Britons by the old pagan Gods, are known as the ‘Treasures of Britain’ and will, Merlin believes, restore Britain to the golden age it supposedly enjoyed before the arrivals of the Romans and, more lately, the Saxons. Specifically, they go hunting for a magical cauldron that’s hidden on the island of Ynys Mon (today the Welsh island of Anglesey) off the coast of the kingdom of Lleyn, controlled by the vicious Irish king Diwrnach. Secondly, Arthur marshals the warriors of most of the Briton kingdoms and sets off to dislodge the most powerful Saxon king, Aelle, from the east of the island – a campaign that eventually brings him to Saxon-controlled London. And lastly, Arthur finds himself facing a rebellion in his home kingdom of Dummonia. The rebels have incited the Christian community to rise against the pagan one there, with Arthur unjustly portrayed as the oppressive, Christian-hating pagan-in-chief, i.e., the ‘Enemy of God’ of the title.

Along the way, Derfel finds happiness with Ceinwyn, the woman Arthur spurned in the previous book, and they start a family together. He also makes a troubling discovery about who his father is. Arthur, meanwhile, learns some hard truths about certain people close to him whom he’s loved or, at least, been willing to give the benefit of the doubt to. That Mordred, the boy-king of Dummonia, for whom Arthur has been acting as the kingdom’s lord-protector until the lad reaches manhood, turns out to be a wrong ’un is the least of the book’s surprises.

From wikimedia.org

A couple of things make Enemy of God feel different from its predecessor. Firstly, Christianity is portrayed much more negatively here. In The Winter King, the Christian Britons co-existed peacefully alongside the pagan ones, and the Briton kings had priests as well as druids in their entourages, ensuring them the support of both the ‘old’ and ‘new’ Gods. This harmoniousness was embodied in the character of the affable and loyal Bishop Bedwin, but Enemy of God bumps him off early on. Thereafter, the only sympathetic Christian character is Sir Galahad, who’s so decent and broad-minded he even lends Merlin a hand in his quest for the pagan cauldron.

Amusingly, Cornwell portrays the Christians’ activities, wailing in tongues, flagellating themselves and generally behaving hysterically as the year 500 AD draw nears – likely, they believe, to be the year when their Saviour returns to the earth – as immensely disturbing to the pagans. They react to the Christians’ shenanigans with as much distaste and fear as modern bourgeoisie Christians have reacted to the many loopy religious cults that have sprung up during the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

A second difference is that we get far more of Merlin in this book. In The Winter King, he didn’t show up until page 282, more than halfway through. I was slightly critical of how he was deployed in the previous book’s plot. I wrote that “…the manner in which Merlin reappears undermines the narrative, because it’s all a bit too unlikely. A couple of times, the cunning old wizard pops up out of nowhere and saves the day. He might as well just whip off a Mission Impossible-style rubber face-mask / disguise and go, ‘Duh-dah!’” This didn’t sit very comfortably with the book’s attempts to treat the Arthurian legend with non-fantastical seriousness.

Merlin’s still something of an issue In Enemy of God, though here it’s to do with how he manages to suddenly revitalise himself. At different points he seems to be at death’s door, or to have lapsed into senile decrepitude, but then he stages startling comebacks. He’s like Doctor Who regenerating when his old body is about to die though, unlike the TV Time Lord, Merlin doesn’t actually transform into someone new.

Still, Cornwell’s Merlin is an immensely engaging character and he gets the best lines. While telling Derfel what a lion is, and describing one he once saw in Rome, he remarks: “It was a very unimpressive threadbare sort of thing. I suspected it was receiving the wrong diet. Maybe they were feeding it Mithraists instead of Christians?” When he goes on to talk about a crocodile, and Derfel inquires what that is, he explains, “A thing like Lancelot.”

It’s more difficult to breathe life into the character of Arthur. There’s a danger that his very worthiness will make him seem two-dimensional and dull. However, Cornwell mostly avoids this trap by highlighting the character-flaws that spring from this worthiness: naivete, gullibility and – paradoxically – being so in thrall to his sense of duty that he becomes villainous. This last thing is illustrated when Cornwell weaves the tragic, chivalric romance of Tristan and Iseult into his narrative. Here, the loving but doomed couple incur the wrath of King Mark of Kernow and Arthur feels duty-bound to side with Mark, even though Tristan has helped him in earlier campaigns. When this ends horribly, Derfel is so disgusted with Arthur that he shuns him for a long time afterwards.

© Cartwright Hall Art Gallery / Bradford Museums & Galleries

It’s surprising to read a book written almost 30 years ago, and set roughly 1500 years ago, and find elements in it reminding me of 2025. But Enemy of God does this in different ways. Living in an era of Trumpian fake news, often transmitted by social media, I found myself smiling ruefully at Derfel’s accounts of how the weaselly Lancelot propagates a false image of himself, one brave and virtuous, by getting the bards to sing songs in praise of him around the countryside. And after Derfel falls out with Arthur, he goes to those bards and pays for “a dozen songs about Tristan and Iseult that are sung to this day in all the feasting halls. I made sure, too, that the songs put the blame for their deaths on Arthur.”

Also pushing fake news are the Christians. At one point, a Christian magistrate called Nabur is executed for treason: “These days, of course, he is called a saint and martyr, but I only remember Nabur as a smooth, corrupt liar.” Later, Arthur has to fight off an ambush in a squalid Christian settlement in the mountains of Powys, led by a filthy, wild-haired fanatic called Bishop Cadoc. This also gets the Dark Ages equivalent of being reported on Elon Musk’s X: “They say that Arthur surprised Cadoc’s refuge, raped the women, killed the men and stole all Cadoc’s treasures, but I saw no rape, we killed only those who tried to kill us, and I found no treasures to steal – but even if there had been, Arthur would not have touched it…” Obviously, “Cadoc was elevated into a living saint…”

It’s also interesting to view Enemy of God through the prism of 2025’s Britain, when Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform Party is rallying its supporters with chants of “We want our country back.” Although Merlin is a very appealing character overall, it’s not difficult to see parallels between his mission to restore the old pre-Roman Britain and the nostalgic British nationalism peddled by Farage. Ceinwyn, who’s quite enamoured with Merlin, gives a startlingly Farage-like speech at one point: “When I was a child… I heard all the tales of old Britain, how the Gods lived among us and everyone was happy. There was no famine then, and no plagues, just us and the Gods and peace. I want that Britain back, Derfel.”

On the other hand, Arthur evokes a more forward-looking – dare I say inclusive? – Britain. Early in the book, he rejects Merlin’s vision of the island, saying: “This isn’t the old Britain… Maybe once we were a people of one blood, but now? The Romans brought men from every corner of the world! Sarmatians, Libyans, Gauls, Numidians, Greeks! Their blood is mingled with ours, just as it seethes with Roman blood and mixes now with Saxon blood. We are what we are, Derfel, not what we once were…” Arthur might be the greatest hero of British legend, but Farage’s Reform Party wouldn’t want to cite Cornwell’s version of him in their campaign literature.

In nearly every respect, Enemy of God is as good as its predecessor. The only area where I think it pales a little in comparison to The Winter King is its ending. Whereas the first volume ended with the bang that was the Battle of Lugg Vale, this volume is slightly anti-climactic. Cornwell was presumably more concerned with manoeuvring his characters into position for the third and final volume than with finishing the second instalment with a bang similar to the first’s. This is, to be fair, a problem that has beset many a middle volume in many a trilogy. However, with everything else about Enemy of God so captivating and entertaining, I’m happy to overlook that slight shortcoming.

And so, in the near-future, I’ll hopefully get to grips with Excalibur…

© Michael Joseph / St Martin’s Press

July 29, 2024February 10, 2025

Bernard Cornwell’s (the) king

© Martin Joseph

My reading has waxed and waned this year. Until March, I lived in an apartment that required a 40-minute ride on a single bus to, and from, my workplace every day. That meant each working day I’d spend more than an hour sitting on a bus with my nose stuck in a book. As a result, I read a lot – six books in January 2024 alone, for instance.

However, one house-move and change-of-address later, I now find myself travelling to work on one bus for ten minutes, and then either on another bus for 15 minutes or on Singapore’s MRT system for five minutes. And suddenly, my reading has been knocked for six. I’ve barely got my latest book out and started perusing its pages when it’s time to change bus or change transport-mode. Since then, in the past few months, the books I’ve managed to finish have numbered a measly half-dozen.

However, one book I’ve read lately has bucked that trend. It’s a book that, from the moment I started it, I couldn’t put it down. This didn’t just happen while I was in transit to and from work. I was sneaking reads of it at my desk in the office. I was also reading it at home, much to the disgust of my always attention-hungry cat. It’s been a long time indeed since a book has taken over my life this way.

The book was The Winter King (1995), the first volume in Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord trilogy, his retelling of the legend of King Arthur.

It’s the first Arthurian novel I’ve read in a while. The last one was Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2015 novel The Buried Giant (though I suppose it’s better described as a ‘post-Arthurian’ novel), which I read early in the days of the Covid-19 pandemic. A couple of years before that, I read T. H. White’s Once and Future King series, which consisted of The Sword in the Stone (1938), The Queen of Air and Darkness (1939), The Ill-Made Knight (1940), The Candle in the Wind (1958) and The Book of Merlyn (1977). Yes, the first book was turned into an underwhelming animated movie by Walt Disney in 1963, but the literary series becomes impressively philosophical, political and tragic as it goes on.

From what I’d heard about the Warlord trilogy, The Winter King was going to be a very different proposition. The word people have used again and again in relation to Cornwall’s books is ‘realism’. Thus, I shouldn’t expect Merlin to tutor Arthur by turning him into a fish, hawk, goose, ant, whatever, as he did in the T. H. White books. No, I expected The Winter King to drip with grim, dark, bloody and muddy veracity, painting as authentic as a picture as is possible (1500 years on) of life in fifth-century Britain, after the Romans had departed and when the Britons found their way of life under threat from invading Saxons. And all the fanciful embellishments that, over the centuries and millennia, have been added to King Arthur’s legend would be shorn from the story.

That was what I expected and in many ways it’s what I got. But the fanciful stuff isn’t banished altogether. Cornwell’s premise is that Arthur’s story is being written down after his death by an elderly man called Derfel. At the book’s start, Derfel is a Christian monk but, as a young man, he was both a pagan and one of Arthur’s most trusted warriors. He’s writing at the urging of the young Queen Igraine, who’s obsessed with the – already exaggerated – tales of Arthur she’s heard. And while Derfel records the story, she badgers him about the enchanting bits he’s left out. What about Arthur, as a boy, pulling a sword out of a stone? No, Derfel patiently tells her, that never happened – though in a ceremony once, Merlin did sadistically make the young Arthur stand all night on top of a stone in the middle of Stonehenge, holding a heavy sword. And what of the gallant and romantic Sir Lancelot? Well, Derfel concedes, Lancelot did exist – but he was a complete c*nt.

Revelations like these obviously aren’t what Igraine wants to hear. You get the impression that, once Derfel’s completed manuscript is in her hands, she’ll have her own scribes alter it until the story is one she’s comfortable with. And so, Cornwell suggests, even when Arthur’s exploits were transcribed for the first time, revisionism was at work. As James Stewart’s newspaper-man declares in John Ford’s classic western The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance (1962), “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Cornwell’s treatment of magic and the supernatural is a little unexpected too. He doesn’t have Merlin performing magical feats in front of our faces, but in a way such things exist – supposedly at the behest of the druids and witches that lurk at the fringes of this primitive, violent society. They play a major role because, real or not, people believe in them. When, for example, Nimue – in traditional Arthurian mythology the main Lady of the Lake, but here a witch-girl who’s one of Merlin’s acolytes and with whom, throughout the story, Derfel has a strange, on-off love affair – constructs a ‘ghost-fence’ out of wooden posts and severed human heads along the flank of an army, it doesn’t matter if the fence possesses real magical powers or not. The fact is, the enemy soldiers are convinced it does and nothing will induce them to cross the thing. No wonder that when the novel’s various kings and warlords move their armies into battle, they’re usually accompanied by a gaggle of verminous druids who histrionically cast spells and curses at their foes.

Interestingly, though Christianity has taken hold in fifth-century Britain and has many converts, including some among the powerful, it’s generally regarded as a curious, sometimes incomprehensible counterpart to the druidic paganism that pre-dates it. As Cornwell writes in the book’s opening pages about Uther Pendragon, king of the land of Dumnonia, he “did accept that the Christian god probably had as much power as most other gods.” Accordingly, as king, he decides to play it safe and employs a few Christian priests in his service as well as a few old-school druids.

This is underlined early on when we see Pendragon, desperate for his pregnant daughter-in-law Norwenna to give birth to a healthy male heir, rely first of all on the priests of his Christian advisor Bishop Bedwin, “chanting their prayers in a chamber beside the hall where holy water had been sprinkled, a cross had been hung over the birth bed and another put beneath Norwenna’s body.” When the birth-process takes a turn for the worse, Pendragon orders the priests out and replaces them with a delegation from Ynys Wydryn – Merlin’s abode – led by the pagan priestess Morgan (a more-disturbing-than-usual version of Morgan le Fay).

“Sebile, Morgan’s slave, put a birch branch over the hall door and waved another over the writhing body of the hurting Princess. Nimue crouched in the door and urinated on the threshold to keep the evil fairies away from the hall, then she cupped some of her urine and carried it to Norwenna’s bed where she sprinkled it on the straw as a further precaution against the child’s soul being stolen away at the moment of birth. Morgan… slapped Norwenna’s hands away so she could force a charm of rare amber between the Princess’s breasts.” Meanwhile, on the ramparts outside, the pagans from Ynys Wydryn light multiple fires and create an unholy racket. “The guards beat their spear-shafts against their shields, and the priests piled more wood on a dozen blazing pyres while the rest of us screamed our noisy challenges against the evil wraiths that had slithered through the night to curse Norwenna’s labour.”

Incidentally, the baby that’s successfully delivered isn’t Arthur, but his nephew Mordred. Arthur is Pendragon’s bastard son and because of his illegitimacy is unable to inherit the crown of Dumnonia himself. He’s already an adult when Derfel begins his tale, is engaged overseas in Amorica – Brittany – and doesn’t make an appearance until about a hundred pages in, when he returns to Dumnonia to become the infant Mordred’s protector.

Also off-stage for much of the book is Merlin. He’s been on a quest to locate something called ‘the Knowledge of Britain’, and has been absent for so long it’s rumoured he might even be dead. In the meantime, life goes on at his base at Ynys Wydryn, a sort of demented, pagan hippy-commune supervised by Morgan and Nimue. There, Merlin, “for his pleasure… had assembled a tribe of maimed, disfigured, twisted and half-mad creatures…” One of its inhabitants is Derfel, who as a small child seemingly miraculously escaped a massacre carried out by the brutal King Gundleus, of the neighbouring land of Siluria. “The Tor was filled with such children who had been snatched from the Gods. Merlin believed we were special and that we might grow into a new order of Druids and Priestesses who could help him re-establish the old true religion in Rome-blighted Britain, but he never had time to teach us.” How Derfel ends up in his old age as a monk in a Christian monastery is presumably something the trilogy’s later books will explain.

Cornwell makes Merlin a memorable character, when he finally appears, and he’s responsible for much of the book’s humour. (Despite its realism, The Winter King is, in places, very amusing.) But Merlin is also, for me, one of the book’s few weaknesses. Specifically, the manner in which Merlin reappears undermines the narrative, because it’s all a bit too unlikely. A couple of times, the cunning old wizard pops up out of nowhere and saves the day. He might as well just whip off a Mission Impossible-style rubber face-mask / disguise and go, “Duh-dah!”

Anyway, that’s the set-up. After Pendragon’s death, Arthur becomes unofficial king of Dumnonia, keeping the throne warm for its official occupant, Mordred, who’s still an infant. Meanwhile, with the Saxons seizing large tracts of Britain’s east coast, Arthur knows he must try to build an alliance among the Britons’ kingdoms – Dumnonia, Gwent, Powys, Kernow and evil King Gundleus’s Siluria, i.e., what’s now modern-day Wales and western England – to fight the invaders off. That is no easy job given the rivalries and feuding that beset the leaders of those kingdoms. And Arthur ends up making the situation worse. He lets his heart rule his head and backs out of an arranged marriage designed to cement the necessary alliance – outraging everyone involved – after falling in love with a certain Guinevere. Of Guinevere, Merlin comments acidly, “it would have been better… had she been drowned at birth.”

Bernard Cornwell is, of course, best-known for his 24 novels about British soldier Richard Sharpe, set during the Napoleonic Wars. I haven’t read any of these – basically because for years I’ve been working my way through another lengthy series of novels set during the Napoleonic Wars, the Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin stories of Patrick O’Brian. Well, if the Sharpe books are as gripping and entertaining as The Winter King, I’ll certainly make a point of reading them eventually… But first I’m going to read the other two entries in the Warlord trilogy, Enemy of God (1996) and Excalibur (1997).

From facebook.com/bernard.cornwell