The Wanderer

2,000 words written in three days.  A third of those words are cribbed from a dark ages poem, too, so really I've done about 450 words per day.  Not great, but that's what happens, I guess.

I've been writing about the Bear of the House of Cornus's fight.  I've written two parts: the army preparing for battle, and getting drunk after a victory.  I've shied away from the battle itself, although I'll have to face that at some point.

In the part before the battle, I discarded a lot of draft material because it was too close to Bernard Cornwell's The Winter King which I have just read the first part of.  I think I'm justified in using a post-Roman Arthur because that was planned long ago, but it sure was difficult not to copy what I'd just read.  The point of this section is to put across the idea that pulling the sword from the stone is about controlling smelting and smithying.  It can be kingmaking to control the ability to draw arms from ore, or the means of production in any way ("F- the g ride, I want the machines that are making em" - Rage Against the Machine).  So far I've set this idea up, but the payoff comes later, when a king is made.  Also, I've gone into subtle sympathetic allegory about asylum seekers.  Being forced to keep it in balance with this being soldiers on the eve of battle has certainly improved the quality of it.

After the battle, a prisoner is goaded into performing for the warriors.  He gives a speech that is so bleak the soldiers forget about him and he manages to escape.  Hopefully the parallels I'm trying to draw about depression and society come through, but it's very implicit and I'll leave it like that.  The speech is the Anglo-Saxon poem The Wanderer set in my own modern English.  I found this in the wonderful slim Penguin The Earliest English Poems.  It's been my intention from the genesis of this project to keep this story in canon with various historical fiction pieces, and these poems are one of those.  I'm delighted to have been able to use it in such a multi-layered way.  On the surface, this is a moving Anglo-Saxon poem about being exiled in a post-Roman world.  I have given it two new layers of meaning.  The first is analogous to what someone might be able to do in a introduction or a review: by setting the piece slightly differently I have expanded and deepened the resonance of it's meaning.  The third meaning I have given it is to compare this remotely ancient and emotive exile with the our current modern dialogue about modern exiles or asylum seekers.  All within the umbrella of King Arthur's first battle.

I am under no illusion that the casual reader will perceive any of that.  My aim is to get just enough into people's heads so that they can work it out for themselves.  Preaching is ineffective.  Priming is more subtle and sophisticated.  All art manipulates the audience; I believe that in creating art we inescapably accept a great burden to take responsibility for the effect of our work.