Special Guest Post by Barbara Lennox, Author of The Wolf in Winter: An epic retelling of the Tristan and Isolde legend, set in dark age Scotland (Volume 1 of The Trystan Trilogy)

Available from Amazon UK and Amazon US

Pupil or rival? Ally or enemy? Brother or son?

Seventeen years ago, Corwynal sacrificed everything to become his half-brother Trystan's guardian and tutor. He's determined to turn him into everything he'd dreamed of being himself – a charismatic warrior and a king in waiting. But Trystan doesn't want to be a king; he just wants to be a hero. So when war erupts in the Lands between the Walls, he throws himself into the conflict, so if Corwynal is to protect the boy he loves like a son, he’ll have to emerge from the shadows, take up the sword once more, and win a war he doesn’t want to fight.

I have a theory about myths and legends – that buried beneath the accretions and mis-tellings, the shifting locations and times, lies a true story about genuine people who lived real lives.

So when I set out to write my own version of the Tristan and Isolde story, that was the tale I wanted to tell – the ‘Ur-story’ if you will, the one that might have given rise to all later versions of the tale, a story that was set firmly in the history and culture of the time, and influenced by the landscape in which it took place. 

So why did I choose to set my story in dark-age Scotland when the legend is most closely associated with mediaeval Cornwall and Brittany?

The first reason was the ‘write what you know’ ‘rule’. I know Scotland. I was born in Scotland and still live there, and I understand its history and landscape. I don’t know Cornwall and have never been to Brittany.

The second reason came from researching the Tristan and Isolde legend. Inevitably I got caught up in the ‘historicity of King Arthur’ question. There are many theories about who inspired the Arthurian canon (of which the Tristan and Isolde legend is a part), and where the stories originated – places that ranged from Brittany to Cornwall, Wales to the Midlands, and as far north as Lowland Scotland. In Alastair Moffat’s hugely entertaining book Arthur and the Lost Kingdoms he makes a compelling case for the base of Arthur’s operations being somewhere in the Scottish borders. 

Another textual influence was Sigmund Eisner’s book The Tristan Legend: A Study in Sources, in which he argues that the Tristan and Isolde legend evolved by absorbing and modifying a number of tales from a variety of sources, mainly from Ireland and the Brythonic Kingdoms of Scotland. I’ve always been interested in how stories form and change as they move through time and distance, acquiring local references along the way, and having new elements grafted on while older parts of the story might be abandoned or altered to suit a different audience. 

When I decided to set my story in dark age Scotland, I already knew this was a period about which little is known. This had the disadvantage of few historical ‘facts’ on which to hang my story, but the advantage of allowing me to bend historical speculation to suit my story. The Irish Dal Riata tribe probably didn’t move into Scotland’s Kintyre peninsula until the middle of the 6th century but who knows for certain?

 Incursions by the Angles on the east coast was probably later than my story, but who’s to say there weren’t a few early raids? I also took liberties with some of the place-names when I couldn’t find original 5th century names. Atholl, for example, almost certainly dates from much later than the 5th century, but I wanted to use a name that a certain historical resonance rather than make something up.

As for the characters in the trilogy, most come from the original legend, although some have been ‘welshified’ to reflect the Brythonic language of the time. Others are semi-mythical figures who are part of the traditional Arthurian stories, such as King Lot and his sons. A few minor characters may actually have been real people.  Dumnagual, King of Strathclyde, and Drust Gurthinmoch, High King of Pictland, are two examples.

But the setting in both time and place is just the framework on which I built a story about a man. And that man isn’t the Tristan of the legend, despite the title of my trilogy. I’ve always been interested in the story of the side characters in the great legends, and how the course of their lives is changed by the main hero or heroine. So the story I wanted to tell was that of Gorvenal (‘welshified’ to Corwynal), a shadowy figure in the traditional tale, tutor and companion to Trystan. Who was he? Why did he stick with Trystan through thick and thin? What happened to him at the end? 

And so The Trystan Trilogy is the story of a man whose life is changed forever by Trystan’s birth when he’s forced to accept the roles of tutor and guardian, a man who struggles to protect a boy determined to become a hero, and whose own life is influenced by Trystan’s choices and mistakes, particularly that doomed love affair with another man’s wife. 

It’s a story which takes the various elements of the Tristan and Isolde legend and mixes them up, changes their order, throws some away, adds a few new ones, rationalises the fantasies (the dragon!) and changes the ending. It’s the story I like to imagine was first told in the Brythonic Kingdoms of Lowland Scotland in the 5th century and which, over the centuries, as war and invasion forced the Britons south to join their kinsmen in Wales, Cornwall and Brittany, gradually morphed into the story we now know so well.

The last word has to go to Ferdiad, one of my principal characters, whom I envisage as the first narrator of the original ‘true’ story of Tristan and Isolde:

Years will pass, and those who remember the truth will die. Wars will be fought, countries rise and fall, and people will flee violence or hunger, taking nothing with them but their stories, the last flicker of a waning Imbolc lamp. But my tale will live on as it moves through the world, as it’s told in foreign tongues in distant courts, is set to music or laid down in ink, changing as it does so. A man who taught me more than how to fight will become a winged beast, the poison on his blade the fire in the creature’s jaws. A glance on a sunlit morning to the echo of a harp will turn into a love potion. The sign of the black ship will become a ship with black sails, and no-one will remember who wielded the notched sword. The Morholt, whom I loved, will be transformed into a loveless giant, and the ending will change, though death will be part of it, as death always is.

Barbara Lennox

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About the Author

Barbara Lennox was born and still lives in Scotland, on the shores of a river between the mountains and the sea. Educated at the Universities of Edinburgh and St Andrews, she spent most of her working life as a postdoctoral research scientist and science administrator, but her first love was always the history and landscape of her native land. A keen hillwalker and Munro-‘compleatist’, she took early retirement to pursue her writing passion, and finally, more than 20 years after writing the first sentence, has completed her epic reimagining of the legend of Tristan and Isolde, The Trystan Trilogy. She’s hoping her next project, set in Roman Scotland in the first century, won’t take another 20 years! Find out more about Barbara and her writing on her websites barbaralennox.com and barbaralennox.wordpress.com and follow her on Twitter @BarbaraLennox4