The best historical fiction books on legendary characters from the British Isles

I will read anything by Parke Godwin. His command of language and his talent for bringing history to life won me over from the first book. In Sherwood, he takes on Robin Hood, whose legend is compiled of stories collected over a 200-year period. Godwin sets the story a hundred years prior to the legend, in the time of William the Conqueror. Sherwood gives us the life of a brash young Saxon landholder, displaced by the conquerors, who leads a guerrilla resistance from Sherwood Forest. It also paints a sympathetic young sheriff of Nottingham, who starts as Robin’s foe but grows to admire the outlaw—and falls in love with his wife Marian.

The best-known legendary character in Britain is, of course, Arthur. I have read dozens of versions of the Arthur story, starting with Thomas Mallory’s Death of Arthur, and when all is said and done, the very best still has to be The Once and Future King by T.H. White. Here are the characters we know from the Disney film The Sword in the Stone and the musical Camelot: Wart, Merlyn, Sir Ector and Sir Kay. Replete with 14th-century knights and jousts, magic and mirth, this saga covers Arthur’s life from boyhood to kingship to betrayal and demise. Written with humor and pathos, it sparked my ongoing interest in Arthur and made me want to know more about the real man who inspired such a lasting mythology.

Mentions of the historical Arthur—a war duke, not a king—date him to the late 5th and early 6th centuries. Merlin’s dates are fuzzier. Whyte sets this tale of Merlin’s origins in Roman Britain, consistent with the historical Arthur, as the withdrawal of Rome’s legions leaves the colony subject to invasion and insurrection. Young Publius, nicknamed Merlin, is a soldier and a blacksmith. He and his cousin Uther battle to keep Britannia from crumbling around them as Roman society is beset by external marauders and internal strife. Through it all, Merlin is intrigued by stories of a stone that fell from the sky—an iron-rich meteorite that has rendered steel, and which Merlin can forge into an incredible sword. In this richly developed story, Merlin is not a druid or a sorcerer, but a smith.

One of the key characters in the Arthur legends is Guenevere, and nowhere does she become more real than in Parke Godwin’s Beloved Exile. In post-Roman Britain, after Arthur’s defeat by the Saxons, a mature and bereft Guenevere is taken captive by a Saxon thane. Keeping her identity secret, she struggles through life as a slave in her enemy’s household. Yet, in her soul, she is still a queen and cannot bear to see her nation torn by treachery and internal conflict. She becomes attached to the Saxon family she now serves and discovers that, in order to preserve Arthur’s legacy, she must make allies of her enemies.

This is perhaps my favorite historical novel ever, not only because of Godwin’s evocative prose (“Half a baby in a ditch.” Brrr!), but because it contains an extended section on the “little people,” the mound dwellers who predated the Celts in Britain. These people became the fairies, elves, and gnomes of legend, but in Firelord they are the last of a dying culture, trying desperately to survive in a changed world. They capture a wounded Arthur, and as they take him underground, the author’s voice alters radically. It brilliantly captures the alien nature of the mound dwellers and their hypnotic effect on Arthur. Only after Arthur leaves them behind does it return, like Arthur, to something familiar.