STONE LORD: HISTORICAL NOTES
First and foremost I must thank all those who supported me in writing this novel, especially the Stonehenge team, my partner Dan Rendell (who created the blog and did lots of PR) and artist Frances Quinn, who painted the cover. For more of Frances’ work, see http://echdhu.deviantart.com/
Stone Lord is a historical novel, perhaps even more properly a historical fantasy novel, due to its use of Arthurian themes and the remoteness of the time period in which it is set. It is NOT proposing a new theory on Stonehenge or King Arthur. It came about simply because there appears to be older, mythic substrata in the Arthurian mythos — hence among other things, anachronistic mentions of Stonehenge (eerily accurate in some respects: the bluestones did come from the west, and it is a burial ground.) The idea of hurling swords into lakes and the sword in the stone could also easily be prehistoric; water deposition is well known and Stonehenge itself has a ‘sword in the stone’ — the famous dagger carving on one of the inner trilithons.
Most of the places in STONE LORD are real and can be visited today — Stonehenge, Durrington Walls,Woodhenge, Marden henge, Avebury, Silbury, West Kennet barrow and the Sanctuary. Others exist but are on private land — the site for Kham-el-Ard, the sacred pool and the ‘Old Henge’ by the river, while others existed but are now gone… the settlement called Place-of-Light is Boscombe Down, where the rich Amesbury Archer burial was found. A sculpture near the housing development commemorates him today.
In regards to dating, I have deliberately not given STONE LORD an exact date. It takes place after the main phases of Stonehenge are complete, but as the beaker culture is waning, so approximately the time of ‘Wessex I’--the Bush Barrow ‘king’ of 1900 BC wears similar gold ornaments to Ardhu. However, I have kept some of the earlier ‘beaker’ traditions in the story.
Durrington Walls plays a large part in several scenes involving the winter solstice; however, in reality this huge settlement had fallen out of use by the time of Wessex I. Using it is deliberate artistic license on my part! I have mentioned that burial mounds were encroaching on the site, which is what did happen during the Bronze Age.
For naming characters I decided to modify the familiar Arthurian names to give them a more ‘archaic’ flavour, something that sounded ‘proto-Celtic’ (since many now believe some form of the Celtic languages were in Britain by 2500 BC, brought via trade with Europe’s Atlantic.) Some are based on the names of mythic characters that do in fact seem to be earlier prototypes for the Arthurian characters… Excalibur derives from Caladbolg, sword of an Irish hero, while Guinevere’s name is cognate in meaning with Findabhair, daughter of the ancient Irish Queen Medbh.
Rituals are of necessity my own creation, but I have based them on cultures at a similar developmental stage, and also what we do know — that there was an emphasis on sun, moon, and death at most stone circles. This was not so much an era of gods and goddesses but of powerful spirits… it was later in the Bronze Age that the deities took on human faces.
As for the antagonists, this was difficult. Obviously they couldn’t be Saxons, as in the original Arthurian legends. So I was a bit ‘creative’ and loosely based them on the Sea Peoples who harried lands around the Mediterranean later in the Bronze Age, and on the Phoenicians who supposedly sailed to Britain to purchase tin (although no Phoenician artefacts have been found in Britain.)
For anyone desiring to learn more about ancient Britain, both the monuments and possible beliefs, I recommend the following books:
STONEHENGE by Mike Parker Pearson
RITES OF THE GODS, STONE CIRCLES OF THE BRITISH ISLES, and PREHISTORIC AVEBURY by Aubrey Burl
BRITAIN 3000 BC by Rodney Castleden
WARFARE IN PREHISTORIC BRITAIN by Julian Heath
PREHISTORIC SHAMANISM by Mike Williams
You can also visit the STONE LORD blog at — http://stone-lord.blogspot.com for more discussions on prehistory and various aspects of the book.
Stone Lord: The Legend of King Arthur (The Era Of Stonehenge) Page 37