50 pages • 1 hour read
Bernard CornwellThe Winter King
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1995A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Paganism and Christianity
Arthurian legend evolved over a period ranging from the end of the pagan era to the High Middle Ages, when the Catholic Church was the most powerful institution in Europe. The legend therefore includes a mix of pagan elements, such as Merlin and the Lady in the Lake, and Christian elements, such as the quest for the Holy Grail. Cornwell locates The Winter King in a part of history where Britain is in a constant push and pull between its pagan traditions and emergent Christianity. The conflict is in part generational. At the outset, High King Uther is a vestige of the old ways, aware of Christianity but finding it to be more of a personal annoyance. Arthur was a ward of Merlin, but he is much more circumspect in his own views on religion, as he recognizes the growing appeal of Christianity and, most importantly for his purposes, the burgeoning financial power of the Church. Therefore, by the start of the novel, pagans generally enjoy political and military power while Christians are winning hearts and minds, which translates into donations.
In this roughly equal but asymmetric balance of power, there are fanatical elements within each camp trying to destroy the other. As the Saxons press further and further into Britain, certain pagans and Christians see the other as the internal threat that must be purged before confronting the external enemy they have in common. Merlin and his acolyte Nimue hope to rediscover the gods, believing if they can “please them and make this land theirs again then the strands will thicken and join to make a great, wonderful mist that will cover all the land and protect us from what lies outside” (43). On the other hand, Bishop Sansum views the pagans as the leftovers of a barbaric past and believes that God will continue to “curse them with rape and slaughter and Saxons” if they fail to repent and claim all of Britain for the Christian god (56). Given that Christ called for his followers to avoid violence, it seems as though the Christians are expecting a miracle to deliver them, should they be able to demonstrate their faith. The pagans are much more comfortable with swords and shields, but as the Christians become more powerful, Arthur and the other warlords start to worry that as soon as they march off to war against the Saxons, there is an enemy behind them taking advantage of their absence. This is a theme that will come into full focus in the sequel, Enemy of God.
Holding Power to Secure Peace
The Britain of The Winter King is a place of astonishing violence and cruelty. It is a place where the strong impose their will on the weak. Political power derives from the sword and those with power routinely use it to their advantage, with little regard for the common good. The church has been able to gain considerable power without resorting to physical force, but they use their presumed connection with the spiritual world to extract wealth and allegiance from the public with ruthlessness comparable to that of the warlords. In this environment, Arthur emerges as someone practically too good to be true (perhaps befitting someone who is known entirely through myths and legends). He is a great leader of soldiers, beholden to neither the Christians nor the pagans, and most importantly, he wants to use his abilities to secure peace and justice for all. As he tells Derfel,
[W]e have a chance […] to make a Dumnomia in which we can serve our people. We can’t give them happiness, and I don’t know how to guarantee a good harvest that will make them rich, but I do know that we can make them safe, and a safe man […] is a man more likely to be happy than a man living under the threat of war (166).
Yet for Arthur to turn his vision into a reality, he must use the same methods that others use to inflict suffering and misery. He must make alliances with unsavory characters like Lancelot because Arthur swore oaths to Lancelot’s father and wants to demonstrate the value of oath-keeping. Just as the church extracts money from people with promises of heaven, Arthur must extract it from the church with threats of violence. Most significantly, Arthur must go to war with his fellow Britons in the hope of ultimately unifying Britain. When the Saxon king Aelle asks him, “does a dog care which of two rats it kills?” (375), Arthur is troubled, and must convince himself and others that it really would make a difference for Arthur to be the one to unify Britain and lead the final confrontation with the Saxons. When Arthur says, “I hate what we are doing, but if we do it, then we can put things right” (382), the novel foreshadows the hard choices and moral compromises to come. The price of peace is a high one, and those in power can’t be sure that the collateral damage will be worth it in the end.
The Interweaving of Beauty and Brutality
The Winter King seeks to locate the myth of Arthur within the actual time and place where Arthur (or his closest historical parallel) actually lived. The novel paints a vivid picture of a brutish world, drawing an explicit contrast between the harsh realities of life and the romantic stories that are already starting to grow up around Arthur during and immediately after his lifetime. In the “present” day when Derfel is writing down his chronicle, he must frequently disabuse Igraine of fanciful ideas, such as the sword in the stone, the great love of Arthur and Guinevere, and the boundless nobility of Lancelot. The novel thus subverts traditional elements of Arthurian legend to show that if anything comparable did exist, it was in a world of endemic violence, endless political scheming, and abject cowardice. As Derfel states, “[Igraine] wants shape-changing and questing beasts, but I cannot invent what I did not see” (113). Yet almost immediately after making this comment, Derfel also notes “the bards showed me how to shape a tale so that the listeners are kept waiting for the part they want to hear,” and that “the tale is better” for some mild embellishments (114). Derfel is by his own admission an unreliable narrator, and multiple people challenge his account of Lancelot as a preening coward.
Derfel’s narrative matches its battle scenes and other accounts of grisly violence with a profound sense of beauty, both aesthetic and cultural. Upon marrying Arthur, Guinevere creates an island of beauty amid all the violence. There is also a gendered element to this: Her court worships Isis, “a woman’s goddess” (244), so the land of beauty doubles as a rare area where women can have a modicum of power. Similarly, Ynys Trebes stands out as a city that is not only physically beautiful but rich in knowledge, art, and culture, representing something worth fighting for. Arthur’s dream of establishing peace and justice is a beautiful vision of what the world can be, even if brutality is necessary to achieve it.
