As of the time of writing, I am yet to watch MGM+’s adaptation of The Warlord Chronicles, Bernard Cornwell's take on the King Arthur Mythos. Thus I cannot give an opinion on the TV series (first rule of criticism: you experience a work of art, then you think about it). As a fan, however, I couldn't help but miss someone in the promotional material: Derfel. You know, the actual protagonist of the books.
The awesome sculpture Galos at Tintagel Castle, popularly called the “King Arthur statue”.
Arthur's face is everywhere in the promotional images. From a marketing standpoint, nothing more logical — he is the character the public will recognize immediately — , but I hope the show did not fall into the alluring trap of making Arthur the main character and sidelining Derfel. And I certainly hope they did not remove Derfel's role as narrator.
As the first book opens, Derfel, once one of Arthur’s mightiest warriors, is now an elderly Christian monk. He is visited by Queen Igraine, who convinces him to write down the stories of his youth. Igraine wants noble knights, magic swords, and docile damsels; she wants everything the poets taught her to expect (and what we, the audience, probably expect) of Arthur. Derfel, however, is uncompromising in telling the tragic, bloody, ugly truth.
He also lies.
And that makes the books so much better.
The First Lie
The first sign that Derfel may not be completely honest comes, tellingly, in the first scene Arthur appears. After the death of the Great King Uther, Gundleus of Siluria tries to kill Uther's heir, the baby prince Mordred. A group of survivors, including a young Derfel, tries to take Mordred to the safety of the fortress of Caer Cadarn. When the Caer is within eyesight, Gundleus's men finally reach them. Mordred's defenders, outnumbered, form a shield wall and prepare to die for their prince.
Then Derfel hears a silver horn. Arthur and his knights, the Sun shining on their shields, descend over Gundleus's men and save the day.
Except, that is not what happened.
A few pages later, the elderly Derfel confesses that his commander knew well Arthur was coming. If he had really thought it was a lost battle, he would have given the baby prince to his fastest knight and sent him to safety, while the others fought to slow Gundleus down. The reason Derfel gives for this change: it makes the narrative better.
Derfel deliberately alters events for storytelling purposes. However, there is evidence that he may change his tale in more subtle ways, ways even he may not be aware of.
Lancelot, the Coward
Warlord has probably the most negative portrait of Lancelot in all of Arthurian media. He is prideful, vain, a man who never entered a battle he wasn't sure of winning, and even then only after the dirty job had already been done. His deeds are lies fabricated by poets, many of which he paid himself.
Lancelot's unpleasantness in The Winter King turns to open wickedness in Enemy of God: he conspires to take the throne, tries to kidnap Ceinwyn (his former bride and Derfel's wife), and causes the death of countless innocents, including Derfel's daughter. Cornwell's Lancelot seems to have no positive attributes, not even a single scene in which he shows a nobler or kinder side.
But remember, Derfel is not completely honest. When, as an elder, he tells Igraine about Lancelot, she presses him. It is not fair, she argues, that people’s stories be told by their enemies. Through the young queen’s mouth, the text once more invites us to doubt Derfel as a narrator.
Is Magic Real?
Cornwell is, obviously, writing for a contemporary audience. Therefore, a good portion of Warlord readers will probably have what I have heard being referred to as “chronological snobbery”: the belief that people in other ages were inherently dumber, less moral, or less “enlightened” than we are today. The trilogy plays to this snobbery by giving us a less-than-flattering first view of the druids.
Druids, in the first book, seem to be frauds: at best self-deluded about their own religion, at worse charlatans (who perhaps believe in their own lies, but charlatans nevertheless). The great druid Merlin is astute, snarky, and incredibly knowledgeable of religions, politics, and nature. He certainly believes in the old gods. However, most of his feats could be attributed to coincidence, superstition, or parlor tricks.
No one, even amidst battles, dares to touch him; but we never see Merlin fulfilling his threats of turning people into toads. When he and Derfel are fleeing a flaming building, he makes a wall crumble over his attackers; but what else is a wall supposed to do in a building already on fire?
From book two onwards, however, the scenes of supposed magic get increasingly difficult to explain away.
First Merlin gives Derfel a bone, representing the imminent marriage of Princess Ceinwyn and Lancelot. Derfel is in love with her, but only breaks the bone as Ceinwyn is already walking down the aisle. At that exact moment Ceinwyn stops, turns around, and runs away with Derfel.
Coincidence, no doubt. Derfel and Ceinwyn had shared a spark before, and Nimue (Derfel's childhood friend and Merlin's protégé) probably used her improbable friendship with the princess to persuade her, behind the scenes, to go with Derfel.
Then, during the quest for the magic cauldron (no, not that one), Merlin, who had promised the gods his own life in exchange for the object, gets sicker and sicker as the quest nears its end. Once again, coincidence: Merlin is an old man partaking an arduous journey through a cold land, of couse he gets sick. But afterwards Merlin, nearly dead, is put inside the cauldron and seemingly comes back to life, health restored, and invokes a mist to hide their flight.
The elderly Derfel himself explains this one: no one was sure Merlin was actually dead, and the place the cauldron was buried in was frequently covered in mist because of its proximity to the sea.
At this point, the reader may be starting to wonder if the coincidences are not a bit too coincidental. Then comes book three, Excalibur, and the coincidence becomes more incredible than the thing it tries to explain.
After Merlin fails to complete the ritual that should bring the old gods back — refusing to sacrifice Arthur's son — Nimue turns against him. She keeps the old druid prisoner, cuts his beard, blinds him, and vows to finish the ritual by herself. To do that, she needs a couple of magical objects, the most important being the title sword, Excalibur. In order to get it, she blackmails Derfel by threatening his wife, Ceinwyn.
Ceinwyn falls sick, and nothing is able to cure her. Nimue soon shows Derfel the spell she used, in one of the most terrifying scenes of the trilogy: a life-sized clay statue that acts as a sort of voodoo doll. Derfel, stuck between the life of his wife and his loyalty to Arthur, chooses a third route. He seeks the only person left capable of undoing the spell: Merlin’s other apprentice, Morgan. The ritual Morgan performs is brutal, but it works: Ceinwyn is saved, her health soon restored.
Coincidence? It could be, as Ceinwyn’s disease was not magical per se, but the fantastical timing between her symptoms and the rituals makes this doubtful. And another miraculous “coincidence”, if we still choose to reject magic, comes near the climax of the book, once more from Nimue.
Derfel, Arthur, and all his loyal men are sailing towards what the reader knows will be their final battle. Before they can reach the open sea, however, Nimue finds them and offers the ocean the greatest offer one can make: the body of a druid. Nimue kills Merlin and throws his corpse to the waves, cursing Derfel and the others. A huge storm follows, sinking ships and drowning most of Arthur’s army.
So magic is real!
Well…
From Pagan to Christian and Back Again
By telling the story, the elderly Christian Derfel starts to connect with his pagan past. He soon finds himself repeating the old superstitions, touching metal to cast out evil and instructing Queen Igraine on the proper druidic rituals for childbirthing. At the very end of the trilogy, it is implied that Derfel will die at the hands of invading Saxons raiding his monastery — but he will die as a warrior, with his old sword at hand. And he hopes that, when he is gone, he can cross the bridge of swords and meet his wife and daughter on the Otherworld that Merlin long ago taught him about.
Derfel reconverts from Christianity back to the Druidism of his youth, and he does so in real time as the books progress. As such, it is only natural that mostly Christian Derfel, in The Winter King, at first paints the druids as con artists; converting Derfel, in Enemy of God, gives us an ambiguous portrait, that could be interpreted either way; and mostly pagan Derfel, in Excalibur, gives us near-incontestable evidences that druids do have powers. Derfel does not seem to be aware of what he is doing, but it is almost certain that an unconscious bias is coloring his memory.
Perhaps the greatest artistry is in the fact that one can read it in either direction. Either there is no magic, and a progressively credulous Derfel unconsciously allows himself to paint dubious evidence as conclusive; or there had always been magic, but the Christian life had conditioned Derfel to retroactively doubt his early memories as charlatanry.
It was John Truby who said that, any time you add a character narrator to your story, you intrinsically cast doubt and subjectivity on a story:
Another important implication of a storyteller is that he is recounting what happened in the past, and that immediately brings memory into play. As soon as the audience hears that this story is being remembered, they get a feeling of loss, sadness, and “might-have-been-ness”. They also feel that the story is complete and that the storyteller, with only the perspective that comes after the end, is about to speak with perhaps a touch more wisdom.
Some writers use this combination — someone speaking personally to the audience and telling the story from memory — to fool them into thinking that what they are about to hear is more, not less, truthful. The storyteller says in effect, “I was there. I’m going to tell you what really happened. Trust me”. This is a tacit invitation to the audience not to trust and to explore the issue of truth as the story unfolds.
The Anatomy of Story