The Warlord Chronicles — King Arthur and How to Guide Your Life
Bernard Cornwell's Warlord Chronicles on Power, Religion, and Love
Bernard Cornwell is one of those writers who, despite being massively popular, is at the same time underestimated. His historical fiction books have sold more than 30 million copies and been adapted to the screen by the likes of BBC and Sony Pictures. But how many who watched The Last Kingdom know that the series is based on books, and how many of those could name its author?
Iain De Caestecker as Arthur in MGM+’s The Winter King
No place better illustrates the Cornwell paradox than The Warlord Chronicles, which tells a historically plausible version of the King Arthur story. Despite the popular subject and being a commercial success, Warlord has been somewhat overshadowed by Sharpe and The Saxon Stories. An unfair condition. It is a phenomenal series, which breaks down the Arthurian motifs and rebuilds them in a more cynical, though not less fascinating, world. Behind the claustrophobic battlefields, the madness of pillage, and the great historical panoramas, there is a subtle yet powerful thematic narrative, which prevents the most spectacular aspects of his books from becoming mere noise. And one of those themes is the question that we all have to face: what must guide our lives?
The Warlord Chronicles tell the story of Derfel Cadarn, one of Arthur's most loyals warriors. The first book, The Winter King, follows Derfel from his childhood until the end of the war between the British kingdoms, when Arthur becomes their uncontested leader. Enemy of God continues the story in the years of peace after Arthur's victory, peace which is broken when the conflict between pagans and christians explodes, culminating in Lancelot's betrayal. Excalibur, finally, takes us to the great Saxon invasion and to Arthur's last battle.
All three are great books, but it is in Enemy of God that the series fulfills its potential — ironical, perhaps, since this is the least bellicose book in this trilogy about war. Warlord, as said, asks us what should guide our lives, and Enemy of God offers three possible answers: Politics, the Gods, and Love.
When we meet Derfel in the second book, he is stuck between his loyalty to his two mentors, Arthur and Merlin. Arthur believes in men, swords, and oaths; in one word, Politics. If the kingdoms of Britain unite, they can push the Saxons back to the sea; if the kings keep the peace and make fair laws, the people will be happy.
Merlin, on the other side, believes in magic, mysteries, and gods. Gods who have left us, but who can return, and when they do, they will destroy both the Saxons and (worse enemies, for Merlin) the christians. If Arthur is order, Merlin is chaos.
Derfel must decide if he will join Arthur on the upcoming campaign against the Saxons, or follow Merlin on his quest for the magic Cauldron of Clydno Eiddin, which could bring the gods back. At the same time, Derfel is in love with Princess Cenwyn, who is promised in marriage to Lancelot. Politics, the Gods, and Love are the three factions weighing on Derfel’s choice.
Merlin wins the dispute in the name of the Gods by dragging Love to his side: on the night before Cenwyn's marriage, he shows Derfel a pile of bones that represents Arthur's plans for Britain. The last bone is the marriage of Lancelot and Cenwyn. If Derfel breaks it, the marriage will be stopped, but so will Arthur's dream of a united Britain — and Derfel will have to join Merlin's quest.
Derfel chooses Love. He marries Cenwyn, follows Merlin, and, as the text says, runs straight into the chaos.
Further ahead, during the years of peace, Enemy of God shows its version of Tristan and Iseult. It is somewhat unconnected to the rest of the plot, managing only to break Arthur and Derfel's friendship — and though that friendship is broken for many years in the secondary world of the story, it is rebuilt in a few chapters from the reader's point of view. A stern editor could, thus, call the whole episode a distraction and remove it from the book.
Let us thank Cornwell's actual editors for not doing that, for the summer of Tristan and Iseult is one of the best parts of the book. It gives us beautiful and terrible images, shows how different Derfel and Arthur are, and makes the reader sympathetic to the main couple, even though we have known them for so little. And, of course, it once again puts in conflict the Laws of Men, the chaos of the Gods, and Love.
Prince Tristan had been trusted with escorting Iseult, ninth bride of his father, King Mark. During the travel, though, Tristan and Iseult fall in love and take refuge on the coast of Dummonia. King Mark demands that Arthur turn the two in, under threat of war.
Cornwell wastes neither time nor narrative tricks to put the reader's loyalty on the side of the lovers. Tristan is brave, noble of character, and had won Derfel's respect (and by extension ours) at the last battle of The Winter King. King Mark, by contrast, is a human Jabba the Hutt: old, overweight, cruel, bringing virgin after virgin to his bed, where none survives for long. Iseult, it is told, would certainly die in a few months as Mark's wife.
And Iseult. When we meet her for the first time, she is a shy and small thing, and the reader can very well ask himself “Is this woman — is this girl worth a kingdom?” At this point Cornwell, having set the trap, attacks:
Culhwch and I followed the lovers, climbing out of the wooded hollow to a windswept hill that ended in a great cliff where the seabirds wheeled and against which the vast ocean broke white in tattered bursts of spray. Culhwch and I stood on the clifftop and stared down into a small cove where Tristan and Iseult walked on the sand. The previous night, watching the timid Queen, I had not really understood what had driven Tristan into love’s madness, but that winch morning I did understand. I watched as she suddenly broke away from Tristan and ran ahead, skipping, turning and laughing at her lover who walked slowly behind. She wore a loose white dress and her black hair, no longer bound in a coil, streamed free in the salt wind. She looked like a spirit, like one of the water nymphs who had danced in Britain before the Romans came. And then, perhaps to tease Tristan, or else to take her pleas closer to Manawydan, the sea God, she ran headlong into the great tumbling surf. She plunged into the waves so that she disappeared altogether and Tristan could only stand distraught on the sand and watch the churning white mass of breaking seas. And then, sleek as an otter in a stream, her head appeared. She waved, swam a little, then waded back to the beach with her white wet dress clinging to her pathetic thin body. I could not help but see that she had small high breasts and long slender legs, and then Tristan hid her from our view by wrapping her in the wings of his great black cloak and there, beside the sea, he held her tight and leaned his cheek against her salt-wet hair.
It is given us, for an instant, to see Iseult through the eyes of Tristan; that is, through the eyes of Love. The same love that Arthur has for Guinevere, and Derfel has for Cynwyn. If there was any doubt left (at an emotional level) that Tristan and Iseult should be spared, this doubt has been washed away by the waves.
And still the fact remains: Tristan has betrayed an oath to his father and king. In a long conversation, Arthur argues with Derfel the origin of oaths. Men need to live together, says Arthur, trying to convince himself more than anyone else. What unites men are oaths, but nothing prevents a man from taking two contradictory oaths. Kings, therefore, exist to be the keepers of the oaths and solve the disputes among them. If we do not respect the oaths to our kings, we have no reason to respect any oath at all. And, if we do not respect our oaths, nothing prevent us from falling into chaos and becoming like beasts.
That is the inexorable logic that bounds Arthur to the terrible conclusion: it is fair for Tristan to die. At this point Arthur, who had never asked anything from the Gods, draws Excalibur:
‘[Merlin] told me that if I was ever in great need then all I had to do was draw the sword , plunge it into the earth and Gofannon would come from the Otherworld to aid me. Isn’t that right?’ ‘Yes, Lord.’ ‘Then, Gofannon!’ he shouted into the sea wind as he drew the great blade. ‘Come!’ And with that injunction he rammed the sword hard into the turf. A gull cried in the wind, the sea sucked at the rocks as it slid back to the deeps and the salt wind gusted our cloaks, but no God came.
The same way Merlin had turned to Love to help the Gods, now Arthur asks the Gods to help in name of Love. But the Gods don't answer; only the Laws remain. Tristan is killed in singular combat and Iseult is burned alive at the stake.
The pattern repeats at the climax of the book. Politics, Religion, and Love not only collide, but overlap.
Growing tensions between pagans and christians explode on a bloody day, when groups of christians loyal to Lancelot go out and kill anyone who does not have their door marked with a red fish. Arthur and his men manage, at a great cost, to open way to where Guinevere is (they presume) being kept prisoner.
Getting there, however, they find her amidst a ceremony of the mysteries of Isis, where she ritually has sex with one of Lancelot's druids, she incarnating Isis, he Osiris. The purpose of the ritual: to make sure Lancelot will sit at the throne. And, we understand, the ritual has happened many times before, with Lancelot himself as Osiris. Politics, Religion, and Love, all in their most corrupt forms, become one.
This is, de facto, the climax of the book. The (unfulfilled) threat of battle Lancelot gives Arthur later is almost an epilogue, a narrative artifice to remove the King of Benoic from the story until the next book. Thematically and narratively, the story ends there, in that dark room where the moon shines on the cauldron and the goddess lays with the god, all to decide one thing: who shall sit on the throne?
That is the great question. Who shall sit on the throne? Not only the throne of Dummonia, but on the throne of each man's soul. Should we guide ourselves by Laws, by Gods, or by Love?
The laws and oaths of Arthur are too fragile face the cruelty of the same men they are dependent on. The Gods of Merlin and the mysterious Isis are too chaotic for us to grow under their shadows. And Love brings as much good as evil throughout the series.
At the end, The Warlord Chronicles offers a lot of questions and few answers. But we can forgive Cornwell for that. A thousand years after any historical Arthurs have long left the Earth, each of us still need to deal with the same question they must have made themselves.
Who shall sit on the throne?