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© LEGENDARY char-

acters have inspired as

many writers (and
readers) in ali ages as King
Arthur, his queen Guinevere,
the wizard Merlin and the
Knights of Camelot.

From the medieval retooling of
‘Thomas Malory to the Victorian pro-
pagandizing of Alfred Lord
Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, to the
modern romantic fantasies of T.H.
White and Mary Stewan, Arthur and
Camelot have truly stood the test of
time and remain potent symbols of
the struggle of light against darkness,
civilization against barbarism.

North Vancouver author Jack
Whyte learned how potent they still
are when his 12-year labor of love,
the four-volume series A Dream of

- Eagles, was immediately accepted
by Penguin Books, despite the fact
that he’d never published fiction
before.

His personal obsession with King
Arthur began at age five with the
first book he ever read. For the next
30 years, he read everything he
could find about Arthur, “including a
lot of books you've never heard of.”
but reading a book by English writer

_ Geoffrey Ashe in the late "60s “crys-
tallized the thing,” Whyte says.

Ashe, author of King Arthur's
Avalon, The Search for King Arthur,
eic., has made a career of attempting

Si Connected.....................36

@ Fashio

John Moore
SPOTLIGHT FEATURE

to reconstruct how the Arthurian leg-
ends might have originated in a
Romanized Britain, abandoned by
the Legions of a shrinking Empire at
the turn of the fifth century, plagued
by invading Saxon barbarians. For
Whyte, Ashe raised as many ques-
dons as answers, since Ashe largely
dismisses the “mythic” elements in
the Arthurian material and concen-
trates on establishing a historical
context.

“It’s ridiculous to assume that
Roman civilization in Britain went
out like a light when the Imperial
Eagles of the Legions were with-
drawn,” Whyte says, “This was a
society that had every modem con-
venience, including radiant heated
floors, except electricity. In fact, the
Legions were withdrawn gradually
over a decade, between 401 and 409

See Legend page 26

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FOR NORTH Vancouver author Jack Whyte, King Arthur and the wizard Merlin may be the stuff
of legend, but not of myth. The need to put faces and personalities on these figures drove Whyte
into his basement writing room in ’78. A decade tater, he had four piles of manuscripts. .

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