Last week, frequent commentator and guest reviewer Bill Brockman alerted me to an article about BBC making Bernard Cornwell’s The Last Kingdom into a TV series. The Last Kingdom is one of my all-time favorite historical novels, so this is wonderful news! You can read the full article in The Independent, titled “BBC’s new Game of Thrones slayer…
The Pagan Lord, the seventh novel in Bernard Cornwell’s The Saxon Tales series, offers another suspenseful and battle-fueled adventure in the decades-long conflict between the Saxons and Danes to decide England’s fate. The story begins when the series’ protagonist Uhtred of Bebbanburg, an unabashed pagan, kills an abbot while attempting to reclaim his eldest son…
Happy St. Crispin’s Day! On 25 October 1415, the English army of King Henry V won the Battle of Agincourt, one of the most significant battles against the French in the One Hundred Years’ War. The battle is the subject of one of my favorite Bernard Cornwell novels, aptly titled Agincourt, which I reviewed here…
Enemy of God is the second in Bernard Cornwell’s series The Warlord Chronicles. Its protagonist is still Derfel Cadarn, who is now near thirty years old and one of Arthur’s lords. The book begins immediately where The Winter King ended, after the battle among the British kings at Lugg Vale. Arthur is trying to keep…
I just finished Bernard Cornwell’s 1356, so I’m jumping ahead about nine centuries this week in my series on medieval fiction to allow for a review of yet another great work by one of my all-time favorite authors. “Go with God, but fight like the Devil!” 1356 is the fourth book in Cornwell’s Grail Quest…
The Winter King is the first book in Bernard Cornwell’s masterful retelling of Arthurian legend. From the very first chapter, it is evident that Cornwell’s version would be different from many tales of Arthur. The narrator, for example, is the little-known Derfel Cadarn, writing his story as a monk in a small monastery to Igraine,…
Medieval fiction set in the late Fifth Century is largely of the Arthurian variety, as I noted last week in my post titled Who Was King Arthur? Many scholars believe that Arthur (assuming he really existed) would have lived during the last decades of the Fifth Century and the early Sixth Century. Saint Bede (a…
One of the things I love about journey tales is all the different places they can take the reader. For example, my own novel, Enoch’s Device, begins at the monastery of Derry in Ireland, but the journey soon takes my protagonist to France (and the cities of Paris and Poitiers), and finally into the heart…
I picked up this book a while back because I’m a huge Bernard Cornwell fan and have always been interested in Stonehenge. It was not my favorite Cornwell novel, but that’s probably because of its Bronze Age setting (I really prefer Cornwell’s books set in the Middle Ages). To be clear, however, Stonehenge did not…
The newest novel from one of my favorite authors, Bernard Cornwell, was released this week in the U.S. My copy arrived yesterday from Amazon and it looks fantastic. Here is an image of its very cool cover. 1356 is the latest novel to feature Thomas of Hookton, the protagonist of Cornwell’s Grail Quest Series. Thomas…
It took far longer than I expected to get around to reading Bernard Cornwell’s Death of Kings. I hoped to skim through the other five books in The Saxon Tales series before reading the sixth book, but that never came to pass. Eventually, I just dove into the novel, and I’m glad I did since…