IT WAS A time of legends…
Of all the historical eras that could lay claim to that title, the first half of the fifth century AD – the time in which this novel is set – must be the one for which the sobriquet is the most appropriate. The Western Roman Empire fell, sending ripples in all directions, and from its ruins rose the tribes and powers that would dominate Europe for the next millennium. Whole peoples moved their homes from one end of the continent to another, kingdoms rose and fell, and some of the figures whose legends still entertain us today lived, achieved their fame and died.
In this tumultuous time a number of ostensibly Germanic tribes swept down from what is now Scandinavia and northern Europe to force their way inside the boundaries of the Empire. Goths, Vandals, Alemanni, Franks and Burgundars swept south, crossing the frozen Rhine and carving kingdoms of their own from lands that had been ruled by Rome. Like a line of dominoes, each newly arriving tribe pushed others out, resulting in more pressure on the already stretched Imperial Army.
In desperate need of soldiers to fight the barbarian menace, Rome withdrew its legions from Britannia. The Irish (at the time referred to as Scoti/Scots) were quick to see this opportunity and began raiding the coast of Britain, taking plunder and slaves wherever they landed. One of the slaves they carried back to Ireland, the son of an official called Calpurnius, took the Christian faith with him and is today known as St Patrick. The Britons, used to the protection of Rome’s Legions, began hiring Saxon mercenaries from Europe to help them defend themselves. Within a decade these mercenaries turned on their paymasters and began to take Britain for their own. The Britons fought back under the leadership of a warlord called Arthur (a name proposed to mean ‘the Bear’) and the legends of the ensuing adventures are still told and retold today.
The Huns came from the east. Like a jackal scenting the blood of a wounded lion, Attila spotted his chance and attacked, riding through Europe in a storm of blood and destruction. It looked as though Attila’s would be the blow that would herald the final collapse of the whole crumbling edifice of the Empire.
Yet Rome did not go down without a fight. General Flavius Aetius, the man Edward Gibbon described as ‘the last of the Romans’, gathered together what he could of the Roman army, formed an unlikely coalition with some of Rome’s deadliest enemies, and brought Attila to battle at the Catalaunian Plains, the conflict that forms the heart of this novel.
From this turmoil arose legends and myths that have echoed down through the ages, and are still told today, long after the historical events that inspired them have been forgotten. Attila, Arthur, the Geats, Sigurd the Dragon Slayer, the Rhine Gold and the fate of the Nibelungs have all been immortalised in Old Welsh poetry, Old English poetry, Old Norse sagas, and medieval epics such as the Nibelungenlied, which over time influenced Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle and in turn helped inspire Tolkien to write The Lord of the Rings.
While the Franks would eventually become the French and the name of the Vandals would live on as a byword for wanton violence, what of the Burgundars, the small tribe this tale focuses on? Their kingdom lived on, and eventually morphed into the Duchy of Burgundy, an entity whose nobility and people played a central role in European politics for centuries to come.
Some readers will notice the similarity between a few of the characters and certain Norse Deities. In the early thirteenth century, Icelandic poet, politician and historian Snorri Sturluson who wrote his Heimskringla, a history of the world that began by explaining the people we now think of as the Norse gods were originally chieftains of two lands (Asaland and Vanaland) in the Don river basin in what is now Ukraine. Odin was the greatest of them, a king so wise and powerful that the remembrance of him after his death turned into worship of a god. Why did I name him Wodnas and not Odin? Wodnas is the form of his name recorded in what is believed to be the earliest reference to him, found on a gold pendant unearthed in Denmark in 2023 and reckoned to date from the early fifth century, the time when this novel is set. This seems accurate, especially when compared to the day of the week those Saxons who crossed the seas to Britain at that time named for him: Wednesday.
What the true nature of this individual was, I will leave up to the reader to decide.
Tim Hodkinson
January 2024