Guest Post - Arthurian author C.M. Grey

Today I welcome fellow Arthurian author, C. M. Grey, to my blog.

Much has been written about King Arthur Pendragon, Merlin the Druid sorcerer and the lady of the lake. There are some wonderful characters within this legend that we can really relate to and we all love the story, the romance and the clash of steel.

However, when I started writing my Shadowland books I decided that the story of Arthur and his Knights had been too well told by some amazing authors and it had almost all been said. I could have invented a story around the legends and given a slightly different take which would have been entertaining and fun to do, but I decided to look for a lesser told story within the Arthurian theme.

My tale from the dark ages starts with an old storyteller who gathers an audience of villagers around him, by a village Inn’s log fire, one midwinter’s eve. He is persuaded to tell a story from his own youth rather than a tale of fancy, and it becomes a retelling of the rise of Uther Pendragon.

Uther was the father of Arthur. He was the man who rose from a humble beginning within the Isceni tribe to unite all the tribes of Britain against a common foe - the Saxon invaders. Under Roman rule, the tribes had lived a simple, relatively untroubled life, but around AD 410 the Romans realised their empire was in peril and departed packing everything of value and heading to their ships. It left a power vacuum in Britain that the Saxon’s, Jutes and Angles immediately took advantage of – the tribes of Britain needed to unite if they were ever going to claim Britain as their own, they needed a strong leader.

In my first book, Shadowland, I tell of the rise of Uther. How he met Merlyn and how he discovered he was destined to lead the Britons against the Saxon’s led by the brothers Hengist and Horsa after his brother Ambrosius died. As much as possible I have kept faith with all the old legends and stories told of Uther and the early years of Merlyn, but because this was the dark ages and so little is factually known, I’ve thrown a bunch of fantasy and a little Druid madness into the mix to make it more interesting.

Shadowland has been really well received with over 240 Amazon reviews and although I intended it to be a stand-alone story, I have been getting so many requests to follow up with another Uther story that almost two years ago I began to write a sequel.

The Shadow of a King will finally be published in March 2016. It tells a very different tale from the first, but still taken from the legends of Uther. Persuaded on his deathbed to tell the story of how he met and wooed Igraine. Uther first recalls the story of accepting the Druid’s quest to journey to the Isle of Erin to bring back the stone ring known as the Giant’s Dance, of how he meets Igraine and how he holds back the might of the Saxon Invaders.

If you enjoy Arthurian Legend, I hope you will try Shadowland and the Shadow of a King when it’s published. Neither are written to be factual books of history, so little fact remains from those times that it leaves it open to imagination. These are merely accounts of how it might have been…

If you fancy checking out Shadowland, follow the links.

US

UK

About the Author...

Born in Essex, England with a heavy dose of 'travel lust', C.M.Gray has since been lucky enough to live and travel in many countries around the world. In fact he has lived for more years outside of England than he has living there! Working as a carpenter, fruit picker and even a stint in stock brokering, he has called home Buddhist monasteries in the Himalayan Mountains, the clamor of central Hong Kong to a farm in deep rural Burgundy. Forever vowing to return and sink his roots once again in English soil... some day, he hasn't quite made it back yet, but does live a little closer these days; just outside of Barcelona in the middle of the forest with his dogs and two wonderful children.