The historical background of this novel is partially but by no means entirely accurate: I have used some anachronisms and made some complete departures from what little is known about Britain between the Roman withdrawal and the Saxon conquest. My worst offence is in the Orkneys, where I have antedated the Irish conquest, invented places as well as persons, and described a situation completely unlike anything that actually existed there. But it is barely possible, if improbable, that some of the Britons whom the Emperor Honorius instructed to organize their own defences viewed these organizations as continuing the late third-early fourth century “Empire of the Britains,” and could have maintained an increasingly Celtic Roman empire into the sixth century.
For the legendary background I have drawn first on various Celtic sources, second on everything Arthurian written up to the present. Some of the poems are loosely based, anachronistically, on Celtic originals: the one on pages 66–67 on a fifteenth-century Deirdre poem; on page 84, an earlier Irish poem; on page 92 on the eighth-century “Voyage of Bran.” The song on pages 249–250 is, in fact, the sixth-century (or earlier) hymn known as “Patrick’s Breastplate” or “Deer’s Cry.” A version of it beginning “I bind unto myself today” is still sung, at least in the Anglican church, and has a lovely tune. The poem on page 314 is also Irish; but later. The others are my own, but represent the sort of poetry current in Old Welsh and Irish—except, of course, for the Aeneid passage, which is book VI. 125–9.
On pronunciation, Welsh looks more intimidating than it is (Irish is best left unmentioned); “w” is usually a long “u,” except in a few cases such as after “g” and before a vowel, when it is the familiar consonant; “y” is usually a short “u” sound: “Bedwyr” is thus three syllables, and comes into later legend as “Bedivere”; “ff” is as in “off,” but “f” a “v” sound as in “of”; “dd” is the soft “th,” as in “bathe”; “ll” something like the sound in “little”; “si” is a “sh” sound—“Sion” is the equivalent of Irish “Sean” and English “John,” and has nothing to do with mountains. The other letters are not too different from their traditional values: “ch” is as in Scottish, German, or Greek; “r” is trilled, and the vowels in general are pure, as in Latin. Accent is usually on the penultimate syllable.
I have used modern Welsh forms, on the whole, as I was uncertain of the old Welsh ones. Place names are in complete confusion, but I imagine they were at the time as well: I have used Celtic forms when these are recorded. Sorviodunum/ Searisbyrig is modern Salisbury (or rather, Old Sarum); Ynys Witrin is Glastonbury; Camlann, South Cadbury where the excavations are. Caer Segeint is Carnarvon; Ebrauc is York; Din Eidyn, Edinburgh; and Yrechwydd a name from poems which might be several places but which I have relocated to suit myself. This should be enough to give the reader some orientation, but, since the novel is only partially historical, geography is not that important.