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Authors of historical fiction claim that their work restores a narrative of meaning to the past, and that it recovers the experiences of those individuals or groups who have been excluded from the formal historical record. This two-fold function is particularly important to Parke Godwin, who suggests that, to recreate the past, the storyteller must be willing both to utilize and to go against the historical record. He positions himself as a kind of 'pagan,' resurrecting an older, more 'authentic' world to which he postulates Arthur belonged. (RD)
The authorial struggle to make the claim for an historically 'authentic,' recognizable, literary version of King Arthur stretches as far back as Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain1 in the twelfth century, and as far forward as the myriad versions of the twenty-first. Nonetheless, despite historical fiction writers' dependence upon material gleaned from histories to create an aura of period authenticity, they frequently critique the authority, even the authenticity, of those same historical narratives that are their source material. While the popular understanding of history is that it is an objective account of the past-of 'what really happened'-some writers of historical fiction argue that their works reflect a 'truer' version of history.2 Their reasons are twofold: that historical fiction restores a narrative of meaning to the past, and that it recovers the experiences of those individuals or groups who have been excluded from the formal historical record.
This two-fold function is particularly important to Parke Godwin in his trilogy Firelord, Beloved Exile, and The Last Rainbow. To Godwin, it is the job of the storyteller to ensure that the lessons learned from the past survive. As I will explain below, Godwin's process suggests that, to recreate the past, the storyteller must be willing both to utilize and to go against the historical record. He presents historians as the representatives of order, ideology, and canonicity. In contrast, he positions himself as a kind of 'pagan,' resurrecting an older, more 'authentic' world to which he postulates Arthur belonged.
It is not the intent of this article to address how accurately Godwin uses historical and archaeological evidence for fifth/sixth century Britain, or even how he uses his secondary sources. Rather, it is to show how Godwin...