![]() What I enjoyed most were the descriptions of life in places like the Culdee colony on the Merrimac River, originally settled by Irish and Scottish monks who refused to compromise with Rome, and now at the end of the tenth century being augmented by Norse settlers and of life in Iceland, and among the earliest settlers in Greenland. ![]() ![]() Two born outsiders, Merewyn, a Cornish girl who believes herself descended from King Arthur through her father Uther (in the 10th century, Cornwall was still not considered part of England), and Romieux of Provence, known outside Provence as Rumon, “an atheling of the right line of Cerdic and Alfred”, move in an unhappy dance through a wonderful cast of insiders ranging from Cornish peasants and Celtic monks through Viking warriors and Norse farmers to nuns and an archbishop (St Dunstan himself), princes and princesses, kings and queens. ![]() By contrast, this book – as we might expect from the title, Avalon – is full of the magic and the stuff of myth. Anya Seton’s wonderful novel Katherine contains virtually no medieval magic or mystery at all, apart perhaps from the passage where Katherine spends some healing time with the mystic Dame Julian of Norwich. ![]()
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