Home
The Eagle
Mummery's the word
Fast forward thousands of pages to the conclusion of Jack Whyte's four-generation epic of Arthurian England and you'll discover who gets the girl and the sword.
In The Eagle (Viking $35), the eighth and final volume of Jack Whyte's expansive Arthurian opus about the origins and exploits of the Brotherhood of Knights Companion to the Riothamus-aka the Knights of the Round Table-Arthur Pendragon's closest friend and admirer, the Frankish knight Lancelot du Lac-aka Sir Lancelot of the Lake, or Clothar-returns to Gaul and gets the last word.
Lancelot, the "lover, adulterer, deceiver and very perfect, gentle knight,"; reveals Merlyn's fate and hears King Arthur confess as to how he inspired his troops by pulling his famous sword Excalibur from the stone. "There was nothing miraculous involved,"; he says. "It was mere mummery, designed by Merlyn for effect, no more than that.";
Fascinated with 5th Century history ever since his school days in Scotland in the 1950s, Jack Whyte immigrated to Canada in 1967 and first imagined a probable solution to the Sword in the Stone mystery in 1978.
Entering the fictional field of Thomas Mallory and T.H. White, Whyte was determined to also trace and imagine the formative years of King Arthur. "Arthur is the quintessential hero who surrounds himself with other heroes of equal stature,"; he said in 1992. "The story of the Holy Grail contains in and of itself the nucleus of man's search for the unachievable.";
And so the Scottish-born high school teacher-turned-actor and advertising writer proceeded to re-write British history 'on spec'. At age 52, in the literary equivalent of pulling a sword from a stone, he acquired Penguin Canada as his publisher after sending his manuscript 'over the transom' (without an agent). Re-published and re-packaged in the United States, his series has consistently gained starred reviews in Publisher's Weekly.
His next series will re-invent The Knights Templar, a medieval order of military monks who, according to Whyte, became "the most powerful and influential organization on earth"; within fifty years of their formation by nine obscure knights in the Holy Land in either 1118 or 1119. Also known as The Poor Fellow Soldiers of Jesus Christ, they were expunged less than 200 years later when King Philip IV ordered the arrest of their senior leaders of the Order in France and they were imprisoned on Friday, October 13, 1307, giving rise to the superstition that Friday the 13th is an unlucky date.
According to Whyte's website, "The novels will look at the Templars as they were at three stages of their growth-the beginnings, from 1119 through 1129, when the nine founders were searching for the treasure that would make them famous; the peak, during the Third Crusade when the Templars were at their strongest as a fighting force, campaigning with King Richard the Lionhearted against Saladin, the Sunni Moslem sultan of Syria; and the very end, with the arrest of the French Templars on Friday 13th and the flight and legendary destiny of the few who escaped the fate suffered by the others at the hands of the Holy Inquisition.";
0-670-86764-0
Fast forward thousands of pages to the conclusion of Jack Whyte's four-generation epic of Arthurian England and you'll discover who gets the girl and the sword.
In The Eagle (Viking $35), the eighth and final volume of Jack Whyte's expansive Arthurian opus about the origins and exploits of the Brotherhood of Knights Companion to the Riothamus-aka the Knights of the Round Table-Arthur Pendragon's closest friend and admirer, the Frankish knight Lancelot du Lac-aka Sir Lancelot of the Lake, or Clothar-returns to Gaul and gets the last word.
Lancelot, the "lover, adulterer, deceiver and very perfect, gentle knight,"; reveals Merlyn's fate and hears King Arthur confess as to how he inspired his troops by pulling his famous sword Excalibur from the stone. "There was nothing miraculous involved,"; he says. "It was mere mummery, designed by Merlyn for effect, no more than that.";
Fascinated with 5th Century history ever since his school days in Scotland in the 1950s, Jack Whyte immigrated to Canada in 1967 and first imagined a probable solution to the Sword in the Stone mystery in 1978.
Entering the fictional field of Thomas Mallory and T.H. White, Whyte was determined to also trace and imagine the formative years of King Arthur. "Arthur is the quintessential hero who surrounds himself with other heroes of equal stature,"; he said in 1992. "The story of the Holy Grail contains in and of itself the nucleus of man's search for the unachievable.";
And so the Scottish-born high school teacher-turned-actor and advertising writer proceeded to re-write British history 'on spec'. At age 52, in the literary equivalent of pulling a sword from a stone, he acquired Penguin Canada as his publisher after sending his manuscript 'over the transom' (without an agent). Re-published and re-packaged in the United States, his series has consistently gained starred reviews in Publisher's Weekly.
His next series will re-invent The Knights Templar, a medieval order of military monks who, according to Whyte, became "the most powerful and influential organization on earth"; within fifty years of their formation by nine obscure knights in the Holy Land in either 1118 or 1119. Also known as The Poor Fellow Soldiers of Jesus Christ, they were expunged less than 200 years later when King Philip IV ordered the arrest of their senior leaders of the Order in France and they were imprisoned on Friday, October 13, 1307, giving rise to the superstition that Friday the 13th is an unlucky date.
According to Whyte's website, "The novels will look at the Templars as they were at three stages of their growth-the beginnings, from 1119 through 1129, when the nine founders were searching for the treasure that would make them famous; the peak, during the Third Crusade when the Templars were at their strongest as a fighting force, campaigning with King Richard the Lionhearted against Saladin, the Sunni Moslem sultan of Syria; and the very end, with the arrest of the French Templars on Friday 13th and the flight and legendary destiny of the few who escaped the fate suffered by the others at the hands of the Holy Inquisition.";
0-670-86764-0
Submitted on October 11, 2005 in By David.
