'I walked in Elen's shoes...'

I love my intelligent readers and it is always a delight to read

their reviews. So I could not resist sharing with you a new five star Amazon review from JMG.

***** The Pathfinder by Wendy Robertson. An evocative novel of a rarely researched time in history. An excellent read.,October 29, 2015

The Pathfinder (Kindle Edition)

What a treat! I have long been an aficionado of historical fiction, delighting in the sensation of living in another time and place. The Pathfinder transported me to a world of otherness, a world permeated by myths and mysteries, a world with vastly differing constructs of reality. Within this well researched novel I glimpsed not only the land of my forefathers but the people who populated it, people who came to life as they lived and loved in a country I know well but within a historical context I barely understood. Wendy Robertson is to be congratulated on her diligent research of a less well known era of British history, alongside her capacity to take the reader from a daily world dominated by scientific concepts of the 21st century to the magical ethos permeating pre and post Roman Britain. I walked in Elen's shoes. I observed through her eyes, I empathized with her feelings - all thanks to the skill of the writer.

Thank you JMG. And thank you from Elen, for walking in her Celtic shoes.   w 

Walk in Elen's shoes. Read the novel

'A Rare Breed.'. The significance of reviews.

Newspaper reviews can be as rare as hen's teeth, so it's great to look back at my newspaper reviews and hope that my new novel The Pathfinder will find such appreciative readers 

Would you like to review it? In the press or on Amazon?

Here's a sample of reviews of my writing: 

  

‘A terrific read. A world on the cusp of change and we experience intimately.’ Historical Novels Review.

 ‘A powerful writer.’    Mail on Sunday.

 ‘Wonderful…Robertson deftly intertwines two time periods, slowly absorbing one into the other through the remarkably likeable protagonist.’   Booklist USA.

‘A great storyteller… she weaves another tale with ideas that still resonate when the story’s over.’ Northern Echo.

‘Wendy Robertson is a rare breed – a writer with an exquisite gift for creating vivid, relateable characters.’ Scottish Daily Record.

Note:: In The Pathfinder I have taken the available material and archaeological history of late fourth century Britain and addressed the powerful pre-Arthurian myths of Macsen Wledig and the British princess Elen. My intention is to weave a story that has hope, truth and justice at its heart.’  W.

Here's an extract which tells how and why Elen is a Pathfinder

[..] Elen:  You should understand that as well as being born and trained as Seers, members of my family have always been pathfinders – my father, Eddu, his father, Caradoc, and the grandfathers and grandmothers before him, going back seventeen generations. I learned the names of these ancients by heart - first at my father’s knee and later at the Seer School in the Green Isle across the water. They were famous across all the island of Britain.

It was they who found the paths that criss-cross this island and the lands across the sea. I have learned that a thousand generations ago the pathways were slight, mere shadows in the grass, reaching out and up to the horizon. As time went by our people started to mark them properly with stones, to raise them with the trunks of fallen trees, and to line them with small stones and pebbles. Then we planted thorn hedges to stop people and animals – tame or wild - destroying our road. Along the way, we would build small temples in stone and wood to shelter the rituals and protect the tributes to the gods that blessed the track and kept clear the way to the next high spot.

I have to say that in these times the pathways are all made. There seem to be no more for me to find. And yet, because of my family heritage, I am still known as a pathfinder.  [...] 

    

Read The Pathfinder  

Elen Walks on Fire: Excerpt from The Pathfinder

So now my novel The Pathfinder

is out there

strutting her stuff

(If you are inspired to read THE PATHFINDER you can obtain it HERE.

I hope you are entertained and enjoy it. Let me know.)

About the story:

The Pathfinder centres on the lives my heroine Elen, her song-smith brother Lleu and their father Eddu a King of West Britain.  

In 383 AD, myth and history tells us of a truly great love story that blossoms between Magnus Maximus, the Roman leader in Britain - afterwards for five years Roman Emperor - and Elen, daughter of a powerful British king in the place we now call Wales. Magnus is fascinated by Elen, a gifted Seer, healer and ‘pathfinder’ whose talented ancestors made straight roads in Britain long before the Romans.

As the Roman Empire begins to crumble, the love and marriage between Elen and Magnus forge a link between the sophisticated creative and trading Celtic culture (with its esoteric rites and rituals) and the pragmatic military culture of Rome, now beginning to impose Christianity on the known world.

But while the story contains political and historical themes it is the  essentially personal story of Elen and Magnus Maximus (called Macsen Wledig in the Welsh histories), Lleu, Elen's brother and Quintanius Sixtus, Macsen’s friend.

And there are touches of Druidic magic...

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Here is an extract from the story, where Elen walks on fire at the Aclet Midsummer revels the day after she has met the Roman commander by a water pool.

Excerpt from Chapter 14 Walking on Fire

[…] Now Lleu’s voice rises in the air. His is not a prayer but a story. He declaims a tale about the ancient power of fire that first came to our ancestors from Lugh the sun God. 
           His tone deepens as he tells of great forces raised by Seers to defend our West Britain from the invaders. He names heroes who fought and seemed to win, then were defeated and slain in their thousands. He names great women who defied the enemy and threatened them with spells and bolts of fire spouting from their fingers. Then he tells how these heroic men and women of the highest council of the wise in the British West - – who in their honeycomb brains held ten thousand years of knowledge of the earth, the sky and everything in between; who were the nestlings of the Gods; who were the most significant of our people – all these great ones who were driven into the sea and slaughtered in their thousands.

         Now, here on Aclet field, you can hear a feather land. You can sense all the people there around the fire-pit straining not to look at the visitors or the bright Roman standard floating above their heads. They are tense, waiting.

        ‘But, wait! Listen to me,’ Lleu goes on, ‘that fire still flickers around us even today. We are still here. And in time the British people will rise again and light their torches to drive the invader from their lands for all time.’

         Even through my meditation I see that what Lleu is saying is forbidden: pure treason against Caesar’s men.  My blood chills. I swear that if Lleu turned to the crowd this minute they would take up the fight and demolish the invaders even here in their midst.

       But Lleu’s voice fades on the air and now an eerie silence fills it. My grandfather and uncle’s faces are stern and Kynan and Gydyan have their hands on the hilt of their swords. The soldier with the standard senses something, even though he cannot understand Lleu’s words. His thick muscled arm tenses as he grasps his standard more tightly. But the three of them, the Commander, the General and the Procurator are standing easy, their faces neutral.

        The moment passes.

        ‘But now in our day!’ Lleu cries on, ‘the flame that will achieve this miracle is the flame of love, the warmth of peoples who see the eternal human spirit in each other’s face and wish the other no harm.’

         Kynan and Gydyan relax and fold their arms across their broad chests again, to enjoy the show. The soldier’s grasp on the standard loosens.

         ‘And now listen to me!’ I jump into the silence. ‘My brother Lleu and I will walk the fire to show to you…’ 
         I scan the crowd, my glance stopping very briefly on the General and passing on ‘…to show you that we can make this miracle with our own human spirit and the help of the gods, sustained by our ancient power over fire and water, over the earth all around and the sky above and everything in between. In this action we show we are the British people and this we always will be. We are still here.’
        At last the people in the crowd send up loud cheers and out of the corner of my eye I see the General smile slightly and say something to the man beside him, his Procurator.

Lleu raises his hand. I close my eyes and think of the statue of Olwen, of Arianrhod in the centre of the pool in my father’s house. Cool holy water.  This is what I have been taught.           Then I raise my hand and, side by side, Lleu and I begin, steady step by steady step, to walk on fire. We do not hurry.  The crowd breaks into great applause as finally we leap back onto the grass at the far end. The old priest, still standing there at the end of the fire pit, waves his staff across us and sings a blessing. I am filled with energy and delight and smile broadly as I wave at the great circle of people standing here. Lleu holds up his arms in a victory salute. The young stick fighters beat their sticks against each other making a rattling rhythm. A pipes-man squeezes out a few notes. Another man makes his elk horn pipe squeal.

         Lleu smiles and shushes the crowd. ‘Would any here like to walk the fire as do my sister and I?’ He grins broadly at the chorus of groans.

         The General’s Procurator shakes his head and calls out in a gargled version of our own language. ‘Only a fool would do such a thing, sir. My master here says that you and your sister do indeed have a gift with fire.’ He pauses. ‘Although he and I, of course, would question your history. […] ’

(If you are inspired to read the novel you can obtain it HERE.

I hope you are entertained and enjoy it. Let me know.)

Mapping The Imagination: The magic of a New Novel on the Horizon.

I’m in that very enthralling, exciting, worrying, phase of embarking on a new big novel. I have this big idea and am reading like crazy, checking facts and looking at landscape in a different way.  It has been some time in coming. I have been waiting for a decision on my last novel about writers living together The Art of Retreating and this process has frozen me like a hare pretending to be a statue in the middle of a harvested field.

 I’ve kept busy, as an artisan writer should be, with my short story collection Painting Matters. I have read novels for my Room to Write reading group although novels have been losing their escapist appeal for me as I take it all too seriously and read as a writer, tending to be too analytical and failing sufficiently  to suspend my disbelief to read with true  pleasure. The other members of the group are very patient.

Then in a London park I was introduced to a girl called Lisa who talked about her current obsession:  Ley Lines in London. I wasvery  intrigued because the past-in-the-present is part of my own world view.  Layers in time and figures in old landscapes are a long obsession for me which has inevitably emerged in some of the novels. For instance it’s an important element in my novel An Englishwoman in France where present day Languedoc lives alongside Roman Gaul in the life-changing experience of a woman mourning her lost daughter.

So, when I got back home I started to read these esoteric texts about  Ley lines and this got me looking at maps in a different way. I looked at the ley line maps and moved on more conventional maps - both contemporary and historical.  Maps can be very exciting sources for a writer. They are both precise and non-literary. You have to think imaginatively to elicit their meaning.  My own invented maps are an important element in the way I have laid the ground work (the ground-world?) for my stories. For instance I made a whole 1850 wall map for my novel A Woman Scorned

Now from these maps there emerged a new person and an very new idea for a novel that had not been there before I started looking at the maps. Magic. . This story is not at all, except tangentially, about the things called Ley Lines. From the Ley line books I have leapfrogged to more intensely serious sources about pre-history and Romano British history and then - I realised -  into the world of polite internecine strife between,  conventional historians and progressive archaeological historians in their increasingly rigorous search for meaning in a world about which there is no direct written record. And I am looking at ancient songs.  Fascinating. 

My new novel  will be (I think) about a certain woman, about a landscape, about journeys, and about what it is to be British. I am  just now trying to make logical sense of the Druids, and the function of the myth of  King Arthur as a metaphor. A long journey ahead.

Beginning again. Ha-aleluya!!

Work In Progress

A Sketch.

In the beginning - alongside the reading -  there are always 'sketches'  which may (or may not) end up as part of the novel. Do you think this sketch will find its place?

****

... So anyway I came into this world of light quite by accident, first in my mother’s belly then into the throng of a broad river well known for its dark spirits. The rain was sleeting down. A strut of the bridge creaked and broke and the chariot carrying my mother and her sister Branwen slid into the river, rained on by golden bangles and silver brooches. 

My brother Lleu told me years later that he heard the river sing like a choir of many voices. I have a ghost memory of the strange glow of the water and also the singing.  No doubt there were also shouts and screams but I do not remember them. .. 

***