50 pages • 1 hour read
Bernard CornwellThe Winter King
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1995A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Changing of the Seasons
In an era without an accurate calendar, it is principally the changing of the seasons that mark the passage of time. As The Winter King unfolds over a period of many years, Derfel frequently notes the changing of the seasons, each of which has clear associations. The opening vignette of Mordred’s birth is on a bitterly cold winter night, where the dying earth aligns with an aging king, his dead son, and mother and child both clinging to life. When Arthur marries Guinevere, he and his followers enjoy one idyllic summer, where Arthur seeks to “build a heaven on earth for his bride” and even manages to escape any immediate consequences for his utter failure to tend to military preparations (210). Summer is the one time of year when nature seems to relax its otherwise firm grip on life. Yet the most important season, year after year, is autumn. Autumn is the time of the harvest, and the harvest gathers sufficient food supplies for an army on the march, before the onset of winter renders such marching impossible. There is thus a kind of inevitability to autumn as the fighting season, and it is Arthur’s refusal to abide by this deterministic march of events that allows him to surprise and smash Powys’s forces.
Omens and Prayers
As Paganism and Christianity vie for control of Britain, their ways of appealing to the gods are constantly at odds. The chronicle opens with the birth of Mordred, where priests are offering prayers, holy water, and a cross on behalf of his Christian mother, until at last they acknowledge their futility and return to the rituals of “the older faith” (9), with Morgan and Merlin’s children creating smoke and banging pots to scare off evil spirits. Gundleus, shrewd enough to play both sides of the religious divide, travels with a Druid who inspects every corner of Merlin’s halls for bad magic (and perhaps some treasures) while tolerating the priests and bishops invoking God’s will at every step of protocol. Although the book does not assign God or gods any direct role in the narrative, it does suggest an equivalence between Paganism and Christianity in that both forms of ritual come across as equally ineffective. Their importance derives in large part from the competition between the two religions for prominence, and so each seems more concerned with proving their own veracity than actually pleasing the deity or deities in question. Yet there is at least one significant difference between them, revealing two ways of approaching the divine. Pagan omens are interpreted, so they reveal only what the gods have already decided. A bad omen following a birth, wedding, coronation, or in anticipation of a battle leaves no other option than stolidly meeting one’s fate. Prayer implies a degree of influence, that human beings retain a degree of free will so long as God is listening. The latter is assuredly more hopeful but if the novel shows a slight preference, it is for the former, as Merlin, his wisest voice, repeatedly states that fate is “inexorable.”
The Songs of the Bards
The story of King Arthur survived for centuries as folklore, so any attempt to rescue the true historical Arthur (if there ever was one) must wade through material designed for purposes other than factual documentation. Even Derfel, who represents himself as putting down the first complete chronicle of Arthur, admits to engaging in “tale-shaping” to entice his audience. Given his professed love for Arthur as “the best man [he] ever knew” (1), and his fierce hatred for Arthur’s main competitor, Lancelot, as a conniving coward, Derfel is a self-proclaimed unreliable narrator. However, even within Derfel’s account, the bards often produce contrary narratives. Therefore, everyone believes that Lancelot is a great warrior simply because he gets the story out first. Likewise, with his supporters in Powys, Gundleus can spin his horrific murder of Norwenna into a tragic accident that left him weeping over his fallen bride. It is an inevitable byproduct of a world where all news is a matter of storytelling, where there is no objective source to mitigate biases and news travels so slow that the first story has time to embed itself in the audience before the second comes around. It remains unclear to what extent Derfel’s narrative is itself a bard’s song rather than a factual account.
