Wonderly Wroth: Author Interview

Wonderly Wroth, the fifth book of Scott Telek’s acclaimed The Swithen series, has just been released. While The Swithen series is committed to remaining faithful to the Arthurian legend as laid down between 1136-1485 (and plans to take twenty-five novels to tell the full legend), this is the second novel in the series to be almost all new, since it covers a period not covered by the Medieval sources. The book picks up just after Arthur has first pulled the sword from the stone and takes us through Arthur’s training to the moment when he is coronated king. 

Here, Telek takes us through the new novel and talks about the many storylines he was trying to get into place before we rejoin the established legendary story in the next book.

Tell me how this book took shape.
Well, as I was reading Le Morte D’Arthur and the other Arthurian sources, there is one paragraph where it says that after Arthur first pulled the sword, King Lot and others kept putting off his coronation, and during that time he was put into training with the knights that served his father, including Uther’s best friend, Ulfius. That’s when I knew I would have a whole novel in here, because the thought of Arthur hanging out with the knights that served his father was just too delicious to pass up, and also the thought of Arthur being trained—we never see that, and I thought it would be fun to explore. 

So I knew that it would end with Arthur becoming king and meeting Merlin, and in Book 6 we’ll come right back into the legend with the revolt of the rebel kings and all that—I’m actually worried about the amount of story we have to cover in the next book. So Book 4 was almost completely original and made up by me, and this one is, too. After this, we won’t have another completely original story for quite a while, and I decided to take this opportunity to explore the culture and values of the knights, since they are such a huge part of the saga.

An issue from the past between the knights Ulfius and Bretel (aka Brastias) becomes the main driver of the plot. How did that develop?
Well I love the character of Ulfius and I knew I wanted to give him a big role while I had the room to play. He was very anguished and conflicted in Book 3, the other one in which he has a large role, and I wanted him to be a bit lighter and funnier here, and I loved the idea of him and Arthur hanging out together. 

One big theme of the overall Arthurian saga is the mistakes we make that come back to haunt us later in life, and how the past hangs over and influences the present. I noticed that during the deception of Igraine that results in Arthur’s birth, we know that Uther is made to look like Igraine’s husband Gorlois, but we never think about the fact that Ulfius was made to look like Bretel, and I started thinking… how would Bretel feel about that? That this other person came in looking like him and his entire life took a turn from it. Would he have anything to say about it? 

And honestly, that’s exactly the kind of thing I want to do in this series; delve into the unexplored implications of what’s there in the legend. One of the reviews of this book hit right on that when he said “Telek likes to dwell in these lost moments of uncertainty in the storyline,” and I liked how he phrased that. Sometimes the tiniest little details in the legend, like this one, are rife with potential issues that could be explored and examined from different sides. And with that, I like the idea of taking this major event from the Arthurian legend and looking at it from the perspective of two somewhat minor players.

Why do you love Ulfius? He is, as you say, quite a minor character.
He is minor, but if you look, he is quite, quite influential, which Bretel points out in the book. It was Ulfius who suggested that Igraine marry Uther, and he is responsible for Margause marrying King Lot and Morgan marrying King Uriens. The Prose Merlin makes quite clear that it was all his idea. It was also Ulfius who suggested that Uther reach out to Merlin to get Igraine, an influential decision if there ever was one.

To me, Ulfius is a happy-go-lucky knight and for that reason, he’s very fun to be around, but he is also very shaded and I’m not sure he has the greatest moral compass, all of which makes him interesting to me. Several characters in the books are influenced by what they have yet to do in the legend, and Ulfius—this is well-known, not really a spoiler—has a big moment coming up in which he rebukes Igraine for not acknowledging Arthur earlier. That moment looms very large over my conception of who he is, and like everyone in the books, he’s going to have some major issues to face in the future, but for now, he’s just a super fun guy to be around. 

Let’s shift to the other major thread of the book, Merlin and Viviane. What she has to say to him will come as quite a shock to most readers. 
Yes, I know, and I am very glad to see that so far it is being received well. I anguished over it quite a bit and reached out to both friends and academics who teach Arthurian literature and asked them if they thought it went over the line. I always imagine lovers of Arthuriana coming to me and saying, “You can’t do that!” but for the most part they are not concerned. 

I will say this is the one biggest change I will ever make to the saga, and the main reason for this is my wish to unify the entire saga into one cohesive story. These tales were never conceived of as one story, which is why Arthur becomes somewhat irrelevant to the thread that includes King Pelles and the Holy Grail, and his knights discover, on the quest for the Grail, that their whole way of life is wrong and must be destroyed. So then… what was he doing there in the first place? Why are we glorifying this guy who gets it all wrong and has to be eliminated? Which is, of course, so much of what is fascinating about the legend. What I’ve done is attempt to add a larger story, over the top of it all, that will unify the entire saga. All of the events of legend can play out as written, I’ve just added a larger context in the background to tie it all together.

The other thing is that the source material says that Merlin is the son of the devil, then just drops it. To me, you can’t say that the entire Arthurian legend is the result of a failed attempt by the devil and then just pretend it doesn’t matter! So what I’ve done is also a way to give context to that so that it works with the rest of the legend, and returns Merlin from the somewhat evangelical representative of Christianity he starts as and swing him back to his Pagan roots by the time this novel ends. Let’s also remember that when you begin the story this way, the Christian God and the Christian devil are real characters who actually appear in the story, and once I realized that, the path appeared to contextualize the entire background that these legends are taking place against.

This novel takes a turn toward the meta. There is a lot of talk about the “story,” how the story becomes legend, and how the legend can vary from reality. 
Yes. That mainly arose organically, I’m happy to say, because I hate when those things are forced. I knew that Viviane would show up and rip the scales off Merlin’s eyes regarding the Pagans and the fact that the Christianity he loves is going to result in the death of a lot of Pagans. Then you have Blaise talking about the book he’s written, which in the sources is often said to be how we know about these events today, i.e. it became the actual Arthurian legend itself.

Now, in the meantime since I had finished most of the Arthurian sources, I started reading Celtic mythology. This is where I saw the original forms of some of these stories and how they had been forced into a Christian context. I was particularly taken with the reality that the Pagans who originated the stories never wrote them down, so the existing versions we have were written by Christian monks. And we know that Merlin was originally a Pagan figure who, with the story of his father being the devil, was also reworked into a Christian context.

Well, in the book, I have Viviane as the representative of the Pagan spirits coming to let the Christian-focused Merlin know that there’s a lot more to it than he sees. We also already have Merlin and Blaise writing down the Christian version of the legend, which we know will become the recorded account, just as it did in reality. And in this novel they are openly discussing how Christianity is coming and just bulldozing over the Pagan beliefs, so… it just became natural for the real legend’s history to become the actual subject of the book. To have them bring up how the recorded story can vary from reality, but it becomes how we know—and all we know—of what actually happened.

You found an interesting fate for Blaise.
Blaise is one of those characters who just vanishes from the story, and when characters just appear or disappear, that gives me creative opportunities to invent those parts. But Blaise has no purpose as a character by this point… I can’t just have Merlin keep visiting him every so often, although it is nice for Merlin to have a friend he can go talk things over with–although from now on, that will be Arthur. Now we’ll have an interesting opportunity when Blaise comes back into the story, and it will be fascinating for him to have conversations with the adult Arthur, Guinevere and others.

This novel was written during the pandemic. Did that influence it at all?
Very much so! When you have Archbishop Dubricius advise Arthur to just relax and go to where life takes him, that was an idea borne of living through the pandemic. The shape of the book was also vague, just like life was. 

Add that while I had a very clear sense of where Book 4 was going, this one was much more formless, and I really struggled with it for a long time. I do not write my books in sequential order, I skip around to whichever part I am interested in, and I noticed that I had written a lot of conversations and left the action until later. That helped me understand that this novel is about a slow progression of ideas, with the main focus on Arthur’s maturing from a sweet boy to a place where we can believe he could plausibly reign as king in the next book. So I was able to relax once I realized that it’s about a gradual change, and so it might seem muddy for a long time.

There’s a lot of disbelief in this book, on Arthur’s part and the people around him, and I discovered that disbelief is a very difficult thing to make interesting or varied. I also have a lot of conversations that gradually deliver ideas, and I had to pay careful attention to what information is delivered when, and make sure they all build and form cogent arguments. This book is quite didactic about honor versus loyalty and really delivers a lot of ideas, because the next one is going to be almost all action and I really wanted to set up the concepts underpinning the world before we go whole hog into it.

Any other thoughts on what we can expect in the next book?
Well, this book is filled with Arthur hearing talk of Merlin, and specifically hearing that Merlin created him with the purpose of carrying out his plan for Britain. Another thing I definitely see in the legend is existential quandaries and anyone who has read the books so far knows that… I love them! I bear down hard on them and one could say they are a lot of what my series is about. With this in mind, I kind of bumped up the understanding that Merlin created Arthur as a kind of social engineering experiment, and beginning in the next book we are going to start to see the wizard and our headstrong young king start going at it.

Now it can be told that I specifically set up the characters of Pendragon and Uther in Books 2 and 3 to compare and contrast with the way Arthur will handle Merlin. Pendragon had his issues, but he was ultimately able to put himself second and do what was best for the country, even if that was just being Merlin’s puppet. Uther could not handle that, and ended up making things difficult for himself by wanting to do things his own way. Both of these were intended to generate some tension with how Arthur will deal with Merlin, since we know Arthur now has an idea that Merlin comes with some big ideas for exactly how he will have to live his life. Merlin and Arthur are together for the first time in the series in the next book, and while there will obviously be lots of battles and intrigue, their relationship will form the core of the novel.