Warlord Chronicles - 01 - The Winter King

✍ Scribed by Bernard Cornwell

• Publisher: MacMillan;St. Martin's Griffin
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 307 KB
• Edition: 1st St. Martin's Griffin ed
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN: 0312156960

✦ Synopsis

These are the tales of the last days be­fore the great dark­ness de­scend­ed. These are the tales of the Lost Lands, the coun­try that was once ours but which our en­emies now call Eng­land. These are the tales of Arthur, the War­lord'; the King that Nev­er Was, the En­emy of God and, may the liv­ing Christ for­give me, the best man I ev­er knew. How I have wept for Arthur... Fifth-​cen­tu­ry Britain lies on the edge of dark­ness. Mem­ories of Ro­man civ­iliza­tion! are fad­ing; the pa­gan Gods are re­treat­ing be­fore the spread of Chris­tian­ity; the Sax­ons are snap­ping and snarling at the bor­ders. On­ly frag­ile bonds unite the un­ruly king­doms of Britain against the in­vaders, bonds ce­ment­ed by the vigour of the High King, Uther Pen­drag­on. But the Pen­drag­on is fail­ing, and his heir is no strong lead­er but a child, born on a bit­ter win­ter night.
On­ly one man could keep Uther's throne safe,-on­ly he could hold the war­ring king­doms to­geth­er to face their true en­emy, the Sax­ons. That man is Arthur: sol­dier, states­man, Mer­lin's pro­tege, Uther's il­le­git­imate son. But he has been ban­ished, ex­iled by his own fa­ther to Brit­tany. Der­fel, one of his spear­men, nar­rates the sto­ry of Arthur's re­turn and of his quest for peace: em­bat­tled, bloody and, fi­nal­ly, tri­umphant. The Win­ter King is a mag­nif­icent tale of the Dark Ages and the re­al­ity of war and po­lit­ical strife in a land where re­li­gion vied with mag­ic for the souls of the peo­ple. It por­trays Arthur the man rather than the leg­end, a mil­itary ge­nius who, with a small band of war­riors bound to him by loy­al­ty and love, strug­gled to keep alive a flick­er of civ­iliza­tion.