Britain And The Phoenicians

My favorite antiquarian book is my oldest, dating to 1672.

It is a first edition, in fact the only edition. It is famous for several things, including the first ever pictorial representation of a Druid. Of course, this is an artists’ fancy, as nobody really knows what the Druids looked like, but the engraving is an engaging representation, and antiquarians thereafter used this first representation as the basis for their own.

Such as Richard Stukeley, who first surveyed Avebury in the 1700s, and attributed it and Stonehenge to the Druids, and his pictorial representation bears a remarkable resemblance to that in my volume.

As indeed it bears a remarkable resemblance to Gandalf the Grey from Lord of the Rings, but that I suppose is the nature of history, it is built layer upon layer that precedes it.

The book is typical of its time in that it has a descriptive subtitle that reveals much of its intention, so that it is a history of the Britons from the Phoenicians to the present day, but what is one of the most remarkable things about the book is the fact that it is one of the least accurate histories of this nation ever to have been published.

The author was an Oxford Don, but he is regarded to have been a charlatan, and the book is all the more interesting for the lack of truth within it.

There are some really fabulous engravings, including one of the Wicker Man, and numerous others that are extremely well produced.

One of its other claims to fame is the fact that it contains genealogies of the English Kings, many of whom are shown to be descended from Noah, and interesting engravings of Coats of Arms.

Given the time that the book was published, when Arthur is mentioned, he is not given anything approaching a special mention, as the mythology of the Arthur that we all know about was of course a Victorian invention.

My interest in the book lies very much with its inaccuracy, since I plan to use it as a means of telling a story that is in itself entirely a work of fiction.

But woven sufficiently around facts as they perhaps were once considered to be so that there is a thread of truth to substantiate my fiction. Intentionally in the mould of a Dan Brown conspiracy thriller, but in my story, the major difference is that the story that is woven from this and other supporting texts proves entirely to be proven false, and this is the central factor in my story.

That something might seem to be the case, and to have been the lifetime's work of one man, which he leaves to be completed by his son.

So that it is a quest of sorts, but in my story a quest by the son to understand the father that he never knew.

But whose fascination with stories that he believed to be true, leading the son to discover something far more important about himself.

I have published the first four chapters of Sacred Places in my book of short stories, available to view online free of charge through completelynovel.com.

The collection is entitled Mother And Child with other stories, and my research to complete the book may take me years.

As it should. It is my third attempt at a novel, the first two of course unpublished.

Perhaps this one might be the pageturner I intend it to be, just like a Dan Brown novel.