Although this book is a work of the imagination I have endeavoured to base the world of Windsmith on facts, unlikely as that may seem for a ‘fantasy’ story – though for me, this world is real: I certainly have spent long enough there for it to feel so!
For me the delight of writing is, apart from the crafting of words into a satisfying form, this journeying and charting – one feels like an explorer in an unknown world. The further in, the deeper you go, the more there is to discover. There is a real frisson at being such a pioneer in a virgin land – though it sometimes seems more than populated and visited by other beings and pilgrims. Yet for a while, during the initial drafting stage, this world is yours and yours alone. It is indescribably nourishing and rewarding to be able to create a private dreamtime one can return to again and again, over the course of months, years even, during the writing process. One can see why Tolkien didn’t want to let Middle Earth go – even being reticent about getting The Lord of the Rings published. What had started out as a series of adventures for his son, Christopher, became very much the story he wanted to tell himself (as I found with Windsmith) and we are inestimably richer for it.
This is because the other delight in such imagineering is in sharing one’s world. I can but dream of Tolkien’s talent, skill and success, but I hope you enjoy exploring this Afterland as much as I have. And it’s only just begun! Shadow World is a big place and has room for many realms, many wonderlands, maybe even your own. I have just depicted the ancestral realms of Kerne and Madoc. Perhaps there are as many worlds as there are people, as many Afterlands as there are lives, each one creating its own quantum reality? If they overlap, who knows, but the Universe is a big place. There’s room for all. The Zapatista slogan echoes this: ‘for a world in which there is room for many worlds’. My cosmology is egalitarian. It does not deny the possibility of other narratives – of many heavens, hells and otherworlds.
Yet here, in Windsmith, the focus is primarily on the Celtic (for now) – specifically the Irish and Welsh tradition, but also with influence from Gaul and further East. The Celtic culture is not exclusively racial, but a pan-European diaspora of languages, art, beliefs, social structures and monuments stretching from the Black Sea, across the Carpathians (via the Danube Valley), over Europe (our mutual Land of the East Wind) into the West. I have based the Chalk Folk (aka the Children of Da’anu) partly on the Tuatha de Danaan, of course – the Irish aboriginal aristocracy, the Lordly Ones who retired to the hollow hills; but also on their cultural forefathers – the salt-mining Hallstat Culture, overlooking its deep Austrian lake, the cradle, or perhaps cauldron, of what we think of as the Celts today.
Although, being a writer fascinated by the ‘What Ifs’ and the negative spaces in our knowledge, I have extrapolated upon what might have been a totem-based clan system here, on the very chalk downlands of England – our own ‘lost tribes’. Of course, there is evidence of Celtic tribes across Britain, but I am interested in the localised phenomenon of the chalk giants, and whether the cluster we have left of ancient originals (the White Horse of Uffington, Cerne Abbas, the Long Man of Wilmington) maybe the fragments of an indigenous pantheon, or if each was the tribal totem of its area. I wondered what others have been lost – could each clan have had its own? Seen from miles around, and appearing on its coins, the bold effigy would be its ‘logo’, immediately recognisable to neighbouring tribes like the costumes, face and body paint, songs and customs of the First Nations people in North America and Canada, or the sacred landscape of the Australian Aboriginals, each with their Dreamtime animal carved into the land by the windings of the Rainbow Serpent.
I have tried to recreate something of the clash between the late Bronze Age and the early Iron Age – when bronze swords met iron on the battlefield, and the victory went to the stronger weapon. This is paralleled by a shift in usage of hill-top enclosures (i.e. Cadbury Castle) from ceremonial spaces to defensive purposes, and those intended as such initially had increased fortifications (i.e. Maiden Castle), often of great size and complexity: a killing maze requiring enormous co-ordinated manpower. It is tempting to conclude that the many stories in the Fairy Tradition of the People of Peace’s aversion to iron is a result of this: that such stories represent a folk memory of a subjugated people, driven ‘under the hills’ or into hiding, by an aggressor with a more advanced technology. This maybe too prosaic an explanation for some, but it did provide the ‘grit in the oyster’ for my story: what if the iron was a gun? Imagine the devastating consequences…What if my trespassers in Paradise brought their own doom with them?
To end on a positive note, I wanted to celebrate the amazing heritage we have. If nothing else I hope Windsmith has inspired you to look more deeply into history, into the Celtic and Steppe culture, and into others. For me, these ‘histories’ are not along a distant line in the far past, but happening right now, right next to us. They are our shadow, (or perhaps we are theirs) and we cannot deny or disown them. Our ancestors live on through us. I wished to honour some of the ancestors of this incredible land called the British Isles. I hope, after reading this, you feel inclined to do the same.