The best books about Celtic Britons

Mark Twain’s King Arthur time travel novel led to numerous others.

While Twain’s novel is more of a veiled attempt to depict his own time, other authors have depicted Camelot as a utopian place and asked what the world would be like if it had not fallen. In The Forever King, a young boy, Arthur Blessing, turns out to be a reincarnated King Arthur. He travels back in time to Camelot to try to restore its past glory.

He failed in the past, but with the help of the Holy Grail, he is determined not to fail again. The novel led to two sequels. Like all these time travel novels, the goal is to change the past to create a better future. But utopias are always hard to achieve.

Nearly any of Christopher Moore’s other books would have better fit this list generically, but I am relying (heavily) on the presence of fantastical creatures and magic spells to maintain the necessary toe in the fantasy pool for my non-sequitur selection of Fool. Based skeletally on Shakespeare’s King Lear, Fool credits Lear’s court jester, Pocket—along with MacBeth’s trio of witches, a “bloody ghost,” and other foils—for engendering the war that followed the king’s tragic decision to disinherit his kindest daughter in favor of his other conniving offspring. Linguistic and bawdy humor are packaged in Moore’s cockeyed and delightfully Will-esque prose, rendering half the fun—at least for readers fond of the Bard—the detection of Shakespearean elements amidst olde-timey twists on today’s ruder colloquialisms.

I love the medieval English setting, and the author clearly knew what he was talking about when it came to such energetic pursuits as archery, falconry, hunting, and jousting. The novel wasn’t terribly well-served by Disney’s cinematic retelling of it, but the idea of exploring King Arthur’s childhood is a fascinating one and the execution is terrific. The main character, Wart, is very well realised and White’s Merlyn is a brilliantly cunning and believable wizard.

One of the first ‘grown-up’ magical books I ever read, it’s the gateway drug into the Arthurian Saga series.

Merlin is a young illegitimate boy struggling to find his place in the post-Roman world.

He has a keen intelligence that is often overlooked and a love of the natural world. It’s these two traits, as well as a knack for being in the right place at the right time, that are responsible for so much of his success later in life, as well as a low-key magic. 

A book to savor, with beautiful language and a setting you don’t so much read about as fall into. 

This well-illustrated and highly readable book (available in hardback and paperback) is a comprehensive discussion of archaeological evidence for sacred buildings in late Iron Age and Roman Britain: ranging from grand Classical public sanctuaries, such as the temple of Claudius at Colchester, to rural, more intimate shrines, such as the temple dedicated to Apollo Cunomaglus at Nettleton in Wiltshire. Many sanctuaries, particularly in south-west England, seem purposefully to have been built within a day’s walk of each other and (sometimes, perhaps) within sight of one another, and it is tempting to see these ‘chains of sanctity’ as pilgrim routes, akin to the Camino trails of southern France and northern Spain. Reconstruction drawings in this book cause the ruins of Roman Britain’s shrines to spring into life, and make it easy to imagine what it must have been like to visit and worship at these holy places. The finds, also, tell… show more.

This book-length study of the magical figure of Merlin is the most authoritative account of the literary lives of Merlin, Arthur’s wizard guide, from his earliest incarnation in Welsh poetry to his reinvention in modern novels and films.

Stephen Knight, a prolific medievalist whose work is always readable and entertaining, takes Merlin’s gifts of knowledge and foresight as his theme, arguing that throughout the many versions of Merlin in literary texts, operations of power are always working to restrict and contain Merlin’s command of knowledge.

Reading this book takes you on a journey that will enrich your understanding of the Arthurian legends.

This is perhaps my favorite historical novel ever, not only because of Godwin’s evocative prose (“Half a baby in a ditch.” Brrr!), but because it contains an extended section on the “little people,” the mound dwellers who predated the Celts in Britain. These people became the fairies, elves, and gnomes of legend, but in Firelord they are the last of a dying culture, trying desperately to survive in a changed world. They capture a wounded Arthur, and as they take him underground, the author’s voice alters radically. It brilliantly captures the alien nature of the mound dwellers and their hypnotic effect on Arthur. Only after Arthur leaves them behind does it return, like Arthur, to something familiar.

I picked up this book years ago at my local library by chance, if you believe in chance—which I do not. At that time, I had no idea the narrative of a historical romance could stretch back to Iron Age times, or that I could lose myself in the characters who populated the legends I love. For years, I’d been listening to Celtic music. In Patricia Finney’s wonderful story, I heard that music in the everyday world she created. I discovered how it feels to drive a chariot. Quite possibly, I revisited a past life. I will be forever grateful this book came into my hand.

This was one of the first Arthurian reference books and remains one of the best.

Its comprehensive scope, covering Arthurian legends and characters across many European literatures, provides answers to all possible questions about the world of Arthur. The format of short alphabetical entries is perfect for browsing – you will find all you need to know about the Bleeding Lance or the ‘Gargantuan Chronicles’ among many other lesser-known Arthurian curiosities.

I found this book invaluable when I was preparing my own book and I still dip into it when teaching students.

I was about seventeen, at an airport waiting for a flight to Cyprus when I picked up this book whilst browsing. Didn’t realise at the time it would change my life forever. I read it three times in two weeks, despite finding out after the first time it was the third in a trilogy. I was hooked on the blood and the battles, the brotherhood of Arthur’s soldiers, the bygone era Bernard Cornwell seemed to so effortlessly breathe back to life. I haven’t looked back since.

Also a twist on a classic tale, The Once and Future King delves into Arthurian legends and forms the basis of many more recent interpretations in film and television.

Often speaking affectionately to the reader, White decidedly takes the role of a wizened elder recounting important stories of ages gone by to the younger generation.

Before the appearance of ‘franchise’ novels set in an Arthurian world, and even before the genre of ‘fantasy writing’ had established itself, the American writer Marion Zimmer Bradley published one of the most remarkable novels about Arthurian Britain and its cast of characters.

Well researched and deeply imbued with the colours of a powerfully-imagined world, the novel refocuses the events of Arthur’s life from the point of view of the women who surround him, especially Morgaine (Morgan le Fay) and Igraine, Arthur’s mother.

This was the first feminist retelling of the Arthurian story, one in which Arthur was no longer the focus of the action, and when I first read the novel I found the audacity of this inversion captivating. 

When I first sat down to write a novel about three sisters, step one was to reread King Lear which is about exactly that. The three sisters in Lear are quite different from mine. Among other things, they like each other much less. But for that delicate sisterly balance between so-glad-I-have-you-to-share-the-burdens-of-an-aging-parent and I-might-actually-have-to-kill-you, nothing beats King Lear.

This is a vivid, dramatic and well-paced version of the story of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. It is set in a legendary time full of castles such as Tintagel, or as here: "Meanwhile Sir Lancelot had lain six days and six nights prisoned in the vault below Sir Meliagraunce’s castle, and every day there came a maiden who opened the trap and let food and drink down to him on the end of a silken cord. And every day she whispered to him, sweet and tempting…" I love the resonance of Sutcliff’s writing; rereading it just now, I couldn’t resist reading it out loud just for the beauty of the sound of the language—something I’m very conscious of because I write poetry.

Written by the first Chosen Chief and founder of the Order Of Bards, Ovates and Druids (OBOD), it was published posthumously in 1990 from lost work rediscovered in 1984.

Based on remains of British or Brythonic Druidism combined with texts from the Druidic revival of the 18th century onwards and the author’s own ideas and research, it is one of the most valuable and practical texts of the modern Druidic path.

It is not an easy book to read, written in a rather academic and haughty style, but still it is well worth the effort of reading.