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I started writing the Deverry series in February of 1982. Twenty seven years later, The Silver Mage, the final novel -- the last of fifteen -- has just been published. I've heard it said that writing a novel is like exploring an unknown country. If that's true, then call me Lewis and Clark. I feel like I've crossed an entire continent. When I began, I thought I was writing a short story, but the more I wrote, the more characters appeared, each with stories to tell. Those stories took place in differing landscapes and differing periods of what turned out to be over a thousand years of imaginary history. Unifying them and placing them into some sort of pattern took me several years before I could finish the first novel in the sequence, Daggerspell. That original short story? It now forms the last section of Volume 6, A Time Of Omens.
I've often been asked what inspired me to start writing epic fantasy. The answer is simple: annoyance. The women in the fantasy stories and novels I'd come across were too often caricatures, villians, sex objects, or domestics for me to find those writings satisfying. Perhaps the most annoying examples, though by no means the worst, are in the books that I otherwise loved, "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy. Tolkien, The Master as I tend to call him, fantasy fiction's equivalent of Henry James, was very much a man of his time with the attitudes of his time and thus he treats Eowyn, she who risks her life to join the cause of the High King, very shabbily indeed.
First she's told to stay home and just hope the enemy doesn't win. When she disguises herself to join the army anyway, the only motive Tolkien can find for her is Love: Romantic, Hopeless Love for Aragorn. Once she helps kill the Nazgul, her glory gets stripped away by the revelation that the hobbits could have done it without her. Her big reward: a marriage to a nice guy. I feel my gorge rise all over again as I recount this tale.
Tolkien at least allows a few other female figures their dignity in the course of the trilogy, though the immortal Galadriel is hardly a "real" woman. Other writers? Worse. So I set out to write a story first, a book later, in which real women appeared who had more on their minds than Love, Sex, or getting money with sex.
On the other hand, I also refused to buy into the Celtic Golden Age myths, which quite erroneously base themselves on the belief that Celtic women were somehow equals to men back in the good old pagan days, before Christianity spoiled everything. Not by half, Dear Reader. (If anything, Christianity improved the status of women, though admittedly not by much.) For one thing, we really cannot speak of a pan-Celtic culture. Certainly the people we call Celts never thought of themselves that way until the 18th century! The belief in that particular Golden Age, like all golden ages, is based on a very poor understanding of the primary texts, magnified by wish fulfillment.
In the early 1800s, when writers like Iolo Morganwg began forging these myths, these beliefs of a Celtic Golden Age served a political purpose, as a basis for anti-English sentiments in Wales and Ireland. Now they've gotten a life of their own thanks to some influential fiction writers -- which is fine for fantasy writing, just so long as the writers and the readers realize the ideas are fantastic! I personally find the real history more interesting.
The women in Deverry cover a wide range in their roles and strengths, but I did want to keep them roughly within the bounds of the historically possible. A few exceptional noblewomen, such as Tieryn Lovyan in the early books, have always managed to rise above the restrictions that their cultures and their times have placed upon them. Others, such as Queen Bellyra, were so hedged around with restrictions that at times amounted to taboos that merely surviving into old age became their main accomplishment. A good many didn't, as indeed, Bellyra herself fails to do.
Among the small and precariously situated merchant or middle class, an exceptional woman like Gavra in Darkspell could, with male patronage, create something of an independent life for herself as well. At the very bottom of the social scale, women like Jill, the bastard daughter of a mercenary soldier, had no standing or protection at all. Most would have ended up in a condition approaching slavery, if they found a place serving in a noble household, or married to a poor and probably brutal husband. A very few, however, might manage to find a better life, simply because they were too unimportant for the men in power to notice.
And in a fantasy world, where magic exists and has its own rules and powers, there exist other ways of gaining more than the culture and times offer.
Next: what is Deverry magic?
The Silver Mage, Katharine Kerr, Deverry, fantasy, Silver Wyrm, dragons, DAW
