Dear Mr. Cornwell: I’m a huge fan of the Sharpe saga, and on that basis recently bought your Arthur trilogy. It’s been a mixed experience thus far (2/3 thru book Winter King), because of your almost unremitting depiction of Christians & their faith in a very negative way. Is this deliberate, Mr. Coldwell? Were you perhaps deeply wounded by Sunday school as a boy? Or figured that no Christians enjoyed your work.. or else that we would appreciate such depictions? I could list chapter and verse from WK.. but aside from Bishop Bedwin, “a good man but not a very good Christian”, it’s there in black and white. If in an otherwise excellent and compelling book the author took endless potshots at Jews or Hindus or some other faith, in a way that verged on repetitive caricaturization, I’d really wonder what bee was in the authorial bonnet, that they’d make such snark overshadow the story. I took the time to write because I’m interested in how & why that facet of the story thus far arose, in a time– “The Dark Ages”– when the church was often the bearer of law & culture & hope to a collapsing Europe, and the spiritual and moral foundation upon which a new civilization arose from the fallen Western Roman Empire. Thanks for taking the time to read my note, and– I hope– answering this sincere query from an interested reader. Yours, Sean A. Taylor Nova Scotia, Canada

Dear Mr. Cornwell: I’ve either not received or mislaid any response from you on the apparent Christian-bashing tone in your Arthur series. Now in book 2, I note some decent things said about Galahad as a Christian. Huzzah! That’s one against a host of unlovely Christians populating your Arthur saga. In Book 2, there’s also this wildly anachronistic comment on p. 133: “What in the name of a holy harlot,” Culhwch asked Galahad, “is a holy ghost?” The languages in question would be whatever Celtic/ Brythonic the ancient local Dumnonians spoke, plus ecclesiastical Greek or Latin. ‘Geist’ as a part of later Anglo-Saxonized middle English simply would not have been in use then [bef. 900; ME goost (n.), OE gst; c. G Geist ].. or for another 500 years. After AD900, meant ‘spirit’ or soul, whether human, divine, or the haunty type. Only later does the word come to mean only the ‘Boo!’ type of ghost. So presumably Bishops Sansum would have used the local dialect, or else ‘In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.’– in which case poor Culhwch, serving the author’s purposes, would not have spoken about ghosts. Indeed, not a few folks in Arthur’s time would know Latin as a written language, and with some vocabulary and place-names: the technical term and revealed name of God the ‘Spiritus Sancti’ or Paraclete (Gk.) or Comforter would not be unfamiliar to people who attended Christian worship, or who had Christian friends or relatives. There is actually an interesting question of whether Byzantine Monks came from Egypt or elsewhere in the East to the British Isles and influenced Celtic Christianity in art, liturgy, monastic customs, and ecclesiastical polity. Even then, it would be ‘pneuma’ or ‘Pneuma hagion’, but never ‘ghost’. Once more, I’m interested to hear your response to my general point, and this specific one. Sincerely yours, Sean A. Taylor Nova Scotia