People of the Black Mountains
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People of the Black Mountains, an historic novel by Raymond Williams.
| Author | Raymond Williams |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Historical novel |
| Publisher | Chatto and Windus |
| Released | 1989 |
| Media type | Print (book) |
| ISBN | ISBN 1561310506 |
This book is a work in two volumes, published in 1989 and 1990. It features a great diversity of people in a single place across the ages. Most of them are ordinary people living unprivileged lives.
It begins in the Old Stone Age and extends through to the Middle Ages, telling a series of fictionalized short stories about ordinary people in the Welsh-border region of the Black Mountains where he was born and grew up.
The series is solidly based on what archaeologists have found - some of the tales are speculative reconstructions based on real burials. It has been praised for "brilliant clarity and imaginative vision" (Sunday Telegraph) and hailed as "the great historic novel Wales has long deserved" (Wales on Sunday).
The story-sequence would have extended to modern times had Williams lived to finish it. What exists is a complete story arc extending from the Old Stone Age to the late-Mediaeval period.
[edit] Stories include:
- Primitive hunters living before the last ice-age
- Similar hunters returning after the ice, and their possible marriage-customs
- The arrival of the first farmers; in this case pastoralists with sheep, which the local hunters don't initilaly recognise as creatures they should not hunt.
- A visiting astronomer-priest from the culture that later produced the Stonehenge trilithons
- The defeat of a Roman force by Welsh tribesmen.
- 'King Arthur', here seen as Artorius, a warlord who had defeated the Saxons but here seen as a burden to the ordinary farmers who produced the food that the warriors ate.
- Harold Godwinson riding through, having briefly chased out the Normans during the reign of Edward the Confessor.
- Normans pushing into Wales
- A local revolt that merges into the general rebellion of Owen Glendower.
- Sir John Oldcastle seeking refuge after being persecuted for supporting the Lollards.
