Theodore Brun seemed to have everything. A high level, high earning job as a Paris based lawyer, a group of interesting friends and activities, a French fiancé, and yet he knew he wasn’t really happy. Something was missing. It took him several job changes and a long-distance cycle ride across Europe before he discovered his calling.
And a decade of hard work later, he’s published a four-book series of Dark Age historicals, The Wanderer Chronicles, and he’s found where he belongs.
Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler, and on Binge Reading Today, Theodore talks about the books that critics describe as “thrilling, epic adventure at its very best” and about finding his place as an author in that remarkable ride that opened up his life to new energy and joy.
Fantastic Fiction GiveawayFor our Giveaway this week, I’ve teamed up with 50 other fantastic authors to give away a huge collection of Women’s Fiction and Book Club books in a BookSweeps Lucky Draw. There’s two prize winners, but the Grand Prize winner gets a brand new E reader as well as a library of new books.
You can win my book Sadie’s Vow, #1 in the Home At Last series, plus books from authors like Stephanie Dray, Madeline Martin, and Michelle Cox, all of whom have been on Binge Reading in the past.
ENTER BOOKSWEEPS DRAWAnd remember, if you enjoyed the show, leave us a review so others will find us too. Word of mouth is still the best way for others to discover the show and great books they will love to read.
Details of things mentioned in this episode:The Second Siege of Constantinople: https://www.worldhistory.org/image/11635/umayyad-siege-of-constantinople-717-ce/
The Anglo Saxon poem The Wanderer:
https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/English/Wanderer.php
Wynfrid of Nursling also known as St Boniface: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Boniface
German god Thor: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Thor-Germanic-deity
Joe Abercrombie: https://joeabercrombie.com/
Hungry Ghosts: Kevin Jared Hosein, https://www.amazon.com/Hungry-Ghosts-Kevin-Jared-Hosein-ebook/dp/B0B31N67Z7/
River Spirit: Leila Aboulela, https://leila-aboulela.com/books/river-spirit/
The Great Reclamation: Rachel Heng, https://www.rachelhengqp.com/
Where to find Theodore Brun onlineWebsite: www.theodorebrun.com
Instagram: @Theobrun
Twitter, @Theodore Brun
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theodorebrunauthor/
Introducing author Theodore Brun Historical adventure author Theodore BrunBut now here’s Theodore. Hello, Theodore, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.
Theodore Brun: Hello, Jenny. It’s lovely to be here, from the other side of the world, literally. And the other side of the clock. You’re 12 hours ahead. Let’s get into it.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. Thank you so much. Now we’re going to be talking about the four-book series of The Wanderer Chronicles, set in the dark ages of Europe in the seventh and eighth centuries, and I know that these sorts of sagas often have quite a strong element of archetypal fantasy in them as well.
So I’m wondering. There’s an obvious character in the book who identifies as a wanderer, but there’s probably a more overarching archetype as well at play here. Talk to us a bit about how the Wanderer works in these kinds of Viking sagas.
Theodore Brun: The Wanderer, it’s interesting the name, the Wanderer, for a start, because I came up with that when I was about halfway through drafting the first book. and in searching around to see whether anything else had been made under that name, I discovered that there is actually a very old Anglo Saxon poem called The Wanderer.
And as I read this thing, it was the first time I’d read it, I was astonished because it was very similar in terms of archetype to my own protagonist. And it’s really about a man, a warrior in this warrior culture, who is forced into exile because his lord and his comrades are all wiped out in a battle.
A Coming Of Age storyAnd so he goes into exile, but it’s not just a physical journey. It’s a journey of let’s say the soul, of the mind, of life’s experience, in which he goes from – it’s a kind of enlightenment that he’s discovering.
Similar to my main protagonist, he’s a boy/young man who has this physical disability caused by his father. So he carried the archetype of the father wound. That’s very strong in this book. And it’s this Coming of Age story is the first novel really ( A Mighty Dawn) where he has to leave his homeland and go out and find his way in the world.
But in the course of obviously becoming a great warrior, which is the surface level, there’s a lot going on underneath in terms of what is life all about and how is he to live as a man in this dark and brutal world of the eighth century. So hopefully over the span of what I plan to be five books he’ll come to his own enlightenment, if you like, on that score, his own form of wisdom.
Jenny Wheeler: Sure. I imagine you’re immersed in the fifth book or starting the fifth book now, and that will round out the series.
Theodore Brun: That will round out the series. I haven’t actually started it yet, because various other things have come in the way, but hopefully I will, It’s all going on in my head at least, and I know where the whole thing lands
Jenny Wheeler: Now, the one we’re talking about particularly today is book four, which has just been published. It’s called A Savage Moon and it opens in 718AD at the point where there’s been a very significant battle in Europe and Byzantium. And you would expect peace to reign on that continent, but it’s far from a peaceful world.
Tell us a bit about in 718AD and the state of Europe at that time.
The unsettled peace of the eighth centuryTheodore Brun: You’re right. You would expect peace to come, but peace doesn’t seem to last very long in that period. I think that the significant thing going on in Europe at that time is it’s a crossover point, if you like, from the more powerful period of the Byzantine Empire, which was really the continuation, not even the successor of the Roman Empire, but based around this big city of Constantinople, which really put every other city and urban environment in its shade.
It was of a different order. But what was happening was that Islam was on the ascendant. You had probably less than a hundred years before Muhammad burst onto the scene, just after the Byzantines had settled the Persians, their great rival once and for all.
And they had about 10 years of breathing space and then suddenly they’ve got this new enemy appears on the horizon sweeping all before it.
And I think it took them about a hundred years to really push the Byzantines back and back out of their provinces around what’s now Palestine and what’s now Turkey till they were really banging on the walls of Constantinople.
I call it Byzantium in my books. And it was a very iconic siege in the sense that everything was thrown at it.
The Arab Muslim armies that came against the city were vast in number. But the one advantage that the Byzantines had was they had built these enormous walls, which still stand, and you can go and walk on top of them and they are incredibly impressive still as fortifications on the landward side of what’s now in Istanbul.
Powerful Byzantium in declineThey just couldn’t get through them. And so while the moment of crisis passed when various things went wrong for the Arab armies encamped around the city, and also the Byzantines had this secret weapon, which was a flamethrower, a medieval flamethrower, which they used at sea.
So they were invincible at sea as well. The crisis passes, but even within the Byzantine Empire, the intrigues did not cease and I think the very next year the emperor who’d succeeded in driving away this threat was having to deal with various conspiracies of people trying to reinstall previous emperors.
It was very unsettled time within that empire because it was in a very weakened condition and the wars didn’t end with the Muslim armies, they were still various campaigns running in what’s now Turkey.
The Arabs remained the enemy for hundreds of years, so that was what was going on in the eastern Eastern Mediterranean, as it were, and then around Rome, Rome was still part of the empire, but the bonds that were tying Rome to that empire were loosening as well.
There was a sea change in this period of history where Rome and what would be the Papal States would start looking to the Frankish kingdom in France, and look west for their protection because the east was so beleaguered by this new threat of the Muslims.
Jenny Wheeler: The Savage Moon focuses on Erlan, who is the Shining Wanderer, the wanderer referred to as a boy in the first book, and the Swedish Queen, Lilla. They’ve got the major roles. There are a number of other side stories as well, but tell us about those two. I feel you have a particular affection for Erlan, the wanderer. What inspires you about him in particular?
Hard medicine for a five-year-old boyTheodore Brun: I think the fact that he is encumbered with this disability. His backstory was that his father was trying to teach him as a five-year-old, that you can’t really trust anyone in the world.
He invites him to jump off this big rock on the beach and he says he’ll catch him. At the last minute he steps aside and lets him fall into the sand, but he doesn’t realize that there’s a stone concealed under the sand.
The child Erlan does himself a chronic lasting injury, and it’s a pretty brutal lesson from his father. That reflects an actual story I heard. They didn’t cripple themselves, but at the same time, the father stepped away. I stole that as an example.
I think the fact that he’s having to deal with this injury means that he can’t run away like other men. He’s not mobile like other men. What he has to learn is to stand and fight better than anyone else.
I think that’s what he has learned to do. He’s learned that he needs to have more resourcefulness, more skills with his mind as well as his body and his strength.
But there are various wounds in his past that I think he’s trying to process whilst going through these adventures and these experiences.
There’s one other layer that I think is important as far as his character is concerned and that comes from his mother, who, although she passes away when he’s rather young, she leaves him with this question, which is,’ are you going to be a man or a monster?’
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100%;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] [data-style="minimal"]{padding:40px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"]{margin-left:-5px;margin-right:-5px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-field,.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-submit{margin:0 5px 15px 5px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-field{-webkit-flex:100 1 auto;-ms-flex:100 1 auto;flex:100 1 auto;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-submit{-webkit-flex:1 1 auto;-ms-flex:1 1 auto;flex:1 1 auto;} Are you a man, or a monster?
‘Are you a man or a monster?’ And I think in this world of – it’s incredibly brutal world. It’s not like the world’s got less brutal, from news going around today, even today.
That question still pertains for all of us really – are you going to be a man or a monster in this world, particularly on the masculine side?
Of course, there’s the excitement, the ‘thrills and spills of swords and splatter’ as a friend describes this kind of book. But there’s also this underlying question, what kind of a man is Erlan becoming, and I think that’s relevant. I feel like it’s connected to me as an author.
It’s taken me, I don’t know, seven, eight years to get to this point in terms of my writing career. (Correction from the audio – Editor note) So that’s quite a development. I’m 46 now, over my late 30s and early 40s.
Still a question for me is, what kind of a man am I becoming? And maybe some of the outworking of that comes out on the page.
So that’s Erlan. I don’t know, do you want me to say what I think about Lilla as well?
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. I didn’t warm to her as much. I felt in some ways ahe wasn’t quite deserving of him.
Theodore Brun: That’s interesting, isn’t it? Because I had another friend who read them and thought the exact opposite, thought that she was the admirable one and he needed to up his game to be deserving of her.
But I’m a man, so I’m trying to write a female character. I think again, it’s a similar question of what does it mean to grow into becoming a 17, 18 year old young woman, who thinks she’s wise, but part of the journey of her, because she knows more in terms of magic and various kind of supernatural stuff, I would say in the context of their culture. I think over the course of her story, she. becomes disillusioned and realizes maybe she doesn’t know half of what she thought she knew about the world.
Queen Lilla has a similar challengeShe’s on a learning process as well. But also, it’s the same thing of, is she hardened as a woman? Is her heart hard?
In the course of this current book, A Savage Moon, it was quite deliberate, I noticed it about halfway through writing it.
She’s become incredibly hard hearted about halfway through the book, almost to the point where she’s masculinized, if that’s a word.
I can’t think of the word for it, but she’s become more masculine in terms of her approach to things, which may be a reflection of my own thoughts, but in the second half of the book, she recovers something of her softness and femininity and vulnerability, as well as having that power of the woman of experience.
They are somewhat broken people figuring out how to be better as well as how to figure out how to meet all their goals in the course of these adventures as well.
The fact that you see this ‘push me pull you’ effect of her rising to him or him rising to her, I think is part of the narrative and in some ways deliberate.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. And you do make it clear that because of the position she holds as a woman, that she has a sense of having to appear even more strong and dangerous to get men to take her seriously.
There’s a certain part of the act where she has to almost overplay things to get taken seriously.
Theodore Brun: Yes, I think that’s right. And where she’s come from, is a place when she’s in her homeland and doesn’t really have for the responsibility that she comes to when she becomes queen through a course of events.
Beforehand, she’s quite disparaging of all this politicking and the bravado of great lords and war leaders and warriors and what have you posturing.
Telling story of European power blocsBut she gets drawn into it and has to find her way of standing her ground and taking hold of some position.
Standing in equal balance with some of the powerful and forceful characters that she comes up against.
There is an element of like iron sharpens iron, if you like, she’s having to get sharper in order to meet the challenge of the forces that come against her or the characters that come against her.
Jenny Wheeler: You’re working with an extremely broad canvas here, because a lot of these books, as far as I understand it, like with M. J. Porter, they focus on one particular country, whether it’s England or the Viking area, the Norse lands, but you cover the whole range.
That must have been quite a challenge, and obviously one that you deliberately chose to take that global view.
Theodore Brun: I think part of it connects with the inspiration behind these books, which was very much a dive into the history of this period where you saw these greater moving pieces of Christendom, the Roman Empire, the emerging Muslim Empire and the Pagan North, the early days of what would become the big Viking culture.
I wanted to explore that whole world, which already meant that you couldn’t just stay up in Scandinavia. And this was more than a story all about Norse culture and rival kingdoms up there.
Although basically the first two books do stay there. and certainly, it made my job a little bit harder in terms of thinking now I’ve got to go down to Constantinople.
What does that look like? What’s going on down there? It certainly extrapolated the amount of research that I had to do, but I’m very glad.
How Theodore Brun fell in love with Dark AgesI think naturally I’m quite a roving person anyway. I’ve traveled widely and so I could use that to enrich these stories.
I think has been a deliberate choice and hopefully, it provides a expansiveness to the nature of the stories, the settings.
Jenny Wheeler: It does. It’s a good point to now ask you about your fascination with this period, because it stems from a number of personal interests and experiences that you had.
Tell us a little bit about that. You’ve got Viking ancestry there in the background, as well as a number of other interests.
Tell us how you got drawn into that period.
Theodore Brun: I think the Viking ancestry, as in my father is fully Danish, even though he was raised and born in England, just before the war.
My Danish grandfather lived till he was 101, and he was living in England. So we were getting you’re Danish, very much a sense of that side of our heritage.
But strangely, that was nothing really to do with Vikings as such. It was more just the country and culture itself. So that wasn’t really determinative.
I think it was more the fact that there was this lecture I went to back in 2009. And it was talking about three great evangelists of history,
The lecture was by a theologian. One of them, the middle one was on this guy called Wynfrid of Nursling, who was an Englishman in the early 8th century.
And the lecturer described this event, which actually is also very topical, where he cut down the sacred oak of Thor, the God of Thunder. in a province in Germany in big dark Germanic forest.
An unexpected hero – and an English saintObviously, he was trying to demonstrate the power of the Christian God over the pagan gods and also push back against what he saw as these abominations of human sacrifice and what have you. So that story affected me, as not a writer in any sense. No, I wasn’t writing. It was total flatline in terms of my writing career.
This was a spark in my imagination that did actually birth something. I suddenly saw this scene of this guy with his axe chopping down this local community’s favorite tree. That’s not going to go down very well, is it? And saw it as a spark of conflict.
But it was enough that actually drew me further into this guy’s story, got hold of a history book about it, started reading about the historical context, and realized he was actually quite an interesting figure connecting the Roman church with the Frankish leadership, the kings of France.
But also then the story of the Muslims invading from Spain up as far as just south of Paris to the city of, or near the town of Tours.
There was this battle of Tours in 732 AD, and I suddenly thought, that’s quite a good climax for some sort of story.
I don’t know what the story is yet, but that feels like a climactic event, which I think I’d heard about in the past, but I’d forgotten about. So that was the hook, if you like, the historical hook that linked me into early 8th century.
Now. In terms of the stories, we’re not actually ever going to unless it’s a different series, I don’t think we’re going to get to that particular battle.
In roaming around… that area of history, suddenly, some of the background of my university days I studied Scandinavian archaeology, which is basically Viking archaeology, but going back all the way to the year zero.
Wynfrid set Theodore’s imagination alightAnd so suddenly the protagonist that appeared in my head was neither Christian nor Muslim. It was this pagan. guy. And I thought okay, so in exploring this world, there needs to be this slightly more neutral character between this big fault line between these big historical tectonic plates, as it were, of these two great faiths.
Who is this guy? Is he a warrior? Is he what? I think out of that seed bed, grew the origin story, if you like, of this wanderer character who was going to explore the rest of the world.
A Mighty Dawn in the first book is really his, where he comes from, why he leaves and where he’s off to next.
Jenny Wheeler: Sure. Wynfrid does make an appearance in this book, A Savage Moon, doesn’t he? He’s got quite a significant role. And I get the feeling he is going to be in the next book as well. Is that a reasonable expectation?
Theodore Brun: He is in this book, and I was very glad to finally get to him because it was such a significant moment for me.
I was a lawyer before, and it was only thanks to this story that I now I can basically attribute absolutely everything that I have in life to that moment of hearing his story.
I feel like I owe the guy or at least that story a lot. It was a pivot point in my life. It was that blinding vision, if you like, of this dark forest.
And maybe it didn’t happen exactly as I imagined it, but I think part of the purpose of this book was to bring this character in, to enact this moment, but it wasn’t historically the same moment, because there were a lot of these pagan trees where there was sacrifices and rituals connected with them.
It was more tying in his story of if something like this had happened, this would leave such an indelible imprint on his mind, the historical character, that of course he would have this antipathy to these places of pagan worship.
I think he has had his moment, I’m not sure he’s going to be there in the next book, knowing where the story’s going to.
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