Frontier Wolf: the 1983 author's note
May. 28th, 2024 07:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hedgebird posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
sutcliff_space(ETA: I've corrected my statement below about the first editions.)
I'm re-reading Frontier Wolf at the moment, and I happened to wonder if the author's note was originally placed before the story, as in my US 2008 Front Street paperback, or after it, as in my UK 2013 Random House e-book. So I looked for the first edition on Internet Archive and found that it appeared at the front of the original UK 1980 Oxford University Press and US 1981 Dutton hardcover editions. (It's not in their tables of contents, but don't be fooled like I was!) But the 1983 OUP paperback has a revised version of the note as its afterword, copyrighted 1983.
More importantly, the 1983 afterword is longer than the author's note in the other editions. Four middle paragraphs of it (from 'Almost on the outskirts of Edinburgh' to 'First Attacotti Frontier Scouts'), describing which aspects of the setting are historical and which fictional, are nearly identical to the original note. But the beginning and ending of the essay, describing the inspiration for the book and its importance to the author, were new and surprising to me, and perhaps to you also.
The full text (about 1,150 words) is below the cut. And if you have another edition of Frontier Wolf, I'm curious to know which version of the author's note, if any, it contains.
-----
AFTERWORD
I suppose Frontier Wolf had its first beginning a long time ago, when I was watching an old ‘Western’ on television.
I have a fondness for old Westerns, because they often seem to deal with the same kind of things and people as my own stories deal with. Loyalties and divided loyalties, the age-old struggle between good and evil, courage, friendship, a kind of stoical Viking under-statement which appeals to me strongly. (A lovely example of this is the desperately wounded Captain of U.S. Cavalry who, on being asked by his Sergeant, ‘Is there something I can do for you, Cap’n?’ replies, ‘Yes, start digging.’)
Well, so I saw this Western, and I do not now even remember what it was called; but one of the lesser characters in it was another officer of the U.S. Cavalry, who had made a wrong decision in his youth and lost a lot of his men as a result, and who, at some point in the story was called on the make the same decision again. Something in me thought, ‘What a waste, what a sinful waste, just to tack this on to the fringe of someone else’s story! It could provide the central theme for the whole book!’ And I tucked the idea away at the back of my mind for safe keeping until I had finished the book that I was working on at the moment.
When the book-of-the-moment was finished, I took the idea out again and looked at it from all directions, and still thought that it would make a central theme for a book. And a book that I very much wanted to write. Clearly it had to be a soldier’s story; and since the Roman army was the one I knew best and was most at home in, it must be a Roman soldier’s story. The Troubles in what is now lowland Scotland in 343 AD gave me the scene of action I needed. So time and place were roughly fixed, and I began to look for my exact setting.
Almost on the outskirts of Edinburgh, where the River Almond joins the Firth of Forth, is a village called Cramond; and where the village now stands, there was once a Roman fort. There is was, clearly marked on my map of Roman Britain. Its Roman name was lost, but I could call it ‘Castellum’ which is simply the Latin word for a fort, and it was in exactly the right place for the story that was taking shape in my mind, about a unit of Frontier scouts based close to the end of the old Northern Wall.
Then I started on the necessary research.
Which is when I learned from the archaeologists who had excavated the site, that there was no trace of Roman military occupation at the date I needed it, nor for nearly a hundred years before. No place where there were signs of military occupation at that time, and no other time during the Roman occupation of the North gave me exactly what the story needed. So, sadly, I put the whole idea aside.
But more than twenty-five years ago, when The Eagle of the Ninth was first published and it was too late to do anything about it, I found to my horror that there was no trace of any Roman military occupation in Exeter. And now, more than twenty-five years later, traces of the Second Legion are being dug up all over the city! So maybe in twenty-five years’ time, the archaeologists will be digging up traces of the Third Ordo, Frontier Scouts, all over Cramond.
Anyhow, after thinking it over for a long while, it seemed to me that so long as I played fair by telling you, the readers, that up to now no traces have been found, I could go ahead with the story I so much wanted to write.
At least I could get out my notebooks and carry the research a bit further, and see what emerged.
One thing that emerged, though it did nothing about the Cramond problem, encouraged me in another way: invaders from Ireland really did play a part in the Troubles of 343 AD, and according to the Notitia Dignitatum, which lists the whereabouts of every unit of the Roman Army around 420 AD, a crack light infantry unit of Attacotti was part of the field army in Gaul at that time. It would be hard to think of anything much more unlikely than an Irish unit in the Roman Army, unless it was two Irish units; and so it seemed to me that, allowing for the changes of frontiers and military needs over eighty years or so, they might well be descended from the First Attacotti Frontier Scouts I was planning to weave into my story.
So at long last I started out to write Frontier Wolf.
Except for the Emperor, none of the characters is based on real people, though they are very real to me; and the same is true of the events in the story. But the Troubles of 343 AD are real enough, and the mysterious part that the Arcani, the ‘Eyes and Ears of the Frontier’ played in them; and there really were Frontier Scouts serving in the other forts where I have put them. And though the actual events of Alexios’s story came out of my own head, the same kind of thing must have happened again and again along the frontiers of the Roman Empire, as they did, and still do, in all ‘Troubles’ and along the frontiers of all empires.
Frontier Wolf is an important book to me, because for quite a while before I started on it, I had been suffering from what is known in the trade as ‘Writer’s Block’. It was not a complete block. I could still write, and I did, but slowly and with an enormous amount of effort, and with a lot of the joy gone out of it. With Frontier Wolf the block was passing and the joy was coming back; so in a way it was like taking a deep breath and making a fresh start in my writing career. A special book to me, yes, and I found as I went on, that the people in it, Alexios in particular of course, had become special to me too, and I had grown to love them very much.
Of course, the more I grew to care about them, the more I tore myself to pieces with them during that terrible winter retreat from Castellum down to the Wall. But tearing yourself to pieces with your characters is the price you have to pay for making the break-through to become in an odd way one of them.
It is a price well worth paying.
R.S.
I'm re-reading Frontier Wolf at the moment, and I happened to wonder if the author's note was originally placed before the story, as in my US 2008 Front Street paperback, or after it, as in my UK 2013 Random House e-book. So I looked for the first edition on Internet Archive and found that it appeared at the front of the original UK 1980 Oxford University Press and US 1981 Dutton hardcover editions. (It's not in their tables of contents, but don't be fooled like I was!) But the 1983 OUP paperback has a revised version of the note as its afterword, copyrighted 1983.
More importantly, the 1983 afterword is longer than the author's note in the other editions. Four middle paragraphs of it (from 'Almost on the outskirts of Edinburgh' to 'First Attacotti Frontier Scouts'), describing which aspects of the setting are historical and which fictional, are nearly identical to the original note. But the beginning and ending of the essay, describing the inspiration for the book and its importance to the author, were new and surprising to me, and perhaps to you also.
The full text (about 1,150 words) is below the cut. And if you have another edition of Frontier Wolf, I'm curious to know which version of the author's note, if any, it contains.
-----
AFTERWORD
I suppose Frontier Wolf had its first beginning a long time ago, when I was watching an old ‘Western’ on television.
I have a fondness for old Westerns, because they often seem to deal with the same kind of things and people as my own stories deal with. Loyalties and divided loyalties, the age-old struggle between good and evil, courage, friendship, a kind of stoical Viking under-statement which appeals to me strongly. (A lovely example of this is the desperately wounded Captain of U.S. Cavalry who, on being asked by his Sergeant, ‘Is there something I can do for you, Cap’n?’ replies, ‘Yes, start digging.’)
Well, so I saw this Western, and I do not now even remember what it was called; but one of the lesser characters in it was another officer of the U.S. Cavalry, who had made a wrong decision in his youth and lost a lot of his men as a result, and who, at some point in the story was called on the make the same decision again. Something in me thought, ‘What a waste, what a sinful waste, just to tack this on to the fringe of someone else’s story! It could provide the central theme for the whole book!’ And I tucked the idea away at the back of my mind for safe keeping until I had finished the book that I was working on at the moment.
When the book-of-the-moment was finished, I took the idea out again and looked at it from all directions, and still thought that it would make a central theme for a book. And a book that I very much wanted to write. Clearly it had to be a soldier’s story; and since the Roman army was the one I knew best and was most at home in, it must be a Roman soldier’s story. The Troubles in what is now lowland Scotland in 343 AD gave me the scene of action I needed. So time and place were roughly fixed, and I began to look for my exact setting.
Almost on the outskirts of Edinburgh, where the River Almond joins the Firth of Forth, is a village called Cramond; and where the village now stands, there was once a Roman fort. There is was, clearly marked on my map of Roman Britain. Its Roman name was lost, but I could call it ‘Castellum’ which is simply the Latin word for a fort, and it was in exactly the right place for the story that was taking shape in my mind, about a unit of Frontier scouts based close to the end of the old Northern Wall.
Then I started on the necessary research.
Which is when I learned from the archaeologists who had excavated the site, that there was no trace of Roman military occupation at the date I needed it, nor for nearly a hundred years before. No place where there were signs of military occupation at that time, and no other time during the Roman occupation of the North gave me exactly what the story needed. So, sadly, I put the whole idea aside.
But more than twenty-five years ago, when The Eagle of the Ninth was first published and it was too late to do anything about it, I found to my horror that there was no trace of any Roman military occupation in Exeter. And now, more than twenty-five years later, traces of the Second Legion are being dug up all over the city! So maybe in twenty-five years’ time, the archaeologists will be digging up traces of the Third Ordo, Frontier Scouts, all over Cramond.
Anyhow, after thinking it over for a long while, it seemed to me that so long as I played fair by telling you, the readers, that up to now no traces have been found, I could go ahead with the story I so much wanted to write.
At least I could get out my notebooks and carry the research a bit further, and see what emerged.
One thing that emerged, though it did nothing about the Cramond problem, encouraged me in another way: invaders from Ireland really did play a part in the Troubles of 343 AD, and according to the Notitia Dignitatum, which lists the whereabouts of every unit of the Roman Army around 420 AD, a crack light infantry unit of Attacotti was part of the field army in Gaul at that time. It would be hard to think of anything much more unlikely than an Irish unit in the Roman Army, unless it was two Irish units; and so it seemed to me that, allowing for the changes of frontiers and military needs over eighty years or so, they might well be descended from the First Attacotti Frontier Scouts I was planning to weave into my story.
So at long last I started out to write Frontier Wolf.
Except for the Emperor, none of the characters is based on real people, though they are very real to me; and the same is true of the events in the story. But the Troubles of 343 AD are real enough, and the mysterious part that the Arcani, the ‘Eyes and Ears of the Frontier’ played in them; and there really were Frontier Scouts serving in the other forts where I have put them. And though the actual events of Alexios’s story came out of my own head, the same kind of thing must have happened again and again along the frontiers of the Roman Empire, as they did, and still do, in all ‘Troubles’ and along the frontiers of all empires.
Frontier Wolf is an important book to me, because for quite a while before I started on it, I had been suffering from what is known in the trade as ‘Writer’s Block’. It was not a complete block. I could still write, and I did, but slowly and with an enormous amount of effort, and with a lot of the joy gone out of it. With Frontier Wolf the block was passing and the joy was coming back; so in a way it was like taking a deep breath and making a fresh start in my writing career. A special book to me, yes, and I found as I went on, that the people in it, Alexios in particular of course, had become special to me too, and I had grown to love them very much.
Of course, the more I grew to care about them, the more I tore myself to pieces with them during that terrible winter retreat from Castellum down to the Wall. But tearing yourself to pieces with your characters is the price you have to pay for making the break-through to become in an odd way one of them.
It is a price well worth paying.
R.S.
