foundation of the dragon?
Fire-breathing dragons are best left for the likes of George R.R. Martin or Katherine Kerr. Brethren is based on a true story so there are no elements of fantasy. The only magic the druids wield is the manipulation of a very human power.
The dragon is the symbol of Wales. Foundation because I am interested in the semi-mythical origins of this special little nation.
The red dragon on the Welsh flag, voted the coolest national flag in the word LINK, was only introduced as the official Welsh flag in 1956, but the tradition goes back a long, long way. Thousands of years, in fact.
From Wikipedia.
Pendragon or Pen Draig (Middle Welsh pen[n] dragon, pen[n] dreic; composed of Welsh pen, "head, chief, top" and draig/dragon, "dragon; warrior"; borrowed from the Latin word dracō, plural dracōnēs, "dragon[s]", Breton: Penn Aerouant) literally means "Chief-Dragon" or "Head-Dragon", but in a figurative sense, "chief leader", "chief of warriors", "commander-in-chief", "generalissimo", or "chief governor") It is the epithet of Uther, father of King Arthur in medieval and modern Arthurian literature and occasionally applied to historical Welsh heroes in medieval Welsh poetry, such as Rhodri ab Owain Gwynedd.
From Alfred the Great, William the Conqueror, Richard III and Henry VIII, I learned plenty of English history in school and after. The stories are usually told from the English perspective though, so when a Welsh name crops up it’s usually just a side character, an antagonist to the glorious English hero kings. Did the school curriculum include equal time on Owain Glyndŵr or Llewellyn the Great? Cunedda? Cadwaladr? Who was the last of Wales’ royal family? Nope. In the Welsh school I went to, not a word. Not even in Welsh lessons! Is that because Welsh historical figures like them aren’t important? Or is it evidence of Welsh history not being given the relevance it deserves?
While researching Brethren, names from the semi-mythic pre-Arthur era kept cropping up, hard men who rose up and forged kingdoms in the power vacuum after the Roman withdrawal, people whose lives are fundamental to the fabric of the history of what would become the nation of Wales. Cadwal, Brei, Gavo are all fictional characters but 300 years later, when the natives of this land were kept to fend for themselves in the face of Irish, Pictish and Saxon raids, real people begin to appear in recorded history. I decided I wanted to write about them, to bring them to life, to shine a little light on an almost forgotten history. So the pre-Arthur era (No I don’t believe he was a real person) will all be material for the Dragon Foundation Series.
