Here Be Dragons
Sharon Kay Penman
St. Martin’s Griffin, 2008 [1985].
Welsh Princes 1
There are few books that have sat on my shelves in that looming state of needing-to-be-read for as long as Sharon Kay Penman’s Here Be Dragons has. I’ve owned several copies over the past decade and a half with the intention of reading what I came to regard as a classic purely by virtue of seeing it everywhere in used bookstores and thrift shops as a youth. The tome came to acquire a daunting weight, that one book I just never got around to, so I would occasionally sell it or gift it, and eventually reacquire another copy out of either guilt that I hadn’t read it yet or hope that I would. And so I finally have.
Here Be Dragons appeals, first of all, because it is a lush 700 pages that promises a fully elaborated medieval world. Beyond that, it promises one that is particularly Welsh. And, beyond that, one that is dedicated to the internecine conflicts of the period—not only the efforts by Welsh princes of the 13th century at state-building, but also their struggles with the forces of the English, which we now recognize as the beginning of the English colonization of Wales/Cymru and the making in the British Isles of yet another long-colonized Celtic peoples deprived of land, language, and political and cultural sovereignty. It is a book on the scale of the best epics—both in fantasy and historical fiction, reminiscent of contemporaries like Jean M. Auel or Ken Follett, and later writers like Hilary Mantel, and with a keen eye to the experiences of women.
Here Be Dragons was published in 1985 after Penman made a name for herself three years earlier with The Sunne in Splendour, about the life of Richard III (1452-1485), who Penman felt was severely misunderstood. A similar impulse to humanize a much despised (or at least disliked) figured of British medieval history drives Here Be Dragons, which, despite the emphasis on Wales and being the first volume in the Welsh Princes Trilogy, is just as much about the life of John I (1166-1216).
The Book Itself
Roughly half of the novel, in terms of pages, tells the story of John’s life beginning from the period of his father Richard I’s conflict with Philip II of France over English territories in France to his somewhat pitiful death on the run from French troops in the Midlands. John’s story starts at a time when England, by virtue of having been conquered by William of Normandy in 1066, still owned a significant portion of land in the present borders of France, including and most significantly Aquitaine, Normandy, and Brittany/Breizh. John’s reign was significant—and his legacy forever marred—because it saw the loss of most of the English land in France, ending the so-called Angevin Empire and throwing into crisis the identity of England’s mostly French-speaking Norman lords (). At the same time that John lost territory in France, conflict with Britain’s Celtic people in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland continued. The rest of the novel is centered on how this conflict unfolds in the Welsh marches on the border with England, where a young prince, Llewelyn of Gwynedd, later known as Llewelyn ab Iorwerth or Llewleyn the Great, gains power, unites other princes, harries the English, and makes political alignments (mostly marriages between Welsh and Anglo-Norman families) to help secure an independent Wales.
Stuck between these two men is Joanna, the bastard daughter of John and one of his many mistresses. While Penman can do little to change the facts of John’s military failures, she leans heavily into creating a dynamic and psychologically complex man who, despite his “Angevin rage” (which leads to some seriously horrible war crimes), is a devoted father to Joanna (once her mother dies and she’s brought to live with John at court) and a loving husband to Isabelle of Angoulême. Still, John lives by the political machinations of the day and marries Joanna to Llewelyn in a bid to solidify English-Welsh relations, put a damper on Welsh border raids, and hopefully garner some Welsh love for the English throne. It’s a savvy move because the Welsh don’t care about the illegitimacy of children and Joanna is, otherwise, useless to John as a political tool in the Anglo-Norman court.
With this set up, Here Be Dragons is a biographical novel of three intersecting lives, though told from many perspectives and including a cast of hundreds, as every major and minor lord who would interact with the principal cast of John, Llewelyn, and Joanna is brought into play (if ever a novel needed a dramatis personae in the appendix, it’s this one!). The novel is an impressive tapestry that seems all the vaster for its attention to the complex, lived reality of the Welsh and Anglo-Norman courts, and of noble houses great and small, with its massive cast of characters whose families we meet across two or three generations in the span of the novel, and who all have a part to play in the internecine conflicts of high medieval England, Wales, and France. It’s easy to get lost in the novel, which requires regular reading to keep up with all of its machinations, including multiple B plots, such as the future inheritance of Llewelyn’s princedom (whether his ragey bastard son or his and Joanna’s calm, intellectual child Dafydd), the fate of various enemies of John and Llewelyn, and the rivalries between this or that Welsh or Anglo-Norman lord. It’s no wonder that Penman made a name for herself as one of the greatest writers of historical fiction—ever—through just a handful of novels.
Here Be Dragons is technically divided into two “books,” the first of which is c. 500 pages and is marked by the life of John and his effect, as a living man, on the lives of Llewelyn and Joanna; the second covers the remaining c. 200 pages and turns its attention to the final eighteen years of Joanna’s life. In this final third-ish of the novel, Joanna’s finally coming to terms with what it means to be John’s daughter and Llewelyn’s wife, a continuing identity crisis that is cast into relief by her affair with William de Braose and the lingering question of her son Dafydd’s future inheritance of the princedom of Gwynedd. The division is certainly odd, since it gives John’s life primacy without actually being a book about John’s life, but despite its best intentions to be a book about Joanna and Llewelyn, it is a book about how John’s actions—whether his fatherly love or the murder of his political enemies—influence the lives of others and, in Joanna’s case, become a shadow that plagues her attempt to find meaning in a new life as a Welsh wife. But this structure to the novel, and the narrative choices Penman makes in choosing who to focus on and for how long, makes the novel feel rather uneven; a generous critic might say that, in giving Joanna the final 200 pages, nearly all to herself, that she has finally come into her own as a person, something possible only with the passing of her father.
Narrative Form and the High Medieval Domestic
Despite all the high drama of medieval courtly life, Here Be Dragons is very much a domestic novel, where action takes places rarely on the battlefield and more often through dialogue, at the hearth, in a bed, across a dinner table. Penman interestingly chooses to omit major events in the lives of the principal character, especially events that have historical significance: many battles, deaths, and other turning points, such as coronations or weddings, happen off screen between chapters, which sometimes skip ahead months or years, leaving readers always search for context to gain a foothold in the characters’ ever-changing world. Instead, most of the chapters feature intense, intimate scenes of dialogue, of plotting, of character work. In Here Be Dragons there are not the lengthy scenes describing the historical goings on of a famous battle—and when there is a battle, it is usually over quickly and the emphasis is on the plotting before and after, the parlays and battle planning—but rather the personal moments between characters. In this way it is probably a disappointing book to some who would prefer the great deeds of heroes and daring do, but the novel reads brilliantly for all its emphasis on character and the story clips along despite the book’s nearly 700 trade paperback pages printed with a small font.
In addition, Penman uses a smart narrative technique whereby she begins most chapters (in the first portion of the book) not with a principal character but with a minor name who will, in a page or two, come to interact with a given chapter’s principal cast. The narrative voice is always a loose third-person perspective that uses limited free indirect discourse to switch between characters’ viewpoints, so that we are able to see the sprawling world of England, Wales, and France from a variety of perspectives, commoner and noble, and from these vantage points we better understand the complex ways in which the principal character interact with the world. That is, we see their world not as a backdrop, painted as in a play, but as one where things are always going on, where every corridor leads somewhere, and every meal is prepared by someone. This narrative style allows Penman to simultaneously tell a primary story about a close-knit cast of characters, to include multiple viewpoints on those characters and from various walks of medieval life, and to not slow down the story by situating the narration only from the perspective of the principal character at hand.
In many ways, this is a novel to rival series like A Song of Ice and Fire: here is all the political intrigue, all the planning for and grabbing at power, all the sexual and personal politics, that characterize Martin’s book. For my critical tastes, Penman’s Here Be Dragons is a far better novel than A Game of Thrones or A Clash of Kings (as far as I’ve made it in the series to date) and a far more consistently good novel across chapters and storylines. It is true, though, that at times there feel to be no stakes for the characters in Here Be Dragons, that they seem to be pulled along by a history that is already told and known, rather than actively in the making, and that is largely a factor, I think, of Penman staying far away from physical conflict, from murder and death, or from crimes such as rape. The deaths that do happen are rarely experienced in the space of the narration and if they are seen by the characters, they are fleeting or not described in any way other than the matter of fact.
Penman’s is, in some sense, a more courtly telling of history, one that is almost romantic in the 19th-century sense, except that it lacks the shimmering quality of Tennyson or Waterhouse, and yet does revel in senses and emotion without turning to pure melodrama. It is neither what we would, today, call the “gritty realism” of fantasy’s grimdark, nor is it the busty and lusty drama of books by, say, Philippa Gregory, which stand somewhere between historical fiction and romance without fully committing to the latter. Rather, Penman stands somewhere near Ken Follett or Hillary Mantel as a writer of “serious” historical fiction that is interested in the stories, emotions, and lived experiences of the principal characters, real historical figures, but not at all interested in the melodrama that is often brought in to sell more popular—and, often, less-well-written—historical fictions of famous figures.
Historical Fiction-ing the Medieval Woman
Of course, this characterization raises many questions about the meaning, ideologies, and values of the terms at play: realism, seriousness, and brow. These are questions that are also highly gendered, and gender is central to Penman’s novel without becoming a strong critical element of Here Be Dragons. It is more of a curious meditation on gender, which says in the baldest terms that women are subjects of men that, in essence, patriarchy exists—without taking the step beyond to question that structure. It is, still, a story about a young girl and then a woman—Joanna—questioning who she is, what her role in courtly life is, and finding her sense of self regularly challenged in her accommodation to life in Wales, where women held a different social status and had greater (though not by any means equal) rights. As she ages and becomes a mother, even then her focus remains on men: how is she defined by John’s legacy of murder his political enemies? How is she defined as a wife to Llewelyn? How is she defined as a mother?
Throughout her life, from her early marriage to affair toward the end of the novel and the social repercussions it has in Gwynedd, Joanna has regular revelations that the women are the pawns of men; yes, loved by the men in their lives, but easily and readily set aside, disregarded, or married off for political gain. Joanna is ever frustrated by this, every surprised, and thus often in conflict with her father and husband—truly making the personal into the political and revealing how deeply emotionally charged medieval conflict could be—while women like Eleanor of Aquitaine or Isabelle are shown as much savvier actors, aware of the plight and role of women in the politics of the nobility, though one turns it to her advantage and usurps a man’s role while the other sits seemingly passively and uses her role as a woman to her great advantage.
When compared to Eleanor and Isabelle, Joanna isn’t particularly smart or politically wily. She is often driven less by political foresight—except when it comes to securing Dafydd’s inheritance of Gwynedd—than by emotional impulses that put her in danger, and she is only safeguarded by the kinder-than-expected reactions of the men around her. She is contrasted to Eleanor or Isabelle, even to her daughter Elena, as someone who blunders through life and very rarely makes an astute move, is rarely in control of her destiny or even tries really to control it, as other women around her do. A generous reading of this rather curious choice for her character might be that Joanna is meant to serve as a cipher for the average woman under patriarchy and how women are affected by the ways in which patriarchy curbs women’s ability to act. Sure there are exceptional women who stand up to patriarchy, but most remain at its whims (this is a driving force behind the rather tame politics of mainstream romance novels, as excellently argued by Catherine M. Roach in Happily Ever After: The Romance Story in Popular Culture). Perhaps Joanna is an attempt to narratively imbue agency and understanding so that we don’t say, “why weren’t women more like Eleanor?” or more pointedly, “why isn’t Joanna like Eleanor?”
Still, in spite of this more reparative reading, the novel gives us detailed critiques of Joanna’s naivety, usually as expressed by other women, so it’s unclear to me what we are supposed to make of Joanna except as a character lesson in dealing with and surviving patriarchy: here is what could go wrong for a woman in this period, here are the forces arrayed against her, here is how she survives, even if one mistake (an affair) nearly kills her. Joanna’s later comeuppance, when she is internally exiled to a coastal castle for her affair, is also rooted in questions of political power; her fidelity as a wife is linked directly to the authority of the prince in his own realm, so that the woman is figured as the very body politic of the medieval state. The threat of adultery—both the fearful and exciting possibility of committing it, and the consequences it might bring—weighs heavily on the narrative, especially in Joanna’s education of the world and her experience of other women.
When Penman closes Here Be Dragons, Joanna is still but one psychologically complex character in a novel full of such characters, where she is neither the most interesting of them—it doesn’t seem like Penman really knows what to do with her—nor the most critically insightful with regard to the thing Joanna spends most of the novel thinking about: her status as a woman (Eleanor of Aquitaine and Isabelle have much more to say about gender, and say it more interestingly). Curiously, the story doesn’t end with Joanna’s or Llewelyn’s later death, but at a somewhat anonymous time and place some three years before her death and six years before Llewelyn’s. But it ends up being a fitting end in a novel that so eschews the grand and monumental moments, where a bed or a hearth is more often the locus of the narrative action; it ends with a life’s romance rekindled, with past pains forgiven but not healed, with the lingering question of what will become of Wales and of all the great actions of people’s lives in the years and centuries to come. Here Be Dragons is both a brilliant work of historical fiction and an attempt to think through what making—or, rather, being a part of—history means.
Sean Guynes 