Avalon

More about the book

Story is set in England during the last quarter of the 10th century, when Saxons and Danes warred and Viking raids ravaged its outposts. Proceeding to King Edgar's court, Romieux de Provence, noble born with the blood of King Alfred and Charlemagne in his veins, is shipwrecked on the Cornish coast, where he meets Merewyn, who believes she is descended from King Arthur. It is Rumon's burden to maintain this fiction when he knows she is the product of a Viking foray; he promises' her dying mother to take her to Glastonbury. Merewyn becomes a lady to the wicked Queen Alfrida, who bewitches Rumon, and much of the book is taken up with the bloody proceedings of succession by murder at the English court. By the time Rumon realizes his love for Merewyn, she, who had loved him, is lost to him, borne off by her true father, the Viking Ketil, and married to Sigurd. She lives first in Iceland, then, when Eric the Red proposes to settle Greenland, in that ill fated community. At the last, widowed, she returns to England, where Rumon has taken the vows of a Benedictine monk, remarries, and acknowledges publicly her true parentage.