Interview with M J Porter

Why do you think you’re drawn to write primarily about the Anglo-Saxon period in England?

I grew up in the shadow of a strange little building which was said to house the bones of long-dead kings in the heart of Mercia. This was obviously not true—the building was made of good old-fashioned Victorian bricks—and the kings were actually British kings, not specifically Mercian, but when I went to university, my eyes were opened to the whole Saxon England aspect and, for me, not very good at geography, having places that I knew about and could place in my mind, helped enormously.

When it comes to your Earls of Mercia series, am I correct in my understanding that you wrote some of the later books first—books following Leofwine’s sons Northman and Leofric—and you then went back to write about Leofwine’s early life when you wrote The Earl of Mercia’s Father, which became book 1 in the series. Tell me a little bit about that experience of jumping backward in the timeline of this family; what special challenges or rewards, constraints or freedoms, did you find when it came to writing a part of the story whose later parts you had already written and published?

I wrote the books in order, starting with The Earl of Mercia’s Father, in its original title of Ealdorman. And I carried on writing chronologically, but then I made the mistake of jumping back in time to write about Lady Elfrida, England’s first queen, in the 960s, and I developed a relationship between her and Leofwine (a political one) and realised I needed to mention it in the books about Leofwine. So not so much writing backwards as then weaving a new narrative through two existing books. It was an interesting experience. The frustration of doing it was only beaten by the book I’ve written on Lady Estrid, Cnut’s sister, where I had to weave known ‘facts’ with events in the Earls of Mercia series to ensure it gelled together. I thought my head was going to explode at one point.

In The Earl of Mercia’s Father, you suggest many of the other nobles, including King Æthelred, seriously underestimated Leofwine’s worth early in his career and only later came to see that worthiness. Is this something that arose out of your research into the period?

I’m very perplexed by Ealdorman Leofwine. The more I’ve studied the period, the more I’ve considered whether he’s been retrospectively added into the narrative because of the success of his son, Leofric. But that’s just my personal thoughts. If everything happened as it seems to have done, Leofwine was very unusual in Æthelred’s and then Cnut’s court because he remained an important individual. No spoilers here, but he’s not named and shamed as Eadric Streona is. He doesn’t die in battle against Swein or his son Cnut. He lives through the unease of Cnut’s first years as England’s king. I just think there must be a reason for this—one that we can’t glimpse through the haze of the past but one there all the time. I determined to present him as honourable and fiercely loyal at a court riven with factionalism and over-mighty men.

Leofwine didn’t marry into Æthelred’s family, which is also quite unusual. We think that three of Æthelred’s daughters were married to ealdormen or military commanders during this period. I assume it might be because Leofwine was too old, but then what of his sons? Northman (Leofwine’s eldest son) did fall foul of the political intrigues taking place, but this doesn’t seem to have dented Leofwine’s place at court, or if it did, not for very long. Some suggest that Leofwine’s father died fighting beside Ealdorman Byrnthnoth at the Battle of Maldon in 991 and that he was related to the ealdormen of Mercia. As such, his pedigree could be even longer, but if that’s the case, he was ‘other’ to the Wessex men who came to dominate much of the reign. Many of the ealdormen were ‘imposed’ over the area they commanded for the king. They weren’t necessarily members of the local nobility, but Leofwine might well have been, and if not him, then his wife. It might, therefore, have taken some time for Æthelred to trust him.

Historians have not been kind to Æthelred, often depicting him as an inept and ineffectual king, perhaps owing to his nickname Unraed (‘ill-advised’), which is a pun on his actual name, which means ‘well-advised.’ But at least in The Earl of Mercia’s Father, I thought you portrayed him in a more balanced way than is often seen—flawed but earnest, well-meaning, and in fact willing to listen to good counsel when it’s given. Do you agree or disagree with those less flattering assessments? Why?

I’m a bit of an apologist for Æthelred. I don’t think he deserved his nickname, and I don’t think he deserves his reputation. I think he was faced with something that no one had faced before. We talk of Alfred ‘saving’ England, but he just saved Wessex. Æthelred was king of all of England, and the Viking raiders were persistent. The events of Æthelred’s reign are known as the Second Viking Age. There had been up to fifty years of relative ‘peace’ before the return of the Viking raiders in the 980s, and if you look closely, much of the warfare after about 910 was concerned with reclaiming the Danelaw, Jorvik, and Mercia than with fighting new invaders. Much had changed in that time. 

The narrative of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, on which we very much rely, is not a contemporary chronicle. All the events were written after Æthelred’s reign, with the benefit of hindsight. The more and more research I do, the more I think he’s tainted by the reputation of his father, as a serial womaniser, of his mother, deemed a regicide for what happened to Æthelred’s step-brother, Edward the Martyr (again unsubstantiated), and the imposition of a Danish king over an uneasy English populace. Even his ‘paying’ off of the Viking raiders seems to be something that happened during the reign of Alfred, and Alfred doesn’t have a bad reputation because of that. I think poor Æthelred was a scapegoat for what happened. Yes, it is possible it could have been avoided with a more concerted approach, but I don’t think the bishops helped with their call to prayer. What they needed was warriors, not prayers. Æthelred II, as he should be known, was the English king who ruled for the longest period of time before the Norman Conquest (979-1013/and then 1013-1016) he was reinstated after the death of Swein.) There must be a reason for this, lost in the mists of time. After all, he had enough sons that one of them could have replaced him after Swein’s death, but this didn’t happen. As the murder of two previous kings shows (Edmund and Edward the Martyr), the English were not above killing off a consecrated king. They not only chose not to do this with Æthelred II, but the witan also restored him to the kingdom. That needs some serious thought.

You’ve written quite a bit of historical fiction set in England in the 7th century and the 9th through 11th centuries (particularly about Mercia), as well as novels and stories set in other times and places. Are there other aspects of Anglo-Saxon England you’re eager to write about? What about other periods of history or other locations? What are you working on next?

I have also written three twentieth-century mystery books, which were a lot of fun, but I intend to write as much as possible about the near-enough six hundred years of Saxon England. To put that into context, that would take me back to just before the Wars of the Roses in today’s money. I haven’t yet touched the 8th century, and I need to do more on the 7th, but I also want to write about the events between the end of Roman Britain and the beginning of Saxon England, and so much more… At the moment, I am writing non-fiction on the royal women of the long tenth-century, and then I’m returning to the world of The Eagle of Mercia Chronicles—early 9th century—and then, hopefully, I’ll make it back to the Earls of Mercia, later 11th century. I’ve left my readers hanging for too long already. 

For more about M J Porter, visit her website: https://www.mjporterauthor.com