Morgan Llewelyn

An Interview with Morgan Llewelyn
By Maireid Sullivan
October 2000

"I think writers are always explaining themselves to themselves." Morgan Llywelyn

Toward the end of our adventure in Ireland, in October 2000, where we had spent time filming interviews with my favorite Irish women musicians, at their homes all around the country, for a documentary based on my book, Celtic Women in Music (1999), Ben and I took time out for another separate adventure. We drove about an hour north of Dublin, to Skerries, Co. Meath, and the home of Irish novelist and historian Morgan Llywelyn.

Morgan was born in the United States, of Irish and Welsh parentage. She has been living in Ireland for the past decade or so. She told us about her love of horses--how she came to be short-listed for the American Olympic equestrian team. She described the devastation she experienced when she narrowly lost her chance to participate in the Olympic Games, coming in fifth in the final tryouts for four places. She knew her beloved horse could not wait for another four years. She described how her mother quickly came to her rescue, helping her avoid shattering depression by redirecting her interests to the job of researching her family history. To make a long story short, when she discovered the Llywelyn connection with Wales and the Battle of Hastings, she wanted to tell the whole family. Both her mother and her husband suggested she write it all down.

She was soon encouraged to present her manuscript, unsolicited, to a publisher who happened to walk by the desk, piled with submissions, saw her name and wondered if this was the same Morgan Llywelyn of equestrian fame. The publisher immediately read the manuscript: She was enthralled by the dramatic realism in the stories of men and horses caught-up in fierce battle, woven through with the seductions of lords and ladies, kings and queens, tales of romance and political intrigue from a major turning point in English and Welsh history. The Winds of Hastings, Morgan's first book, published in 1978, is the story that led her to write many books (40 million sold) illuminating Celtic history, from ancient times to the present. Morgan told me that she wrote her second book, "Lion of Ireland"- the story of Brian Boru, published in 1980, for the Irish side of her family.

The study of Celtic history is enormously broad, and Morgan is such a rare creature in the way she touches upon all of it! I don't know anyone else who has such a well-grounded comprehension of the breadth of the Celtic world, and especially modern Irish history. Morgan Llywelyn has imaginatively brought Irish history to life, from its ancient roots to the twentieth century, by cross-referencing intuitive insights and factual information. What a storyteller! It was a great privilege to see her express her irrepressible energy and genius before my very eyes, and it is personally encouraging to have experienced her great warmth and generosity of spirit!

Here follows
Part One of our conversation.

Mairéid Sullivan: Let’s talk about your love of horses, Morgan.

Morgan Llywelyn: I’ve always been horse-crazy. I was the only one in my immediate family who was. I’m sure it’s genetic. I had ancestors who were horse-crazy. But I was a great disappointment to my parents. My mother had no interest in horses. My grandparents had no interest in horses. My mother’s mother had ridden in her youth. She had fox hunted and done all those Anglo things. But nobody in the family really cared about all of that. From the earliest memory of mine, I was mad about them: a picture of a horse; the shape of a horse's back. The smell of horses, I thought was wonderful. It was always my preoccupation. I was going to grow up and raise horses. And when I was eight or nine, we went for a Sunday drive in the country. We were living in Texas at the time--with my grandfather. We drove passed a polo field and I went mad, absolutely mad. And so my mother stopped the car and let me go up and look at the horses and talk to them, and first thing you know, I was over the fence and talking to the manager of the polo field, a wonderful Mexican man named Louis Ramos. I don’t know if he is still alive or not. But he told me about the horses and he took me around to see the stalls, and watch a practice match. Next thing I knew, on the weekends I was getting on the bus and going out to the polo field. My mother was thoroughly convinced that a dose of this would cure me. Well, they let me muck-out the stalls and in return they let me ride on some of the older polo ponies, which is how I learned to ride.

Mairéid: How old were you then?

Morgan: By this time I was about eleven. Then I started skipping school and going out there during the week. Another person was keeping jumpers out there and she let me ride her jumper. The horse cantered down to the fence and stopped and I went on and jumped the fence and broke my nose. Louis rang my mother, saying I was sitting there on a hay-bail, blood streaming down my face. My mother was still absolutely convinced this would cure me. And it didn’t. I just kept on. I never got over my love of horses. As you see around me still, I have horses everywhere. (Referring to her collection of miniatures.)

Mairéid: When they finally took you seriously, what happened?

Morgan: I don’t know if they ever took me seriously. I took it seriously. I saved my lunch money and saved it all up until I could buy a horse from a rent stable nearby.

Mairéid: Did they know about this?

Morgan: No. Until I showed up with the horse. I had paid $75 for an old horse, and I brought him home to put in our back yard, as they call it in America, where he ate all my mother’s roses, which did not make him popular. But I eventually traded him in on a black mare, Briar Rose, who I trained to jump. When I was fourteen she jumped seven feet with me. A spectacular jumper--a natural born jumper.

Mairéid: Often?

Morgan: Once. Once at seven feet is enough, at the Forth Worth Stock Show. At that time it was a record for an woman in America. About six months later a female member of the Olympic team jumped seven feet six. I think the world’s record for a man is eight feet three--a horse in Chili.

Mairéid: My father trained jumpers.

Morgan: Did he? How extraordinary! I loved jumping. Loved it! After I married, I was doing some catch riding, when our son was six months old and we were living in Colorado. My husband was a pilot.

Mairéid: What is catch riding?

Morgan: It means for fifty dollars, you’ll ride someone else’s horse in a show. I turned one over on myself, when we were jumping on a timed outside course, and we were jumping over the hunter course. It was a green jumper, the first year for him, and I didn’t know him at all, but I thought I was a fabulous rider. I tried to bend him around my leg, because when you are jumping against the clock, you are turning mid air if you can, to make up time between the fences. I tried to bend this horse around my leg to get to the next fence in a more auspicious angle and instead of bending, he rolled over. With me underneath him on the stone wall. I broke a considerable number of bones.

Mairéid: At what age was this?

Morgan: I was probably twenty, because it was the summer. I broke thirty-six bones. I fractured my pelvis, broke both legs. A big mess. I finally got out of the body cast and my husband began to make noises saying, "You can’t jump any more horses." I wound up riding dressage, which I loved. It turned out I liked dressage more than jumping. I like the pickiness, the precision, the finesse, the patience, the reiteration. A writer would understand when I said ‘the rewriting’. I love that. It suited my temperament right down to the ground. So, then I showed dressage for a number of years. I finally acquired Attacus, who was my big gray horse. Oh, he was wonderful! I got him as a six-year old and had him all his life, for thirteen years. He got me as far as being short-listed for the United States Olympic team in 1976.

Mairéid: Olympic training is a very difficult discipline. How was that for you?

Morgan: That was pre-drugs and I think the drugs issue never influenced the Equestrian sports anyway. Because you’d have to give them to the horse, and you just can’t give drugs to horses. It was very demanding. Showing horses by itself is a terrific discipline for someone who becomes a writer later, because a horse has to exercise every day. You have to do it whether you want to or not. You don’t give yourself a day off. You can’t. Whether headaches, stomach aches, no matter what is going on in your life, the horse has to have his share. So that is very good for a writer.

Mairéid: Horses generally love their relationship with people and like to participate with people.

Morgan: Horses are very generous. A mentally healthy horse is a very generous animal. And they do try to please you. They try to help. They try to participate. They can be enormously affectionate. Dressage is a telepathic art. It’s like dancing with a good dancer. It may take eight years to get a horse to it’s peak. It is a marriage. It is you and the horse. There is no catch riding in dressage. You have to be on that horse, with that horse every day. And it’s like dancing in that all of the nerves of your body plug into his nerve endings. I weigh a hundred and eight to ten pounds and I am sitting on a thousand to twelve hundred pounds of horse. And all twelve hundred pounds are my twelve hundred pounds of muscle. Right into my fingers, my seat bones. It is a fabulous, totally addictive feeling, when it’s good. When it’s bad, it’s really bad.

Nothing can embarrass you publicly like a horse. Horses will do unpredictable things. They can take a dislike to something very suddenly. A horse at that level of competition is very high-strung. A dressage horse and rider are judged as a unit--on how you look as a picture. So you have to have as much grace and poise as possible. You have to sit up there looking as if you are doing nothing and the horse is doing all of it. A really good horse will give you that appearance. But the horse and rider both are very up, very keen, and the trick is for both of you to look like you are out there playing and having a wonderful time. It requires enormous concentration, especially to forget the hundred thousand people who are watching every move.

One of the great advantages in riding, and perhaps more in dressage than in other forms of riding, is learning all of this communication with a non-human mind. This is a super training ground for a writer. Because you have to develop whole levels of empathy. It’s not even like being close to a dog or a cat, which have different minds--more sophisticated and cunning in many ways--but your safety depends on your communication with this non-human mind. On a really good day, not only do you know what the horse is thinking but the horse also knows what you are thinking. And you feel this electric current moving back and forth between you. It’s quite magical.

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Mairéid: Let’s talk about what happened to take you from riding to writing.

Morgan: Well, I didn’t make the Olympic team. I missed it by five-tenths of a percentage point at the final trial. So I was the fifth best dressage rider. To say I was disappointed would be a severe understatement. I was dreadful. I kicked the door. I swore. I was in a really bad frame of mind. My husband couldn’t think of anything to help me. Neither could our son. My mother, to distract me, got me involved. She’d always been our family chronicler. She was very involved in family history and genealogy. On her side of the family, through her father’s mother, they went back to Llywelyn the Great. The last, and I always say this with my tongue in my cheek, the last legitimate Prince of Wales. And my mother was very proud of that, and she had the family genealogy back through the Llywelyn’s, as far as 642 AD. Llywelyn on one side and Mooney on the other. Her middle name was Llywelyn. And I had been Christened with that as my middle name also. So, she wanted to get me involved in anything that would keep me from being desperately disappointed. The Olympics is every four years and my horse was fourteen then. By the next Olympics he would be eighteen, so this was his last shot at it. And he had given his all. I just hadn’t been quite good enough. I knew that. Everybody was saying it’s the horses fault, but it wasn’t the horse. I wasn’t quite good enough, even though I had spent my whole life trying to make the Olympic team.

Mairéid: That must have been a real tragedy for you, and a huge challenge learning to cope with the shock. It is interesting, when one is comprehensively undergoing a tragic experience, to see how one gets out of it. What were the actual circumstances for you?

Morgan: Well, my mother insisted that I help her do the research. At that time she and my father were living in an apartment very near ours. We were living in Maryland. My husband was a pilot for Baltimore Airways. My mother would have me come over every afternoon. She made iced coffee for us and talked about all of her research on family genealogy, because she was trying to trace down all the other lines too. I know now it was a very conscious thing on her part, to distract me. I guess I recognized it subconsciously then too, and just refocused all of that intense passion onto helping her with that, because it kept me from thinking about my own disappointment.

Mairéid: You knew deep down that you were going to sink deeper into a depression or you were going to survive by refocusing you mind?

Morgan: Yes. This was something to grab onto. And I did. With a vengeance. I’d always been a voracious reader. I started reading her collection of the nonfiction and the histories. The one that she was really interested in at the time was Frank Stenton’s Anglo Saxon England, which had a good deal of information on our Llywelyn ancestors. I got to reading that and I came across this story that absolutely fascinated me. I kept going back on the afternoon and when my husband came in from flying, I’d say, “Charlie, I want to tell you this.” And I’d start telling him this story I had uncovered and the more I talked about it the more excited I got. And Charley kept saying, “That’s a book. You ought to write that down.” And mind you, I had left school at sixteen to show horses. I had no education. I said, “I can’t possibly write a book. I read them like mad, but I can’t possibly write a book. There’s just no way.” And I kept on boring him blue in the evenings. I was talking about all of this, Hastings, and the Normans, and the Danes, and Harold, all this marvelous stuff. And he kept telling me to write it down. So, finally, I began to write it down.

And it did make a book. And as I wrote, I found the same kinds of opportunities for detail and polish and for passion and for energy that had been focused on the riding. I got really seriously into enjoying the writing. I got about two hundred pages of it done and I would read it to my mother and I would read it to Charlie and they both started urging me to try to sell it.

I had not a clue. I think there is no substitute for ignorance. Ignorance is the best asset you can have. I had a huge library even then, nothing compared to what I have here today. I went and I looked at the books in my library. This had turned out to be a kind of historical romance, not a kind of ‘bodice ripper’, but it revolved around the love of Aldyth for one of my ancestors, Griffith Ap Llywelyn, who was killed by Harold, and Aldyth (or Edith) subsequently married Harold and was an eye witness to the battle of Hastings. Aldyth was an eyewitness to his death. My ancestor had been her first husband, whom Harold had killed.

Actually, what had happened, what excited me and made me write the book, was Harold had also had a Mistress named Edith Swanneck. She, too, was at the Battle of Hastings, where Harold was killed by William. She, too, had been a witness. After Harold was dead, William the Conqueror, who in those days was known as William the Bastard, had people searching the battlefield, trying to find Harold’s body. Because Harold was the king of England, and William had now made himself King of England, he wanted to get that body out of sight at once. They had stripped all of the dead and left them naked and mutilated on the battlefield.

It was October and it was hot. I could see it--more, I could smell it. They could not identify the dead king. Finally, and this is true, by torch light, William sent out monks together with not the kings wife but his mistress, to identify the body, the chronicler tells us, by signs that only she knew. Edith Swanneck identified Harold’s body on the battlefield. And when his men gathered it up and took it away, it was never discovered, as it was buried in a hidden place. Harold’s widow, Aldyth, then took their young sons, who were the linear heirs to the throne of England, and disappeared from the pages of history. This was a fascinating story. I could see these two women, above the battlefield, and the scene by torch light.

So, I had written down as far as the battle itself and discovered in doing that, now that I was studying the battle, I really loved the military campaign. I loved military history. I loved how all of this worked. And I sent off what I had, which is the first two hundred pages, to the publisher I respected most for literary merit in historical novels, at that time, and it was Houghton Mifflin in Boston. I thought, well, I’ll please Charley, I’ll post it off. I didn’t know you needed an agent. I didn’t know that publishers were hardly ever reading unsolicited manuscripts anymore. I just wrapped up what I had in an envelope and stuck my name on it and sent it off. Went back to living my life. Our son Sean was getting ready to go to Johns Hopkin. I got a letter in the post from a woman called Ruth Hapgood at Houghton Mifflin saying they were buying my novel and where was the rest of it? I went into shock. There wasn’t any rest of it. I hadn’t finished the book. But, fortunately, our son had just moved out of his room and into the dorm at Hopkin. So I rang Good Will and had them come and collect his furniture and I went down to the nearest cheap shop and bought all of the bright green Turkish toweling I could find and a lot of play-dough and a lot of little lead soldiers and I turned the floor of his room into the battle ground. I reconstructed the Battle of Hastings. I had the soldiers here and the soldiers there, to understand how the whole thing worked. I finished the book, and sent it off to Houghton Mifflin and it was an alternate-main selection for Doubleday, the Doubleday Book Club. And I was a writer. Hadn’t meant to be. Hadn’t planned to be.

Mairéid: When was this?

Morgan: Winds of Hastings was published in ’78. I wrote it in 1977. And no sooner was it published than Ruth came to me. She says, “What are you going to write next?” I said, "What ‘next’?" “Oh! You have to write a second book. It has to be better than the first one. You don’t want to be a one book author,” she said. And I said, “No. Do you think I need to get an agent?” “Certainly,” she said. So I acquired myself an agent. But my father, my very Irish father, took umbrage at the fact that I’d written a book about the Welsh side of the family, which is only a quarter of me--less than that really. There was a great amount of throat clearing and waving of eyebrows at me. So, he armed me with every history book he could find with the his ancestors in them. And my next book was Lion of Ireland, the story of Brian Boru. That was 1980.

Mairéid: That was the first one I read. When I read the book it all came back to me. I was told those stories at home and at school as a child. Brian Boru always loomed heroically large for me. You did a wonderful job with the story.

Morgan: My father had told me the story. To hear dad talk, of course, he was at the Battle of Clontarf.

Mairéid: Both of my parents told the story as if they were there.

Morgan: And subsequently, at the GPO, with Pearce. It is remarkable. Everyone in Ireland was at these great battles.

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Mairéid: You picked the best Irish story.

Morgan: And I’ve never looked back. So that’s how I fell into this and people ask how did I get started. And I simply say, “It wouldn’t work for you.”

I have a story about why the publisher bought The Winds of Hastings. As it happened, Houghton Mifflin wasn’t reading unsolicited manuscripts either. It came in over the transom, as they say, which is publisher's vernacular for 'unsolicited' and then it goes into a thing called the slush pile, and the secretaries, when they have time, send it back. Ruth Hapgood, who became my editor, wandered through and saw my name on the envelope. She told me this story later. "Let's see that," she said. And she took it into her cubbyhole and sat down. Why did she pick it up? She is a horse show groupie and she recognized the name. My horse was famous and I had shown him all over the country. For that reason she thought she'd have a look at it. And she opened it and the first page is a physical description, together with smells of the battlefield two days after the battle, and she said she sat down and read the whole thing. So, it's one of those weird coincidences. I didn't do it the hard way. I didn't spend years starving in a garret. I didn't intend to be a writer. It was a pure accident.

Mairéid: What does it do to you when you realize that life, in hindsight, is a series of miracles that are all interconnected somehow. There was meaning here. There was a form that was being fulfilled. What do you think about that?

Morgan: I actually used that in the third book, after Lion. In trying to understand myself, and I think writers are always explaining themselves to themselves. I knew that I was as close to being pure Celt as one can be, mostly Irish with a little add-mixture of Welsh. I wanted to know more about the Celtic people. And so, I went back to the earliest anthropological classic Celt, which is Hallstatt in the 7 century BC. And wrote there, called the Horse Goddess, the story of that moment in time, that cusp of history, when the Celts acquired the ridden horse and burst out of their homeland, which was Bohemia--the Rhineland, Hallstatt, Austria, and covered Western Europe. The heroin of the Horse Goddess, is a woman I called Epona, the eponymous Horse Goddess, and I have her acquiring the art of riding the horse from the Scythians, who were coming west.

There are two heroes, Kazhak, a Scythian warrior and prince, and Kernunnos, who is part of ancient Celtic mythology; the priest, the Shapechanger. I was fascinated by the idea of the Shapechanger. I got a marvelous book called Shapechangers and Werewolves. It's a Central European book, studying the whole idea of sympathetic magic and the practitioners of sympathetic magic becoming Shapechangers as they lured the prey in for the hunter. I like the whole idea of Kernunnos, He is apparently the villain, as you start off, but by the end of the book he represents what we owe to the tribe. And the whole importance of giving back what you owe to the tribe.

In the Horse Goddess, I wrote quite a lengthy bit which appears all the way through, about the pattern. Listening to the pattern inside yourself and letting that pattern take and shape you. Partly as a result of what was happening in my own life, I'd realized that we, each of us, do have a pattern and that perhaps in the noise of the twentieth century, we didn't listen to it anymore. We didn't hear it. We started off in our own directions where we thought we could make this happen, and make that happen, and yet the pattern, like a spider-web, is underneath us all the time.

Actually stop and listen to the spirit within, I am always having Epona listening to the spirit within, then you know what to do or what not to do. That little still small voice in there. Suddenly you go this way and not that way and can never tell anyone why you go this way and not that--why you take this path and not that path. But you are guided by that spirit within. So I concluded that it must have been very much like that for our ancestors. Much more so than it is now. They were much more spiritual, if you will, in that they were drawn in these directions by recognition and intuition that we tend to ignore anymore.

Mairéid: Most people tend to have a fantastic idea about what stillness means. Stillness is so still that it seems too natural--too easy for many people, since society demands we make an effort. When I have reflected on a moment when I am making a choice, I've realized than in almost all of those moments I'm looking inward and absorbing information without discussing it. It is the act of looking and absorbing from which I make the choice. That stillness is very difficult to articulate but it is crystal clear and so calm.

Morgan: It has to be calm because your inner 'computer', and we wouldn't have this idea 700 years before Christ, your inner computer is synthesizing all of this information. Taking it in--making its balanced judgments: what our ancestors would have called intuition. It is all the same thing. It is all of our knowledge, all of our experiences, all of our sensory perceptions and something else, all blending in us to feed us back a certain amount of information that we can act upon or not.

Mairéid: I see us as being like little bubbles of reality which we move around in, meeting other bubbles of reality and if we connect, it is unique. But difficulty occurs when sometimes we connect with somebody and there isn't an understanding, especially if you have to work with them and they have an influence on the manifestation of your dream when your dream is not necessarily perfectly formed yet, and they take it in another direction--against you.

Morgan: I know what you are saying. That always gives me a metallic taste in my mouth. I think it is a chemical thing. You can meet people and you can see that almost invariably they are people who, upfront, understand exactly--and they have your idea--and they don't have your idea. And they are not going down your road.

Mairéid: There is a vision here. Living each day is about letting the bubbles interact, equally.

Morgan: You are listening to the spirit within. Before you leave I'll give you a copy of the Horse Goddess. I think you'll enjoy it and you can let me know what you think. Because into it I put a great deal of the philosophy that I was developing as I matured and worked my way through things--spiritual discoveries, these sorts of things.

Mairéid: We must teach by our own experience.

Morgan: Yes, ...the whole Bardic transmission of education. We each can show our own way and if there is something valid in that for someone else, then they can pick it up. I think the one thing we must not do is superimpose that on someone else. What we can say is this worked for me. This is what I have discovered. If this works for you--wonderful. It doesn't have to. But this worked for me. So that's what I try to do.

Sometimes things work against you. I published the Horse Goddess to huge acclaim, because it came after Lion Of Ireland and Lion had just swept everything away. President Regan invited me to the white house, ...all these things for Lion. So when Horse Goddess came out, something went seriously wrong. Because I was looking at the idea of the Shapechanger. This represented the beginning of the Druidic culture, which I thought was really important, the genuine Druids, not the people dancing around Stonehenge, but the genuine Druids. And when it hit the bookshelves in America with a Druid in it, people who didn't read the book said, “Oh, that's fantasy,” and I found myself in the Fantasy and Science Fiction department in the bookstores. I went in to the publisher and I said, “I write mainstream historical fiction. Why are you marketing me in Science Fiction? Druids are not Science Fiction. Druids aren't even fiction. They were the whole intellectual class of the Celtic people. If you call them fantasy, you might as well call the Pope fantasy.” But from that day to this I am considered a Fantasy writer.

Stubbornly, I kept on writing what I wanted to write. After the Horse Goddess, I had the Celts, so to speak. I showed how they came out of their isolation, from the salt mines of Hallstatt. I was very lucky, the Austrian government let me spend time in Hallstatt to absorb the feeling there. They have a wonderful reconstruction.

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Mairéid: How did you get them to let you do that?

Morgan: I gave them Lion of Ireland. At any rate, I had learned, doing Lion, as I wrote most of it over here, that for me it is very important to be on-site--to live on-site. To take my shoes off and walk the ground, to smell the air, to try and get as far back in time as I could, to turn off the twentieth century around me. I've done that with every book.

After the Horse Goddess, I wanted to take the Celts a little farther, to show how they got to Ireland. The next book was Bard, the odyssey of the Irish, which is the story of Amhergin (pronounced Avrigan in old Irish), at the end of the Bronze Age, 500 BC. When the Milesians arrived in Ireland they brought the Iron Age with them. They are the descendants of Epona and Kazhak, of the Horse Goddess, 200 years later, when they came down over the Pyrenees, into Galicia, getting ready to go to Ireland. That was a challenge in that I wrote it in triads. I wanted to use the poetic Celtic triads. So, instead of having one adjective, I had three, or three adverbs. Everything was in three. I used two of Amhergin's own poems, which still exist. They are the oldest known poems in Western Europe, and I wrote one for him in the book. Bard not only tells the story of the coming of the Iron Age, but I am still dealing around the cusp of folkloric history, and getting even closer to what they are going to accuse me of writing ...fantasy. This is because I brought in the Tuatha de Danann, who anthropologists speculate just might have been a proto-Celtic people who were already here.

They were definitely Bronze Age. They may have been La Tene Celts. But they used Bronze rather than Iron. And the Milesians came with Iron. The Milesians, who had originally come out of Hallstatt, had introduced forged iron to Rome. By the way, the Celts introduced the Romans to forged Iron and to the use of soap. The Celts introduced trousers to western Europe. The Celts brought in the cult of the trophy head, which they got from the Scythians. So they were to blame for a lot. When the iron came it, of course, destroyed the Bronze. I was fascinated by this cusp where one people come in and destroy another, subjugate another, wipe out another, because in Ireland we are preoccupied with this kind of thing. And taking the hypothesis that the Tuatha de Danann probably were real, and then realizing that the Milesians, who were also Celts, not only overcame them but subsequently deified them--made them their gods and goddesses: The magic people. They developed all kinds of superstitions about them. This was so typical of the ancient Celts, who always glorified their enemies. Because you've done a lot more if you’ve defeated someone spectacular than if you've defeated someone who is just a bog trotter, haven't you? A huge difference.

Mairéid: Would there have been an element of sorrow after destroying such a beautiful people, that then led them to want to believe they are immortally alive, but in a different realm? Since they describe such wonderful attributes of the Tuatha de Danann, they would, quite possibly, not want to think that they had barbarically destroyed those attributes.

Morgan: More likely they usurped all of those attributes for themselves, as Christianity would usurp paganism when it came into Ireland. They may have felt a degree of guilt. We are a little pre-guilt here though.

Mairéid: What about the idea that the Tuatha de Danann live under the earth and are the spirit of the earth, the elements. Another realm of beings who will continue to be present as long as the original land is there. Finally, they might have, smilingly, said something like, "Well, we did kill them, but they are still here, and even more profoundly so. And they continue to support us."

Morgan: I'll tell you a little story, Mairéid, that goes with that. My dear friend Sonja Shoreman, who lives in Ennis, and I do a lot of rambling. One of our favorite places is the Burren. And one of our favorite places there is the wonderful Oughtmama Valley. There are some ancient churches there. There is a Holy Well, St. Coleman's Well. They still have Pattern Day there, and walk around St. Coleman's Well. And it is holy water for eyes. We were up there one day and, as happens in this Catholic country of ours, people had left offerings inside the well curb--people who had come to bathe their eyes in the water. And they had left rosaries, and little miraculous medals. Suddenly we burst out laughing when we saw that someone had left a yellow plastic Pope-mobile, which I thought was a wonderful thing to find in the Holy Well. The Pope used to travel around, after the attempted assassination, in a yellow Pope-mobile with a big plastic bulletproof bubble, and this was a little model of it.

While Sonja was looking at this, I think she photographed it, I looked at something that I had seen there several times before and hadn't really investigated. Finally, I got down on my knees. It was a stone cairn about a meter across, a very old stone cairn, within a couple meters of the Holy Well. There was a little aperture on one side. I got down and looked in and I began taking out what I found in there. Bear in mind that this is within six feet of a Holy Well, which, of course, was once pagan, but is now a Christian Holy Well. It's a stone cairn with a little opening. It was filled with iron. Old iron. Pieces of horseshoe, pieces of roofing nails, broken pieces of plow. Some of them, Mairéid, still so new they hadn't rusted. People who come up to Oughtmama to do the pattern, to pray at this wonderful holy place, also bring cold iron and put it in that cairn, that entrance to the other world. Because the iron keeps the 'good people' underground. And I bet they don't even know why they do it. But they bring up their offering and, traditionally, put it in the stone cairn. I thought, now this is Ireland: a yellow plastic pope-mobile and cold iron to keep the fairies away.

Mairéid: I saw that during my childhood in West Cork. It is all there still.

Morgan: Its all there, as you would say, in the bubble. I never forgot that. It was so extraordinary.

At any rate, the Milesians came to Ireland. And that was Bard. And then, after Bard, we were living in New Hampshire at that time, and my editor wanted me to write a book about an Irish woman. I’m not really comfortable writing about women. Granted, Hastings was a love story. But that is not really what interests me, ...those relationships only. When I have sex in my books, I am not writing romance, I’m writing sex. It is part of the human experience. I’m really interested in power and politics and war. So I said, all right, I’ll write a book about a strong Irish woman: Granuaile--power, politics and war! So I gave them Grania in 1986. I wrote that when my husband was dying of cancer. Five members of my family died within thirteen months. They were all living with me. With the money from Lion, we had bought this big farmhouse in New Hampshire, and invited our elderly relatives to come live with us. I didn’t think they would, but they did.

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Mairéid: They came and they died?

Morgan: They came and they died. We had my mother and father. We had Charlie’s grandmother who was ninety-two. Charlie’s father, who died of brain cancer and then my husband. My son was in Pittsburgh at this stage, finishing Law School, and so after Charlie died, I sold up and came to Ireland.

And the next book I wrote, the next serious book I wrote... I wrote a couple of little stories to pay my freight. The next serious book I wrote was Druids, published in 1991, which is an investigation of the Druidic culture. I went back and retranslated Caesar. I wanted to look at Caesar’s battle for Gaul, told from the point of view of the Celts. Because we get all this wonderful Roman propaganda about how marvelous the Romans were. Forget that! Caesar caused one of the great genocides of all time. He exterminated hundreds of thousands of Gauls. In some cases just by having their hands cut off so that they bled to death. His statistics were seriously skewed to convince the people back in Rome that he was much more victorious than he was. Because it was all a political power play, for himself. So, Druids is told from the point of view of the Gauls, ...the Celts--Vercingetorix, who of course was real, and Ainver, the chief Druid. It finally winds up in the sacred sacrificial grove of the Carnutes, which was Vercingetorix’s tribe. And where the great grove of the Carnutes stood, the sacrificial Celtic grove, the cathedral of Chartres stands today, which is where the book ends.

But I really wanted to find out everything I could about the real Druids. Here is where I began to realize that Christianity had appropriated the pagan world. Because in studying this one, I learned that the great cathedrals all over Europe were built on pagan sites. It isn’t just our Holy Wells here that were pagan wells. It’s all over the world. But it is very interesting to read the classical scholars about the Druids, because I had not known the extent to which things were known about them. I was already very aware that I was being bashed for writing about Druids because everyone ‘knew’ they were fantasy and fairy tales. Caesar writes about them. Marcus Aurelius writes about them. Suetonius wrote about them. I quoted some of the most powerful quotes, in the beginning of Druids, from the classical scholars, because I thought people might be interested. Caesar, for example, accused the Celts of being barbarians because they worshipped too many gods, and they very foolishly believed in the immortality of the soul, which proved they were stupid. I found a lot of very interesting material about the Druids. We know more about them than we think we do. It was the whole intelligentsia of the Celtic world. The judges, the poets, the genealogists, the healers, the teachers. Anyone who had gifts of the mind, rather than gifts of the hand, could qualify to be a Druid. And, of course, the Druidic schools, the great Bards had to study for twenty years. Everything had to be learned by rote.

Mairéid: It’s the same today, and for a few years longer. There are countries in Europe and Australia, for instance, where education is free

Morgan: Absolutely. The great difference was that the Druid class was supported by the rest of them. They gave their gifts freely in turn for being supported. As it should be. We are trying to get back to it a little. While I was writing Druids, the Editor-in-Chief of Morrow got in touch with my agent, and asked if I would be interested in writing about 'Cuchillane' (mispronounced as Cu-chill-lane) for William Morrow. I said, “Who? What?” After awhile the penny dropped and I said, "You mean CuChulain. Oh, I’d love to, actually.'" That was Red Branch, published in 1989.

Mairéid: I really enjoyed that book. You did a great job with the character of Medb as well as CuChulain.

Morgan: Medb was fun. Medb was what was left over from Grania and Gormlaith in Pride of Lions, ... this very strong woman. As I would subsequently do in Finn Mac Cool, I wanted to look at this seminal figure in Irish folkloric history as having been a real person. Because I don’t think we have that much imagination. I think they are based on a degree of reality. CuChullain could well have held the gap of the north, because in those days all of Ulster was forest and bog and mountain and one little narrow pass in or out. One hero fighting alone could have held it for awhile, and if he did he would become myth. Starting on that principle, I tried to develop the whole story of CuChulain, aligning it with the myth, to show you how the myth wove in with real life, trying to understand him from a psychological point of view. He was interesting to me in that if the folk lore that supports him is true. He believed he was the son of a god. This is right about the era of the birth of Christ. I thought, well, how does a man deal with this. How do you deal with growing up with the possibility that you may be half immortal. So I had to look at that aspect.

Mairéid: His father was the Lugh. Interesting to see the parallel with the time of Christ.

Morgan: CuChulain’s father was the God, Lugh, if his mother was telling the truth. I had to be very dodgy about all this, because we never really know. But I enjoyed this aspect of writing about Irish history because I’m writing about a time when these things were not myth: when they were real; when people genuinely believed them. And I had to write them so that the reader sees the people genuinely believe it. This isn’t fantasy. This isn’t a fairy tale. These are the beliefs of the time.

Mairéid: Humanity has always had a class of people who work on analyzing the mysterious: e.g. today's physicists, etc. It is marvelous to see that the perception we are applying in science today is parallel to ancient perception.

Morgan: They lived in a world where their text book was nature.

Mairéid: In some traditional Irish Sean Nos songs, the anger of nature is expressed through the singer--the anger in the song is an expression of nature's anger.

Morgan: The Celtic Gods weren’t gods like the Greek and Roman Gods. The Greeks and the Romans put up statues of themselves and made themselves Gods. The Celts were looking at all the faces of creation, the creator imminent in the creation. The tree, the river, the mountain--these were all the faces of one God.

Michael O’Brien, of O’Brien Press, came to me one day and asked me if I could write Brian Boru’s story for children. I had never written anything for children and my immediate reaction was, …I mean, he had four wives and married some of them simultaneously, he had at least thirty-two concubines, who got lost in the cutting room floor when I wrote the original novel. It wasn’t a children’s story. It was a complex story about a complex man. I said. "No, I couldn’t possibly." So, because when I’m challenged, I’m challenged. I went home and tried to figure out how I could. I ultimately did it. I wrote a children’s book for O’Brien Press called Brian Boru.

Mairéid: We were all told the story as children so there had to be a way to do it.

Morgan: Oh, yes. There is, there is. I learned that you can tell children almost anything you can tell adults, and make them understand, if you relate it through the senses rather than through the abstract. They speak in a more basic language. And then I did Strongbow, in 1992, for O’Brien Press, again. And told the two stories in alternate chapters. Aoife tells one and Strongbow tells the other.

Mairéid: Have you written that story for adults at all?

Morgan: I’d always wanted to write the Strongbow story for adults.

Mairéid: It is a very important story. Just at that point in time Ireland almost achieved unification.

Morgan: Almost. Thank you Diarmuid Mac Murchadha.

Mairéid: Hardly anyone refers to that time being a very important turning point in Irish history.

Morgan: It was a turning point. I had been interested in writing it for adults and I couldn’t get my publisher interested in it at the time. So when O’Brien asked me to do it for children, I said, "Oh! Yes! Oh! Sure, no problem!"

Mairéid: Do you think you captured that historic reality? I often wonder why every historian I have read on that particular subject is so dry.

Morgan: History should never be dry. History is about sex and violence, it should not be dry.

Mairéid: And power.

Morgan: And power. If it is dry, they are telling it wrong. It’s as simple as that. So I did Strongbow. And then O’Brien wanted to utilize my horse experience and asked me to write a story for children. So I wrote one called Star Dancer, published in 1993. It’s about dressage in Ireland, which is almost an non-sequitur. There isn’t much. And then I did some stories for Poolbeg Press. They were doing anthologies and I contributed several stories to their anthologies. I wrote a book, an environmental ghost story of sorts, called Cold Places. People keep coming and asking me for these things. If I am at that stage of a big novel, where I’m doing the initial research, then I can write a children’s book while I’m doing the research. Once I start the big novels I can’t do anything else.

With my books for children, I present the history without the children realizing that here is a serious book. In writing about Brian Boru or Strongbow, I’m telling them really serious and important history, but it has to be done in an entertaining way. Cold Places is about Man’s relationship with the earth, with ancient archeological sites and with circles and standing stones and making young Irish readers aware that these things are still potent in our world today.

Mairéid: What aspects of the potency do you want to emphasize--that a child can relate to?

Morgan: Using their own imaginations. Weaving them around the stones, finding a truth for themselves in the stones. In that particular one, because it is sort of a ghost story, rather a frightening story, the boy actually goes back in time to the time they were built, and even before then finds himself trapped in the ice age. It is an adventure story.

Mairéid: What are the emotions then that you think have come through?

Morgan: Practically all of them: fear, ambition a sense of fun, a sense of play, high energy, loyalty, curiosity. All of these are things that can appeal to a child on a very basic level. And you can write about characters who are experiencing these and describe that experience in a way that will be analogous to something in the child’s own life. They say, "Oh I know how that felt. I know what he is feeling," and you got ‘em. It’s as simple as that.

Mairéid: How do you decide what to write about? You’ve written so many books its almost a trite question.

Morgan: It’s terrifying (peels of laughter), when I think of how many I’ve written. I think in terms of the big books. The big, serious historical novels. It’s one every two years, maybe two and a half years. When people ask me to name books those are the ones I think of. When I go and I look at them, I think, how in the world did I do that? I don’t know. Someone says in the pejorative, "I’m churning them out," and I don’t. I just write all day every day, seven days a week, because I love it. If you do that, it adds up to quite a lot of books.

End Part One.

In Part Two, Morgan tells of her experiences in researching and writing on twentieth century Irish history.