Magic, Rebirth and Christmas

AWW: Wow, thanks. It's always nice to hear my site helped if even in a small way. When you revisited the Robin Hood legend with the Outlaw Legacy saga, most of the magical elements were not present in Rebirth, although magic seemed more of a factor in Destiny.  What are your thoughts about the role of magic in the Robin Hood tradition, and why did your approach shift across the novels?

AG: Legend takes place in a totally magical world, like a Fairy Tale. Initially, my plan for Rebirth was for it to be the real-life story behind Legend’s fantasy but the characters took on a life of their own.

   I’m interested that you notice there’s more magic in Destiny than Rebirth, that was an intentional choice. There are certainly some magical elements in both but I agree they are more prominent in Destiny. I think this is because I was originally intending to write one long book but ended up breaking it into three. Destiny covers a much broader period of time, around thirty years, compared to Legend where the main action takes place over a little less than two years. Since it covers more life-events, I think it was natural for the magic to be more apparent during this part of the story.

   Within the continuity of Rebirth and Destiny, Legend exists as a story told by Alan-a-Dale inspired by an earlier Robin Hood he had been a close friend to. I’m also working on a prequel that tells the story of that Robin and his gang.

   As to the idea of including magic in Robin Hood stories in general, I believe that magic is a subtle but real part of every-day life and folk in medieval times believed that even more strongly. Magic, faeries, elves, good spirits and dark forces weren’t so much something to be “believed in” as an accepted reality like we take electricity and the internet for granted. It makes sense to me that this world-view should be represented in stories about people of that time.

AWW: One of the most notable aspects of your Robin Hood novels is that sense of family. By Destiny, Robin and Holegn have a large extended family.  What appealed to you about making Robert of Huntingdon a family man?

AG: That happened organically really. I started off by writing about Robert and Holegn in the early part of their life when they are in their mid-to-late teens but, as the story continued and it became clear that I was going to be following them through to the end of their life, it made sense that they would have children.

   As with many families in pre-industrial times, I imagined they would have children of many different ages, with some grown to adulthood while their younger siblings are still being born. As the child characters aged they grew into very interesting characters in their own right and I found I very much enjoyed writing them. It also gave me a chance to create more completely original characters of my own rather than my own versions of established characters. Without giving too much away, it also gave me the opportunity to work in more than one interpretation of some of the traditional characters.

AWW: You’ve also written books featuring Santa Claus and his family. And in Nottingham: A Dark Tale  of Christmas Spirits, you gave the Sheriff of Nottingham a Dickensian Christmas Carol experience. What appeals to you about Christmas traditions?

AG: Along with Robin Hood, Christmas has always been something of an obsession of mine and there is a lot of crossover between many of the Christmas/Santa traditions and a lot of the folklore that has been integrated into the Robin Hood traditions.

   As I say in the introduction to Nottingham, every author has a book they wish they had written and mine is A Christmas Carol. It’s a story that has been adapted and re-told so many times in so many ways with almost any type of characters you can think of so I decided to become part of that grand tradition and write my own version with my own characters. It was fun to “mash up” my three different “worlds” into one story!