Guest Post: The Wanderer and the Way (Cuthbert's People #4) by G. M. Baker
- Archaeolibrarian
- 9 hours ago
- 6 min read
Book details:
Book Title: The Wanderer and the Way
Series: Cuthbert’s People
Author Name: G. M. Baker
Publication Date:March 10th, 2025
Publisher:Stories All the Way Down
Pages:249
Genre:Historical Fiction
Any Triggers:Rape is mentioned by not portrayed.
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The Camino de Santiago de Compostela, now the most famous pilgrimage route in the world, was founded in the early ninth century, largely due to the efforts of Bishop Theodemir of Iria Flavia. As with most people of this period, nothing seems to be known of his early years. What follows, therefore, is pure invention.
Theodemir returns footsore and disillusioned to his uncle’s villa in Iria Flavia, where he meets Agnes, his uncle’s gatekeeper, a woman of extraordinary beauty. He falls immediately in love. But Agnes has a fierce, though absent, husband; a secret past; another name, Elswyth; and a broken heart.
Witteric, Theodemir’s cruel and lascivious uncle, has his own plans for Agnes. When the king of Asturias asks Theodemir to undertake an embassy on his behalf to Charles, King of the Franks, the future Charlemagne, Theodemir plans to take Agnes with him to keep her out of Witteric’s clutches.
But though Agnes understands her danger as well as anyone, she refuses to go. And Theodemir dares not leave without her.
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A lot of historical fiction concerns itself with the lives of the great, with kings and queens, lords and ladies, bishops and generals. Understandably so, since these are the lives for which the historical record can supply some degree of detail. I prefer to write about the lives of ordinary people, those of whom history records nothing at all. But ordinary people can live extraordinary lives, even if those lives are never touched by the pen of the chronicler.
But for an ordinary person to have an extraordinary life, some catalyst is required. Most ordinary people are content in their ordinariness until the splash of some great stone in the river of life upsets their tiny boats. My Cuthbert’s People series uses the great Viking raid on Lindisfarne of 793 for the great splash that upsets the little boat of Elswyth, the beautiful daughter of a minor Anglish thegn living along the coast of Northumbria. The Lindisfarne raid causes bad blood between the ealdorman’s son she is to marry and the innocent Norse trader who lands on her father’s beach, and this leads to violence and bloodshed and to Elswyth fleeing with the trader and his men in a small boat, bearing a secret that could ruin her father and send her mother and sisters into slavery.
The Lindisfarne raid must have sent ripples through the Anglish and Saxon kingdoms and rocked or wrecked many small boats and set many ordinary people on the course for extraordinary lives. For later periods, we have records of many such lives, particularly for periods for which we have personal letters home, such as those that formed such an integral and moving part of Ken Burns’ Civil War series. For the Anglo-Saxon period, we can only imagine them. And yet, most of the people of that place and time were not the tough warriors or bold queens who inhabit most historical novels of the period. They were slaves, farmers, fishermen, the sons of traders, or the daughters of thegns.
The sudden rocking of the small boats that are the lives of ordinary people are more dramatic than those which ripple under the hull of the much larger boats that are the lives of kings and queens. Dealing with great events is part of the job description for nobility. They may even be the cause of such events. It’s what they signed up for, and they enjoy a degree of foresight and control that is denied to the small boats of ordinary people, rocked by big waves they never saw coming.
The great events that rock the small boats of my characters in The Wanderer and the Way, Theodemir and Agnes, are the resistance of the Christian Kingdom of Asturias against the Moorish invaders of the Iberian Peninsula, the Adoptionism controversy, and the hunt for the bones of St. James, the later discovery of which would lead to the foundation of the Camino de Santiago, the most famous pilgrimage route in the world. As small boats are sometimes swamped or thrown off their course by the movements of great ships, so my character’s courses are shaped in part by encounters with King Aphonso the Chaste of Asturias and Alcuin, the greatest scholar of the age and councillor of Charlemagne.
Focusing on the lives of ordinary people means I seldom need to study great events in much detail. What I focus on instead is the ideas of the people at the time and what shaped them. In the case of the Wanderer and the Way, I found the Adoptionism controversy particularly fascinating. Adoptionism is the idea that Christ is related to God the Father not by “procession” as the Nicaean Creed asserts, but by adoption. The arguments on either side of the controversy would be of interest only to academic theologians today. What is interesting to me is how much people cared about the issue and how much it mattered in the affairs of state. Thus when I have Alphonso send Theodemir as an ambassador to the court of Charlemagne seeking aid against the Moors, he is very concerned that Theodemir can demonstrate to Alcuin that he and Alphonso hold the orthodox position on Adoptionism.
It is a matter of record that Alphonso sent such embassies to Charlemagne, though I could find no detail of their composition or instructions. But a moment’s reflection shows that affairs of state today often depend on proving one’s orthodoxy on current matters of philosophy or ideology. For instance, part of securing a treaty or a trade deal today may involve showing that you hold the same views on issues of gender as the person you are negotiating with, even if those issues are not related to the matter you are negotiating. That the demonstration of orthodoxy on a theological question may have been key to a negotiation in the late eighth century, then, should not surprise us at all.
One of the things I like about writing historical novels is that I can use something like Adoptionism as an ideological purity test in my story without any present-day reader being distracted by the controversy itself. To the best of my knowledge, there are no Adoptionists left in the world. Most Christians accept the trinitarian formula of Nicaea, and the rest of the world has no opinion on the matter. This allows me to focus on the role of ideological conformity in human affairs independent of the issue itself.
Not that Adoptionism is a major theme of the novel. It isn’t. It’s a minor detail, included more for verisimilitude and to establish a sense of time than because it affects the main theme or the plot, which is centered on the moral quandary of attempting to rescue from grave danger someone you love who is determined not to be rescued. But I do think that a vital part of historical fiction is discovering and understanding the ideas of the past, why people held those ideas, and the importance they attached to them. If your characters do not think and act as people of the time would have thought and acted, you are really writing a contemporary novel in fancy dress. And while you are of course free to do just that, it is a horse of a different color, even if it is letter perfect in every hat and scarf and rifle and mizzenmast stay sail.
Born in England to a teamster's son and a coal miner's daughter, G. M. (Mark) Baker now lives in Nova Scotia with his wife, no dogs, no horses, and no chickens. He prefers driving to flying, desert vistas to pointy trees, and quiet towns to bustling cities.
As a reader and as a writer, he does not believe in confining himself to one genre. He writes about kind abbesses and melancholy kings, about elf maidens and ship wreckers and shy falconers, about great beauties and their plain sisters, about sinners and saints and ordinary eccentrics. In his newsletter Stories All the Way Down, he discusses history, literature, the nature of story, and how not to market a novel.
Author Links:
Website:https://gmbaker.net
Substack: https://gmbaker.substack.com/
Twitter / X:https://x.com/mbakeranalecta
Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/gmbaker
Amazon Author Page:https://www.amazon.com/stores/G.-M.-Baker/author/B09WZK7MD4
Tour hosted by: The Coffee Pot Book Club
Thanks so much for hosting G. M. Baker today, with such an interesting post linked to his new novel, The Wanderer and the Way.
Take care, Cathie xx The Coffee Pot Book Club