Guy Gavriel Kay has been writing a style of historical fantasy-fiction that I consistently find to be well-crafted and thoroughly enjoyable. His published writings break down into three groupings: the trilogy of “The Finoavar Tapestry”, a series of related but independent historical fictions that are set in and among various European analog locales and peoples, and as an extension of this a pair of beautiful books grouped as “The Sarantine Mosaic”. This book is set in a locale strongly tied to and evocative of the Viking, Anglo-Saxon, and Celtic peoples and places of Northern Europe and fits into the second grouping.

Kay is a Canadian who lives in Toronto, and he came to some early notoriety in his early career after Christopher Tolkien, who became the executor of his father’s literary estate after his death, asked Kay to help him edit and assemble some of his father’s unpublished works. The result of this collaboration was the publishing of The Silmarillion in 1977. Wikipedia has a good entry on this.

Kay’s first books, The Fionavar Tapestry, were of a genre of fantasy fiction that has become quite common since the development of the popular fantasy genre — a group of young people in our world meet a wise, older man who whisks them away to a parallel fantasy world embroiled in an epic struggle between good and evil. One can certainly accuse Kay of copying from Tolkien in these three books, as many of the same elements from Tolkien’s fantasy are present, but Kay acknowledges directly that these were intended as homage to Tolkien, and were intended to overcome what he saw as the “debasing of the genre” by other authors. Kay’s writing is also far more focused on character than plot and ideas.

In this second grouping of standalone books, which includes Tigana, The Lions of Al-Rassan, and A Song for Arbonne, I don’t think this is the strongest book in some respects, but it may be the most beautiful in terms of Kay’s empathy for both his characters and his readers. This is a book full of relatively small events — the fate of the world isn’t at stake, just the fates of the peoples who come together in the story — and characters who are both heroic and flawed. In this respect the book feels very modern, and one can easily place oneself in the book.

On the other hand, like all of Kay’s writings of this type, the book is completely infused with a deep sense of a very specific time and place (something also very important to Tolkien), and Kay has a deep respect for the culture and peoples that he writes about. In this book we have three key cultures represented: the Vikings (called Erlings), the Anglo-Saxons (called Anglcyns), and the Celts (called Cyngaels). I wonder if this was difficult for Kay to write given Tolkien’s deep love for these same peoples and their languages, and his desire to create the Middle-Earth legendarium as an authentic and native mythology for a people who he felt had none of their own. But Kay’s purpose in his writing is very different from Tolkien’s and there is no sense of derivation or imitation here.

What I also like is the way that Kay treats the element of magic or the fantastic in his writings. Unlike the “Dungeons and Dragons” approach to magic, where under every rock it seems one can find an enchanted sword or book of ancient wisdom, in Kay’s worlds (like ours) real magic is vanishingly rare, and only accomplished through great sacrifice. His characters’ encounters with the fantastic, with the “half-world” as he calls it here, always leaves them changed, and the powers they encounter aren’t always understandable by mortal humans, or even particularly concerned with them. Some of his mysteries stay mysterious. If anything, sometimes it feels like Kay is a little too judicious with his use of these forces in his writings, and at times his can feel a little less like historical fantasy and a little more like historical fiction.

Regardless, Kay is definitely the master of this style he has helped create and popularize, and this book is a veritable paean to a heroic, beautiful, and vanished world.