Robert Wolf is a publisher, journalist, workshop-leader, novelist, playwright and anthologist, known mainly in the UK for editing An American Mosaic, published by OUP, with its contributions from farmers and river-workers of small-town Iowa and the Mississippi and homeless people in Nashville. His interest in ancient writers has long been discernible from sporadic allusions in his non-fiction, but this book is nonetheless an unexpected development. Its publicity describes it as an ‘epic prose poem’ and its subtitle is ‘A History of Ancient Britain from mythic origins to the dark ages’.
It begins at Troy, from which Aeneas escapes to found Rome. Aeneas’ grandson Brutus then voyages similarly from Italy to arrive in Britain, which he names after himself, defeating its autochthonous giants and founding Troia Nova, later called Trinovantum, later called London. A millennium of equally mythical rulers follows, of whom only Leir (Lear), Cordelia and Lud might be familiar to us now. The Roman era offers some stabler history (Caesar, Claudius, Septimius Severus, Maximus), after which the mythical returns (Vortigern, Ambrosius, Uther, Arthur), until the final victory of the Angles and Saxons. The legendarium takes in Cymbeline, the martyrdom of St Alban, the Picts arriving from Scythia, and Bladud’s imitation of Icarus, among much more.
But if this is a variant of epic poetry then it certainly extends the genre. It does have battles, monarchs and the supernatural, and nature-based ‘epic’ similes, in twelve ‘books’. But it reads more like popular historical fiction in its sequences of melodramatic playlets:
[Vortigern] lifts his hand. “As you know the face of fate, tell me
my end. How will I die?”
Merlin looks steadily:
“Death is coming even now, as Uther and Aurelius sail from
Amorica. You blundered when you killed their father.”
The king’s eyes burn with a strange light reflected from the
young seer’s eyes. […]
There are deliberate stylistic anachronisms (‘Camera on the Britons’) as well as chronological yelps (the first four chapters all dated 600 years too early) and an indifference to canonical naming (Atandros? Speratium? Cogidamnus? Asclepidopilus?). The tense oscillates between past and present, and the diction between grey (‘Caesar’s mood is grim’) and purple (‘No-one heard his scream except the God of Death’), while King Arthur says things like: “Jesus! Don’t show Gawaine the bodies, he’ll go mad.”
The narrative itself is constructed from elements of Gildas, Nennius, Caesar, Dio Cassius, Virgil, Bede, Plutarch (‘The Great God Pan is Dead’), William of Malmesbury (Joseph of Arimathea arriving with the Holy Grail) and especially Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 12th-Century History of the Kings of Britain. It replaces, however, the Biblical or Roman-Imperialist doctrines of its models with Earth Mysteries concepts (it’s dedicated to The View over Atlantis’ John Michell). So we get, for instance, the Glastonbury landscape zodiac:
[…] men had shaped the hills and fields about the isle in the image
of the constellations, which foretold the story of a king and his
knights and of their sacred quest […]
And ley-lines:
Madden began […] clearing tracks running straight for miles across
the land, and where track crossed track, as temple, circle, stone, the
power gained, field and forest ripened and flourished. […] And
Cathbad saw that the tracks on earth marked the paths of heaven.
And (hence the title) eternal recurrence: ‘The Heavens circle. Time circles. Cycles repeat and the great gears of Heaven grind on.’
The readership here, I guess, would be people looking for a synoptic and uncritical synthesis of British mythical and mystical historiography, and who are unworried by creative expansion of the sources, spasmodic errata, fluctuating registers and New Age esotericism. Others might be happier going back directly to Geoffrey of Monmouth or Bede, or perhaps the first sections of Milton’s History of Britain. Yet others still might find this book’s very unorthodoxy attractive. British historical mythology does have some marvellously quirky stories. Maybe it’s fitting, as Robert Wolf does here, to retell them in quirky ways?
Guy Russell 15th November 2026
