Interviewer: Marion Taffe
Bernard Cornwell is one of the great historical fiction authors of all time. He has published more than sixty books spanning time periods from Iron Age Britain to modern times. His Last Kingdom series and Warlord Chronicles were both adapted for television, but it is his first fictional creation, Richard Sharpe, that keeps calling him back to the page. Bernard spoke to Marion Taffe, author of By Her Hand, about his love of Shakespeare, using of swords in the garden, which historical fiction author he most admires, and the challenges of writing those epic battle scenes.
Marion: Can you tell us a little bit about Sharpe’s Storm?
Bernard: It’s a story set towards the end of the Peninsula War. When Wellington had invaded France. And he had to fight a couple of very desperate battles which are not very well known, which is nice for me. Much of the book is about the Battle of Saint Pierre. Which some of the men who took part said was the fiercest battle they faced in the whole of the Peninsula War. And then he achieved a brilliant act of engineering in crossing the edge of the river, a last driving Soult away from the fortress city of Bayonne. So that’s the background of the book.
Marion: The river crossing — it’s a constant battle, isn’t it? They are not just facing the enemy but the geography as well.
Bernard: It’s the geography and also the huge difficulty — crossing a tidal estuary, a vast distance, expecting to receive a lot of opposition. They were quite lucky there wasn’t much. But it was an extraordinary feat of engineering and in the end an extraordinary feat by itself.
Marion: The world has changed a lot since the first Sharpe book came out in the 1980s, and readers have no doubt changed a fair bit as well. Has Sharpe also changed in that time in your mind?
Bernard: Not a great deal. He’s still grumpy. He’s still resentful and he’s still utterly vicious in battle. I like Sharpe and I’m now eighty years old and I’m trying to find books to write that I’ll enjoy writing. It’s always nice to be back with Sharpe. When I put the first page up on the computer and write the word Sharpe, I feel I’m back among old friends. So I’m just enjoying it.
Marion: And did it feel that way when you came back to him after fifteen years?
Bernard: Yes. I feel like I’ve never been away from it. I guess every writer gets voices in their head and there were other people I’d be writing and Sharpe would interrupt and say, ‘hey, what about me?’
I know him so well, and I like him, I think a great deal more than he would like me.
Marion: I think, for Sean Bean fans, it’s nice to know that there’s at least one character he’s played who hasn’t died, which is good.
Bernard: Well, it’s not a spoiler to say his future is to settle in France, of all places. And so as far as I’m concerned, he lives happily ever after.
Marion: I know, as a reader, it adds a layer of satisfaction that, especially with Uhtred telling the story (in The Last Kingdom books), I had to keep telling myself it’s OK, he’s got to live, he’s got to tell the story.
Bernard: Yes, and Sharpe’s story in some ways is unending. Simply because I keep circling back. Sharpe’s Command (released 2023) was set in 1812 and now he’s back in 1814 (in Sharpe’s Storm). I guess there’s still a few gaps left if I really want. I always said that when I retired I’d go back to writing Sharpe.
Marion: So this is retirement, writing a book a year? It’s very prolific. You’ve said you’re quite happy to hand over control of your work when it’s being adapted. Have you always had that approach, or was it difficult at first?
Bernard: It was never difficult. I worked in television for a long time. I worked in news and current affairs. And, although I knew a hell of a lot about that side of television, I knew nothing whatsoever about producing television drama. And people who made these films, these programs, they did know a lot. And I just regarded the fact that me being involved at all was more likely to put an obstacle in their way. So it was better to stand back. If you’re producing a program about Sharpe or about Uhtred (The Last Kingdom), or Derfel (The Winter King), you have constraints that I don’t have. I mean if a Sharpe book is beginning to sag a little in the middle, I can reel on 40,000 Frenchmen and let Sharpe loose. But they can’t, because 40,000 Frenchmen costs a lot of money. So they have to make decisions that are not mine to make and I’m not qualified to make them so I’d rather they get on with it. And so far it’s worked.
Marion: And can you tell us about the experience of seeing those characters brought to life on screen?
Bernard: It’s unreal. I remember the first moment I saw Sean Bean (as Richard Sharpe) on the screen, I thought, oh, he’s perfect. And I still hear his voice when he talks to me, which Sharpe does a lot. I hear that Yorkshire accent. But I felt much the same seeing Alexander Dreymon playing Uhtred. And people asked me whether I had any influence over the casting, and the answer was absolutely none. Usually when they say why was Sean or Alexander cast, I answer, because they look like me.
Marion: You’ve covered the full gamut of British history and a bit of American history as well. What are some of the unique challenges you have faced for different periods in research?
Bernard: Well, you’re forced to approach them in a different way. The book I’m writing, right now, there’s a lot of written sources. And I try to make the history behind the story authentic. Having a lot of sources makes it quite easy to do that. But on the other hand, if you’re writing about the Saxon period or the Arthurian period, there are very few sources, and that’s a huge opportunity for the writer because you can make it up, which I enjoy.
Marion: Is there a time period that you haven’t written about yet that you would like to, or are you quite comfortable with Sharpe?
Bernard: The book I really enjoyed writing was Fools and Mortals, which was about Shakespeare. And I did wonder about writing another two or three books with the same characters. But, so far, I’ve resisted. I like that period very much. And there is some very dramatic stuff going on in that period. One book that would be fun to write would be the actual establishment of the Globe Theatre.
Marion: I suppose there’s no battles, or a different type of battle?
Bernard: In Fools and Mortals, yes, I think it’s the first book I’ve written in which nobody dies. One character once fires a pistol, but he misses. This is a different sort of book for me. But there’s a lot of drama going on on stage, as you can imagine. So I mean it’s possible I’ll write a couple more with Richard Shakespeare who was a real brother of William that we know very little about. And again, that’s useful. We know very little about him. We’re free to make him up.
Marion: Going back to the large time frame that you’ve written over, can you see some common threads through the time periods? Do you sort of see where some dots connect over the centuries?
Bernard: I see where the heroes connect. They’re almost always outsiders. They’re all misfits. Is there any connection I see? I don’t really see — then again, all except for Fools and Mortals and The Gallows Thief are set against the background of war. Not because I love war, but I love the opportunity it gives you to have an adventure story with a lot of chaos and a lot of danger.
Marion: There’s a lot of tension, definitely, and speaking of battles, you’re renowned for your battle writing. George R.R. Martin has said you’re the best of the best. Can you tell us how you approach a battle scene?
Bernard: There are two or three things I do deliberately. One is to try and give the reader, before the thing even starts, an idea of the ground. And so exactly where they’re fighting and what the problems on the ground are. When I wrote my nonfiction book on Waterloo (Waterloo: The True Story of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles), the first chapter is all about Wellington. The year before he fought the battle he visited that battlefield and made a note of it. He thought it would be a good place to fight a battle. And that means by the time we get to Chapter 2, the reader actually knows what the scenery is, what the layout of the land is. Once you’ve done that, you can forget about it because the reader knows it as well as I do, I hope. And it’s actually quite hard work, I find I am feeling more tired after writing a battle.
There’s a wonderful book by Sir John Keegan called The Face of Battle. And what he was trying to do in The Face of Battle was to discover, what was it actually like to be at Agincourt, to be at Waterloo to be at the Somme? What is the soldier seeing? What is he hearing? What is he smelling? What is he feeling? And that’s basically my guideline to do what Sir John said we should do when we write military history, to try and recreate the experience of the soldier. So the book I’m writing now I’m constantly thinking, what is Sharpe seeing? What is he hearing? And that’s my guide. Although Sharp knows very little of what’s going on beyond the ten paces around him, I have to let the reader know what’s going on. But you can’t let Sharpe know. You know, this is a secret between the reader and the book, not with Sharpe.
Marion: Whereas with Uhtred, you are in the thick of it…
Bernard: Yeah, with Uhtred it’s the shield wall. Uhtred really has no idea. If he’s fighting against the Danes, he knows what’s happening within five paces of himself, but he doesn’t knowwhat is happening elsewhere. Sharpe is probably slightly more experienced. He’s learned the knack of judging about his progress by sound, which a lot of soldiers recorded in their memoirs that they can do that and that takes a hell of a lot of experience.
Marion: Is all the research from the archive? Or are you involved in living history groups at all? There’s a sword in the background there? Is it important getting your hands on artifacts and things like that?
Bernard: Things like that, yes. That sword was a gift from George R. R. Martin — he’s an extremely generous man. There’s a company in America. I can’t remember its name. It makes duplicate swords of basically all the television heroes, all of the swords used in Game of Thrones. Then George wrote to me and said, did you know they’ve made Uhtred’s sword? And I said, no, I didn’t know. And he said, would you like one? And I said, George, you’re being too generous. But it arrived in the mail anyway. So, there it is.
Marion: That’s fantastic with the amber and everything there. For people who can’t see the video, there’s Uhtred’s sword on the back wall in Bernard’s study there.
Bernard: I also have Sharpe’s sword, the real thing. A heavy cavalry sword from Waterloo hanging in the living room. My poor passivist wife has to put up with this. There’s a Brown Bess musket, a Baker rifle, three or four swords, and in another house I own, there’s even a cannon.
Marion: So those things that you can touch and feel the weight of, does that really help you with the writing process as well?
Bernard: It helps because I’m familiar with the weapons. Sharpe’s heavy cavalry sword I have used to clear some underbrush. It’s a very good machine for that.
Marion: How do you develop relationship dynamics for your characters? The one that really stands out for me is Uhtred and Alfred. That was a brilliant relationship with their tension and their mutual respect. Can you talk us through a bit about what happens on the page when you introduce two characters to each other?
Bernard: I wish I could. I think some of that just comes. I’m so glad you picked up Uhtred and Alfred because I always enjoy putting those two together because, as you say, there was tension. And Alfred is an interesting character in his own right. He is the very opposite of Uhtred. There are statues to Alfred. There’s two I can think of in England and in both of them, he looks like he’s a second row forward, dressed in armor and in fact, he was a very ill man all his life. He was very intellectual, and his passion was to translate. And he was a very, very pious Christian. I’m not saying a pious Christian can’t be a great soldier because obviously, they can. But what we know about Alfred doesn’t add up to this picture of the second row forward swinging an axe and shield. I just don’t think he was good at that. He was an intellectual and he used his intelligence to defeat the Danes. But to do that he needed men like Uhtred, and that’s why the relationship works. He needs Uhtred even though he doesn’t like Uhtred. I think he might like Uhtred on a personal level, but he thoroughly disapproves of almost everything Uhtred stands for. I’m toying with the idea of doing another book.
And it’s the same with Sharpe and Wellington. I mean, with Sharpe shadows. Wellington’s career and Wellington is in many ways his patron. But they are so very, very different. With Sharpe, there’s an immense admiration for Wellington, I suspect Wellington is slightly suspicious of Sharpe. He’s a very loose cannon, and that’s fun.
Marion: In Uhtred’s stories I could see a lot of themes from Old English poetry, not just from Beowulf, which most people know, but also The Ruin, The Wanderer. You have Egil as a character, so drawing on the Norse Sagas. Was that influence of Old English language and literature important for you to tap into, and what role did it play in shaping Uhtred’s worldview?
Bernard: It was very important, and you’re right. You can see traces throughout the books. Uhtred’s astonishment and even obsession with Roman ruins come straight from the poetry. So does much of the battle scene because, if you read the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, it’s not very informative. You’ve got an entry saying, ‘in this year did the pagan hoard come to England and by the grace of God they were defeated’. But how were they defeated? We don’t know because they don’t tell us. But the poetry does tell us. It was really the poetry of the Anglo Saxons that got me interested. I was forced to study it way back at college, and I confess, was never any good at it. But the poetry did find me and I went on reading it, albeit mostly in translation, for the last fifty years, sixty years. And when I came to write the books, yes, a lot of the themes of the poetry came out in the books. Especially the reaction to the Roman ruins and it’s still possible to see these glorious buildings and wonder how, how the hell did anybody do it? It must be the work of the gods.
Marion: I was wondering for a bit of a fun question. You have (four protagonists) Richard Sharpe, Derfel, Uhtred and Thomas of Hookton coming over for dinner. How do you think they’re going to get along?
Bernard: Well, as I have the ability to pluck these characters from my books, I’d like a few others too. That will be the women, because the women will at least keep them calm.
Marion: You do write some great female characters who are very strong beside these strong men.
Bernard: They need to be. I like strong female characters. I always got annoyed when on film, you have a couple running away from some dreadful danger. It’s always the girl who trips over and causes the disaster to happen and I thought, no! Why should that always be the case? She’s just as strong as he is in the mind, and probably as fit. So I like strong women, and as my men tend to be rather strong too, they need a strong woman to cope with them, even control them. But sometimes I have to kill them off.
Marion: They do die sometimes, yes.
Bernard: Back when I was first writing the Sharpe series, it was fairly useful to have a new woman in each book. Because it gave you a romantic subplot. So the previous one had to die, which was very unfair. The one I regretted was Lady Grace from Sharpe’s Trafalgar, who I really liked enormously. But as she wasn’t in the later books, it meant she couldn’t be allowed to live. I made sure that that was off-screen, so to speak. That was just sad.
And sometimes I really regret killing them off and the one I regret killing most of all is Obadiah Hakeswill. Although he may be a terrible, terrible man. He was wonderful to write. I killed him. And I felt no regret whatsoever at the time, but I felt regret on the next books, because I didn’t have him. I did flirt with the idea of giving him an identical twin. But I resisted.
Marion: Any advice for people who think they might have a book in them?
Bernard: Just keep going. I think it’s very daunting to begin writing, and you are assailed by the fear that what you’re doing will never be good enough. You just have to remember that every best-selling author began with that same fear. Exactly the same fear. And you write for yourself initially. You write a story that you want to read then you hope …other people would like to read it. The people I admire most of all tend to be women who are housewives and mothers. And I know from experience, being a housewife and mother is a full-time job and yet they still find time to write a book.
I luckily married somebody who gave me the time. She looked after the house. Everything about it. And that gave me plenty of time to sit down and write the first book.
I still feel nervous every time I start a new book. I usually have to wait until I’m about two-thirds of the way through before I find out what the book is really about, and whether it’s going to work or not. But that’s because I’m totally and utterly incapable of planning the book. Part of the joy of reading a book is to find out what happens. For me, part of the joy of writing is just the same. To find out what happens. It’s not a very efficient way of doing it.
Marion: It is interesting that you say that it’s inefficient considering that you’re still putting out a book a year and for a long time it was two books a year. When you started — writing your first book — can you remember how long that took?
Bernard: Five months. I’d given up a perfectly good job in Britain to become an illegal immigrant in America. I needed to earn money, and the only way I could think to do it was to write a book. So I put the typewriter on the table and started. And every time I thought this is hopeless, the style is all wrong, it’s not good enough, I thought, it’s your only option, so keep going. So I kept going.
Marion: Is there another book after Sharpe’s Storm that you’re thinking of? Could you give us a little hint of what might be coming?
Bernard: Well, the only hint I’ll give you is that in discussions with my publisher, we talked about two things. One, I’d quite like to go back to Uhtred because I like him too. Or even Thomas of Hookton, who I suspect is more likely. As I said, now in my old age, my retirement, I’m tending to go back to old heroes rather than invent totally new ones. Well, I do have an idea for a totally new one, but whenever it occurs to me I go to the sofa and lay down until it passes.
I remember when I wrote the Winter King, which was an extraordinary book to write. And it’s still one of my favorites, because it was such a pleasure to write. I’d given myself six months to do a huge amount of research into Arthurian Britain and there came a point in September that year when I just got bored doing endless, endless research. And I thought, every book I’d written at that point, was in the third person. And I just had an idea that this book had to be written in the first person. And I thought to myself, well, I’m bored with research. I’ll just do an experimental chapter in first person. And four months later, that book was finished. I’m not saying it came so easily, but it came with such fluidity. And then with Uhtred I wrote almost entirely in first person. Now I’m back in the third person … each choice gives you different difficulties.
Marion: Going back to the page-to-screen theme, are there any other stories that producers are looking at?
Bernard: Well, it would probably be risking fate to tell you. But I can say that Agincourt is in the hands of a film company.
Marion: Oh, fantastic!
Bernard: But I’ll believe it when I see it.
Marion: Is there or are there any new historical fiction writer or writers that you’ve read recently that you admire?
Bernard: Maggie O’Farrell is the new queen of historical fiction. She is brilliant.
Marion: Is there anything specific about her writing that really stands out?
Bernard: I think it’s just the sensibility behind it. I’ll confess she made me cry at least twice in the book. You know that she’s channeling a great deal of emotion and skill into the writing.
A note from Other Terrain.This interview also shows how an unpublished novel is not locked in stone.
A few weeks after this interview, Bernard announced that the publication date for Sharpe’s Storm would be postponed to late 2025.
We look forward to announcing the publication date in future.