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In ancient times, Greek and Roman poets invoked of the Muse. She was a goddess, a female figure that 'inspired' their work. That is, she 'breathed upon" or 'into' them their themes and deep creative ideas.  They saw her as something utterly outside of their selves and set apart from ordinary human experience.  Without her first impulse, they could not sing or write their poetry.  Once she had breathed upon them, then their rational, conscious minds could continue the process and finish off the poems.  Welsh poets of the post-Roman and medieval periods invoked a similiar figure, the Awen, the so-called "white goddess" about whom the poet Robert Graves wrote so much nonsense.  Despite Graves, however, there's no doubt that this figure, the Awen, seemed real enough to early bards.

I had alway considered the Awen or Muse a poetic convention, a formal remnant of early pre-literate cultures, until I began to write fiction.  Once I started the short story that grew into a saga, I understood things a fair bit better.  The original short piece itself burst out of the first sentence and began to write itself.  The core material of the entire series presented itself to me as long fragments of stories that began, slowly, to take on an overall if non-rational shape.  For about eighteen months I wrote compulsively, often getting up in the middle of the night to "just make a few notes" that turned into ten pages of fiction by morning.  It was a kind of madness, all right, except it did turn into novels that other people can read, understand, and enjoy.

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For the Deverry series I did a fair amount of research on the actual history of Dark Age cultures so that I could make up a plausible society and a consistent technology.  I started out to do the same for the magic worked in this world, but eventually I realized that what knowledge we have about the magic of Celtic lands in the Dark Ages is extremely scant.  We can postulate a lot of charms and curses, and indeed, I did incorporate a lead curse tablet into the plot in A Time Of Omens and the subsequent sections of the books that deal with the Deverry Civil Wars.  The inscription upon it, by the way, is based upon a curse given in Joshua Whatmough's The Dialects Of Ancient Gaul.

I realize that there are plenty of books available purporting to teach "ancient Celtic magic," supposedly preserved in folk customs or passed down among initiates or even "read from akashic records on the astral plane."  Anyone who's inclined to believe these theories might profit from reading two books, The Triumph of the Moon and The Stations of the Sun by Ronald Hutton, a reputable historian whose study of the actual facts reaches a very different conclusion.

What a great many people consider "ancient Celtic magic" is actually the product of the occult movements that flourished in 19th and 20th century Great Britian.  Modern paganism is indeed modern, the first and probably only religion ever born in the U.K.  Wicca falls into the same category.  Most folk traditions only go back so far and not very far at that, perhaps to the 16th century in some cases.  Now, I'm not saying that because of their lack of history these religions are somehow invalid or silly. Every religion had to start somewhere and with someone, either a great leader or a group of mystics whose teachings were later codified.

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I started writing the Deverry series in February of 1982. Twenty seven years later, The Silver Mage, the final novel -- the last of fifteen -- has just been published.  I've heard it said that writing a novel is like exploring an unknown country.  If that's true, then call me Lewis and Clark.  I feel like I've crossed an entire continent.  When I began, I thought I was writing a short story, but the more I wrote, the more characters appeared, each with stories to tell.  Those stories took place in differing landscapes and differing periods of what turned out to be over a thousand years of imaginary history.  Unifying them and placing them into some sort of pattern took me several years before I could finish the first novel in the sequence, Daggerspell.  That original short story?  It now forms the last section of Volume 6, A Time Of Omens.  

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Katharine Kerr is our guest blogger during the week of November 9th. If you have any questions for Katharine Kerr, add a comment to any of her posts.

Here is more information on The Silver Mage:

"Prepare to get lost in the magic" (VOYA) of Katharine Kerr's newest Deverry fantasy.

The Horsekin are assembling along Prince Dar's northern border, and the Deverry alliance simply does not have the men and resources to prevent their enemies from moving into the wilderness areas known as the Ghostlands. But suddenly, the Dwrgi folk and the dragons come to Dar's aid, tipping the balance in their favor and offering Dar's people a chance to defeat the Horsekin once and for all.