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.
Publication Date: March 10th, 2025
Publisher: Stories All The Way Down
Pages: 249
Genre: Medieval Historical Fiction
An Interview with G. M. Baker.
What inspired you to start writing?
Reading, I suppose. I can’t remember when I wasn’t writing. I mean, there must have been a time when I didn’t know my letters and couldn’t hold a pen, but as soon as I could, I was writing. I have a vivid memory of my first day at school being handed a ruled notebook and told that in it I would write all the things I knew. So I started writing what I knew, and got my knuckles rapped for it. Apparently I was not supposed to know anything, or how to write, until the school taught it to me. I have been an unrepentant writer ever since.
What was the hardest part about writing this book?
Proofreading. No matter how many times you go through it, there’s always one more typo, or several.
But for the writing process itself, I think it may be knowing when the fruit is ripe. A story grows in secret in the darkness of the mind, and can only be written when it is ready to flower and to fruit. You can’t get ahead of it, but there is also the danger that if you wait too long, it will rot on the vine.
But you do have to wait for it. Part of it, at least, is that you have to fall in love. You have to fall in love with your characters, perhaps all of them, but the main ones at least. They will not come out human until you love them. It is too easy to cheat on a character you don’t love. But to love them is to know them, and then you can’t cheat and have them do anything they would not do or say anything they would not say.
I had to wait quite a long time for The Wanderer and the Way, not because I was not in love with Agnes/Elswyth. I had been in love with her for years and for three novels already. But I had abused her so much in those stories that she was practically in a catatonic state, and so she simply could not drive this story. And yet, having had her make an appearance back in Northumbria at the end of The Needle of Avocation, I had to get her back there to make that appearance. But, knowing her as I did, and loving her as I did, I knew that she would never leave her fellow kidnap victims, women she felt responsible for, of her own volition.
And so I needed someone else who would be both willing and able to force her to move, and it took a long time for him to show up, and to understand his motivations, and to fall in love with him so that I could know him truly. And so I had to wait for Theodemir before the story could be written, and that was a hard thing, and I fretted over it, but I wrote The Wrecker’s Daughter instead, because I had fallen in love with its plain, murderous protagonist in the meantime, after having written the first five pages of her story a decade earlier. You have to fall in love with bad people in this business, even if you let them become a little better in the end. That was the problem with Theodemir: I needed him to be bad enough to do what was required of him, and yet to be human enough that I could fall in love with him. That was hard. That took a while.
Does one of the main characters hold a special place in your heart? If so, why?
Elswyth was the main character of the first two books of the series, and at the end of the second book, I had her kidnapped by Vikings and carried off to Spain. The memory of her hung over the third book as well, though the main character of that book was her sister, Hilda, because Hilda was the plain sister, the overlooked, the taken for granted, and I fell in love with her, and thought she deserved her own novel. But Elswyth hung over that novel as well, because Hilda was stepping into the place that should have been Elswyth’s, and everyone she met, it seemed, had met and was in love with Elswyth.
So yes, obviously, it is Elswyth, or Agnes, as she desired to be known in the novel, who holds a special place in my heart. Each novel sees Elswyth from a different angle. In The Wistful and the Good, we see Elswyth partly through her own eyes, but also through the eyes of her mother, Edith. In St. Agnes and the Selkie, we see her through the eyes of the abbess Mother Wynflaed and through the eyes of Eardwulf, the king. In The Needle of Avocation, she haunts the memories of Hilda, Eardwulf, and Wynflaed, who each bleed in their own way for their wounded love for her. In The Wanderer and the Way, she is seen through the eyes of Theodemir, who loves her and must save her though she spurns him at every turn.
If your book was to be made into a movie, who are the celebrities that would star in it?
This is a difficult question because I don’t know who the celebrities are today. I don’t think I could pick Taylor Swift out of a police lineup. So lend me Bill and Ted’s time machine and let me pluck my cast from the past.
For Theodemir, I think a young Ewan McGregor would work. He has that quality of outward swagger and inward self-doubt that would suit Theodemir and his struggle with his vocation, and with his unrequited love for Agnes.
For Witteric, Theodemir’s wicked uncle, Richard Harris would chew the scenery with appropriate ferocity.
For Alphoso the Chaste, King of Asturias, Alec Guinnes would bring that mix of wisdom, gentleness, and firmness of purpose that the role would require.
For Hathus, Captain of the King’s Guard, who leads Theodemir and Agnes/Elswyth along the route that will become the Camino Frances, Russel Crow in his stalwart, dutiful Master and Commander mode would work well.
For Alcuin, the great scholar of the age, Paul Scofield, after the manner of his performance as St. Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons, would bring a suitable gravity and wit.
But Agnes/Elswyth presents a particular casting problem. She is a literary construct, an almost fairytale creature. She is the girl you are in love with. Only the girl you are in love with is fairer in your eyes than all other women. That is who Agnes/Elswyth is to everyone who meets her, everyone, at least, with sufficient grace to love her. She is the girl they are in love with, from the moment they set eyes on her. And, of course, the girl you are in love with is a real character. Every man has met her at least once, whether he won her or not. But at the same time, no human face, no actress, however pretty, can be that perfection of beauty on screen because she cannot be for every viewer the girl you are in love with.
Physically, Elswyth was the product of a union between a Welsh slave and an Anglo-Saxon thegn, though she is described as entirely Welsh in her looks. But more than a thousand years have passed since her time, and who is to say what the Welsh women of that time looked like? She is described as small and dark and tending to plumpness, so perhaps a young Jenna Coleman would fit the bill, but she must also have a dash of the wistful prettiness and desperate resolve of Julia Schlaepfer from 1923, like herself, a heroine of high and tragic romance.
What do you hope your readers take away from this book?
I hope that they will feel that they have gone on a perilous journey with a pair of star-crossed young people, and that that journey mattered. Mattered, that is, not in the sense of changing the world, but in the sense of changing them, because those are the journeys that really matter. An experience, then. That is what I want the reader to take away from the book. I don’t believe that a story should try to deliver a message. I believe that experience is prior to propositions. Leave messages to the philosophers. Novelists are in the experience business.
You may, of course, derive a message from an experience. We do that all the time. Where else do messages come from if not from experiences? But the job of the author is to give the experience and to give it in full. Whatever message you take from it, you will have to come up with for yourself.
In the end, I suppose, I want you to love Elswyth/Agnes as I do. I want you to love Theodemir as I do. I want you to rejoice for them and weep for them as I do. If you take that away from the book, and nothing else, I will be well satisfied.
Buy this Book
