H.T. Rapinski Here to do the Camulodunum Chronicles

Hey guys! How's it going? Pretty good blog, right? Unlike my friend Kaitlynn I'd appreciate comments and critiques on my posts.  Here goes the first one.

The Camulod (Latin it's Camulodunum) Chronicles were written by a historical fiction writer by the name of Jack Whyte.  No not the lead singer of the White Stripes.  It's a great book series about the Romans in Briton during the start of the fall of the Roman Empire.  You follow the blood line down to the man who would be known as King Arthur.  In the first two books you follow Publius Varrus, a retired centurion who ventures back to his home town in order to rekindle his father's forge.  Varrus in the second book eventually forges the singing sword out of a meteorite that he found in Celt territory.  He creates a "colony" of Romans to hopefully survive the withdrawal of Legions from Briton.  This colony is made up of several Roman villas and a good friend and one time commander of Varrus' lives in one of these.  This friend is Caius Brittanicus.  The son of this man is Caius Merlyn Britannicus, middle name sound familiar?  The next four books are dedicated to following this astonishing man's life as he runs the colony. With all Roman troops having been drawn back in defense of Rome by Stilicho's orders Briton is completely open to invasion by the Picts from the north.  Merlyn, as he goes by,  deals with the problems of the colony and seals a peace pact with the nearby celts who's leader is Uther Pendragon.  This alliance goes well as the Pendragon clan is renowned for their ridiculously huge and powerful longbows.  Camulod is trained in the ways of Alexander the Great's armies in that they rely heavily on charging cavalry with infantry as support.  In the next two books the main character is passed on to Clothar the Frank who is good with the lance and earns the nickname of, you guessed it, Lancelot.  These books are the closest that we get to the time period in which King Arthur lived as Lancelot knows him personally.  I loved these books as a kid, but there is one caveat.  In about every book there is at least one sex scene.  In most books I'd skip these automatically but Jack Whyte makes it so that these scenes are, in many cases, critical to the plot.  There is a lot of fighting.  Whyte is great at describing both the individual duels and the large battles.  Likewise he cunningly twists the Arthurian tale into one that could fit neatly into history.  And what better than Roman history?

This has been H.T. Rapinsky.