"Found Them? In Mercia?"

Not a good place to go looking for coconuts.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail was released the summer between my high school graduation and my freshman year of college, which, of course, was perfect timing. When I moved into my freshman dorm the last week of August, 1975, everyone on the floor was quoting the film. One guy had a hand-lettered sign on his door that said, Stop! Who passes this door must answer me these questions three, ere the other side he see...

I wasn't terribly surprised by any of this. I thought it was wonderful. I wonder if I would have been surprised in 1975 had anyone told me the film would still be frequently quoted in 2015. And, since I already outed myself as one who played Dungeons & Dragons, I might as well go ahead and acknowledge the well-known fact that when playing Dungeons & Dragons, it is practically obligatory to quote extensively from that film.

• "He's not at all well."
• "Run away! Run away!"
• "Perhaps it will help to confuse it if we run away some more."
• "There are some who call me...Tim."

So, in choosing which of the multiple Anglo-Saxon kingdoms to focus on  for The Sorcerer's Apprentice, I am immediately drawn to Mercia, the kingdom mentioned in the opening scene of the film, when King Arthur and his trusty servant, Patsy, are riding through the countryside on pretend horses while Patsy imitates the sound of horses' hooves by clacking two coconut half-shells together. They meet a stranger who confronts them with this fact and asks where they got coconut shells. When Arthur replies, "We found them," the stranger's reaction is the line I am using as the title of this post.

If that's not a good enough reason, how about this one: the names of the other major kingdoms: Wessex, Essex, Sussex, East Anglia, Northumbria, Kent--the so-called Heptarchy--are all pretty familiar today. Here in the USA, one can find many places named Essex, for instance. Sixteen, according to Wikipedia. There are 15 towns and six counties named Kent in the US. My home state of Pennsylvania has a Northumberland County, Northumberland being just a more Anglo-Saxony way of saying Northumbria. But there doesn't seem to be anyplace in our world called Mercia, other than the original. Even the original Mercia is today more often referred to as the "Midlands."

So it sounds a little more exotic than the others, at least to my ear, and less well used, though it has the advantages of being short and simple and easy to pronounce.

And there's a Tolkien connection. Tolkien grew up in Warwickshire, in Mercia. He loved Warwickshire. Several locations in Middle Earth are likely based on real places in Warwickshire. And back when Tolkien was trying to map his legendarium onto the real-world map of Europe (something quite like what I would have done), he put Tirion, the refuge of the elves, on Warwick.

So those are reasons enough to want to tell a story set in Mercia. But a have an even better one. A really interesting bit of Mercian history that sounds perfect for the starting point of my novel. More about that next time.