The Protagonist

Okay. The story is called The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Obviously, the protagonist is the apprentice. In Dragonslayer, the apprentice was Galen. The movie doesn't tell us anything about Galen's background, but he doesn't seem too different from anyone else in the story. He seems like a guy who grew up somewhere nearby.

I don't want to do that.

I want my apprentice to be a misfit. I want him to be someone the Anglo-Saxon community around him doesn't fully understand. I want him to look on the Anglo-Saxons from an outsider's point of view.

There's a really good writing reason to do that. If he's an outsider, and he looks at the other characters and the world in which he lives with an outsider perspective, then he's well-positioned to explain them to the reader, who is also an outsider. For example, a fellow Anglo-Saxon isn't going to explain to the reader how Anglo-Saxons are fair-skinned and often have red or blond hair, right? He or she is just going to take that for granted as something not worth thinking about. But an outsider would mention it.

Also, remember my first line?

From a window atop a lonely tower, perched on a lonely rock at the edge of a lonely kingdom, a lonely man looked out upon a lonely land.

Why is he lonely? After all, he's got a job and a place to live. A sorcerer's apprentice probably lives a higher standard of living than a peasant farmer's kid, right? But if he's an outsider, someone from a far-off land who doesn't quite fit in? Then he's likely to feel lonely and out of place from time to time even if he as a master and a community he calls home. That makes for an interesting protagonist. At least, to me.

The story is set in Britain. So I thought, what's the farthest country I can think of, one of whose sons might plausibly find his way to Britain in the seventh century?

People got around more in those days than you might think. Some people, anyway. Upper class people. Okay, I guess my protagonist comes from an upper class family. But where?

Someplace really far, like China or India, is not out of the question. It's not physically impossible. But there's no known case of a person traveling that far in the seventh century.

On the other hand, there's St. Theodore of Tarsus, who was Archbishop of Canterbury from 668-690, almost contemporaneous with my book. In 656, when my story starts, St. Theodore is 54 years old and living in Rome. But he was born in Tarsus, in the Byzantine Empire, and will later be living in Britain. So there's precedent for someone traveling at least that far.

I picked Egypt. Partly because if I picture a map of the Roman Empire at its height, Britain is in the extreme northwest corner, and Egypt in the extreme southeast. So, two places very far apart, but with a common heritage of having been in the Roman Empire in the not-too-distant past.

And there was some interesting stuff going on in Egypt in the seventh century. More about that later.