One of the greatest difficulties in writing a historical novel, it seems to me, is the most fundamental one – getting the language right. This is particularly difficult in trying to reconstruct distant periods. The whole thing is an exercise in anachronism. How are you going to recapture a defunct language and the ambient references of a long-vanished, alien world?

Alien = Latin for strange(r) is the right word here. This is surely what Sartre was getting at when he called the past ‘another country.’ But we love other countries, we love travel.  Travel, both with and without difficulty,  positively draws us these days. Gap years, trekking, Lonely Planeteering, taking off with families, or the single pursuit of adventure, whatever is beyond the border, a week by a pool or the challenge of hardship and danger, we want to find it.

The countries I want to visit no longer exist, they are as distant as ‘far worlds’ in the sense of being inaccessible,  except to the imagination.  How do you make people in these far worlds, speak and express themselves, how do you portray their world of beliefs, feelings, emotions, sense of self, the familiar objects, the uses of things and processes around them, how do you find a language to enact all this?

To me, on a theoretical level there are analogies to be made between the art of historical fiction and the art of translation.

• Both historical fiction and translation presuppose the idea of some sort of fidelity, faithfulness, the notion of adherence to an ‘original’ -the original of the language from which one is translating, or the original of facts, sources, documents, what actually occurred etc.
• And both invite a degree of interpretation which involves making choices. In historical fiction, like translation, there is the challenge of having to choose between possible alternatives, make conjectures, think about what is plausible and keep faith with some kind of over-arching sense, (the feel, mood or spirit) that you are trying to bring across from one mode of expression to another, from one language to another, or from one period of historical time to another.
• In translation you always have an original to work from, but that’s not always the case with periods of history where facts are contentious and disputed or the sources are scant or conflicting and it’s in these gaps that imagination can work…
• And the stuff on which imagination works best is surely on the ‘original’ of human nature – those things we share with all who went before and, in spite of our vastly changed lives there is a great deal that connects us. (Love, death, fear, illness, grief are still part of the human condition.

Another point, about historical events, made by German writer, Sebastian Haffner, is what he calls “their varying degrees of intensity.” [Defying Hitler p.6]. Some events, says Haffner, fail to impinge on ‘true reality’ that is: “ the most central, most personal part of a person’s life.” The usual way in which history is written, he says, fails to reveal this. Official, academic history, he says, does not register the intensity of historical occurrences. One historical event passes over the lives of individuals without a stir. Another tears through people’s lives like a cataclasm.

My feeling is that the Norman Conquest had elements of both these degrees of intensity.