The Kings in Winter

by Cecelia Holland

It was a time of legend, a time of strugle, a time when the Kingship of the hero Brain Boru is being contested by men of other clans, and by the Danish invader who had come in their longships to take hold of Ireland and make it their own. All through a long winter of strife, Muirtagh struggles to balance his own honor and that of his clan, against his divided loyalties to the three would-be Kings of Ireland.

First published in 1968, The Kings in Winter is considered by Cecelia Holland's fans to be her finest work. The book is set in Ireland during the Danish invasion around 800 A.D.. Set against this background is a clan feud that consumes the majority of the plot.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Medieval, Ireland, Fiction, 11th Century, Irish Literature, Historical

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

Pen name used by Elizabeth Eliot Carter.

Cecelia Holland is one of the world's most highly acclaimed and respected historical novelists, ranked by many alongside other giants in that field such as Mary Renault and Larry McMurtry. Over the span of her thirty year career, she's written almost thirty historical novels, including The Firedrake, Rakessy, Two Ravens, Ghost on the Steppe, Death of Attila, Hammer For Princes, The King's Road, Pillar of the Sky, The Lords of Vaumartin, Pacific Street, Sea Beggars, The Earl, The King in Winter, The Belt of Gold, The Serpent Dreamer, The High City, Kings of the North, and a series of fantasy novels, including The Soul Thief, The Witches Kitchen, The Serpent Dreamer, and Varanger. She also wrote the well-known science fiction novel Floating Worlds, which was nominated for a Locus Award in 1975. Her most recent book is a new fantasy novel, Dragon Heart.

Reviews

[Kristina · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has been on my shelves for years. Reading it was an enjoyable experience because of the author’s engaging writing and the historical subject material. Some of the dialogue was choppy and there were a few typos. Overall, however, this journey into eleventh-century Ireland was chilly but worthwhile.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've never before read a book quite like this. It's about deathly serious events, but the dialogue has some of the funniest one-liners I've read. It seems to assume that the reader will know much more Irish history and mythology than most people do, so reading it made me feel like I was wandering around with a paper bag over my head, peering out through narrow eyeholes. Unless you're already an Irish history buff, you'll learn something by reading this. If you want to read a historical novel about 11th century Ireland, this is a good choice.

[Ozymandias · Rating 2 out of 5]

Plot: 6 (meandering but generally effective if inconclusive)
Characters: 4 (motivations often seem unclear)
Accuracy: 9? (plausible but poorly recorded)

The prose is excellent and the attitudes and beliefs on display believable, but it all seemed a bit too alien and unhelpful to me. There's actually a historical introduction because the book does such a bad job of explaining its own backstory, and when it does it is in an awkward manner. The book seems to take too many things for granted, particularly assumptions about character motivation. I have no idea what Muirtagh's motivations and goals were, even though we're given his story in exquisite detail. There's just something left out that needed to be made explicit. I mean, why does he do what he does? That's something you need to know. Which is a problem when your whole novel is built around him. It's too bad too, because I generally found him an entertaining and quick-witted character.

And I suppose when it came down to it I wasn't that interested in the overall plot either. It was hard to tell from the description, but it sounded like it was going to be one in a long line of 'man of peace forced to go to war to protect his family' stories. And I suppose that's still broadly right. But Cecelia Holland loves to take typical narratives and complicate them. Normally that's a good thing, but here it basically means undermining the plot so that it has nowhere to go but random directions. Once the feud turns violent the narrative needs to kick off into full gung ho revenge or frightened flight and survival. Instead it dithers and goes nowhere. It doesn't help that most of the interesting character relationships vanish by around the halfway point.

[Julian Dean · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cecelia Holland's sparsity of language allowed for a mythical feel to this historical fiction. Yet, despite the beauty in scantness, the characters seemed distant and reckless. It was hard to connect with the protagonist as he seemed ill-defined and the surrounding characters seemed stereotypical and one dimensional.

[Dorothy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the book, I found the main character interesting and horseback riding chases exciting . The plot line is relatively simple but for some reason it felt muddled and at some points I had a hard time following it.

[Marsha Valance · Rating 4 out of 5]

During the Danish invasion of Ireland which ended in the battle of Clontarf, Muirtagh, an Irish chieftain, must decide between his duty to his liege-lord, Brian Boru, and his responsibility to care for his clan's best interests.

[Grant Billard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good story. Character development is kind of spotty and hard to understand the emotion of the characters through the book. Paining a picture of the land and where certain scenes take place was not horrible but also not great.

[Kathleen Rehagen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is about Ireland, and I normally love Irish stories, but I did not love or even much like this story. It was dense to the point of being painful to read.

[Kristen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cecelia Holland is one of a handful of masters of historic fiction. Her characters are true, more real than many "real" figures found in histories and biographies, as are the finely detailed and carefully researched past worlds she creates.

The Kings in Winter tells the story of a fictional Irish chief, Muirtagh, who lived in the time of the legendary Irish king Brian Boru.

Muirtagh's clan, then led by his father, was massacred before the story begins. They now live in the hills, away from the land that was once theirs. Muirtagh, who prefers the harp to killing, declines to scheme for revenge - a stance that ironically transforms the clans who took part in the massacre into murderers rather than the brave heroes avenging past wrongs, as they prefer to see themselves.

Muirtagh unsuccessfully maneuvers to shield his family from harm, survives a winter as an outlaw, and finally takes refuge with the high king's enemies - and the Danish invaders allied with them.

Muirtagh's outlaw winter was a favorite part of the story for me. "In the afternoon he reached the shore of huge lough and made a camp beside it. Sitting before his fire, he wished he had his harp; he wasn't sleepy, and it would be pleasant to play his harp. The wind came up over the lough, sharp and edged with cold. He should have chosen the summer to get outlawed in.

"Finally he got up and went after the mare, who was grazing along the shore. He hadn't tethered her, thinking she wouldn't go far from him, but when he came close to her she lifted her head and moved away. He followed her along the shore, but she wouldn't let him get near her, and eventually he gave up. She put her nose down to the grass and began to browse again.

"If she got away from him he was helpless. The thought of being left on foot in this country, of being seen and chased on foot, took the breath out of his lungs...."

The battle at the book's end is a classic, vividly describing both action and Muirtagh's interior take on it.

I finished it about 1:30 a.m. last night, couldn't put it down.

An aside - I don't understand another reviewer's complaint about the Irish names. It's a book based around 999 in Ireland. Given those circumstances, what names would be preferable?

[Nigel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I ordered this from the library off the back of Hammer For Princes, and as luck would have it, it turns out to be set in Ireland in 1014, the lead-up to the Battle Of Clontarf, which, as it happens, happened, as it happened, a thousand years ago this coming weekend. For various ways and reasons, I haven't read much historical fiction set in Ireland. Looking over my Goodreads list, I see Year Of The French and that's it. I'd love to read more like this.

Our hero is Muirtagh, bowman and harper, clan chief of the O'Cullinane's, who have stayed in their refuge in the Wicklow hills for these last twenty years, since they were massacred and chased out of Meath by the mac Mahons. After pursuing and slaying a gang of Danish horse thieves, they are intercepted on their way home and summoned to Tara at the behest of the High King, Brian Boru. In the wake of the subsequent events in the High King's hall, the old feud is rekindled and Muirtagh's desperate efforts to save his clan end with him renouncing his chieftainship and fleeing as an outlaw with blood on his hands. The story culminates in the Battle of Clontarf, with Muirtagh on the side destined to lose.

I can't get over how good this is. Not being a big historical fiction head, with a few notable exceptions, I can't say whether these books are actually as underappreciated and abandoned to obscurity as they appear to be, but if so, it's truly undeserved. Holland's prose is spare, polished and unadorned. The story and the characters are superbly crafted, and the whole things is lean, smooth, tight, muscular and amazingly readable. Going by my own tastes, this book is in a magical, if unlikely, zone where Dorothy Dunnett and George RR martin overlap and I would unhesitatingly recommend it to fans of either.

[Rose Kelleher · Rating 4 out of 5]

"unexpectedly good"

Others have summarized the plot, so I'll just mention a couple of things I found interesting. First, I wasn't expecting the main character to be quite so complex; I guess I'd pictured a stereotypical grunting sword waver. Muirtagh is funny, sly and unpredictable. Towards the end I began to be disturbed by his actions: why was he joining Bjorn and fighting the Irish? Had he gone crazy? Ultimately I was able to make sense of it because of the initial work Holland put into depicting Muirtagh's affectionate family life and his fear for his wife and children, especially Eoghan. Why would this man, who loved his family above all else, make such a bizarre decision? And why did he behave so oddly at the very end, in a scene others have called disappointing and anticlimactic? The key is trusting that there's a proverbial method to his madness. Making the best of an extremely difficult and complicated situation, he sacrificed his own happiness in the best interests of his family. It's heartbreaking, yes, but in that violent culture it could have gone so much worse.

Some have complained that the first part of the book is "slow"; I couldn't disagree more. Those domestic scenes are essential to understanding what Muirtagh does later; they give a good sense of what life was like in Ireland at that time; and they're delightfully funny and human. My one complaint, and this may just be me, is that some of the prose and dialog were overly terse and hard to follow.

[Leslie D. Soule · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is refreshing to see a main character who is neither particularly likeable nor trying too hard to make us like him (aka drama queen). Muirtagh is a rare leading character, neither romantic (the book is purely historical fiction – quite the rarity these days) nor charismatic, and yet he has a solid stoicness about him that makes him believeable.
Political intrigue abounds as Muirtagh finds himself in the middle of the dramas of three would-be Irish kings, and Cecilia Holland expertly weaves a tale set in Ireland around the year 1014. The real strong point of this novel is its snarky dialogue, as expressed by this quote from page 66:
“’My brother is young,’ Muirtagh said. ‘He’s not aware yet that there’s a difference between the – the trouble a man chooses to get into and the trouble he gets out of the world anyway.’”
I rather enjoyed this tale, where the hero is a harp-player who tends to get a most interesting form of revenge going. I like how the author used a historical setting and non-conventional language. Generally, this is taboo, but it does make the story more interesting and relatable. Our character is an outlaw, and an unconventional hero because you normally don’t find warrior-singers or warrior-harp-players. Writers generally tend to write about warriors who do one thing really well – fighting – at the expense of all else. I would certainly recommend this book to anyone looking for a good book that is out of the norm.

[Lori · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have enjoyed many of Holland's historical fictions, but this account of intrigue and betrayal among medieval Irish petty kings and Viking interlopers seems so vague and distant as to render the main characters unreachable and unsympathetic. The harper Muirtagh, a man temperamentally unsuited to perpetual border wars, is one of the few survivors of a petty-noble family decimated by Brian Boru's men a generation earlier. Muirtagh strives to preserve the remnant of his clan, all the while nursing his continued grievance against Boru's forces, expressing his dissent mainly in his canny words. Holland gives Muirtagh, and select other characters, the legendary Hibernian gift o' gab, but this does little to humanize or personalize these vengeful, intrigue-obsessed men.

The most authentic feeling moments in the book are not Muirtagh's verbal besting of his more powerful, noble rivals, nor the betrayals and battles the menfolk wage, but the small domestic vignettes of the hard, unsentimental, but emotionally rich life Muirtagh shares with his wife Aud, his brother, and their broods of young children. This - the only part of the story that resounds with genuine emotion - is the life Muirtagh ultimately renounces as an outlaw, which seems doubly sad when it is the only part of his story that feels genuine.

[Bibliophile · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Kings in Winter reminded me of why I've never been a huge fan of the prolific Cecelia Holland's historical fiction, whose work I'd tried a long time ago. I'm sure the setting and research were impeccable and there was definitely a sense that this was the way people really lived in eleventh century Ireland, but I just didn't like anyone in the story enough to care about what happened to them. I did like Aud, the wife of the main character Murtagh, and the scenes of domesticity that I found to be quite charming, but alas, the book was much more about Murtagh and his relationships to the kings of the title (Brian Boru, and the two rival kings of Munster and Leinster.) The scenes set amidst the Vikings who had come to fight against Brian were interesting, but they came at a point that was well over the halfway mark of the book, and I had trouble figuring out who was who and moreover, didn't particularly care.

I'm still interested in reading more by Cecelia Holland, but I'm afraid my earlier judgment may still stand.

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I vacillated between 3 and 4, so I give this 3.5. I have been immersed in Irish fiction and non-fiction in the past few months. After reading the preface, I reviewed the Battle Of Clontarf in history so I began the book knowing the fates of the historical figures. Muirtagh is an interesting character, a medieval anti-establishment chieftain who wants to lived peacefully on his land with his family and his harp. The High King, Brian Boru, and his family's old enemies, the mac Mahons, won't allow that. He is drawn into the bigger feud among the Irish kings and the Danes.

[DoctorM · Rating 5 out of 5]

A favourite from my Lost Youth. A sharply-drawn account of the end of the Viking era in Ireland, with a clear cool detached view of politics and clan rivalry and warfare. Her main character's slow burn towards revenge against the High King's courtiers and her scenes of life in Viking Dublin are wonderful.

[Scott Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant!

[Margareth8537 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Writes about societies I don't know but are interesting to see. Brings them alive, sometimes in very few words, and you want to find out what happens to individuals and their society

[Donie Nelson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fictional character in the time of King Brian Buru of Ireland - talented writer but these early books of hers are very internal, lack sense of danger or drama.

[Randhir · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent read on the times of Brian Boru, the High King of Ireland and a traitor towards whom our sympathies lie

[Christine]

I read this so very long ago, that I no longer have a distinct memory of it. Having just rediscovered Cecelia Holland, I'm planning to reread this book, and try a few of her other historical novels.

[Mary Quann]

my brain gets snagged by all the difficult to pronounce names and place names, so it's hard to see if a plot is unfolding. I would listen to it, if an audiobook were available.