Free History: Riding the Waves of Time
Free history is free in the sense that free verse is free of all the rules that traditionalists placed on poets – that their work must rhyme, must balance, etc. History that is written according to rules, like poems that have to rhyme, is less able to conjure up the essential meaning of the past. Form is given priority. Educational objectivity is a mantra that drowns out the meaning.
Considering different perspectives on the past, for example, present-tense approaches, fictive as well as fictional approaches, subjective approaches, metaphorical approaches. Ian states: ‘We break things too neatly into the extremes of fiction and non-fiction whereas there is a whole gamut of different perspectives in between those two poles, and really no hard-and-fast line between them. Absolute ‘historical fiction’ is impossible – just as complete ‘historical non-fiction’ is impossible (unless one is talking about a single, isolated, well-evidenced fact) and there is a great degree of shading from one into the other.’
Dr Ian Mortimer is the Sunday Times-bestselling author of the Time Traveller’s Guides to Medieval England, Elizabethan England, Restoration Britain and Regency Britain, as well as four critically acclaimed medieval biographies. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 1998. His work on the social history of medicine won the Alexander Prize in 2004 and was published by the Royal Historical Society in 2009. He has published three historical novels writing under the author name of James Forrester https://www.jamesforrester.co.uk/. He lives with his wife and three children in Moretonhampstead, on the edge of Dartmoor.
Photo: Stuart Clarke
The Historical Novel Society UK 2024 conference 