How much are you indebted to the work of Geoffrey Ashe in portraying Arthur as the "Riothamus"?

It's a theory I've embraced; it explains and accounts for the legends better than alternative theories -- such as those which center the Arthurian drama in Scotland (Norma Goodrich). While alternative theories are fascinating -- and necessary -- I've not been impressed by Goodrich's suggestions that Avalon was the Isle of Man, Camelot was both Carlisle and Stirling, and that the Round Table was a Temple. Ditto with Graham Phillips pinpointing of the whole Arthurian drama in Wales. Geoffrey Ashe's scholarly work has influenced me the most, I suppose, and I'm wondering how much it has influenced you.

Frankly, I’m a great fan of Geoffrey Ashe and his work. I admire his style and his theories and have little trouble accepting most of what he postulates. My major difficulty, in fact, has been in distancing myself from some of his theories…I want my stories to be mine alone, and so I have to step carefully around Mr. Ashe in many places. His was the first voice I heard uttering and muttering theories on the Riothamus, and I found his perspective offered me one of the most telling insights I had ever seen into the "historical" Arthur. Riothamus had been known for many years, but scholars had previously thought the name to be an actual name…Joe Riothamus, or some-such…but then it became clear that the word Riothamus was actually an honorific pre-Saxon title, meaning The High King. Some time after I read that, around 1980, I believe, a colleague of Ashe’s, Professor Barbara Moorman of the University of Southern Mississippi, successfully deciphered three medieval documents that identified Riothamus as having diplomatic relationships with European rulers who are known to have existed in the period just after the Roman evacuation of Britain, in the first half of the Fifth century. One of those documents, according to Ashe’s statement at that time, actually referred to Riothamus as Arthur.

I spoke to Professor Moorman in Mississippi in the early 1980s after reading the original article announcing her discovery, and she was very gracious. She listened to my burbling about the idea I had for the book I was about to write (which then had a working title "The High King") and refrained from putting me down or pooh-poohing my ideas. And it has only now occurred to me that I have not spoken to her since…

So, yes, I owe a lot to Geoffrey Ashe, his scholarship and his ideas. As for the other theories you mention in your post, I agree with you on all of them. The Isle Of Man as Avalon doesn’t do a thing for me, nor can I see Camelot split between Carlisle and Stirling. The Round Table as a temple? That might be a more tenable argument than the others, but reason and logic both dictate to me that the equality of the Round Table smacks of the equality within the original republican Roman Senate. Let me tell you why I think that could be true, and in the doing of it, I’ll explain my original thinking on the original title of the series, "A Dream Of Eagles".

I believe that Britain, around the turn of the fifth century, might have been to the Roman Empire what India was to the British Empire at the turn of the twentieth century — a stronghold of elitist, ultra-conservatives who believed that they alone, in their insulated society, had safeguarded and come to represent all that was finest in their original, unsullied societies; Republican Rome in the one instance and Imperial, Victorian Britain in the other…. I grew up, in the 1940s and 1950s, among former Indian Civil Servants and Indian Army veterans who had served their active lives in the luxurious, servant-studded colonies of the British Raj. They were a breed apart, a stuffed-shirt, pompous, overbearing sub-society of snobs and bigots who thought their ways were the only ways and everyone else in the world was inferior. Most of the ones I knew were bitterly resentful that they had to spend their retirement back in Britain, living in relative poverty among the peasants and deprived of their cheap house servants. Even as a snot-nosed kid, I could see that. I also knew that the wealthy ones, the ones who could afford to do so, had all opted to live on in India after their retirement.

I believe that something of the same thing also happened to the veterans and officers of the British Roman legions, many of whom had been born of families who had lived in Britain for generations. When the legions left, these people had no other home to go to. Rome was no longer Rome … Constantine the Great had taken the Imperial Court to Constantinople, and had left Rome to be shared among the newly-recognized Christian Church, the Imperial Civil Service, and the Mob. No one who was anyone lived in Rome any longer, and the city was being threatened by invaders — Alaric the Goth and Attilla the Hun. Consequently, many wealthy Romano-British families chose to remain in Britain and take their chances of surviving life without the legions. These people began to set up private enclaves and to take organized steps to defend themselves. Many of their leaders would have been Roman-trained, professional soldiers who were proud of their service with the Eagles, and who thought of themselves, as Roman officers always had, as Eagles. From that came my title. My protagonists, Britannicus and Varrus, privileged and elitist, saw themselves as guardians of the unsullied Roman Way — the Republican Virtues of ancient Rome, uncorrupted by the debaucheries of the Empire. They dreamed of surviving the Fall they knew was coming, and of re-establishing the greatest society the world had ever known, firmly based this time on the secure and defensible island of Britain. Their Dream was 1,000 years premature — but the first step towards its realization was the uniting of the entire country under the rule of one man, one Monarch: Arthur, the first and greatest High King of Britain