Did you plan "The Golden Eagle" as a continuation of the original series?

This seems like a good point to bring up a question that has been nagging me. I've read reviews and other comments that indicate the Dream of Eagles series was meant to end at Arthur's coronation. However, Merlyn makes frequent references to Arthur's death, which led me to believe the series would address it. Is Golden Eagle really a planned continuation of the series? Or, were The Saxon Shore and both Sorcerer books re-edited to add references to Arthur's death? (Katie)

As to why I chose this course of action, it might be better, and it will certainly be simpler, to explain how, and as I do, I’ll be answering Katie’s question, too…

Now, Katie has observed that Merlyn, in his retelling of the tale of his own life, makes frequent references to the death of Arthur and the disappearance of all that Merlyn held most dear. She states, too, that these references had led her to believe that the story would deal with the death of Arthur… Well, as George Gershwin stated in "Porgy and Bess", It Ain’t Necessarily So… Katie has been operating on a false assumption: that what you think you see is always what is actually there. (You might have to read that bit again and think about it…) Truth is, there’s nothing unusual or strange about an old man referring to things that happened in his life despite the fact that the events he mentions have no relevance to the story he’s telling at the time. The death of Arthur was one of the major traumas of Merlyn’s life, but in "A Dream Of Eagles" (or "The Camulod Chronicles" as it’s known in the United States,) Merlyn is not telling the story of Arthur’s death. He is telling the story of his own early life and how it revolved around the training of the young Arthur. And that is the story that ended when the young man became King and began his legendary career. With his Coronation, Arthur’s formal training was over. That part of his tale was told and done with, and it’s the only part of the tale that I was interested in telling, ‘way back when I started writing it, in 1977.

But then, as the years passed and my cast of characters grew larger and more articulate, people began haranguing me, telling me that I could not simply abandon my readers there at the Coronation of the new King, simply because I had now told them how the sword got into, and out of, the stone. They told me, time and time again, that the story deserved to be told to its conclusion, seen through the eyes of these characters… And over time, I came to agree with those people, and then not merely did I grow resigned to telling the story of Arthur, I had the temerity to become excited at the prospect. So I have now contracted for a further miniseries of novels, which will take up at the exact point where The Sorcerer ended and will be narrated by Lancelot. They will tell the remainder of the story of the Golden Eagle of Britain, Arthur the High King, from the first battle directly after his coronation, to his death in battle many years later, all as seen through the eyes of his best friend and closest confidant, the heroic Knight who travelled across the seas to join his own hero Arthur, and then fell in love with the King’s wife and betrayed all that was most sacred in his life. Stay tuned. In the meantime, I’m finishing Uther, which came before the others.

And on that topic, Uther is not part of the Dream Of Eagles’ series, per se. It is a stand-alone novel, narrated in a different voice, and it arose out of a need — perceived by my readers — for closure on the matter of who killed Cassandra. Was Uther guilty or innocent? Merlyn could not answer that question and others in Eagles’ Brood, because he simply didn’t know the answers, and they were not important to the tale he had to tell. Now these answers are being provided as part of Uther’s own story, which also includes the story of Gulrhys Lot of Cornwall and how he met his grisly end, as well as the story of how Uther met and wooed Ygraine, Arthur’s mother. It should be out some time early next year, (1999).