Risingshadow has had an opportunity to interview K.V. Johansen about her new fantasy book, The Wolf and the Wild King.
About K.V. Johansen:
K.V. Johansen was born in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, where she developed her lifelong fascination with fantasy literature after reading The Lord of the Rings at the age of eight. Her interest in the history and languages of the Middle Ages led her to take a Master’s Degree in Medieval Studies at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, and a second M.A. in English Literature at McMaster University, where she wrote her thesis on Layamon’s Brut, an Early Middle English epic poem. While spending most of her time writing, she retains her interest in medieval history and languages and is a member of the SFWA and the Writers’ Union of Canada. In 2014, she was an instructor at the Science Fiction Foundation’s Masterclass in Literary Criticism held in London. She is also the author of two works on the history of children’s fantasy literature, two short story collections, and a number of books for children and teens. Various of her books have been translated into French, Macedonian, and Danish.
Click here to visit her official website
About The Wolf and the Wild King:
High fantasy born of myth and folklore, of the dark and the trees and the winter’s cold, the flint blade’s edge and the secrets that are spoken only in dreams...
Assassin, executioner, shapeshifter, and dutiful son of the undying Queen of the land called only the Forest, Mairran is haunted by the voice of an Immortal long lost, who runs with him as a wolf in his dreams. More used to being the instrument of death than an arbiter of justice, he is dispatched by his mother to find the killer of an earl whose life was offered in an unsanctioned sacrifice to the Forest.
In an earlier age, the outlaw Lannesk swears an oath to follow the Grey Hunter and the Wild King, ancient guardians of the Forest, in a war against the invading dragon-kin and their sorcerer-priests, who seek to wake the great dragon long ago bound in sleep beneath the Lake. Past and present tangle around troubled assassin and mute outlaw, as a conspiracy of fell magic threatens the land and its people.
Evocative of a darker, grimmer McKillip, The Wolf and the Wild King is a brooding, lyrical new work from a master of epic fantasy.
Cover art by K.V. Johansen.
An interview with K.V. Johansen about The Wolf and the Wild King
- Could you briefly tell us something about yourself in your own words?
I’ve been writing all my life, and my first book, a secondary world fantasy for children, came out in 1997. I’ve written everything from picture books to literary criticism, but fantasy remains my first love. The five-book epic fantasy series Gods of the Caravan Road is probably my best-known work outside of Canada. My academic background is in Medieval Studies. I also dabble in art, mostly digital painting, these days, and I play classical guitar, electric guitar, and bass. I like trees!
- Your new fantasy book is called The Wolf and the Wild King. What can readers expect from this book?
The Wolf and the Wild King is a secondary world fantasy set in a northern land called only the Forest, which surrounds a great freshwater sea. It’s ruled by an apparently immortal and nameless Queen. When one of her earls is murdered in what looks like an unsanctioned sacrifice, the Queen sends her son Mairran, her assassin and executioner, to investigate. Meanwhile, a couple of centuries earlier, a young man, Lannesk, and his brother Anzimor are outlawed after their stepfather is killed by a rival earl. Hunted through the Forest for weeks, they swear to join the warband of the Immortals called the Grey Hunter and the Wild King against an invasion of dragon-worshippers long ago exiled, who are attempting to seize the Holy Isle and wake the ancient dragon who once ruled the Forest. It’s a very atmospheric book, a forest in winter, long dark nights, ancient rites, snow and firelight -- and swordfights under the trees, a settlement besieged, a desperate winter battle against vicious enemies.
- Is The Wolf and the Wild King in any way different from your previous fantasy books?
Gods of the Caravan Road was epic fantasy, five long books set at different points of a conflict that spanned centuries and covered a continent the size of Eurasia, with excursions to other continents, too, and with a number of narrative threads interwoven. The Wolf and the Wild King is more closely focussed. Aside from a glimpse of Lannesk’s childhood, it’s set all in one land; even though there are two timelines separated by a couple of centuries, those eventually come together. It also follows only two characters, Mairran and Lannesk, who are telling you the story -- though Lannesk’s thread, in this book, is in the third person, but there’s a reason for that, which will eventually become apparent. One of them cheats a little and tells you parts of someone else’s story, to give you what Sage, a young Forest-blessed fox shapeshifter, has told them, fleshed out by their instinct to tell a good story and maybe include some of their own deductions and suppositions. I’d call it “high fantasy” rather than “epic fantasy” because of its close focus on only two people, and how they affect events. It’s a very northern story; in part it grew out of a desire to tell a story of forests and winter and the north, whereas Gods of the Caravan Road grew out of the silk road and a natural history book and TV series, Realms of the Russian Bear. (Though that of course included northern forests, with a chapter on Siberia.) The Forest of The Wolf and the Wild King is a very Canadian forest, too, in its natural history, though I included some European elements, as I like the idea of aurochsen.
- Could you tell us something about the protagonists in this book? What kind of characters are they?
Mairran is a Forest-blessed shapeshifter who is wolf and raven as well as human; as both wolf and raven, he’s female. He says, boy, girl, he doesn’t much care what you call him, but he really takes issue when someone calls him a “good birdie” at one point. He’s his mother’s executioner and assassin, and her priest for the human sacrifice offered at the solstices. He has a very ironic self-presentation; you don’t necessarily want to trust what he says of himself, as he’s prone to cutting himself down. He’s been very messed up by his mother’s use, or abuse, of him, in shaping him into this weapon of her rule; he also has at least one ghost in his head. He’s very fragile and brittle, someone more likely to shatter than to bend and spring back, and sad, though he does have his loyal shield-companion, an older woman, Nowa, who began as his weapons-tutor and whom he calls his keeper. She’s the reason he’s not what his mother wanted to make him, the reason he’s still a good person. He desperately wants to save people and things; he has pet ravens he rescued as nestlings and adopts the teenage Sage when he finds her starving in the Forest. For all his self-deprecation, he’s a very dangerous man. You see him fight his way out of an ambush and think, whoa, people fear him in a sort of contemptuous way because he’s the priest of the sacrifices, but they’re not paying attention; he’s not counted one of the Queen’s swordtheyns as a mere courtesy.
Lannesk, on the other hand, is much more quiet and straightforward, at least, he looks that way on the surface. He’ll set his back to the storm and keep rooted. He’s an oak, if Mairran is glass. He spent his youth trying to look after his little brother Anzimor and his feckless mother when they were vagrants, doing whatever they could to survive. His mother’s marriage to an old sweetheart, a man who had claimed an earldom he had debatable title to, elevated him and Anzimor to lordly status as the stepsons of the earl, but that isn’t where Lannesk belongs, he feels. He has the heart of a Singer, as the bards of the Forest are called, but he and Anzimor as young men are warriors of their stepfather’s tower, his scouts and spies. When their stepfather is overthrown by his cousin they go on the run and end up swearing themselves to the Immortals called the Wild King and the Grey Hunter, joining an army to fight the dragon-kin. Lannesk is mute from an injury to his throat as a boy, but he plays the harp (by which I mean the true harp, the northern lyre!), and the Grey Hunter recognizes in him, or draws out of him, the ability to make magic from his music. When all is lost, Lannesk is someone who will still carry on, breaking himself -- even oaks can fall -- to salvage something, however small, from ruin.
- What inspired you to write The Wolf and the Wild King?
Landscape is always an important part of a story for me. I wanted to write a northern book, a forest book. I also wanted to do something where music played a part in the magic, so this is a book with the idea of music woven through, as well as forest and winter and long nights. I’ve put musicians of one sort or another into a lot of my writing; I also keep coming back to shapeshifters. I think Mairran is the last working-out of an ur-character I’ve been writing, or have been mining as the raw material of characters, since I was in high school, the last things I hadn’t explored with that.
- What kind of magic can readers expect to find in this book?
Some of the magic of the Forest is inherent in the Immortals, who aren’t gods but are more rooted in the land, genii loci who may have been human or animal once, or who perhaps never were and were just born out of the land. In the past there were more inhuman inhabitants of the Forest, like the faylings; many were slain fighting against Erryth the Golden, the dragon who was one of the Immortals but who became a tyrant over the Forest long ago. Human magic is mostly a thing of music, a power drawn from the land and shaped by music and song, and by will, by those who have some talent for that and have reached some -- probably inarticulate -- understanding of it. Lannesk makes songs out of thought and harping, and sometimes his brother is able to be his voice in that; his songs are able to counter the magic of the dragon-kin sorcerer-priests, who work their magic with song and the sacrifice of human lives. There are also witches, who may have skill in tracking, or in calling winds, or in seeing or scrying by offering a little of their own blood to the Dark Mother, a goddess associated with death and sleep and dreams. There are those who are Forest-blessed, born with some ability that seems more than human. It might be as small as having an ability to tame animals, or as overwhelming as being a Seer; it might be something like being a shapeshifter, debatably not even human, and by Mairran’s time, feared, even cast out or killed rather than respected. It’s never a systematized magic, not something that can be set down in rules.
- The Wolf and the Wild King is the first half of The Forest duology. Will you be writing more books that are set in the same fantasy world?
I’m currently working on The Raven and the Harper, which is part II of The Forest. I think that Raven will finish the story of this world -- for now, anyway. It’s a very contained story, rather than history sprawling off and giving birth to new threads and new tangents the way Gods of the Caravan Road did. I have another big epic fantasy world I’m itching to write, though, and a sword and sorcery written and out on submission that I’d like to write sequels to as well, so for now, the duology will be it. In the future, though, the world of the Forest and the Lake could give birth to short stories quite easily, with different characters at different points in its history, past and future. I’d like to see Sage as an adult, or the Grey Hunter in the days when she and the Wild King were plotting to bring down Erryth. I wouldn’t say no to a return, especially as short stories.
- Did you have to do any research during the writing process?
The technology, the weapons and the fighting style is mostly Viking-era to thirteenth century, so that was an area I’ve been researching, or reading in, most of my adult life. Deciding the Forest was going to be mostly like forests I know meant the research there was more just experience of my native environment. However, there’s always more to learn! I grew up on the shores of Lake Ontario, which isn’t that northerly really, but I read a lot about Lake Baikal and Lake Superior, about ice, though the Lake of The Wolf and the Wild King is the size of the Baltic, actually. I read a fair bit about that, too! One thing I did a lot of research on was the Forest-harp, the northern/Germanic/Anglo-Saxon lyre. I read articles on the northern lyre in English and in German, I listened to recordings, I watched videos of musicians, and of amateurs and professional luthiers building them. I’m a guitarist of dogged persistence, some technical skill, and no musical talent; I built an electric guitar from a kit a few years ago, I have some woodworking skill, so now based on that experience I am seriously thinking about trying to build my own lyre, a Sutton Hoo or Trossingen model. That probably doesn’t count as research, as I haven’t done it yet, but maybe all the thinking about it does count!
- Is there anything else you'd like to add?
I hope The Wolf and the Wild King will be something people put on their shelves with McKillip’s or Cherryh’s fantasy!