Behind the Legends of Orcadia

I've always been fascinated by places where history and legend seem to overlap.

Orkney has plenty of them. Ancient stones, burial chambers, remote lochs and stretches of landscape where it's easy to imagine that the stories attached to them might contain just a little more truth than we realise.

That fascination became one of the starting points for The Orcadian Series.

I didn't want to recreate the Viking world or write a story constrained by history. I wanted to take some of the things that fascinated me about northern folklore and mythology and ask a much more interesting question:

What if some of it were true?

Not true in our world, necessarily, but somewhere else.

That somewhere became Orcadia.

It's a world of rival peoples, old beliefs, strange creatures and places where the boundary between the living, the dead and something altogether older isn't always particularly secure. Some elements have recognisable roots in folklore and mythology; others have grown entirely from my imagination.

The Trows, for example, owe their beginnings to the creatures of Orcadian folklore. The Finfolk, mysterious beings associated with the sea, provided another wonderful thread to pull at. Ancient symbols, burial traditions, Norse mythology and the idea of fate all found their way into the stories in one form or another.

But Orcadia was never intended to be a collection of old legends retold.

I wanted it to feel like a real place with its own history.

That's why familiar ideas often change once they cross into Orcadia. Legends become creatures. Symbols acquire new meanings. Old beliefs become part of everyday life. Pieces borrowed from mythology sit alongside things that exist nowhere outside the books.

And at the centre of The Burning Sword is someone who knows none of this.

Fourteen-year-old Jackson Bell begins in our world, searching for answers after his father disappears in a Scottish river. His discovery of an ancient burial chamber eventually takes him somewhere he couldn't possibly have expected.

Orcadia.

I liked the idea that Jack should encounter the world in much the same way as the reader does. He doesn't have a guidebook explaining its history. He has to work things out, decide whom he can trust and gradually discover why his arrival there may not have been accidental.

Perhaps that's also why ancient places fascinate me.

We can learn when something was built, examine what survives and make educated guesses about the people who were there. But there are always gaps.

And gaps are irresistible to a writer.

Because somewhere between what we know and what people once believed, there's room for another world.

That's where I found Orcadia.