Have you built up a huge personal library?

The thing about the traditional tale is that too many people just follow-my-leader. There are far too many anthologies that have far too many stories we already know. Joseph Jacobs estimated -- he's the biographer of the Jewish people but better known in the world of children's books because he did those wonderful anthologies of English and More English fairy tales, Celtic and More Celtic and then Indian fairy tales, in the 1880s and 1890s - he estimated there are 10,000 English traditional tales. Different stories, not variations. So why is it, I asked myself, we keep seeing the same wonderful but overworked tales, when there is such a rich body of material.

I thought, well, it wouldn't take very much resourcefulness to go and find some of these stories. So you go to the British Museum, the London Library, Folklore Society Library and so on, and get to grips with some. When I did my British Folktales, which consisted of about seventy retellings, many of them were of lesser-known stories, for that reason. I assume that at least some people who read my books find it helpful to know the original source of a story.

The King Who Was And Will Be is a marvellous information book about King Arthur and his world. It's designed in a very individual way. How did that come about?

It was conceived from the word go as a joint venture between the artist Peter Malone and me. We knew that it would be large-format with colour pictures. Beyond that I don't think we really knew very much. I wanted it to be a jigsaw of the main pieces of the world of King Arthur, which we all know about, almost, but few of us know about one for one the entire shape of the jigsaw. We've all heard of Lancelot or Tintagel, Excalibur, but we may not all have heard of Marie de France, we may not all be absolutely sure when the chips are down what courtly love really consisted of... So I thought it would be a useful way of limbering up for my own retelling of these Arthurian legends, to be sure that I had a reasonable handle on the main pieces of the jigsaw.

That answers my next question. So when you wrote The King Who Was And Will Be you knew you were going on to write The Seeing Stone.

Absolutely. What I hadn't planned on doing in The King Who Was And Will Be but actually decided to do while the book was in the making was to hunt around in early English, Welsh, French and German sources for little snips which seemed to illustrate life in the Middle Ages, to set alongside the Arthurian pieces of jigsaw. Again it's the scholar manque at work in me in a way.

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