The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [85]
Fine, I said, already used to argumentative characters. Have it your way, Hildegarde. We can always change it later, if the copy editor tells me it isn’t French.
A year or two later, I found myself in London, in a store called Past Times, which specializes in the reproduction of art and artifacts from … er … past times. They had a rack of musical recordings, compositions dating from the tenth century to the twentieth, performed on period instruments and according to the performance conditions appropriate to the time of the composition. Finding this interesting, I thumbed through the rack, only to find a tape of songs composed by … one Mother Hildegarde.
Hildegarde von Bingen, to be exact (as I recall, my actual exclamation at the time was, “Ha! So it isn’t French!“). A mystic, a composer—and an abbess—from the twelfth century. But Mother Hildegarde, nonetheless.
As for the minor characters who don’t speak up for themselves, I often rely on a book titled Scottish Christian Names, by Leslie Alan Dunkling. This is really a rather misleading title, since a good many popular Scottish names are not “Christian” at all, coming from much more ancient Celtic roots. The author of the book really means simply “first” names, as opposed to surnames, and the general derivation, meaning, and alternative forms of each name are included.
HISTORICAL CHARACTERS
Names are, of course, not a problem when dealing with characters who are real historical persons. The chief difficulty in these instances is to do justice to the actions and personality of the dead (or at least to treat them with such respect as they seem to deserve), while still ruthlessly subverting them to the purposes of the story.
This is an ethical as well as a technical problem, though one luckily has the advantage of not needing to worry about being sued for defamation. Any novelist who deals with historical characters has to determine how to handle them—and the handling of course grows somewhat easier if little is written about those characters, since this allows the author maximum flexibility.
The principal historical character with whom I was dealing was, of course, Charles Stuart, a person about whom much has been written—most of it glamorized, inaccurate, and wildly misleading.
A major difference in doing real historical research, versus that required for writing a historical novel, is that with the latter, one need not be quite so picky about the reliability of the sources. Still, a sense of obligation and respect toward the historical characters—who were, after all, real people—dictates that one should try to obtain at least fairly accurate information as to who they really were, and then to do nothing to discredit them, beyond the bounds of their known reputations.
I was fortunate enough to find a book titled Bonnie Prince Charlie, by Susan Mac-Lean Kybett, on a remainder table (one of a writer’s greatest resources). It appeared to be by far the best description of Charles Stuart available; the book is scholarly (Kybett being a respected British historian), thorough, and—luckily—very readable, and presented an excellent picture both of Stuart and of the political situation surrounding the circumstances of the Rising.
I’ve found that when doing historical research, while one may consult hundreds of books, normally only a few prove to be extremely useful. Bonnie Prince Charlie was one such book, and I used Kybett’s portraits of Charles Stuart and the other prominent Jacobites as the basis for my own fictional portrayals.
While it was, of course, necessary to invent incident and dialogue involving Stuart and other historical persons, I tried to make sure that such descriptions fit with what was known of each character’s