I have not long finished a New Zealand historical fiction book called Season of the Jew (mentioned in another thread). Really good book by one of our top (now deceased) authors, Maurice Shadbolt. But I have been really puzzled by the notes at the back about the real stories of the true-life protagonists. He has told us, accurately and using their real names, about the Maori warrior Te Kooti, and various other people of the times. He says his main character, George Fairweather, a lieutenant originally with the 65^th Foot is composite but far from fictional and then goes on to say he lived from 1824 - 1901, leaving a son Matui Fairweather who was killed on Turkey's Sari Bair range during the Gallipoli campaign, and on the same day, 8th August 1915 James Newman, his adopted brother was killed by a defective British salvo attempting to hold Chunuk Bair. I can't find any records of these people by those names, and indeed the story of James Newman, who survived a Maori attack which left his mother in dreadful pain before dying of wounds that split her body, is mentioned in AH Reed's The Story of NZ but there they are called Wilson. A James Wilson was killed on Chunuk Bair that day. There's no wedding record, births or deaths that fit the names. It seems odd to call people by name in a historical footnote if that isn't what they were called.

In the book his first child is born at the end of the hostilities written about, so around 1869, which makes him 46 in 1915. This birth may, of course, have been fictional. But I can't find anyone who fits
all this. The captain should have an English name, unless he took his mother's.

Shadbolt also says Fairweather’s wife predeceased him in 1890, they had three children as well as the adopted boy. "Some of George Fairweather's watercolours of early colonial life and especially of Maori life in the mountainous Urewera have begun to fetch respectable prices in auction rooms."

All this is very definite and yet it doesn’t fit anything I can find. How do authors usually deal with characters like this? Not only do I find it mystifying, but it has wasted a good few hours of my life trying to work out who exactly Fairweather and his fighting son were. And I haven’t succeeded. I feel a bit cheated, but don’t know if I really have any reason to.

SOmetimes an author will find a character of whom little or nothing is known except birth and death dates, and will build a story around him or her, making that character play out the fictional hero that is in the author's mind.

However, when they do that, a little honesty wouldn't go amiss....

On the other hand, some authors make up a character who is then placed in aweave of substantiated and unaltered truths. This is tricky but fun to do. I was startled by an email from an American friend who believed my every word about my characters yet could find no proof of their actual existance.

I don't know how to start new threads so have decided to put my thoughts in this thread.  Has anybody seen the latest very loose adaptation of the Dracula legend which has recently started on Sky Living?  I don't have Sky so I'm dependent on acquaintances who are kind enough to let me see it on their TV.  The Sky Living (made by NBC I believe) offering bears very little resemblance to Abraham Stoker's novel of the same name. This was disappointing because I've liked Katie McGrath and Victoria Smurfit in other programmes.  I am aware that the Dracula of "real" history was not like Mr Stoker's creation, that he just took a historical  "baddie", Vlad the Impaler, as an instrument about which to weave a story. But as for the latest TV adaptation, it is not very faithful to the novel. With one exception I can think of I'm not normally too keen on adaptations which diverge too much from their source material [if I know the original] - heck I even got annoyed by Bathsheba in a film of "Far from the Madding Crowd" being played by blonde Julie Christie when the character in the book has black hair (though I liked Julie Christie in other things).  
Ought I to cut NBC more slack for changing the material in the series from the source novel?

Hi Lir - if you go in through the home page and select which category you want to open a new thread in you'll see a blue button over the list of existing threads with "New Topic" on it. That will open the screen for setting in the first post - just remember that it also contains a field for the title of the new thread and won't let you post without it being filled in.

Speaking of Dracula, in Ireland it is well understood that Stoker drew huge inspiration and quite a lot of the more noteworthy characteristics of his character from the old Gaelic legend of Abhartach. Abhartach, like Count Dracula, leaves his grave at midnight, drinks the blood of his victims, is of high social rank and can only be dispatched with a sword made from the yew tree, much as Dracula with his wooden stake. Burying him upside-down also stops him in his tracks though Stoker dropped that bit.

Thank you for the information, Nordmann.  You know, despite being of half Irish descent I had never heard of Abhartach; mind you the Irish among my great-grandparents came over to Britain heap big moons ago, though one of my grand-dads may have been born in the Emerald Isle.  Does the word "Avatar" have anything to do with Abhartach?  I had heard that vampire films sometimes draw on the story of Elizabeth Bathory, a truly unpleasant lady if she really did the things she was accused of (my understanding is that there is one school of thought that her crimes were exaggerated by certain Catholics because she was a Protestant, but I don't know the truth of it).

When I've a little more leisure I'll have to look up Abhartach on the internet - though of course on the internet one cannot always be certain how accurate the information contained on a particular site is.

My OED tells me that "avatar" is derived from two Sanskrit words "ava" and "tariti" so that the two combined mean "descended from a deity". Abhartach on the other hand is a name derived from the same root as the modern Irish "abhac" which translates as "dwarf" in English. In Ireland there has never been a tradition of belief in mythical dwarfs so the term has always just meant a normal person of restricted growth.

Having said that Irish is a language with many evidences of its roots in ancient Indo-European so it is quite possible that the "ava" bit does indeed share a common semantic source indicating "descent" in a genetic sense.

nordmann wrote:

In Ireland there has never been a tradition of belief in mythical dwarfs so the term has always just meant a normal person of restricted growth.

You surprise me Nordmann. Given the long history of metalliferous mining in Ireland - for gold, silver, copper, tin, lead - I am rather surprised that Ireland doesn't have the equivalent of english dwarves or dwergs, scottish droichs, welsh corrachs, cornish knockers, norse dvärger, german nibelungen and kobalds, flemish kabouter, and french bergluetes and nains. Does Ireland really not have any mythical tradition of industrious little fellows who toil beneath the earth, and who may lead miners to hidden riches, warn them of underground hazards, ... or mischeviously tempt them into danger?

Irish mythology is replete with little people, even ones who moved underground en masse - but none of them took up mining that I'm aware of, no.

Nordmann, belatedly thanks for the information about 'avatar' etc.  My broadband is [I hope] back on track now so I can check the forums (fora?????) periodically again.  The Irish little people I remember hearing stories about were leprechauns.  I do remember when I was younger [in England] shops used to sell leprechaun brooches, around the time they sold shamrock brooches, circa St Paddy's Day.  I was born on St Paddy's Day and named after him (well otherwise I was going to be "Ursula Mary" - nothing wrong with U-M but it didn't go with my [Irish] surname).  But that aside, even the leprechauns "sold out" at one time and went all Hollywood in "Darby O'Gill and the Little People", so it's not just vampires that "ain't wot they used ter be".

Leprechauns were really only ever an American thing. In Ireland the term had indeed been used to describe small creatures that screwed around with farmers' work (blocking ditches, turning cows' milk sour in the udder and so on) but only in the South Tipperary and North Cork region. They are in fact only one of a plethora of such goblin-type entities which went by different names and with slightly regional variations in behaviour all around the country.  For some reason however theirs was the name that caught on in the USA and it was there that all the palaver about crocks of gold, rainbows etc, were added on.

Ironically they were never part of "the little people". Belief in them was rooted in much more general Irish myth relating to the Tuatha Dé Danann, a quasi-historical reference to an ancient Irish race who withstood the Formorians but were defeated by the Milesians, thus ending pre-Celtic Ireland. They continued to play a role in spiritual belief right up to recent times and are regarded as something way more significant than the other mischievous or evil inhabitants of the non-human ether. When Disney's Darby O'Gill described leprechauns as "the little people" he would have been regarded as sacrilegious by many - even when the film came out in 1960 or so.