The revised and expanded ebook of my Strange Country: Sir Gawain in the moorlands of North Staffordshire, an investigation is now available on Amazon. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, you’ll recall, is one of the most famous supernatural tales in English literature.

This book offers a concise overview of the existing Gawain research relating to North Staffordshire, and then adds a wealth of new detail and facts drawn largely from previously overlooked sources. The case is clearly made that one of the most famous works of English literature belongs to North Staffordshire. Obvious new candidates for both the Gawain-poet’s patron and the Gawain castle are suggested, and these are found to fit naturally and almost exactly when compared with the expected dates, castle features, dialect location, social status and life-story. A wealth of surrounding detail is also explored, such as: the history and role of the King’s Champion; English contacts with full-blooded paganism during the Prussian crusades; the two lavish courts at Tutbury; and the history of the Manifold Valley. This ebook is well illustrated and copiously referenced with linked round-trip footnotes.

This should now be considered the definitive edition of my book, which until now it has been available in paper from Lulu. It’s had a number of additions and yet another round of close proof-reading.

The book follows my equally successful sleuthing on the trail of the real identity of the Time Traveller from H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, arising from a study of Wells’s formative time spent in Stoke-on-Trent and North Staffordshire. I hope to also have an ebook edition of my ‘young H.G. Wells’ book available sometime later in 2019. Having cracked, to my satisfaction, both the Time Traveller and the Gawain-castle, the next book will be a far larger one that explores the young Tolkien and Earendel in intellectual and historical context. This will also have something to say about the local connections, but mostly Birmingham, since for Tolkien the Staffordshire topography came a little later and was more incidental to his intellectual development.