[William Cloud Hicklin]

I just finished reading a most interesting book, The Dark Queens, covering the tumultuous lives of Brunnhild (yes, that one, or at least the real one) and her sometime sister-in-law Fredegund; the former a sort of cross between Elizabeth the Great and Catherine de Medici, and the latter a fullblown Lucrezia Borgia. Fortunately for us, most of their lives and fascinating (and bloody) doings were recorded by Gregory of Tours, a formidable historian.

I love the Merovingian period because it exists on the fringes of the Roman, the medieval and the legendary world. This was, after all, the period during which King Arthur was busy not existing in Britain! And Brunnhild herself went into the Cauldron of Story and, apparently because this Visigothic princess was for a time Queen Regent of Frankish Burgundy, was translated by 150 years and 150 miles to get tangled in the fall of Gundahari and the Rhenish Burgundians, and thence the Nibelungenlied, Volsungasaga and Ring des Nibelungen...