Here Be Dragons

Wales in the Thirteenth Century

Sharon Kay Penman spent eleven years writing and researching Here Be Dragons, and the novel’s sense of deep historical rootedness reflects every one of them. Set in the early thirteenth century, in the complex and violent border territory between England and Wales, it tells the story of Joanna — the illegitimate daughter of King John of England, given in marriage to Llewelyn ap Iorwerth, Prince of Gwynedd and the most powerful Welsh ruler of his era.

This is not a period or a setting that receives much attention in historical fiction, and that neglect is part of what makes the novel so valuable. Penman illuminates a Wales that is not the defeated nation it will eventually become but a sovereign culture in active, intelligent resistance to English domination — with its own laws, its own bardic traditions, its own complex internal politics. Llewelyn Fawr, the Great, is not a romantic hero in the conventional sense but a statesman and military leader of genuine ability, and Penman renders him with a complexity that historical fiction does not always extend to its period figures.

The Impossible Position

The emotional and political center of the novel is Joanna’s position between two worlds that are increasingly in conflict. She is English by birth, the daughter of a king notorious even by medieval standards for his cruelty and unreliability, and she loves him anyway with the complicated loyalty of a child who needed a father’s recognition. She is Welsh by marriage and by choice, having built a life and raised children in Gwynedd, and she loves Llewelyn with a depth that develops over decades of marriage into something very different from what it began.

When John and Llewelyn go to war — as, given the political realities, they must — Joanna’s position becomes untenable. Penman does not simplify this dilemma or resolve it easily. She allows the novel to hold the full weight of what it means to love people who are trying to destroy each other, and the result is one of the most emotionally honest treatments of loyalty conflict in the genre.

A Landmark of Medieval Fiction

Here Be Dragons was Penman’s debut novel, and it announced one of the most significant careers in medieval historical fiction. Her meticulous research is deployed with the lightness of a writer who has so fully inhabited her period that the details emerge naturally from the drama rather than being inserted for authenticity. The Welsh language, the bardic tradition, the specific texture of castle life in this period — all of it is present, none of it feels like homework.

At 704 pages, the novel is a serious commitment, and Penman earns every page. The large cast, the long timespan, and the political complexity all reward the sustained attention the novel requires, and the ending — which history determined long before Penman arrived — lands with the force of tragedy genuinely prepared for and genuinely felt.

The Welsh Princes Trilogy

Here Be Dragons is the first volume of what became Penman’s Welsh Princes trilogy, continued in Falls the Shadow and The Reckoning. Together the three novels trace the rise and ultimate destruction of independent Wales across the thirteenth century, from Llewelyn Fawr’s consolidation of power through the catastrophe of Edward I’s conquest and the death of Llewelyn the Last, the prince’s grandson. Read as a sequence, the trilogy is one of the most ambitious projects in medieval historical fiction — a sustained elegy for a sovereign culture that English history has often treated as a footnote. Here Be Dragons establishes the world, the dynasty, and the emotional stakes that the later volumes carry to their tragic conclusion, which gives even its happiest passages an undertone of foreboding for readers who know where the story is heading.

Penman’s commitment to documented history is one of her defining traits as a novelist. She built her reputation on rigorous archival research and a refusal to bend known facts for the sake of a tidier plot, a discipline she carried forward into her later medieval novels, including The Sunne in Splendour — her landmark reappraisal of Richard III — and the Plantagenet series beginning with When Christ and His Saints Slept. She is frequently named alongside Dorothy Dunnett as one of the writers who elevated historical fiction’s standards of accuracy, and Here Be Dragons is widely regarded as one of her finest achievements.

History Beneath the Romance

What separates the novel from conventional historical romance is Penman’s insistence on the texture of real political life. The thirteenth-century conflict between the English crown and the Welsh principalities was not a simple clash of nations but a shifting web of alliances, marriages, betrayals, and legal disputes over land and homage. Penman renders this complexity without flattening it, and she takes seriously the distinctive features of medieval Welsh society — its native law codes, its bardic culture, its different conventions around legitimacy and inheritance — that set it apart from Norman England. Joanna’s marriage to Llewelyn is itself a political instrument, arranged by King John to bind the Welsh prince to English interests, and the novel never lets the reader forget that the most intimate relationships in this world are also matters of state.

Who Should Read It

This is a book for readers who want their historical fiction to be both emotionally rich and genuinely informative, and who are willing to invest in a long, slow-building narrative that rewards patience. Admirers of Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth or the historical breadth of Dorothy Dunnett will find a kindred ambition here, while readers drawn to strong, constrained heroines navigating divided loyalties will find Joanna among the genre’s most compelling. Those new to thirteenth-century British history may want to keep the genealogical notes Penman provides close at hand, but the effort pays off in one of the most immersive portraits of medieval Wales ever written.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — One of the finest medieval historical novels ever written, Here Be Dragons rewards patient readers with an extraordinary portrait of Wales, England, and a woman caught in the spaces between empires.