Today, I have something a little different for you all: I have invited fellow author Justin Lee Anderson onto my blog and – as most of the followers of this blog seem to like reading about the world – he has kindly written about the place which helped inspire his epic fantasy series, the Eidyn Saga; Edinburgh.
Though I was born in Edinburgh, I moved to the US with my parents when I was 3 and didn’t move back until I was 14. We used to come back here for holidays most years, and it’s difficult to describe how magical Edinburgh seemed to me as a kid. Dad was a professional football player, and when we moved to a new city (as we did every few years, at least) we were often put into new build houses, or at least recently built ones. So imagine little me, used to living in an American townhouse, coming back to a city with stone tenements built before the US existed, in the shadow of a 350 million year old volcano and an honest-to-god medieval castle! It felt like time travelling. The sheer weight of history in this city was just mind-boggling. And of course, all the little cultural things made it feel completely foreign too, like the cans of lentil soup my grandma always had waiting for me, because it was the only thing I could eat to get over my horrendous travel sickness after the half day’s flying it took to get here.
In my late twenties, I sort of fell into writing and editing a visitor’s guide called Edinburgh: The Capital Guide. I had done reviews for restaurants and occasional things like comedy and theatre before, but this was a whole new level. And I reckoned I had a relatively unusual perspective to do it from.
I decided pretty quickly I was going to do something different. Instead of the kind of dry, slightly twee guidebooks you often get, I was going to write something with some personality. My premise was that the book would be the equivalent of having a friend who lived in a city give you their knowledge and recommendations, and it worked out pretty well! For example, I would give shopping advice, but in doing so I’d tell the story of how I coincidentally bought my first wedding ring from the same shop my dad bought my mum’s engagement ring in.
I also wanted to include things that tend to get people excited, like a summary of some of the grisly stories of Edinburgh. For example the one where, on the night of the signing of the Act of Union between Scotland and England, while the Edinburgh mob rioted in protest, one family returned home to find their mentally unstable son had murdered a serving boy and was busy roasting him over the hearth! Or the ghost stories, like the “drummer boy” who was sent to investigate an underground passage to see where it led, and given a drum to bang so the others could keep track of him. After a while of listening to him move ever deeper, the drum suddenly stopped banging and the boy was never seen again – but legend says you can still hear him drumming now and again beneath the High Street. Edinburgh is awash with these kinds of tales, and the vaults under South Bridge are said to be particularly haunted.
I also got to visit a lot of Edinburgh’s tourist attractions as part of the job, and one of the most interesting is Mary King’s Close. There is an entire street of houses underneath Edinburgh City Chambers (which legend says was sealed off with plague victims left to die inside, but that’s been debunked now). Down there is a room where a little girl’s ghost is said to linger, and it’s full of dolls and toys that people have left as a tribute to keep her happy. I’m one of those sceptics who really wants to believe in ghosts, and I don’t know what to tell you, except that there was definitely a different feel in that room.
Nowadays, Edinburgh has married that deeply historical and supernatural vibe with a wonderfully diverse, rich cultural side. It’s home to, I believe, more festivals than any other city and attracts 2 million visitors a year – four times the city’s native population. Any time you’re walking around the centre of town, you’ll hear a range of languages being spoken amongst the plethora of diverse restaurants. I love the feeling of it being both a very Scottish, but also a global city.
It was this love for Edinburgh that led me to create the country of Eidyn for my epic fantasy series The Eidyn Saga. One of my major inspirations was wanting to create a genuinely magical world based on Edinburgh’s history, mythology and etymology. Many of those grisly stories inspired plot elements or characters, and every part of the country is drawn from a real part of Edinburgh. The ghostly ruins at Caer Amon are inspired by Cramond’s real history as one of the oldest settlements in Scotland, Barrock Castle sits in place of Craigmillar Castle, where Mary Queen of Scots stayed, her French retinue inspiring the name of Little France in its shadow – Gaulton in Eidyn. The royal castle of Dun Eidyn sits in the sprawling Nor Loch – inspired by the real Nor Loch that was drained to form Princes Street Gardens beneath Edinburgh Castle.
Map by Tim Paul.And then there’s the pubs! I figured if you’re going to have a story with lots of inns, and you’ve got a town as old as Edinburgh, you might as well use real pubs in the story! So readers could (and have talked about) creating a real pub crawl of the likes of the Starbank Inn, The Canny Man, The White Hart and, grandaddy of them all, the Sheep Heid. All pubs with unique characters and histories themselves.
And just to cement the books’ place as a deeply Scottish epic fantasy, I decided to use Gaelic as my magic language (instead of the ubiquitous Latin). I just wish I’d thought about having to read them out loud when I made that decision!
For everything else The Eidyn Saga is, it’s a love letter to my hometown. Edinburgh is the only place that’s ever truly felt like home to me, and while I’ve moved away a number of times, I’ve always been drawn back. I adore it, and if you’ve never been, I can’t recommend it enough.
Lang may yer lum reek!
(Long may smoke blow from your chimney!)
The Lost War, Book 1 of the Eidyn Saga, is out now from Orbit Books. Book 2, The Bitter Crown, is out December 5th (US) and 7th (UK).
Justin Lee Anderson was a professional writer and editor for over 15 years before his debut novel, Carpet Diem, was first published in 2015 and went on to win the 2018 Audie award for Humour. His second novel, The Lost War, was first published in 2019, won the 2020 SPFBO award, and was republished by Orbit Books in 2023 as part of a four-book deal for The Eidyn Saga.
Justin lives just outside his hometown of Edinburgh with his family.
Tej Turner 