After completing her wildly successful series of historical novels about the fictional sixteenth-century Scot Francis Crawford of Lymond, Dorothy Dunnett was invited by her publishers to write about one of three real figures from Scottish history: Mary Queen of Scots, Bonnie Prince Charlie or Macbeth. She chose Macbeth, but not in the way the publishers expected. Her Macbeth is the same person as Thorfinn the Mighty, Earl of Orkney (explaining why
Orkneyinga Saganever names Macbeth), and she went beyond the usual remit of the historical novel by proposing this as a serious theory; she intended to publish the research which had led her to this conclusion but did not succeed in doing so before her death in 2001, though she did note in a letter that a numismatist had contacted her to…
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Citation: Hopkins, Lisa. "King Hereafter". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 21 August 2023 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=41324, accessed 24 November 2024.]
