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From Tad:

Okay, the first thing you need to know, if you don’t already, is that I love stories.

I don’t mean that in the most obvious way, that I love reading stories in general, or that I love a few particular stories. No, I mean that I love that humans tell stories. Because old tales, particularly the very oldest, can teach us a lot about how our ancestors thought, especially those who lived in the human eras before writing.

I could spend days talking about this. (I won’t though, I promise.) Modern physical archaeology, in combination with linguistic scholarship, can show us how stories descended and changed as ancient people moved and lifestyles changed, until the stories were eventually locked into a kind of formal shape when writing arrived.

This of course leaves out lots of steps along the way and afterward: misunderstandings and intentional changes brought about by linguistic differences, or sometimes outright religious antagonism which caused the first collectors and writers of old oral folklore to make choices and changes of their own. Like I said, I could write about this for days.

But anyone who knows my work knows that old stories — and songs, which are often only stories set to music — fascinate me, whether they are someone else’s religious truth, a warning against dangerous behavior, or simply passed on from generation to generation for amusement or historical instruction. This fascination runs all through my work. Hell, one of the main themes of the Otherland books is about humanity’s penchant to try to understand the universe around us by making stories.

So, speaking of ancient days, way back in the 1980s, when I was first constructing the world of Osten Ard, I injected one such old tale into The Dragonbone Chair. (There are lots of stories, myth, and folklore in TDC, but we’re only really talking about this one.) It was a song the young protagonist Simon said was taught him by the chambermaids of the Hayholt when he was a child, and it tells a tale of Jack Mundwode, a perhaps real, perhaps entirely mythical forest bandit, and his gang of fellow outlaws. And, yes, the comparison with our world’s Robin Hood is legitimate — “Mundwode” is a rough translation of “Woodward” or “protector of the forest”.

But even back then, I knew that there must be many Jack Mundwode stories in Osten Ard, because in our world, stories of brilliant (and usually unfairly demonized) outlaws were common throughout the Middle Ages. Beside Robin Hood stood Fulk Fitzwarin, William of Cloudesly, Hereward the Wake, Willliam Wallace (yes, he was real, but much mythologized) and Grettir Asmundarson of Grettir’s Saga. The urge to memorialize bandit heroes continued right up into the 19th and 20th Centuries, with Old West gunmen and Depression-era robbers and gangsters being lionized as heroes of the common people.

So I began to wonder whether Jack Mundwode was even Erkynlandish, like Simon and the chambermaids who taught him, or whether his tales might have been knocking around Osten Ard longer and from farther away than that.

Somewhere during the recent writing of The Last King of Osten Ard books (the ones that started with The Witchwood Crown) I wrote a sentence that cited a group in Hernystir called Flann’s Crows as famous outlaws. Even as I wrote it, I thought, “I’d like to know more about them,” as I often do — that’s one of the reasons my books are so freaking long and my worldbuilding is so sprawling — and wondered briefly if they might be another country’s version of Jack Mundwode. After some consideration, I decided that the Crows might be a modern (meaning from the time of The Witchwood Crown) version of an earlier historical band, and that the earlier band might have been the real origin of Jack Mundwode and his outlaws.

Now, the thing about Osten Ard worldbuilding is that I’ve already packed so many historical details into the now ten Osten Ard novels (and also a few short stories), soon to be eleven novels, that you can’t just drop something in like putting bread into a toaster. Instead, it’s a bit like finding a place for that last bowl when you’re stacking the dishwasher and it’s already full. It requires a great deal of research (into my own world building, which is all kinds of weird, since often I have to canonize things that were utter throwaways forty years ago, but now have to be treated as gospel, at least by me). Because I never want to cheat the readers if I can help it. I want my fictional worlds to be as real as imaginary worlds can be, and I grew up on Tolkien, remember — a pretty high bar.

So, I began to develop Flann’s Crows as a group that existed in Hernystir two to three centuries before the version of Osten Ard presented in The Dragonbone Chair. Which of course meant that I had to figure out what was going on in Hernystir before I even started inventing characters. Luckily, it fell smack-dab into the time when Tethtain (known to my readers as one of the kings of the Hayholt in Erkynland, where Simon was raised) was on the throne of Hernystir. I needed to then figure out 1) why Tethtain wound up in another country, and 2) how he might come to die in the Hayholt, not his own land, and therefore become part of the lore about the Hayholt’s several kings that Simon learned as a fascinated child.

Once I had that hook, I could start understanding the history better. And since my just-forming story took place in an era prior to Simon’s, I also had to consider what changes there would be to Osten Ard as a whole from that time to The Dragonbone Chair and subsequent volumes. Simon’s world (the human part) is roughly equivalent to our mid-late Medieval, so I needed to think about what would be different in an earlier era, roughly equivalent to the end of the Anglo-Saxon rule of England blurring into the early Norman era. (I like to have historic analogies, because it helps me keep technology and clothing and political divisions fairly coherent.)

That fixed, and knowing that the larger Flann’s Crows story would last until approximate the early 900s in Osten Ard (Simon’s era runs from the mid-1100s to the early 1200s, as marked by Founding Years), I began to think about the characters. By linking Flann to Jack Mundwode, and thus a bit to our earthly Robin Hood legends, I felt it might be interesting to draw in some parallels to our world’s semi-mythical outlaw band of Sherwood Forest, but with a few changes to make Robin’s well-known bandit crew less mythical and more real. I won’t talk too much about this because some appropriations are minor enough to serve as Easter eggs for readers who enjoy that, and I don’t want to spoil anyone’s fun, but an obvious example is Robin Hood’s huge friend Little John. Flann instead has a member of his band called Long Liam, and although in size and strength he is more than a match for Little John, he is intellectually and emotionally more than a bit different from LJ. Similarly, since my Flann is more romantically interested in men than women — yes, shock revelation! — his version of Maid Marian is still female, but her relationship with Flann is much different than Robin’s with Marian.

But another difference in The Splintered Sun is not just with the old Robin Hood stories, but with the entire tenor of the Flann’s Crow stories compared to my other Osten Ard work. I think this is the most swashbuckling Osten Ard novel I’ve written, in the sense of big adventure, big drama, and a lot of humor. (At least I hope people find it humorous.) Flann’s Crows are a tight-knit outlaw band, but they argue all the time, gleefully insult each other, and that’s part of who they are and why I enjoyed writing them. It’s not just humor, either. They have the arguments over morality and ethics that we almost never hear in medieval legendry.

And of course, all this swashbuckling doesn’t occur in a vacuum, either: The Splintered Sun plays heavily on the potentially deadly and devastating war of succession that will happen after the heroic and beloved King Tethtain dies (although he’s not dead yet in these books and you’ll even meet him). Along the way, there will be appearances of one sort or another by at least a few figures known from other Osten Ard books. Who and how? You have to read to find out, but some of them may surprise you. (Yes, I stole that from internet clickbait.)

So now this book that was at first purely a Tad-type musing about the roots of stories, of folktale and myth, has become another novel. I think it’s both fun and exciting, with the same combination of adventure, ideas, character focus, and world-building that make Osten Ard a place that has kept people’s interest for the last several decades. I hope that’s true again with The Splintered Sun. All I know is that I’ve done my best. It’s up to you to decide whether I managed to pull it off or not.

The Splintered Sun, from DAW Books and Hodder & Stoughton, will be published in US and UK territories on October 6, 2026

FOR FANS OF COMPLEX WORLDBUILDING and fully-realized characters; readers of George R. R. Martin, John Gwynne, Joe Abercrombie, Patrick Rothfuss, and Brandon Sanderson will be thrilled

A QUEER ROBIN HOOD: One of the novel’s main characters is a steal-from-the-rich type bandit who is very handsome, very blond, and very romantically interested in other men

A BREEZE TO READ: Thanks to a fast-moving plot, lots of action, and a merry sense of humor, the pages of Tad Williams’s latest fly by

A STANDALONE ADVENTURE IN A BESTSELLING WORLD: Set in the same world as the bestselling Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy, which included DAW's first book to hit the New York Times bestseller list

INSPIRED BESTSELLING FANTASY EPICS: Osten Ard has inspired authors including George R. R. Martin, Patrick Rothfuss, Brandon Sanderson, and Christopher Paolini

2.4 MILLION COPIES SOLD IN SERIES: The original Osten Ard trilogy has sold over 2,400,000 copies across all formats

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