Stories of King Sean:
Introduction
Introduction
There have been a very good many books written about King Sean. Of the academic, some are dry musty tomes whose turgid prose would do better in the fireplace of some poor unfortunate hard on the their luck than wasting space on the shelves of various University libraries about the world; whereas others are incisive and informative, a credit to their authors and a boon to the human race. Of the popular, some are filled with pages that should be better sent to benighted countries who are running short of lavatory paper; but others would be worth the expensive of distributing to every household in the land. The last is the aim to which this little collection of stories aspires.
This book does not pretend to academia. Whilst I myself have spent most of my life defiling the intellectual ivory tower with my persistent presence, and to my great shame am responsible for at least one weighty entry in the annals of irrelevant scholarship, this is the book I have been wanting to write ever since I was an undergraduate. Indeed in many ways my undergraduate thesis was the seed which, after many long years dormant and near-forgotten in the dusty soil of erudite thought, has finally germinated. I present a collection of tales of Just King Sean, a selection of stories of the colossal king. Some of these entries are taken from the chronicles that described his reign, either written at that time or shortly thereafter. The rest have been selected from the entire period of time from then to now. Some of these are historical accounts, others are fictionalised renderings - though the ones selected I believe to be plausible unlike some scribblings in that particular field of authorship.
What is my aim? Very little in truth. I hope this fusion of perspectives from differing times and in different mediums will both entertain and enlighten. Rather than directly seek to impose my own view on the reader, I aim to let the reader do the leg-work and formulate their own conclusions. To be sure my selection of this story instead of that tale does not entirely remove my influence from the process, but I pride myself I am not totally corrupt. Do not therefore always expect consistency, or even agreement, in all that follows. Humanity's view of itself and its past is one wondrous, unresolved, argument.
The other reason I have chosen to collate this work is that King Sean is one of those figures about whom stories have gathered across the centuries, much like the remains of ancient tar pits gathered the bones of creatures who had become trapped. He is like a vortex in our history, continuing to affect us even now. It is largely through the stories of him and his reign, retold with varying levels of skill and ability, that most folk know of him at all.
I would like to thank the authors still living, or the estates of those now dead, whose works I have sampled that are still within copyright. To those long gone writers whose works are no longer protected by law, I praise for having put to paper the words as best they could. And I thank the fates to allowing me to live long enough to see this work be published, and for allowing some of the older examples to survive their long journey in spacetime.