Finally, I'm reading through the last of the Templar anthologies. What a wild, righteous and radical ride it has been, in the hip sense of those words. As is only natural in creative works, I couldn't help but notice that a lot of the stories are presented out of historical or chronological order and the ideas therein develop accordingly, but nevertheless, many of them can come together to make a cohesive and exciting story except where we're explicitly told they don't count as such, like with Poul Anderson's Time Patrol entry. I'd like to suggest an order for these stories, starting with the ones that are most certainly in the same continuity. My inspiration for this is partly that I myself happened to read most of them waaaay out of order, so this should help me fix that if there is a next time. You will need all five books for this, but that's just the way it is. Hopefully, this helps with rereading this wonderful saga.
1. KK's White Knights, in Crusade of Fire
2. Diane Duane's Blank Check in On Crusade
3. KK's & Deborah Turner Harris' The Temple and The Stone
4. KK's City of Brass in Tales
5. Deborah Turner Harris' Harvest of Souls in Crusade of Fire (introduces the bad guys of Crown)
6. Deborah Turner Harris' & Robert J. Harris' The Company of Three in On Crusade (concludes the short story trilogy passed between KK and DTH and alludes to wisdom in the desert which will be useful in Crown
Things become trickier when we move on to the era covered in The Temple and The Crown because so many of the short stories cover the fall of the Templars, which that book does too. I sympathize, as that was a truly dramatically charged time.
7. The Temple and The Crown the caveat is that there are stopping points that I think would or would not be helpful, therefore:
a. After the expulsion of the Parisian Jews is mentioned, read Borne on a River of Tears in On Crusade
b. Jacques de Molay is regarded as a well-meaning ignorant by Arnault and Torquil, but if you want to like him, I recommend End in Sight in Tales #1, immediately after Nogaret brings the lying witness before King Philip.
8. We could throw Richard Woods' trilogy in there, too, along with the ones that jump between the 14th and 20th centuries, but that's a good amount of interruptions, for now. His stories coming next makes sense to me. For that, you'll want to read all three of his anthology entries in order.
9. Between the 20th-century stories and the ones set entirely in the historical time of the Templars, one should read The Men of Stone by Andre Norton, in On Crusade. This is a quicky, and it follows on the theme of the Templar treasure fleet touched on in previous entries. This is also a common thread in a few of the 20th-century stories.
If I missed anything, let me know. For now, this is what I think would be a compromise between chronological order and dramatic order, only including the stories set before the 20th century. I may need to familiarize myself with The Adept before contemplating those.
Oh, I nearly forgot, after that first story, there's this historical document that may prove illuminating:
http://www.prioratodisanmartino.com/download/The.Primitive.Rule.pdf
Quote from: Marc_du_Temple on December 15, 2023, 07:41:32 PMOh, I nearly forgot, after that first story, there's this historical document that may prove illuminating:
http://www.prioratodisanmartino.com/download/The.Primitive.Rule.pdf
I keep hoping that one day someone will do a novel or film about the Baltic Crusades-- not the Alexander Nevski story (though the film and its music-- Prokofiev! --are both wonderful), something about the Teutonic Knights and the Brothers of the Sword in a world of deep, shadowed, ominous forests and Baltic paganism and Russian Orthodoxy. After all, Lithuania maintained its pagan religion until the 14th-c.