- 2 days ago
CTP (S3EFebSpecial3) Founding Love: A Queen’s Defiance (DHMorris)
Exploring more of the fascinating intersection of Activism, Community Engagement, Faith / Religion, Human Nature, Politics, Social Issues, and beyond
We trace Judith’s path from princess of Francia to first anointed Queen of England, her refusal to be bartered again, and her daring flight with Baldwin Ironarm. Along the way, we unpack the Carolingian Renaissance, church power, Viking pressure, and how fact shapes fiction.
• genealogy spark leading to decades of research
• choosing historical fiction over biography for flow
• Judith’s forced marriages, refusal, and imprisonment
• Baldwin Ironarm’s loyalty, warfare, and moral code
• anointing of queens and its lasting ritual legacy
• Carolingian learning, script, and cultural reforms
• Vikings, border shifts, and the birth of Bruges
• appendix method for historical clarity without footnotes
• http://NewClassicsPublishing.com
https://tinyurl.com/SubscribeToCTP
CTP Audios: https://tinyurl.com/CTPonBuzzsprout
CTP Videos: https://tinyurl.com/JLDonBITCHUTE
https://tinyurl.com/CTPgear
Exploring more of the fascinating intersection of Activism, Community Engagement, Faith / Religion, Human Nature, Politics, Social Issues, and beyond
We trace Judith’s path from princess of Francia to first anointed Queen of England, her refusal to be bartered again, and her daring flight with Baldwin Ironarm. Along the way, we unpack the Carolingian Renaissance, church power, Viking pressure, and how fact shapes fiction.
• genealogy spark leading to decades of research
• choosing historical fiction over biography for flow
• Judith’s forced marriages, refusal, and imprisonment
• Baldwin Ironarm’s loyalty, warfare, and moral code
• anointing of queens and its lasting ritual legacy
• Carolingian learning, script, and cultural reforms
• Vikings, border shifts, and the birth of Bruges
• appendix method for historical clarity without footnotes
• http://NewClassicsPublishing.com
https://tinyurl.com/SubscribeToCTP
CTP Audios: https://tinyurl.com/CTPonBuzzsprout
CTP Videos: https://tinyurl.com/JLDonBITCHUTE
https://tinyurl.com/CTPgear
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00Hello, welcome to another episode of Perstitutionalist Podcast.
00:06I am your host, Joseph M. Leonard.
00:10That's L-E-N-A-R-D, it's the French, it's not, it's Leonard without an O.
00:17Thank you for tuning in, as Graham Norton used to say, on his show.
00:24Let's get on with the show!
00:26Joining me today is Deborah Morse, although on her book it's D.H. Morse,
00:34so D.H. Morse will be what I ultimately put on the scrawl at the bottom of the screen
00:41and post for the video behind the scenes version, that's D-E-B-O-R-A-H, not D-E-B-R-A, D-E-B-O-R-A-H,
00:53D.H. Morse, like the cat, yes?
00:56Yes.
00:58Okay, that makes that part easy, but more important to remember D.H. Morse.
01:05Welcome to the show, D.H.
01:08Thank you so much, Joseph. I'm so delighted to be here.
01:12What MLB team do you play for as a designated hitter?
01:17Ba-dum-bum.
01:21D.H., designated hitter, baseball?
01:25Uh, not sure.
01:29Yeah.
01:30Anyway, yeah, my audience knows I can't pass the lame puns.
01:35Anyway, I'm excited for you to be here because my audience pretty much most knows I have a historical fiction book.
01:46I'm wearing the shirt for Terror Strikes coming soon to a city near you.
01:51It's historical fiction, or a.k.a. as I call it, faction, part fact, part fiction.
02:00And you are a historical fiction author, so I'm excited to have a conversation about that with you.
02:08Welcome again to the show.
02:12So, before we get into the book kind of stuff, and people on video can see my latest book,
02:21short 30-second trailer playing behind me,
02:25I'm getting fancier these days.
02:27I'm running video off my green screen now.
02:32At any rate, nitty-gritty, where were you born and raised?
02:37Where are you now?
02:38Significant places you've been in between.
02:41How much time have you spent in prison and for what?
02:46For the record, for the transcript, she's laughing.
02:50It's a joke, people.
02:51It's a joke.
02:52Go on.
02:53Got to clear it out for the transcript, though.
02:58I was born in San Diego, California.
03:02And I was raised mainly in California, but moved to Japan.
03:12I lived, my husband was in the military.
03:15And so we lived for 12 years in Europe.
03:20I lived in Egypt for six months.
03:24I've traveled a lot throughout Europe.
03:30And Mexico, lived in Canada for a little while, not long, maybe six months.
03:38What part of Canada were you in?
03:40In Alberta.
03:42Alberta.
03:43Okay.
03:43I used to vacation up Native Son, R.I.P.
03:47Gordon Lightfoot, Aurelia, Ontario, Canada area.
03:52I used to vacation all the time.
03:54So, but go on.
03:55And I met my husband as a student at Utah State University.
04:04And that was my alma mater.
04:08And graduated in theater and music.
04:15And went on from there on for a master's in English.
04:21And then switched to law school.
04:27But during law school, became very ill.
04:30So, I was not able to complete my last year of law school.
04:34But the training was great.
04:37And I've taught, as a grad student, I taught in the English department at Utah State University.
04:44And then I taught for five years in English in their business department.
04:53So, business English, business writing, business grammar, and business law at Salt Lake Community College.
05:01And I have four children, 11 grandchildren, and a little Yorkie.
05:10Oh, a fur baby.
05:12Yeah.
05:13A Yorkie named Max.
05:16And he basically runs our household here in Kansas City, Missouri.
05:22So, we've actually lived on both coasts.
05:25We've lived also in Texas.
05:29Because of the military lifestyle, we moved around a lot.
05:34And it was a very interesting life.
05:39Enjoyed it a lot.
05:40But we are firmly planted right now in the middle of the country.
05:44And we love it here.
05:45In the state of misery.
05:47I mean, Missouri.
05:49I've said that before.
05:50Yeah.
05:50When it gets too cold or too hot.
05:53I say that all the time.
05:56Yeah.
05:58And you said business several times.
06:01And now you're here to give me the business.
06:03Again, my audience knows any lame pen, no matter how lame it is, I cannot pass on the chance.
06:16At any rate, I've seen you already hold up the book.
06:21Let's hold up the book again for the benefit of behind-the-scenes video.
06:26But for audio and benefit of the transcript, it is The Girl of Many Crowns.
06:37There's a the in front of it.
06:39Again, D.H. Morris, like the cat.
06:42So, what is the historical part of the historical fiction in this?
06:54Okay.
06:55I would say that it's 90% fact.
06:59And just filling in the gaps with narrative.
07:05So, it's like a movie on the screen, based on a true story, but, hey, dramatization to make it flow better.
07:16Exactly.
07:17And fill in some potential holes with, it kind of probably went this way, but it's not close to it type thing.
07:26Exactly.
07:27The story behind this book is that I was doing, when my husband and I got married, my aunt gave us a huge genealogy chart, because she was the family genealogist.
07:45And she said, we have royalty in our background, if you go back far enough.
07:50So, I looked at that, and it didn't look right on the chart.
07:55And I thought, I need to fix this.
07:59So, I got into genealogy, thoroughly enjoyed it.
08:03And the more I delved into trying to fix what I thought was an error, just became a more and more intriguing story.
08:15And it kind of was in the back of my mind for decades.
08:22And then when it came to COVID, like probably a lot of other people, my husband said, you have all this research still on this book.
08:35So, I finished, I did a lot more research, finished the research, and I thought, I'm going to write this up as a biography.
08:44But then it was very long, very cumbersome.
08:49And I thought, if anybody's going to read this, it's got to flow like a novel.
08:54But for me, the important thing, because it is an ancestor, I wanted every single detail to be as exact and real as possible.
09:07Well, you read my mind.
09:09You anticipated where I was going next.
09:11Indeed, writing it as a historical fiction novel as opposed to a biography.
09:20A lot of people think of them like movie documentaries.
09:24Oh, boring.
09:25Put me to sleep.
09:27Right?
09:27Or a memoir.
09:29Who the heck is D.H.
09:31Morse?
09:31Why do I care about her memoir?
09:33A historical fiction book provides the tale with the details, but it's much more presentable, much more open, isn't the word.
09:49People are much more receptive and interested in reading it that way.
09:54Yes.
09:55It was your thinking.
09:57It would be my thinking, anyway.
09:59And I realized that all these footnotes were just making it read like a textbook.
10:08So I went back and removed every single thing that the reader did not absolutely have to know and tried to make it flow better.
10:20It's actually the story of the great-granddaughter of Charlemagne.
10:27It takes place in the 9th century.
10:30And it's not just her.
10:32It's her and her family.
10:36Her father is the first king of France.
10:40He's known by historians as Charles the Bald.
10:43He wasn't bald, but that was his name, given to him by historians several hundred years later, because there were so many Charleses.
10:56They had to distinguish between them.
10:59And so he, at her age of 12, her father has her married off to the 50-year-old widower who is the king of Wessex, father of Alfred the Great.
11:22And he marries her off to him for political reasons.
11:28And a year and a half later, he dies.
11:32And then he has her marry his son, who is 24.
11:38She's 14.
11:41And that is part of the gap that I fill in.
11:45And she is so traumatized by that, that when he dies a year and a half later, she comes back to France.
11:57And when her father says, I'm going to arrange another marriage for you, she's now 16, 17.
12:04And she says, no, you're not.
12:07I am not going to marry again at your command.
12:11And so he imprisons her.
12:13That's half of the story.
12:16The other half of the story, and these run simultaneously, there is a knight who is the companion of her brother, Louis the Stammerer.
12:32And we follow both of these stories until they join.
12:36The knight's name is Baldwin Ironarm.
12:40He's a very brave and honorable knight.
12:46It's very important to him for both of them.
12:48Their religion is important.
12:51Their ethics and morals are important.
12:53And we follow him throughout wars and assassination plots in France, while we follow her story in England.
13:08And then when she comes back, they reunite and fall in love.
13:17And he helps her escape.
13:20And then they're on the run from the empire.
13:23And it's a pretty exciting story.
13:29It ends happy.
13:31They are the founders of Bruges, which is one of, I think, the most beautiful city in Belgium.
13:42And often considered kind of the founders of Belgium, even though Belgium wasn't really a country until hundreds of years.
13:51The only thing I know about Bruges is the movie with Colin Farrell, I think it was.
13:59Have you seen that movie?
14:01I have not.
14:02No, it's a pretty off-the-wall kind of movie, so I don't know if it represents it well or not.
14:10But you mentioned footnotes, and that kind of perked up my ears because, weirdly, in my latest book, Complicated, I have a few footnotes.
14:25Because I don't believe in doing everything the traditional way, even though in my life I'm pretty much a traditionalist.
14:33But when it comes to publishing, this is the 21st century.
14:39If you buy a movie on Blu-ray, you get bonus materials, right?
14:44Everything's on the internet.
14:46The way I see it, a book should give you bonus materials.
14:50So I actually have footnotes, not a ton, in my complicated book, so that people have some online material references as bonus-free items they can go to.
15:06But I understand what you're saying.
15:08Indeed, too many footnotes then start to clutter things up.
15:14It interrupts the flow, but I wanted to have some of that extra material also.
15:23What I did was I have an appendix at the end, because this covers seven years in the foundation of Europe.
15:33It's where you have Vikings attacking the country, the infant country of France.
15:43It's called Francia at that time.
15:46You have the German, King Charles' half-brother, Louis the German, is trying to take his country from him.
15:57If he had succeeded in the war that takes place in these seven years, he would, I guess the French would have been speaking German.
16:06But it is a very volatile period of time, and it shows the foundations of Europe and how all these borders are being formed.
16:18And it's a fascinating period of time.
16:23It's one of the most important periods.
16:25It's during the Carolingian Renaissance, too.
16:30And people think of it as the Dark Ages.
16:33But this little jewel of a time during the Carolingian period, which lasted not too long, from the time of Charlemagne down to his probably second great-grandson, maybe a hundred years.
16:53It was, or maybe a little more than a hundred years, it was a time where our, actually, our handwriting, our writing, our form of writing was created by them.
17:11That's when that was created.
17:13They were creating beautiful works of art, beautiful buildings.
17:21They had very progressive ideas about education.
17:29Charlemagne and his grandson, King Charles, they wanted their entire realm to be educated, including the women.
17:38And so, that kind of disappears later.
17:43It all depends on who's the leader as to whether these things take place.
17:48But at the end of the book, I got off track, sorry.
17:52At the end of the book, I do have an appendix.
17:56And what it does is it takes each of the characters and tells you what happened to them, ultimately, in their life.
18:06When they died, how they died, what, you know, what they went through.
18:15Usually, it's just like a paragraph or two for each.
18:19Yeah, it's kind of like, also, too, in movies, based on a true story, at the end, they'll roll as part of the credits.
18:28So-and-so went on to this and that and the other.
18:32So-and-so is still alive, or so-and-so died in blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
18:37So, yeah, it sounds like you're writing it clearly ready for movie adaptation.
18:48I've had a number of my readers say, oh, I hope somebody picks this up for a movie.
18:55It needs to be made into a movie.
18:57Maybe that's partly because of my undergraduate theater background.
19:03I basically see it in scenes.
19:08That's how I write also, yes.
19:12It just, to me, it's more visual.
19:15And then I try to describe what I see.
19:18Right, exactly.
19:19And like most of my books actually come to me in a dream.
19:23So I kind of see it as a movie, then I write it.
19:28Exactly.
19:29That's a very similar process.
19:31Yeah, I understand where you're coming from.
19:33And before I forget, let's repeat, we're talking with D.H. Morris.
19:37And the book is The Girl of Many Crowns because she is the first woman to ever, the first anointed queen of England.
19:53She is, she has a crown as the daughter of the king, the first king of France.
20:01So she has her crown as a princess.
20:04She has a crown as the first anointed queen of England because nobody had ever anointed by the church any women before.
20:16The queen was always just, you know, the king would pronounce her queen.
20:22But the church did not take the holy chrism, which is the holy oil, and anoint queens until Judith.
20:32And when they did, from that point on, that became a regular part of the ritual, including for Queen Elizabeth, the most recent Queen Elizabeth, was based, everything was based on Judith's anointing from that point on.
20:52Very interesting.
20:53Yes, it's a very interesting.
20:55This is exactly why I love historical fiction, of where, you know, my terror strikes coming soon to see you.
21:04Very, very different kind of historical fiction, of course.
21:08But, yeah, some facts, some fiction.
21:11I love how you could take, one of my favorite movies is Beyond the Mask by Burns Family Christian Studios here in Michigan.
21:21And that's a historical fiction movie loosely based around a revolution in an attempt to assassinate George Washington.
21:33So I love stuff like that.
21:37And, indeed, I could see this as a movie or a multiple part.
21:41Or maybe, hopefully, just a TV movie that could be shown in parts, or even better, probably a miniseries, it sounds like it's well set up for.
21:57That's what I think, because she, I have the book divided into three parts.
22:03Part one is Judith of Francia, her childhood, well, we start when she's 11, by the time, and end that first part, when she turns 12, and is married to King Alpha Wolf, the father of Alfred the Great, and leaves for England.
22:24Part two, and part two, all takes place with her in England, Baldwin, Iron Arm, the powerful knight, his protecting of her brother, and his duty to her father in wars, and all kinds of Viking exploits.
22:47And then, part three, and that's Judith of Wessex, and she's twice Queen of Wessex, so we get another crown on her.
22:58And then, Judith of Flanders is the third part, and that's when she comes together with Baldwin, Iron Arm, who is actually the Count of Flanders.
23:11And becomes, gives away all of her royalty to become.
23:18As in Flanders Field, that the poppy poem is based on?
23:23As in the earlier names of the Belgium area, where Belgium is today.
23:33Interesting, interesting.
23:35It's a fascinating story, and it would never leave me alone.
23:39So finally, I thought, after 25 years or so of saying, oh, I hope somebody writes a story about that.
23:47It was, oh, it's COVID, and nobody is writing it, and I'm getting old, so maybe I better write it.
23:54Well, thank you, D.H. Morris, for joining.
23:59That's great.
24:00Again, I'm ecstatic to have another historical fiction author on with me.
24:07It's awfully niche as a genre, but to me, they make great stories because of the embedded actual historical relevance,
24:19because our education system is so damn poor these days.
24:24We don't teach history or civics or even economics now, so we've got to get people history somehow.
24:34Another aspect of the book that I discovered as I was doing the research, I was a little surprised.
24:42I don't know why, I should have anticipated this, I guess, how important their faith was to them.
24:52I was amazed.
24:54It really was in every aspect of their life.
24:58Yeah.
24:59Well, those were definitely tougher times.
25:02I mean, we think about all the modern conveniences we have.
25:08It's easier to take a whole lot for granted now than every day was laborious, I would imagine.
25:19And the church was a huge figure in their lives.
25:24And the church at that time, the only church that, well, their Islam was there.
25:32It was a fairly new religion, but the only church there in Europe, Charlemagne, decided we are going to be Christian.
25:41So if you're a Viking, you're probably a pagan or you're a Christian.
25:48You're one or the other.
25:49So their Christian experience plays a great role through this.
25:58Interesting, good and bad, because the king's main advisor, his name is Archbishop Hinkmar, who I'd never heard of before.
26:14And it's certainly got to be his name, because that's not a name you'd make up.
26:21No, no.
26:22He was one of the most influential writers of the ninth century.
26:27And he was responsible for writing her ceremony and coming up with the whole idea.
26:36And you see, it's almost a Game of Thrones type plotting.
26:40And then he also, you see that he is influential in trying to force her and Baldwin Iron Arm into excommunication, into being captured, and their life is threatened.
27:00And so it's very interesting.
27:06I also love the fact that we have a strong male character.
27:12Because right now, I think for a long time, women have been...
27:21Oh, there's toxic masculinity, idiocy.
27:24Yes.
27:25There's toxicity in both sexes.
27:27Oh, there's toxic...
27:28There's toxic femininity.
27:31Yes.
27:32Martin Luther King Jr., content of character.
27:36It's part of the human nature.
27:37It's an individual thing.
27:40It's not a group or collective thing.
27:44Exactly.
27:45And a man's desire to be protective is not toxic, I don't think.
27:51I agree.
27:52I think that is part of what God gave them as part of their nature.
27:59And so we have a strong, protective knight.
28:05We also have a strong, protective female who wants to protect her servants from any retribution they might have for helping her escape from the palace.
28:18Because we know that she escaped.
28:21It says she escaped, history says, dressed as a servant.
28:25How would she do that without help from her own maid?
28:30So her maid is one of the few characters who is completely fictional.
28:38Almost every other person in there is factually based.
28:46Some of the actual dialogue I was able to find in ancient records.
28:54Whoa.
28:55And I was able to put in there.
28:57There is a surprising amount.
29:00But if you're, you know, if your viewers are looking for a book that gives men a great role model and women a great role model and good moral principles and an inspiring happy ending.
29:19Why can't we have happy endings?
29:22I love it.
29:23Oh, yeah.
29:25And truth.
29:26And it's all true, which is amazing.
29:28Yeah.
29:28It's more, like, it's amazing.
29:32Well, a lot of this takes part in France.
29:35Is the book available?
29:37Have you had it translated and published in French?
29:41I have not.
29:42I've been considering it.
29:43But it does take place kind of part in France, part in England, a little bit in Italy, and a little bit in Germany.
29:54So, right.
29:56It's Europe.
29:57French, Italian, and German.
29:59You've got great opportunities to have it translated and sell there.
30:05It is the birth of Europe, as we know, actually.
30:09Uh-huh.
30:11Okay.
30:11If people want to learn more about you and the book, do you have a website?
30:19They can go to newclassicspublishing.com and read a little bit more about it.
30:27But they can also pick up the book on Barnes & Noble or Amazon or Audible.
30:37Yeah.
30:37All of the usual suspects.
30:43Especially Amazon.
30:45The number that used to be 80% of all books are sold there.
30:49I think it's probably closer to 90% of all books are sold through Amazon nowadays, I think.
30:55And especially now, Amazon Audible, their virtual voice.
31:01So, you have an audio book.
31:03Did you hire actors to read the book or did you use Amazon Virtual Voice?
31:10I considered it, but I decided to do it myself.
31:15I have done a lot of acting in my life.
31:19The most difficult part was doing the men's voices.
31:24And I can't do a man's voice.
31:27But I think I was able to put in the passion and the meaning by reading my own.
31:39Yes, yes, that's great.
31:42I don't want to read my own books.
31:48I think it is great.
31:51I think it is better if a book is read by the author rather than somebody else.
31:57And certainly better than just Amazon's AI doing it.
32:02But at least it's still available that way for people who prefer to hear a book now rather than have to read it.
32:12I will tell you a funny story about that.
32:16I originally was going to do the AI because I wasn't familiar with it.
32:22And they said, let's record your voice and we will use AI.
32:27Digitize it.
32:28Yep.
32:29Yep.
32:29And so they couldn't do it.
32:32They tried for months.
32:34And the problem was one of the main characters, Judith's brother, who later becomes king after the father dies.
32:43But that doesn't appear anywhere but in the appendix.
32:47Sorry, I shouldn't have mentioned it.
32:48But he's named, historians refer to him as Louis the Stammerer because he had a stammer.
32:59And AI could not replicate the Stammerer.
33:02Oh, yeah.
33:04That makes sense.
33:06Exactly.
33:07AI tries to be too perfect.
33:10It can't mimic that.
33:12Yeah.
33:13Oh, that.
33:14Oh, wow.
33:15I would have never thought of that.
33:17But as a former IT guy, once you say it, it makes perfect sense to me.
33:25But I wouldn't have thought about it in that sense.
33:28So, again, we've had D.H.
33:31Morris, Deborah Morris, D.H.
33:34Morris on the book, which is entitled?
33:37The Girl of Many Crowns.
33:40Yep.
33:40And to learn more about the book, you can go to newclassicspublishing.com.
33:46Thank you, D.H., for coming by today.
33:50Thank you so much for having me.
33:51It's been a delight.
33:53Like and subscribe to the Constitutionalist Politics Podcast and share episodes.
34:01We need your help.
34:02Thank you for having tuned into another Constitutionalist Podcast show.
34:10I really appreciate that you stopped by.
34:14Again, please like, share, subscribe.
34:17We need you to help spread the Constitutionalist Movement.
34:23Thank you again.
34:24Take care.
34:25God bless.
34:27Love you all.
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