Trivia / The Pillars of the Earth

• Black Sheep Hit: This novel is not in Ken Follett's usual genre, but it is one of his most successful works.
• Dawson Casting: 28-year old Eddie Redmayne and Hayley Atwell as teenaged Jack and Aliena in the early episodes. Justified by the need to dramatize a story that spans 35 years.
• Falsely Advertised Accuracy:
  • Ken Follett claimed he did a lot of research for this book, but he appears to think medieval labor was capitalist (it was guild-based) and never to have heard about how various religious orders ran orphanages, and taking in neighbor's children was routine (hint: extended families and/or godparents), so there'd be lots of options for that baby one can't care for, apart from leaving it on its mother's grave. He also repeats the very old, long-discredited idea that Beckett's canonization was a political maneuver. He doesn't understand medieval manorialism (he seems to think rents were owed individually rather than by the village collectively, reading the Post-Reformation landlord system back into the 12th century). Maybe we should amend his claim to, "I researched the architecture." World Without End is a Surprisingly Improved Sequel in this regard, with the guild and feudal manor systems in particular playing a prominent role.
  • Aliena's walking the Way of St. James (with a suckling baby!) while searching for Jack comes across as even less of a challenge than it is today, rather than the life-threatening event it was in the Middle Ages. And she manages by learning some Spanish, even though Spain was not unified politically nor linguistically in the 1140s (in fact, the oldest travel guide ever, Aymeric Picaud's Liber Sancti Jacobi from the same decade, insists heavily on the international nature of the pilgrimage and includes a list of useful Basque-Latin translations).
  • The family Jack stays with in Toledo identify as "Christian Arabs" and have names like Rashid al-Haroun. While this might be possible for Christians in the Middle East, it is evident that Follett confused the Spanish Mudejars (Moors under Christian rule, who kept Arab traditions including names) with the Mozarabs (Iberian Christians who adopted some Arab trappings while under Muslim rule, but were conscious about their Visigothic heritage, had Roman-Visigothic names, and spoke a Latin-derived language). By 1145, 60 years after the conquest of Toledo, the Mozarabs had lost any Arab-Muslim influence and integrated into the dominant Christian society. There was no such thing as a "Christian Arab" in the city, nor any incentive for anyone to identify as one.

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