Fantastic book sabotaged by its narrator

This book is an absolute triumph. It’s fresh, engaging, and manages to bring something new to the crowded field of Arthurian studies. The author has clearly poured decades of meticulous research into this work, and it shows—every page feels like a labour of love. Unfortunately, the audiobook narration is a labour to endure.

Chris Sims is an interesting choice for this work. Let’s start with his distracting accent. Perhaps Sims is an American living in Scotland, or possibly he hails from a remote corner of Canada, but the exact origins of his vocal inflections are as mysterious as the location of Mount Badon. I sincerely hope this isn’t an affectation—a misguided attempt to infuse a Celtic vibe into the performance. If it is, it comes across as a failed audition for one of the adult vikings in How to Train Your Dragon and makes Mike Myers’ Scottish brogue sound like Rabbie Burns.

Sims often seems caught off guard by the text, reaching the end of a line only to realise the sentence isn’t over—his tone drops off prematurely, leaving the delivery disjointed and jarring.

The mispronunciation of English place names is a recurring theme. It’s almost expected at this point for Americans to get them wrong—for example, Derbyshire comes out as “der-bee shy-yur.” This wouldn’t be so distracting if place names weren’t so frequent in the text.

Dates aren’t safe, either. Instead of the natural flow of “twelve thirty-six A.D.,” the narrator opts for “one thousand two hundred and thirty-six A.D.,” another disruption in the flow of the narrative.

The most heinous crimes, however, are perpetrated against the Welsh language. To his credit, the narrator seems to have spent a few minutes on a YouTube tutorial—he’s figured out that “dd” is a hard “th” and “w” can be a vowel sound, pronounced “oo.” Beyond that, it’s a mess. He mumbles and slurs through Welsh words and place names, seemingly hoping no one will notice, and completely misses the cadence and emphasis on penultimate syllables so crucial to the language. Many Welsh words are oddly over-pronounced, standing out awkwardly in the narration, and it’s painfully obvious that they’ve been edited in after the fact. Again, there are a lot of them in the text.

All of this is a shame because the book itself is outstanding. In a field crowded with recycled material about the historicity of Arthur, this work feels genuinely fresh and insightful. If you’re an Arthurian enthusiast, it’s absolutely worth your time—just maybe not your ears. Consider picking up the print version instead.

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