One of the things which obsesses Grail scholars is how the legends originated. Many of the myths that emerge at different times in different cultures have the same roots. After dinner one night I found myself reading The Waste Land out loud to my children - the real Waste Land, the great Waste Land, that is, T.S. Eliot's, not mine. The blend of Grail imagery with other myths, and with Ovid in particular, drove me back to re-read Jesse Weston's From Ritual to Romance, and to Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough, and then to Metamorphoses itself. Somehow this resulted in the idea of tying the Grail legend together with Ovid in a story set in the First Crusade. Using the same title for my book, and allusions to it in my chapter titles, and in various places in the text, is really a homage to the great poem, as well as adding a little literary joke to the novel. (There are 23 allusions to the poem in the text if you are looking for them).

I wanted the First Crusade tale to read a little like the adventure stories that I was brought up on and still re-read often - Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda, John Buchan's Greenmantle, Henry Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, for example. If you know those books you may recognise genuflections to each of them in my story. To please my children I also promised them a reference to Monty Python and the Holy Grail. But medieval French is less well known and I did not want to lose the connections to the Grail legends.

That's why I came up with the device of the Dons' story. Some of the friends who read the book before I published it liked the Dons. Some did not. If you don't, just ignore the Saint Lazarus's College sections and read Hugh's story. It stands by itself. But I decided to leave the Dons in, because for me they add another dimension. I thought that if they were commenting on some of the literary origins of the story they could talk a little about the history behind it. I have read many historical novels where I have asked myself part way through 'did it really happen like that?'. Some of the events of the First Crusade are so extraordinary that they are hard to believe and I wanted the Dons to point up some of the background. I also wanted them to inject a bit of humour into the story and dilute some of the blood and battles. In part some of the parallels with Hugh's story poke gentle fun at the 'time slip' novel genre. And in part they are meant to confirm that Hugh's story should not be taken too seriously.

-Simon Acland on the Genesis of The Waste Land