The past re-imagined

Welcome to the website of Sile Rice, author of The Saxon Tapestry.

“On a day in summer a waking dream came upon him. Sitting on the bank he saw the lands of his fore-elders. The rushes were blowing in threnody and he saw a man he knew to be himself. A man grown. Iron-hard. Gold-clad. But the bee skeps were forsaken and the roof trees snapped and everywhere was dark as when the wolf swallows the sun. And he knelt, that man he was to be, and dipped sword Brain-Biter in the mere, washing clots of blood from the blade.”

Anglo-Saxon England is poised between its last great flowering and catastrophic end. Two men – one a king, the other an outlaw – try to hold back the tide of history.

Sile Rice’s novel The Saxon Tapestry was originally published twenty years ago by Hodder and Stoughton and Arcade Publishing and received very favourable reviews. A new and expanded edition in two parts is now available exclusively online:

  • The Changeling (the First Book of The Saxon Tapestry) – available from:
  • The Loom of Battle (the Second Book of The Saxon Tapestry) – available from: