A collection of notices and anecdotes linking real people, places, traditions, and incidents to a noted novelist's historical romances. Organized by tale and setting, the volume offers local lore, biographical sketches, comparative passages, and historical and topographical notes that seek to identify prototypes for characters and scenes. It combines printed parallels and oral testimony to show how legend, lived experience, and landscape informed narrative detail, and includes descriptive fragments about scenery, castles, and surviving witnesses to illuminate the sources behind familiar episodes in the novels.