Three maps of early 7th century Britain

When a literary agent sends a novel manuscript out to acquiring editors at major publishing houses, s/he likes to send it with everything the editor might need to put the work in context. For Hild, my novel about Hild of Whitby (which of course wasn't called Whitby then), set in early seventh century Britain (the narrative spans 617 - 631 CE), this includes a map, a glossary, and a family tree for the main character/s.

I've spent the last two weeks happily constructing this supplemental material. You've already seen Hild's family tree, along with all my questions and caveats. Today it's the turn of the maps.

I've included three: my first draft attempt, the second iteration made with help from a scientist friend who downloaded GIS data, and the final (so far) representation which collates data from several stages and was polished by a friend who has mad Photoshop skills. If you only have time to look at one, look at the last one.

You can see a much bigger version of each map if you click on it.

So. Map Number One:

I think of of this as my sketch map. I made it by brazenly scanning a map from the endpapers of someone else's book (I will certainly buy the author a drink given the opportunity) and then scrubbing out the names and replacing them with my own (by the squint-and-point method--no claim to accuracy at this stage). This is where you see how sadly lacking I am in Photoshop skills. (Though my Anglo-Saxon Twitter icon might have been an early giveaway.) I hadn't the faintest idea how to make something that looked like a wall, so I just drew a thick line, then 'bit' chunks out of it with dabs of the Brush tool. I used the same tool to dab in the dots for vills and other settlements. And to create Puffin Island/Glannauc, just off the eastern tip of Anglesey/Mon.

Glannauc makes an appearance in the book. More on that later.

But this first map was never intended to be anything but an initial sketch map, a for-personal-use-only building block for the real thing.

For the second map, a friend in New York worked her academic institution's servers half to death to bring me a true projection of Great Britain, complete with relief features. I sent her the sketch map, and coordinates of anything that might be misconstrued (for example, Derventio--see below) and the names of the rivers I needed. She sent me this:

You'll see that there are one or two made up names, too, for example Mulstanton, which is a settlement on the River Esk, below the cliffs of the Bay of the Beacon/Streanæshalch/Whitby (the spellings get fixed in the next iteration). As for Derventio, I plumped for a place close to an old Roman villa, at Malton. (Yes, I know there's another Derventio near Derby, but I wasn't interested in that one, story-wise.)

But I found this map difficult to read. And it still needed territories/peoples adding, and walls, and so on. And I needed more room. So I cropped it to the size I needed, and begged for help from a photographer friend.

This is what we came up with:

If you click on the map, and then zoom in, you'll see that there are actually two Glannaucs: the tiny one is the real one. The big one right next to it is purely imaginary. I just needed the reader/editor to be able to see it. That'll get fixed for publication. So will the relative sizes/fonts of the various peoples and their regions. For this iteration my priority is for editors to be able to find a region on a map quickly, so they didn't have to go look things up and get bumped out of the story.

You'll also see that there's a lot left out. I was ruthless: if it wasn't in the story, it's not on the map. As it is, there are some Irish places, and some non-British locations (Hedeby, Frankia, Less Britain) that are mentioned in the story but not included here for the sake of clarity and simplicity.

If you see something you don't agree with, please let me know--either by email or in a comment. I want to get this right.

I'm hoping I can do the final map for the book in colour. I'm hoping I can do an absolutely enormously detailed map for the website I'll build to support the book closer to publication. I'd love to illustrate tiny little scenes from the book on this enormous map, and include tokens/banners/signs of dynasties/peoples on their region (ravens, boars, bulls, eagles).

What else have you often wished authors included on their maps? Tell me what you'd love to see. Please.

---

Many thanks to Angélique and Jennifer for their labour of love. Good friends, both.

Hild's family tree

The new title for my novel about Hild is...Hild. It just makes sense :)

My hand-drawn family tree for Hild is now neatly printed and legible. I'm hoping readers of this blog will give me some feedback.

click to enlarge

As you can see, there are several names missing. For example those Æthelfrithings who died before they amounted to much, historically speaking: Osbald, Osric, etc. There are also wholly fictitious characters, and some invented names for people who know must have existed.

For example Osfrith's wife. We know he had a son. I thought a high-status Frank would suit nicely. And what's higher at the time than the Frankish king? Clotrude sounded like a reasonable name for the sister of Clothar II. There's plenty of time to change this before publication, though, so if anyone out there has a better idea, please make a suggestion. Or at least tell me why this won't work. Or, even better, point me to Osfrith's real wife, whose name I somehow missed.

Similarly, if you know--or are willing to make an informed guess--regarding Osric's wife/Oswine's mother--I'd be grateful. (I didn't bother to invent a name because she doesn't appear in the book.)

You'll see, too, that I invented the name of the daughter of Hereswith and Æthelric: Ælfwyn. I hope that sounds acceptable. If it raises red flags, do please let me know. I have lots of leeway at the moment, but as the book gets closer to publication, change will grow more difficult.

I couldn't find a name anywhere for the niece of Beli of Alt Clut, and I didn't feel competent to even guess at something suitable. If anyone has any notions about that, I'm all ears. Ditto the Pictish wife of Eanfrith Æthelfrithing.

You'll see that I chose to make Eanfrith's mother, Æthelfrith's first wife, Bebba (of Bebbanburg fame). Given the Brittonic sound, I rather arbitrarily plumped for Alt Clut antecedents. If any of that in any way clashes with what's known to be known, sing out.

I also posit a fruitful liaison between Hereric and 'Onnen, some leftwise cousin of Ceredig, king of Elmet'. Their son is Cian. He's one of the major characters in the novel, so if, historically speaking, this is ridiculous, please speak now.

My major choice was to make Æthelric, the king of Deira before Æthelfrith swept in from Bernicia, Edwin's much older brother. This means that when the Iffings fled Northumbria and scattered, Hereric, Hild's father, was the heir-in-exile. I expect some disagreement over that one, but at this point I'm reluctant to change it. Though I'll definitely listen to well-reasoned argument.

Hereric's wife is Breguswith. We know as much from Bede. I pondered making her East Anglian, but for reasons I forget, I couldn't quite make that work. Instead, she's now Æthelbert's daughter--Eadbald's half sister.

I'd love to hear your thoughts, on any and all this.

And sometime soon I'll have a spiffy map to discuss...

Light of the World

Hild is done (for now). She has a working title: Light of the World. (Subtitle, if novels had such things, might be something like The woman at the heart of war, politics, and religion in seventh century Britain.)

The book, volume one of three, is huge: 963 pages, 197,878 words (excluding the title).

I've sent it off to my agent. She'll get back to me with suggestions, in terms of possible cuts. (With something this length, they're always looking for cuts. It wouldn't shock me if they suggested I cut it in two and publish as separate volumes. I just don't know if I'll listen...)

Now I start looking for expert readers. Key word = expert. This is not a finished work. It still needs shaping. The input I need now is from those who know some aspect/s of the period, Britain 617 - 631 CE: politics, monetary systems, trade, health, family relationships, religion, flora and fauna, war gear, liturgy, metallurgy, textiles... Anything and everything, really. [ETA: Also languages, Old Irish, Old English, and Latin in particular.]

For example, there are two lengthy scenes set in Gipswīc. It mentions trade goods, coinage, exchange rates, food, slavery, elite hierarchy, etc. There's a lot of potential, in just those scenes, to get things laughably wrong. And I have no doubt I do. Some of it will be easy to fix. Some of, given the story, might not be fixable.

If you think you can help, if you're willing to read nearly a thousand manuscript pages of rip-roaring fiction (life, death, politics, nature, sex, violence, grief, joy) and not forward the ms. around to all your friends, if you're willing to accept that the needs of fiction sometimes clash with the facts, please email me or drop a comment to that effect. I can send you a raw .doc file. I can promise that I'll do my utmost to take your input and use it (with deference to the exigencies of story) and I'll thank you in the acknowledgements. (Actually, in the interests of full disclosure, if you're an expert, and are reading this, I probably also read you--so it's likely I'll be acknowledging your expertise anyway, ha. So, okay, I'll also think of some other nifty Thank You.)

I can say this without blushing: I'm a good novelist. This book, though, is a stretch. I've never written a coming of age story, never written from the point of view of a child, never written historical fiction. I need all the help I can get.

I've done my best to get things right. I've had to make some dubious choices here and there for the sake of story (I've mentioned already some of the heinousness regarding music and Fursey). What happens isn't impossible, but some of it is rather, ah, unlikely.

What kind of novel is this? It's difficult to describe because I've never seen anything like it. Imagine Kristin Lavransdatter meets Game of Thrones (only without the dragons). It's epic in every way. Except for actually being an epic in the accepted lit-tech sense: it isn't from multiple viewpoints; Hild is in every scene. So it's an "intimate novel of character painted on an epic canvas." With warlords, priests, and kings. And anxious reeves, stressed out seers, and beleaguered queens. Plus some slaves and farmwives and scops. And more trees than you can shake a stick at. And rivers and oceans and rills and burns and becks, and seals and cows and crows and otters and herons, and death and destruction and famine and plague (well, not plague plague--or maybe just a hint of a possibility of it, in Kent, once--just illness and cattle murrain). And song, and heroism, and gold-and-sparkly-jewels, and plotting...

If I were Empress of the Universe, and if this were a graphic novel not, ahem, a literary work of wide popular appeal, I'd call it: Butcher Bird! (Everything you know about the 7th C is Rong!) Because you don't get to be famous by being all sweetness and light.

But, oof, I'm getting punchy. So I'll leave you with this photo of carnelians, to which Hild is passionately attached. In the book, they're a political gift from the infant Rhianmelldt to the child Hild. I don't specify the hows and whys in the text, but I imagine they were acquired by numeri in Greco-Roman Egypt, then brought to Hadrian's Wall on deployment, passed down through generations (or stolen, or retrieved from a hoard or accidentally-unearthed grave goods, or...), ending up with the British elite. I am also passionately attached to these beads; I own them. (Supposedly they're 1st century Greco-Roman grave goods, dug up from an Egyptian oasis.)

Photo: Jennifer Durham

Britain After Rome, Robin Fleming

(This is a cross-post from my Ask Nicola blog.)

Thanks to a generous reader, I now have a copy of Robin Fleming's Britain After Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400 to 1070. (I talk about why I wanted it so much here.) Yesterday, after lunch, before I went back to working on Hild, I flipped through it. I was struck by this statement on page 175:

Hartlepool's abbess Hild had learned the religious life from her sister--the mother of the king of the East Angles and a nun--who had trained at a Frankish monastery...

Bearing in mind that Fleming's book is largely based on material culture, I'm sorely puzzled. I don't understand how the above inference can be drawn from archaeology. Especially as it directly contradicts Bede:

When she decided to abandon the secular life and serve God alone, she went to the province of the East Angles, whose king was her kinsman; for having renounced her home and all that she possessed, she wished if possible to travel on from there into Gaul, and to live an exile for our Lord's sake in the monastery of Cale, so that she might the more easily attain her eternal heavenly home. For her sister Hereswith, mother of Aldwulf, King of the East Angles, was already living there as a professional nun and awaiting her eternal crown. Inspired by her example, Hilda remained in the province a full year, intending to join her overseas; but she was recalled by Bishop Aidan and was granted one hide of land on the north bank of the River Wear, where she observed the monastic rule with a handful of companions for another year.1

As I say, I was just flipping through it. It might be that there's some explanation, some interesting archaeological trail I'm unaware of. That would be thrilling. But right now I have a sinking feeling that she's just imagining.

Just imagining is fine. It is, after all, what I do for a living. But I'm a novelist. This book is presented as a narrative history. I have difficulty accepting that Hild learnt from her sister. In their adult lives, the two sisters follow two different religious traditions. Hereswith was either at Faramoutiers, which, though run under the Rule of Columbanus, was founded in a time and place much steeped in Roman culture (material and otherwise), or, possibly (though much later--it wasn't founded until 658), Chelles. Both would have been under the authority of Roman Christian bishops. Hild, on the other hand, led Hartlepool and Whitby, under Bishop Aidan, who was Ionian-trained, as 'Celtic' a Christian as it was possible to be.

As I don't think Hild learnt from her sister, I'm now going to worry that I have to be sceptical about all her statements regarding eras with which I have no real familiarity. (Almost everything. I know the seventh century well enough to play Jeopardy, maybe, that is, until 680, when Hild dies...)

So if anyone out there has read the book, I'd love to be reassured. I've been looking forward to this one!

1 HE iv.23, trans. Leo Sherley-Price

The never-ending mystery of English

One of the big mysteries to me as a novelist (as opposed to professional historian) is the lack of a convincing explanation for the apparent obliteration of Brythonic (the native Celtic language of Britain before the Romans came and muddled everything up) and substitution of Old English, a Germanic language. (My terminology is imprecise; I'm not an academic.)

Over at Historian on the Edge, Guy Halsall discusses Steve Brohan's theory of Old English as a lingua franca between the "language of lowland Britain...a Romance low Latin" and "a late Brythonic/proto-Welsh" of the highlands in post-imperialist Britain (think roughly 400 - 600 CE):

Pre-Anglo-Saxon British highlanders would know some Latin but not much - enough to be able to make transactions with lowland villa-owners etc, especially to pay taxes and so on. The villa owners, by contrast, would know no British. When an Anglo-Saxon military elite came to power, however, both would need to learn Old English to communicate with these warrior aristocrats, and knowing this language would enable them to communicate with each other in the new set up.

This makes perfect sense to me. Apart from anything else, it's a survival tactic to learn the language of those who carry the weapons. Misunderstandings could be fatal.

What also makes sense to me: the survival of the native syntax. You can hear this in periphrastic phrasing of local dialect. (I grew up in Yorkshire. My mother's family was from Ireland, my father's from London. When either of them got tired, I could hear entirely different syntactical bones shining through their vocabulary skin.)

All making perfect sense. And yet, and yet... Food for thought.

I just wish, growing up, that I'd known there was such a thing as philology. I might have done a better job of my 2004 memoir, And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: Liner notes to a writer's early life:

Yorkshire's history is stamped on its landscape, literally and figuratively, and it moulded the language that I absorbed with my mother's milk (and grandmother's whisky). A quick survey of Yorkshire place names (from natural features, to street names, to towns, to pubs) is like cutting a language core: in the sturdy bedrock of Anglo-Saxon there is the occasional gleam of Brythonic Celt heaved up from an earlier age, the pale glint of Norse, even strangely evolved fossils of Latin and Norman French. This hybrid and textured language is largely responsible for who I am. To explain, let me give you a few broad strokes of West Yorkshire history.

In the Iron Age, the place that was to be Leeds was an agriculturally various land enjoyed by the Brigantes, Brythonic Celts. In the first century the Romans arrived, and started building forts which became cities. Then they laid nature-defying roads across hill and dale between those cities, followed by armed camps to guard those roads. The Romans abandoned the region after about three hundred years and left the native Britons in charge again. Around this time, Angles, Saxons and other Germanic peoples started visiting Britain and staying, forming kingdoms and acquiring territory. A couple of hundred years later the Norse--Danes, mainly--arrived and the region lived under the Danelaw, with its own language and coinage and culture. Gradually, after battles and negotiations and marriages and so forth, the Danelaw melded with England. And then the Normans came.

By the time I showed up, 894 years after the Battle of Hastings, layer after layer of language was stamped on the place names of Yorkshire. The first street I remember living on was hilly street called Balbec Avenue. Bal is from a Celtic word for hill. Our family would drive for day trips to Otley Chevin, a big rocky outcropping overlooking an ancient market town (Otley bears the distinction of having the most pubs per capita in the British Isles). "Chevin," it turns out, descends from a word very similar to the Welsh (also a Brythonic language) cefn which means "hill." On the way to the coast for a holiday, we'd drive through Wetherby, a name that comes from wedrebi, a combination of wether, that is, neutered sheep, and -by, a Norse word for settlement. The hills were called the fells, from fjell, a Norse word for hill. York (I could write two pages on the evolution of that name) was built on the river Ouse, a name that comes from a Celtic root word, -udso, meaning water (water, in Irish--a Goedelic Celtic language--is uisc, which is the root of "whiskey"). The name of the River Esk, which bisects Whitby (a town on the North Yorkshire coast), also comes from that Celtic root word for water. The River Aire, which flows through Leeds, empties into the Ouse at Airmyn, "myn" being an Anglo-Saxon word for rivermouth. Esk, Ouse, Airmyn... I had a childish vision of waves of invaders, marching along with their Roman shields or Anglo-Saxon leaf-bladed spears or beautiful long Norse swords, coming to a river and saying arrogantly to a local fishing along the bank, "You there, what do you people call this?" and the local scratching her head and saying, "This, your honour? We call this 'water'."

I imagined the officer nodding self-importantly and reporting to his commander, later, "...and so we forded the river, which locals hereabouts call the River Water..." And, just like that, history to me was no longer what you found in history books, but was thronged with real people. Words assumed hidden power; I began to understand them as keys to the puzzle of the universe.

Words are like icebergs; nine tenths below the waterline. We don't see the entire meaning immediately but it has mass and momentum; it matters. To me there is all the difference in the world between "muscle" and "flesh," or "red" and "scarlet." Rhythm and grammar matter, too. Yorkshire syntax, more than many regions of England, shows its Celtic roots, its periphrastic, roundabout manner of speaking: "Dyuh fancy going down t'pub, then?"

I'm the product of two thousand years of history. It shows in my work.

Speaking of which, the second draft of Hild is cruising along. I'm four-fifths of the way through. It is most definitely not a Romance...

First draft of Hild is finished

I finished the first draft of the first volume of my novel about Hild. It's huge: 976 pages (more than 200,000 words). I'll lose a lot of that in the rewrite, of course, but it will still be long.

Submitted as proof:

Photo taken with crapcam (sorry about that). It turns out that 976 pages is nearly 11cm (4.5 in) high and weighs north of 4 kilos (>9 lbs).

Why all the detail? So I can avoid actually beginning the rewrite...

Two excerpts from Hild-as-child

Sentences are something I've been thinking about a lot lately. I've always been a fan of clarity and simplicity: poetry masquerading as prose. Rhythm matters. Word choice matters. Metaphor matters. I love to vary the rhythm and shape of sentences in a paragraph--unless I'm going for a particular effect.

But while writing about Hild, all my notions about sentences fall to pieces. I find myself writing these vinous, sinuous things--in a variety of modes, depending on the mood, geography, and languages spoken by the characters.

Here's a paragraph from the first couple of pages when Hild and her family still live in exile, in Elmet, at the court (I use the word loosely) of Ceredig. She's nearly four:

Hild recalled no sights or sounds of the place they'd come from, the standard against which all was compared, the long-left home. She had vague memories of sun-on-grapes, others of a high place of lowing cattle and bitter wind, of ships and wagons and the crook of her father's arm as he rode, but she knew none of them were home, could be home. She recognised people who might be from that long-lost perhaps never-real home when they galloped in on foundering horses, or slipped through the enclosure fence during the dark of the moon. She knew them by their thick woven cloaks, their hanging hair and beards, and their Anglisc voices: words drumming like apples spilt over wooden boards, round, rich, stirring. Her father's words, and her mother's, and her sister's. Utterly unlike Onnen's otter-swift British, or the dark liquid gleam of Irish. Nor like the cool clicking tiles of bishops' Latin. Hild spoke each to each. Apples to apples, otter to otter, gleam to gleam, though she had only sung snatches of the strange Latin in songs under her breath. And only when her mother wasn't there: Never stoop to wealh speech, never trust wealh, especially those shaved priestly spies.

And here she is, a handful of pages later, her father dead, at the court of her uncle, Edwin, in Northumbria:

In some ways, Hild's new life was not so different. Her days, the court's days, were one of constant movement from royal vill to royal vill: Bebbanburgh at the end of the lean months for the safety of the rock walls and the cold grey sea, and Yeavering at the end of spring, when the cattle ate sweet new grass and the milk flowed rich and fat. Then south to the old emperor's wall, to the small towns built of stone, and a day at Tinamutha and a boat down the coast to that wide river mouth, wide as a sea, and up the river to Barton in early summer and then, sometimes, Sancton, and always to Goodmanham's slow river valley at summer's height--the rolling wolds crimson with flowers, the skeps heavy with honey, and the fields waving with grain. Then the twenty mile journey to York, with its strong walls and snug stonework, its river roads for carrying the last of the sweet apples and the first of the pears, and high towers in case of bitter war, winter war.

War there was, but in summer. Edwin took war on the road with his warband, ten score gesiths and their men, their horses and wagons, a few handsful of shared women. They were always back before autumn, weighed down, depending on the war, with Anglisc arm rings and great gaudy brooches, British daggers with chased silver hilts--though the blades were no match for Anglisc or Frankis work--or strange heavy coin, and they would wind themselves about with boasts and intricate inlaid sword belts. And always by the end of summer there was a double handful more of big-voiced, hard-chested men glittering with gold. Not all were Anglisc, but they drank and shouted and boasted the same way.

These are sweeping let's-move-time-along sentences, quite unlike the kind of thing I'm used to writing in novels. Certainly there wasn't much like this in the novels about Aud. Aud thought in arrow-straight sentences. Hild is much more elliptical and, of course, much younger. One of the surprises for me writing this book has been the number of asides--often in dashes--I feel compelled to include: something I've never done before in fiction.

As the novel progresses, I do a lot more focus-changing: zooming in on a personal moment, widening out a little to follow interactions closely for a scene or two, then pulling right out and up again to 70,000', to describe the ebb and flow of kingdoms and religions. Generally speaking, the older Hild gets, the more the narrative slows down and sticks with her moment to moment. But the constant zoom and pull is a bit dizzying. I don't always get the focus sharp, or hold it for the appropriate time. But, hey, that's what rewrites are for.

Speaking of which, enjoy the above paragraphs. Who know what will actually make it into the finished product.

H. Rider Haggard and the Venerable Bede

** This is a cross-post from my personal blog, Ask Nicola **

Yesterday I was feeling torpid and decided to actually read some of the free books I downloaded a few weeks ago, last time I was feeling ill.

I read King Solomon's Mines by (Sir) H(enry) Rider Haggard. I'd always assumed I'd read it before. (I read a bunch of his books as a child. My favourite, easily, was She, though I don't remember much--we're talking forty years ago--apart from the power and glory that was Ayesha. Yum. Echoes, for the child me, of Jadis of Charn, aka the White Witch.)

Anyway, I'm reading along, not recognising anything--apart from the tropes. After all, Haggard pretty much invented the Lost World genre. It's all here, the full-bore colonial overkill: adventure, wild riches, characters who are More Than They Seem, manifest destiny, etc. Jolly good fun if you can cope with the wholesale extermination of game, women as chattel, and adult Africans as either cruel or naïve. (It displays the full panoply of -isms, with the exception of homophobia. Haggard seems touchingly innocent regarding the admiration of manly men. Or maybe he was having fun. He was clearly having fun in other ways.) After about fifty pages I adjusted, and settled in for the happy slaughter.

Once I relaxed, I began to recognise chunks of prose. Haggard was obviously delighting in ripping off the Bible, Milton, Shakespeare, and a whole host of other vaguely recognisable Classics.

One passage that struck me particularly was a scene wherein the intrepid explorers debate whether to undertake a risky journey across the desert to find the fabled diamond mines. One of their number, Umbopa, asks the leader of the expedition, Sir Henry (is the name a coincidence? I think not) Curtis, "What is life? [T]ell me, white men, the secret of our life--whither it goes and whence it comes!" Then he answers his own question:

"You cannot answer me; you know not. Listen, I will answer. Out of the dark we came, into the dark we go. Like a storm-driven bird at night we fly out of the Nowhere; for a moment our wings are seen in the light of the fire, and, lo! we are gone again into the Nowhere."

Now look at this passage from the Venerable Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (The Ecclesiastical History of the English People--I'm using the Project Gutenberg translation, whose author I don't recall, offhand), in which one of Edwin's thegns is arguing in support of a conversion to Christianity, on the grounds that Christ alone knows what's what, while we, as puny human beings, do not:

"The present life of man, O king, seems to me, in comparison of that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your commanders and ministers, and a good fire in the midst, whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad ; the sparrow, I say, flying in at one door, and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry storm ; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, into the dark winter from which he had emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are utterly ignorant."
(HE II.13)

Haggard adds some Africa-specific stuff to Umbopa's speech: "Life is nothing. Life is all. It is the Hand with which we hold off Death. It is the glow-worm that shines in the night-time and is black in the morning; it is the white breath of the oxen in winter; it is the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself at sunset." But it's Bede in essence.

I love the notion that something written in the eighth century (concerning events in the seventh) is here being applied to the nineteenth century and read in the twenty-first. It's yet another indication of the influence of Hild's time (and Bede's work) on the present day.

Speaking of which, Hild is calling. Time to get back to her.

an update

Perhaps this will surprise no one but I like the novel I'm writing. I've spent a 100,000 words taking Hild through childhood and am now poised to introduce her to young womanhood. Not a moment too soon.

Don't get me wrong. As I've said, I'm enjoying this novel--delighting in it, in fact. But writing that many words about a child has been a challenge. For one thing, there's no sex. I'm not used to parsing a character's world without the electric tightening of sexuality running through it. It's odd. Lots of people around Hild have been having sex--they're human, after all--but she notices this from the perspective of a person who doesn't know, on a visceral level, what that means. And then there's been the difficulty on getting the most basic information: where did they sleep? What did they eat, exactly, and when and with whom? How did they feel about dogs? Naturally, all this complicated by Hild's ever-changing status. She begins as the second child of an Anglisc prince-in-exile in the forest land of the British people of Elmet. Then she's in Deira, at the brand-new court of Edwin, her uncle. Then she's playing rag-tag-and-bobtail with a warband travelling north of Hadrian's Wall. And so on. Every time I work out one set of details, everything changes. I've lost count of the halls, camps, wagons, vills, ruins, settlements, wics (etc.) I've had to invent and then discard after ten pages. Then within each, say, vill, there's the byre, the dairy, the hall, the weaving huts, the smithy, the kitchens, the temple enclosure, the well or spring, the kitchen garden, the new church... And then different people use these places differently: the wealh and the gesith, the women and the men, the nobles and the priests.

However, I've reached the point where Edwin has been king of Northumbria (Deira and Bernicia), and then overking (of the Angles, and possibly some Saxons, and the probably-Jutish Kentishmen--and, y'know, women), for well over a dozen years. Hild is beginning to return to places I've described before, travel in wagons I've already mentioned, take ship in vessels previously encountered. I can sometimes write as many as fifteen pages before I have to go look something up (and then spend an entire evening getting crosser and crosser trying to reconcile radically divergent scholarly opinion or, worse, stare at nothing, just an empty hole where the data should be).

By now I've mostly worked out how to keep one foot in the not-contravene-what-is-know-to-be-known (particularly regarding gender roles) camp and one foot in the I-can-make-exciting-shit-up! camp while finding a good narrative through-line. I'm happy with my solution to the competition between my need to make Hild extraordinary and to give her agency, and for her to be absolutely representative of her time (and a child, and female).

So now, for a while, I get to play. Now I get to take Hild back to Elmet--the area around present-day Leeds. I was born and bred in Leeds. I love it on a DNA level. Now I get to imagine it fourteen hundred years ago, before cars and roads and train tracks, before power lines and grown-for-product forestry monoculture, before the wolves and the bears were all killed and the cloud systems were never formed by contrails. All that and sex too...

I'm deeply excited.

I just got a fabulous grant!

The Authors' Foundation, administered by the UK's Society of Authors, have just given me a grant. Now I can do my research in England in person.

Can you spell Bedes World?

I'll be in Yorkshire and Northumberland mostly--Bebbanburg, Goodmanham, Sancton, York (again), Whitby (again), hopefully Yeavering... Any other suggestions?

Oh, this is going to be awesome! Just wish I could have got it earlier--I'd have been at Leeds, drinking beer in The Stables, talk talk talking up a storm about Hild. Hey, maybe next year!

2,000 year-old carnelians

*** This is a cross post from my daily blog because I feel guilty about not posting anything here for weeks. ***

photo by Jennifer Durham

Around my wrist I wear a set of 73 carnelians cut and faceted in Roman workshops in the first century. They were a present from Kelley for our tenth anniversary. I am passionately attached to them.

I use the plural, workshops, because it's obvious that they are from several different times and places--different colour and clarity, different sizes, different wear patterns. Some, I think, might have been worn for a couple of hundred years; some for only a generation. They were dug up from Bahariya Oasis in Egypt, a centre of Greco-Roman winemaking around the third and fourth centuries. In other words (though no one at the gallery would admit this), they are grave goods.

I don't know the provenance, the chain of custody, of my beads. All I can tell you is they came from a respectable gallery in Australia. I prefer to believe that they were properly excavated, recorded in context, and then legally sold. But I honestly don't know. All I know is I won't give them up, and they've sparked much daydreaming.

They are part of the organising matrix of my fiction about Hild. Originally, I thought I'd write one longish novel about this fascinating woman. But then I found that she wore my beads. And then I wanted to write about a woman of the 3rd century CE who also wore the beads, and a woman of the 10th century, ditto. (Rather thrillingly--at least to me--the tenth century woman is Aud the Deepminded, the historical namesake of Aud of The Blue Place and two other novels.) And the Hild novel grew in my mind to two or possibly three novels. So I have a four or five novel sequence laid out in my head: the Carnelian Sequence.

They look particularly beautiful in the sunlight. Over the years I've tried to catch their fire in photographs, and been driven to despair. The picture above, taken by FoAN Jennifer Durham, comes the closest to how they look in real life. (I believe she used tungsten lights to mimic sunlight.)

So my creative dance card is pretty full, just with the Carnelian Sequence. And yet, as always, I have ideas circling, waiting to land, like a skyful of planes running low on fuel: movies, tv series, stories, novels, graphic novels. Some will crash before I can land them safely, but, wow, it feels marvellous to watch them all tonight, twinkling away up there.

pewter Hild

Medieval stocking stuffers! What a cool idea. (Via Heavenfield.) Pewter whatchamacallits from Aebba Art Gallery. I've always been very fond of pewter--though I hated polishing it when I was a child. It was always my job before Christmas: rub rub, polish polish, tuh. It was the old-fashioned kind of pewter, too, with lead; hand-hammered. Beautiful in candlelight. I hadn't given it much thought, but I wonder if Anglo-Saxons used pewter much. I know there was a lot of tin in Britain. That and a smidge of copper and antimony (and lead) are all you need. I don't know how people got antimony, though I do know its sulphide is kohl. So if the women were into cosmetics, no doubt they had access.

No, I'm not going anywhere in particular with this. Just noodling. These things would make awesome Christmas tree decorations...

most heinous use of a musical instrument--so far

I know very well (that is, I think I know) that 'harps' in Hild's time were essentially lyres, like this:

reproduction of Sutton Hoo lyre at the British Museum

However, story-wise my notions of 'harp' are so strong that I've taken the liberty of giving Anglo-Saxons gut-strung lyres, like the one above, and the British--especially the Irish--more traditional twelve-string beasties like this one from the Winchcombe Psalter:

11th c winchcombe harp (from The Winchcombe Psalter, c. 1030-1050 AD), photo from Simon's Anglo-Saxon Harp page

In addition, I've strung the British harps with bronze rather than sheep gut. Their singers are better, too. (Some cliches one simply shouldn't mess with: Celtic harps glittering in the firelight; supple, trained voices, etc.)

To make up for their not-great harps:

I've given the Angles pipes and whistles (though I haven't bothered describing them--too many things to fret about: pan pipes? antler? bone? wood? how many holes? how tuned?) and drums. The Britons would have had these, too, of course, but it's just simpler to divide the spoils. I often wonder whether they had some kind of idiophonic, glockenspiel/marimba-type instrument: bells, wooden blocks, chimes. But this isn't a novel about music, as such, so I elected not to chase down those details in my research. (Naturally I'm eager to hear from those who might have the info at their fingertips.)

One thing I would really like to know more about is plainchant. I know James the Deacon accompanied Paulinus to the north and spent the rest of his life there. But I'm trying to imagine what it must have been like for Hild to hear that kind of music for the first time and fall in love with its cool clarity. Right now she thinks, It was the music stars might sing. Were it water, it would turn any bird who drank of it white. But I'm prepared to accept she might just think it sucked.

Then I run into the difficulties of resonance: plainchant only works in stone buildings. So immediately I have to make the basilica at York still standing, and I have to clear it of hangings and furniture and floor rushes. I have to cover the newly dug fire pits with hard board, which makes the place really, really cold... But it's lovely to imagine Hild standing there wreathed in her own breath, lost in the music. Then, of course, I send her back to the firelit halls of Yeavering with much meatier, rowdier music, perhaps something like this:

and, in the end, I know where my heart lies. But the heart in question is Hild's. Lots of decisions ahead...

Update on Hild, plus Where do they sleep?

illustration of 10th century (I think) sleeping arrangements

I've been working on my Hild novel for a year now. She is twelve. I have 75,000 words. (To put that in context, most novels are around 100,000.) If you believe Bede's suspicious symmetry, she lived to the ripe old age of 66--so this is turning into a huge project, much, much bigger than I'd anticipated. I'm enjoying it enormously.

Right now in the narrative Hild is about to witness the assassination attempt by Cwichelm's man (yes, I know his name, but don't want to give it away to my primary--non-historian--reader, who reads this blog). She's met Paulinus, and heard James the Deacon lead his first group of half-trained choristers in plain chant (the only suitable venue was the ruined basilica at York, stripped of all furnishings to improve the acoustics). Æthelburh is pregnant. I've gone against received wisdom and have already married Hereswith off to Æthelric (also known, it seems, as Egric to his North Folk, where he rules as prince while Eorpwald is king proper of the East Angles).

One thing that I find I'm fudging, though, is the issue of where Hild sleeps. She's with Edwin, so she travels from vill to vill: York, Bebbanburh, Sancton, Goodmanham, Barton perhaps, somewhere near the Derwent perhaps--I'm positing a new vill built upon some Roman remains near Stamford Bridge--and so on. I've done a little reading on the archaeology of as many of these places as I can and, well, it's not helpful.

If Hild were a warrior-type, a gesith, no problem: she'd bed down in the mead hall with all her fellow sword swingers. But where does a royal relative, a 12-year-old girl, sleep? Looking at the Yeavering evidence I'm tempted to say there was a family hall, or women's hall, not far from the main hall, and Hild could sleep there safely. At other places I've imagined a women's quarters screened off from the main hall but in the same building. I've pictured her with a real bed, which comes to pieces, in a pinch, for travel. But I'm aware that I've taken this notion from funerary practice and it may be inaccurate for daily life.

Anyway, I'm punting here. I'd love to hear some educated opinions (or total guesswork; it's all welcome) on the matter. Are there good sources anyone can recommend? (Preferably online, but I'll take print if that's all there is.)

As always, thanks in advance for your help. I know I'm always asking for stuff, so...is there anything I can do for you in return? Anything of my process/progress you're curious about?

dogs in the 7th century

I don't know much about dogs; my sister had one when I was seven, but I'm a cat person. Nothing against dogs, I've just always lived in cities, which I think is a hostile environment for large dogs (and small dogs, in my experience--small though it is--tend to yap). So, regarding dogs: utterly ignorant. I've been researching the 7th century for a while now (for my Hild novel), but find I still don't know much about it. So, in this regard too: utterly ignorant. Now I'm faced with writing about dogs in the 7th century and my mind has gone terrifyingly blank.

Here's how I imagine the dog situation in the north of England circa 627:

• There are herd dogs--large, loyal protectors of flocks (sheep, cows, goats, maybe even geese) that run with the flock to protect it from predators but don't herd the flock under commands from the shepherd/cowherd/goosegirl. These dogs (sometimes just one, occasionally a pair) would spend much more time with the beasts than the humans. They eat, sleep, even play with the cows/sheep. Perhaps they were imprinted as puppies and mostly think they *are* cows/sheep.
  

• There are sight hounds, coursers and so on, like deerhounds--probably largely under royal or at least 'noble' control.

• Bulldogs would control large animals going to slaughter.
  

• There are hounds of war: huge things that perhaps wear spiked collars and are trained to do one thing: kill. These would most likely be kept in royal kennels because they might not be safe to allow anywhere else.

• Perhaps isolated farmsteads or small settlements would have a couple of dogs-of-all-trades.

• Perhaps people would form bonds with some of these dogs. Perhaps that would be discouraged. Perhaps not.

I read about Cuchulain and his hound, and I wonder, Did they care for each other? Or was the dog just a tool--an important and precious tool, like a sword, but not something to devote feeling to? If dogs were, to some degree, pets, how would they be trained? Would women be allowed to keep dogs? Would they want to?

Hild has basically had a puppy forced upon her by the queen, Æthelburh, who wants a dog for herself (I've yet to work out why) and thinks that if at least one other female at the royal vill--even a child, like Hild--has a dog, Æthelburh won't seem like such a foreign weirdo.

So now I'm trying to figure out how it all works: what would the dog (a bitch, I've decided) look like? Would it have a leash? How would it be trained? I'm thinking a cross between a wolfhound and a Molossian-type herd dog--big, but not as heavy as a Molossian or as tall as a wolfhound--that has protective but not herding instincts, with an urge (though not an overwhelming one) to chase prey. It would hit maturity around 18 months.

So my question for both dog-lovers and medievalists is: does any of that make sense? Do you have suggestions?

anachronism!

I'm wondering how people feel about anachronisms in historical fiction. Last week I came across a startling instance in a new paperback reprint of a well-received historical-type fantasy (perceived level of tech maybe 2nd or 3rd century CE). This is from a very respectable publisher, lots of critical attention, etc. Yet I hurled it across the room after reading for three minutes. Why? Because on page 5 a character feels a "thrill of electricity." Electricity. In the 2nd century. In a fit of pique, I tossed it in the recycling.* And then tonight, rereading one of my all-time favourites, Mary Stewart's The Crystal Cave, I found a fish "jackknifing." It bothered me. Not enough to throw the book, but enough to pop me out of the story for a moment.

I'm working really hard while writing this novel about Hild to be rigorous with the language, probably to an excessive degree. For example, in one dreamy, other-wordly passage I wanted to talk about aconite, the poisonous purplish blue flower--but that name wasn't around until the Normans. Okay, I thought, I'll call it Monkshood. But, no, that makes no sense in a society with no monks (we're in Northumbria, pre-Paulinus, pre-Aidan; no doubt there were some Brittonic-speaking priests skulking about but I can't quite imagine monks). So, okay, how about Wolf's Bane? Good--except apparently that usage wasn't known until the tenth century. If I've done my research properly (and, as always, I welcome corrections), the Old English term for aconite was probably thung (þung), a generic term for poisonous plants. But, really, thung? Tuh. It's not poetic at all. So I compromised and called it 'the thung that people call Wolf's Bane'--and one minute later deleted it. I can't bear that level of clumsiness in fiction. So, despite all my efforts, the flower is now Wolf's Bane and I just hope all the botanists and medievalists will not fling the book at the wall.

And I haven't even begun to work out how to deal with the place name problem....

So, your thoughts? Will anyone even notice my (attempted) rigour? Am I being too fussy?

* Yes, I know, I should have recycled it via a loving home, or the library, or something, but it was a freebie (publishers send me a lot of stuff), and I suspect they sent out so many, and it's such rubbish, that soon all potential loving homes will be inundated.

scriþan

I've come across this verb four times in Crossley-Holland's translation of Beowulf. Shrithe (scriþan). I can't quite triangulate on its meaning. I imagine something between slither and slide and slink and slip but it's irritating not being able to pin it down. I know that in most languages there are no exact equivalents of many words but, still, it's beginning to bug me. I'm not sure if it's a word from which I'm supposed to infer magnificence and/or inevitability, awe or disgust. Is it more 'slither' or 'sail majestically' or what? At etymonline.com I found this:

SHRITHE - Bruce Mitchell's "Invitation" gives this account of the word: "The [Beowulf] poet uses the verb scriþan four times -- of hellish monsters, of shadows, of Grendel, who is both a hellish monster and a sceadugenga 'shadow-goer' and of the dragon. The word seems to imply smooth and graceful movement (it is used elsewhere of the sun, clouds, and stars, of a ship skimming over the sea, and of darting salmon in a pool) and an element of mystery (other poets use it of the coming of May, of the beginning and ending of the day, and of the gradual passing of human life). In Beowulf, there is also a suggestion of menace and danger which is echoed in other poems, where the word refers to the spread through the body of a disease which could be cancer and to flames raging unchecked. Had it survived, poets would have used it as a rhyme for 'writhe' and sports writers would have turned it into a cliche applicable to footballers, cricketers and baseballers, tennis-players, and boxers."

If not for the 'darting' salmon, I'd go for something like 'steal' as in 'stealing up to the door'--a sense of stealth, and smoothness, and movement. Any better suggestions?

brave Beocat, brood-kit of Ecgthmeow

In honour of it being a holiday, I thought I'd post this poem by the Beowulf scop's cat, that is, Henry Beard. Illustration by, well, me. (It's an old pic; if I were doing it now I'd add a little boar, with bristles along its back, on top. Possibly some engraving on the sides.) Anyway, enjoy the poem--I'm particularly fond of "Hrodent slayer."

Grendel's Dog, from Beocat

Brave Beocat, brood-kit of Ecgthmeow,
Hearth-pet of Hrothgar in whose high halls
He mauled without mercy many fat mice,
Night did not find napping nor snack-feasting.
The wary war-cat, whiskered paw-wielder,
Bearer of the burnished neck-belt gold-braided collar band,
Feller of fleas fatal, too to ticks,
The work of wonder-smiths, woven with witches' charms,
Sat upon the throne-seat his ears like sword-points
Upraised, sharp-tipped, listening for peril-sounds,
When he heard from the moor-hill howls of the hell-hound,
Gruesome hunger-grunts of Grendel's Great Dane,
Deadly doom-mutt, dread demon-dog.
Then boasted Beocat, noble battle-kitten,
Bane of barrow-bunnies, bold seeker of nest-booty:
"If hand of man unhasped the heavy hall-door
And freed me to frolic forth to fight the fang-bearing fiend,
I would lay the whelpling low with lethal claw-blows;
Fur would fly and the foe would taste death-food.
But resounding snooze-noise, stern slumber-thunder,
Nose-music of men snoring mead-hammered in the wine-hall,
Fills me with sorrow-feeling for Fate does not see fit
To send some fingered folk to lift the firm-fastened latch
That I might go grapple with the grim ghoul-pooch."
Thus spoke the mouse-shredder, hunter of hall-pests,
Short-haired Hrodent-slayer, greatest of the pussy-Geats.

From Poetry for Cats, by Henry Beard (Villard, 1994)

playful mating with another woman

Thanks to Lisa, I've been apprised of a 'lovely tantalizing bit' of woman-on-woman sexuality. It's from the tale of Niall Frossach, from the Book of Leinster, folio 273b-274a, lines 35670-35711 (Vol. 5, p. 1202). Also, apparently, in Liber Flavus Fergusiorum and a late version in Leabhar Cloinne Aodha Buidhe (c. 15th century):

There was a fine, firm, righteous, generous princely king ruling over Ireland, Níall Frassach, son of Fergal. Ireland was prosperous during his reign. There was fruit and fatness, corn and milk in his time, and he had everyone settled on his own land. He called a great assembly in Tailtiu once, and had the cream of the men of Ireland around him. Great kings and wide-eyed queens and the chiefs and nobles of the territories were ranged on the stately seats of the assembly. There were boys and jesters and the heroes of the Irish in strong eager bands racing their horses in the assembly.

While they were there, a woman came to the king carrying a boy child, and put him into the king’s arms. "For your kingship and your sovereignty," said she, "find out for me through your ruler’s truth who the carnal father of the boy is, for I do not know myself. For I swear by your ruler’s truth, and by the King who governs every created thing, that I have not known guilt with a man for many years now."

The king was silent then. "Have you had playful mating with another woman?" said he, "and do not conceal it if you have." "I will not conceal it," said she, "I have." "It is true," said the king. "That woman had mated with a man just before, and the semen which he left with her, she put it into your womb in the tumbling, so that it was begotten in your womb. That man is the father of your child, and let it be found out who he is."

(translated by David Greene in the Swedish journal "Saga och Sed,"1976)

The implications are intriguing, to say the least. Though it seems the king might reasonably expect a woman to lie about having sex with another woman (and so can assume there was some stigma in such sex), the phrase 'playful mating with another woman' is far from judgemental. In fact, it all sounds very jolly and uncomplicated: just a casual tumble, grins all round.

Does anyone have any thoughts on the matter? (Does anyone have any further tidbits? I'm learning a lot...)

retconning beowulf

I've been reading Beowulf again, this time Crossley-Holland's translation. I'm struck by its similarity to episodic television drama. (Radio drama too, of course, but apart from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, radio serials were before my time.)

For example, halfway through, around line 1270, we get a recap, a Previously on Beowulf the Grendel Slayer moment:

...one of them, Grendel
that hateful outcast, was surprised in the hall
by a vigilant warrior spoiling for a fight.
Grendel gripped and grabbed him there,
but the Geat remembered his vast strength,
[...] thus he overcame
the envoy of hell...

In daytime soaps characters often announce things the other characters already know. So we'd get some awful piece of dialogue such as, 'Hello Susan, identical twin to my amnesiac foster mother'. In Beowulf, starting around line 1335, we have:

...she has avenged her son
whom you savaged yesterday with vice-like holds
because he had impoverished and killed my people
for many long years...

Why does Beowulf need to be told what he did yesterday? He was there. This is for the audience, because some of them might have missed the earlier installment.

But the biggest swerve of all, for me, was the retconning of Grendel. (Retconning is a fan term, meaning 'retroactive continuity', basically putting a sudden new spin on the information we thought we had about a character, or event, in a long-running series.) Think of all the daytime soaps you've ever watched (or just read about--because none of us have ever stooped to that rubbish, oh no), or that moment in Tootsie where Dustin Hoffman's character pauses dramatically and announces 'the hospital administrator you thought was a nice girl actually turns out to be A MAN!' In Beowulf we find that our good old-fashioned monster turns out to be THE OFFSPRING OF CAIN!

I'm not a scholar. I haven't studied Beowulf at any level. Perhaps this is all old hat to the literary historians out there. But it's new to me, and extremely interesting. I've been under the impression that Beowulf was meant to be an epic, one-night performance, like an uncut Shakespearean play, but clearly it's an episodic drama. Why else would the scop put in reminders, rewinds and retcons? (Yes, I know the Anglo-Saxons drank a lot--but so much they couldn't follow one poem over the course of an evening?) It's pretty clear to me that this piece was designed to be performed over several nights; Yule, perhaps, or during the multi-day visit of the king or ealdorman.

Thoughts?