Hild is a young woman at the heart of the violence, subtlety, and mysticism of the early medieval age-all of it brilliantly and accurately evoked by Nicola Griffith’s luminous prose. The stakes are life and death: for Hild, her family, her loved ones, and the increasing numbers who seek the protection of the strange girl who can read the world and see the future. And she is indispensable-until she should ever lead the king astray. She establishes herself as the king’s seer. She has the powerful curiosity of a bright child, a will of adamant, and a way of seeing the world-of studying nature, of matching cause with effect, of observing human nature and predicting what will happen next-that can seem uncanny, even supernatural, to those around her. Edwin of Northumbria plots to become overking of the Angles, ruthlessly using every tool at his disposal: blood, bribery, belief. A new religion is coming ashore the old gods’ priests are worrying. In seventh-century Britain, small kingdoms are merging, usually violently. Here is none of your saucy barmaids of yore (Hild is sexually attracted to women as well as men).Hild is born into a world in transition. And though gore and chivalric romance abound, Griffith is particularly concerned to represent the complexity of the worlds of medieval women - dyers and weavers and cooks but also doctors and queens. There are details of the narrative that seem to be there only because Griffith wanted to include something interesting she had learned about the early medieval period, and every one of these jostles our belief in the world she has constructed.īut this is the kind of novel you read in a few sittings or on the subway, glad to follow the meandering plot from battle to battle, intrigue to intrigue, barely keeping track of the shifting alliances and Old English names, all of it sweeping the merciful and shrewd Hild toward her exalted calling.
To make sure we don't miss the point, Griffith has Fursey reveal his ignorance of sedimentation and the tremendous age of the earth: "It must have been a cataclysmic event: such a beast hurling itself into solid rock." The past on the page is a fragile reality, and the more distant the more fragile.
The sole purpose of the exchange, as with certain scenes in the first season of "Mad Men," is to make the reader feel smug for understanding something the characters do not and could not: in this case, that Fursey has stumbled upon a fossilized dinosaur. There is a clumsy scene in which the Irish priest Fursey tells Hild of a dragon's skeleton he saw embedded in a cliff. Griffith does not always seem to understand how deadly cheap authorial irony is to historical fiction.
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