Hild: a remarkable novel about interesting times
In which a historian and a novelist reflects on a historical novel...
Coffee With Clio is about history in all its forms: about reading and travelling, thinking and experiencing. I don’t always read much historical fiction, but when I do, I’m always coming at it as a historian, and sometimes, that is a real treat…
Hild by Nicola Griffith is the first in a series of books novelising the life of Abbess Hild of Whitby. It was released in 2013 and the next book is out this year. I can’t wait!
The life of Hild is known to us mainly through Bede’s seventh-century Ecclesiastical History of the English-Speaking People, composed in around 731 CE. Bede was born just before Hild’s death in 680, and describes her importance as a religious leader and an adviser to kings. He does not tell us anything much about the details of her life and upbringing - her feelings and inner thoughts, her favourite hobbies or colours. That just isn’t how anybody wrote in this period, or, probably, how they thought about people and their identities. We do not know any figure from the early Middle Ages in this way and Hild is no exception. We have a fairly bare narrative about a woman and the ways in which she was important to what Bede cared about.
That was the Christianisation of the various English kingdoms in the British Isles in the eighth century. Christianity had come to Britain under the Romans, and was well-established by the fifth century when Roman authority over Britain collapsed. However, various people from Scandinavia, who collectively came to be known, by the time of Bede, as English (a mainly linguistic-cultural term), invaded Britain from the fifth century onwards, and began to settle. They came from areas that had never been under Roman rule and they were not Christian. They pushed the Christian Britons to the edges of the island and established their own kingdoms in the fertile farmlands in the middle. Slowly, these new groups also adopted Christianity, and this is the process that Bede was trying to make sense of. Along the way, he also tells us a great deal about the political interactions of the various different English and British (and other) kingdoms in the island, but that wasn’t his main concern.
In this world, Hild was born as a member of a royal family. She herself seems to have become Christian quite early in her life and she went on to become the head of a joint monastery, with both nuns and monks under her authority. (This practice later went out of fashion, but was not uncommon at the time.) She oversaw a major council that decided key issues relating to church authority in Britain, and was apparently considered wise and influential in her lifetime. That is the story in its bare bones.
Hild is an effort to build a person around those bones and to tell a story of her life. The novel blends fiction and known facts into a whole world in which Hild might have existed and in which she might have become one of the few famous women from this period in British history.
The early Middle Ages (c. 300-900 CE) are much more rarely novelised than the later Middle Ages, in my experience. This is undoubtedly because of the comparatively smaller volume of sources, and the fact that those sources, as already noted, do not tell detailed stories about individual lives. I wonder, though, whether it is also because the early Middle Ages feel much less familiar to people.
Many things about the world today that can seem as if they have always been true were not the case or were only just beginning. Christianity was not yet a global religion at the start of this period. Islam would only emerge in the seventh century. Apart from Sri Lanka, no state anywhere occupied the same territory as any single modern nation. The idea of the political units that we now call England, France, Greece, Italy, etc. would have been completely alien. In fact, at least at the beginning of this period, larger areas of the globe were not under the control of any state at all than were. The states that made the largest impact were huge, multi-lingual and multi-ethnic empires. Smaller kingdoms, too, rose and fell, conquered and were conquered.
With some exceptions, these are not centuries about which films are often made or with which people are generally familiar. (The most significant exception is the Vikings!)
The choice to write a series of novels about a nun, living in northern England in the seventh century, therefore, already tells you that Hild is something a bit different. None of the usual stereotypes about the Middle Ages apply. Most hadn’t even happened to be stereotyped: there can be no knights in armour, no ladies in wimples. There can be no crusades and crusaders, nor even, really, any cities with their narrow, windy streets and people selling sheep tails from carts. England in this period did not have any major urban settlements, with the possible exception of London, and Hild’s life was lived away from such places anyway. A good sized battle may have involved (many) fewer than a hundred men and kingdoms within the British Isles might stretch only a few day’s journey on foot in any direction.
Writing Hild took years of research. I came across the novel mainly because Nicola Griffith consulted with many medievalists in the course of writing it, one of whom was my partner. Building a world out of the scant narrative in Bede called for detailed knowledge of archaeology and other written sources to understand the economy, the dress, the food and the architecture of the time. Situating Hild in her political world required working with complex sources and often incomplete accounts.
The result is stunning. As a historian, I can be quite picky about reading fiction set in my period of study. It is too easy to see the lazy reliance on tropes and stereotypes or to feel the jarring misstep of a piece of dialogue that is wrong because no medieval person could ever have thought or expressed a particular thing. Even when work is well-researched it can be annoying when the author dropps their discoveries into the plot with a figurative pointing finger: ‘Look, I found this weird thing these people did! Isn’t it cool that my character is doing it, and weren’t they weird?’
Hild did the opposite of shaking me out of the story with clunky research bombs and clanging anachronisms. It sucked me into a world so real I could feel it, smell it, taste it and dream it. Fiction has a power to bring the past to life in ways that history cannot and doesn’t claim to. At their best, history and fiction work together to help us know, through research, and then to understand, through the imaginary, what it might have been like to live in other times. This book is that combination at its best.
Nicola Griffith’s writing is beautiful, which certainly helps, but it is beautiful for its attention to historical context too. Perhaps my favourite extract from the whole book is this:
Somewhere a man was calling in a peculiar cadence, and he sounded almost Anglisc. Almost. Instead of the rounded apple thump of Anglisc, these oddly shaped words rolled just a little wrong. Not apples, she thought. Pears. Heavy at the bottom, longer on the top. (Hild by Nicola Griffith, p. 165)
As a language nerd I fell in love with this. It captured the sensory delight of languages and dialects. As a reader, it surprised and stuck with me. The familiarity of the sound of apples falling connected me across centuries, and across the gaps between reality and fiction, with people so different from me. It fits Hild’s world - of crops and seasons - but it speaks in mine. As a historian I loved it. As a novelist, it made me sick with envy.
The characters are likewise a tour de force. Nicola Griffith creates whole, nuanced and entirely believable people, who are absolutely products of their time and place. Edwin, Hild’s royal uncle, has found a permanent place in my head: ambitious, superstitious but pragmatic, flamboyant yet brutal, unpredictable and frightening. He is unlike any attempt to write a medieval king that I have come across. His personality is disturbingly knowable yet uniquely shaped by his time, place and circumstances. As a historian, I will not look at Edwin, or the interpersonal ways in which power works, in the same way again.
There are things I might nit-pick about in Hild. Sometimes the reader is asked to work very hard: the narrative is dense and fast-paced, and it can be easy to lose track amidst the complexities of Hild’s world, especially the political alliances and betrayals. The immersive world-building can sometimes go too deep, too fast, using terms and metaphors that would have been familiar to the characters but aren’t to us. Perhaps most of all, although people undoubtedly grew up faster in the Middle Ages than today, at times in the early part of the book, Hild seems extremely young to be as precocious as she is, even if she was remarkable.
It is also worth adding some content warnings. Do not give this book to very young relatives who are interested in the Middle Ages (or who you would like to be)! It contains content of a sexual nature and scenes of violence. Neither are gratuitous but both are memorable and emotionally charged. They have a lasting impact. The world of Hild is not some violent dystopia, as the Middle Ages can sometimes be cast. People don’t bed-hop with wild abandon, as HBO might like us to believe of the past. Hild nevertheless lived in a world in which sex and violence were close, as real as apples and pears.
Having said all of that, would I recommend Hild to anybody interested in the Middle Ages, in page-turningly exciting novels, in multi-dimensional women (and men) characters, or in the indulgent joy of gorgeous writing? Yes, without hesitation. Hild is one of the most remarkable and beautiful novels I have ever read, and not only about the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages are just a bonus!