Hild by Nicola Griffith
Blackfriars (Little Brown), July 2014
E-book, 560 pages
*Review copy kindly provided by the publisher, via Netgalley.
"I'm not pretty."
"You don't need to be pretty. You're like lightning. Like a tide. Like a blizzard."
"Something to run from."
"Something to get caught up in. Something to remember for the rest of your life."
There are some books which simply fit you, and you know them almost immediately.
It starts with the chatter. You hear about a book here and there, increasingly. It pops up in your social media feeds and on Goodreads and eventually your friends' bookshelves. The blurb begins to grow in your mind, which is when the booklust starts. You want it, you need it.
But it isn't out in the UK yet and, though it continues to hove in and out of view, you wait. You wait and wait, until you don't have to wait anymore. You embark with trepidation.
This is the point where it can go wrong: all the anticipation falling away, leaving only disappointment. Or where it can go right: everything settling beautifully into place, exactly as you had hoped.
Thus, Hild: the latter. This long, rhythmic, meticulous novel set in the north of England in the 7th century, which tells the childhood of St. Hilda of Whitby at the court of her uncle King Edwin of Northumbria, fits me perfectly. I loved it, and oh I want you to love it too.
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Seventh century England is a divided patchwork of small kingdoms, overlaid with complex dynastic rivalries to match the most expansive epic fantasy. Kings and their sworn fighting men - their gesiths - spend summers at war with neighbours, extending their lands or struggling to defend them, and winters recovering in their halls. Enemies from further afield, from Ireland and Scotland, try their chances raiding along undefended coasts. Allegiances are formed and oaths sworn, and every single one is fragile, contingent on the shifting sands of power year on year. In this world high born women are incredibly valuable, as 'peaceweavers' whose marriages cement the alliances of their fathers, brothers, uncles; but when the sands shift the lives of the losers and their wives and their children are vulnerable, forfeit. Lower down the social scale farmers and labourers live hand to mouth, dependent on the next harvest and the next and the next. Survival is chance and luck; a good summer, enough rain, a sharp edge on your knife.
Hild is born into this world around 614, the youngest daughter of Hereric, an aethling of the Kingdom of Deira, and his wife Breguswith, a princess of Kent. The family's fortunes fall when Hereric's uncle Edwin takes the throne, and they find themselves in exile in the tiny Yorkshire Kingdom of Elmet. Hild opens with Hereric's death by poisoning, when Breguswith, three year old Hild and her older sister Hereswith are thrown back on the mercy of King Edwin. They join his court at York, and are woven into his tangled campaign to consolidate the northern Kingdoms.
Breguswith is a fiercely intelligent player of the royal game and spends the next decade working tirelessly to place her daughters in positions of influence and therefore safety. She uses every tool at her disposal: her wit, her body, her skills as a weaver, as a healer and as a killer. Hereswith is destined to be a peaceweaver, and as her great uncle's closest female relative is a bargaining piece of high value. Hild's wyrd, or fate, is very different; almost certainly unique amongst her people. She is extraordinary.
Before she was born Breguswith prophesied that Hild would be 'the light of the world', and she makes sure that her little daughter is tutored to fulfil this promise from the cradle. She manoeuvres Hild aged six or seven into a dangerous but powerful position as Edwin's seer, claiming an uncanny ability to predict the weather, the outcomes of war, the plans of his enemies. Hild has her mother's sharp eyes and a silver quick mind; she sees things that others miss, both in the natural world and in her uncle's hall. From the pattern that emerges she guesses and gambles and grows into her prophesying.
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Hild is the first installment in a projected trilogy of St. Hilda's life, and lingers long and languidly in her childhood. Our protagonist is three when the book opens, still a teenager when it closes, with hardly a whisper of a thought of her later career as a woman of the Church. It's a challenging pace to adjust to, running counter to every expectation of momentum and propulsion, especially in a book that runs to nearly 600 pages. Griffith uses her hundreds of thousands of words to layer depth into her setting, to expose us to the annual rhythms of her characters, to explore their world geographically, politically, emotionally. It reaches for totality, for immersion in a complete system.
Griffith has her work cut out, because Hild and Hild's world are completely alien to us (unless you happen to be a scholar of the 7th century). Hilary Mantel's job is easy in comparison, because we have such a well developed pre-knowledge of the court of Henry VIII and the implications of the Reformation. Much much less so the court of King Edwin and the implications of the North's conversion to Christianity. It seems to me that you have two choices if you want to write about people in such times. Either you turn your setting into an allegorical set piece (think Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant) where vaguery and alienation are the point; or, like Griffith, you dig as deep as you can into the archival and archaeological record and you pursue minutiae in order to remake a world. Her research blog, Gemaecce, is a testament to her efforts.
The structure of the novel echoes the structure of its character's lives, and specifically the lives of high-born women like Hild. It cycles repeatedly through the seasons, as Hild's household moves around Edwin's strongholds from spring through to winter, and at each place enacts the same rituals of work and play. We dwell with them in the dairy, in the weaving room, in the fields, in the hall. Although Breguswith and Hild are noble and therefore saved from hard labour, they are still workers. Women are largely responsible for the transformation of Edwin's main crop - wool - into the fine cloth that he trades with the continent. They sit at the centre of a commercial network that stretches from the sheep to France and back again.
The weaving takes two, it isn't a solitary task, and this need is embodied in the most important social relationship of womens' lives. When they reach adulthood girls are paired together as 'gemaecces', high born to lower born, to work and raise their family together in a lifelong friendship. Hild's pairing with hers is one of the most powerful moments of the book, an intense right of passage:
...they joined the other women of the household in their gemaecce pairs, old woman with old, young with young, women who had woven and spun and carded together for years, through first blood and marriage and babies, who had minded each other's crawling toddlers and bound each other's scraped youngsters, and wept as each other's sons and daughters died of the lung wet, or at hunt, or giving birth to their own children - all while they spun, and carded and wove, sheared and scutched and sowed.
Griffith pays prolonged attention to the relationships between these women, to the specifity of how they live and to the ways they exert influence and agency. In so doing she flies gloriously in the face of everyone who ever excused a writer for short changing female characters in historical fiction because the past was a man's world. There are so many wonderful rounded breathing women here, with Hild at their centre. Breguswith's gemaecce Onnen is a native British woman, with an illegitimate son, Cian, who works as tirelessly as her partner to make the best world for those she loves. Edwin's second wife Aethelburh arrives as a Christian in a pagan kingdom, using her fertility, her dynastic connections, to bring the new faith to her husband's people. Hild's slave Gwladus - not just a woman, but an unfree woman - eeks out sexual favours to claw back a modicum of security.
Still, this is a martial world and women do not rule it. As Edwin's seer Hild moves beyond the court, is taken on his campaigns and to his neighbours to receive tribute, but she is always an exception. Women and their work may be everywhere - the eight year old Hild sees a ship and thinks 'It was a new sail, beautifully dyed, tightly woven, the work of ten women for a year.' - yet there are limits.
Hild finds herself in possession of a form of power and influence that sets her apart and makes her anomalous. It is a mixed blessing. Marked from childhood, she finds it more and more difficult to fit into her gendered world as she grows older. Her uncle employs a priest to teach her to read and write, and she badgers Onnen's son Cian into showing her how to use a sword; one of Edwin's thegns gifts her a battle seax. By the time she has her first period she has mastered the mysteries of letters and can kill a man. It isn't any wonder that her own people look askance at her, and call her haegtes, witch, battle bird.
Her position is strangely parallel to the new Christian priests at Edwin's court. He is on the cusp of the conversion that will set the course of religious change in England, and the priest of Woden rubs shoulders with the priest of Christ Paulinus in his hall. The new priests are a breed apart, with their long skirts and books, more like women than gesiths. 'Women make and men break,' Hild thinks. 'She frowned. What about men in skirts, where did they fit? Skirt or sword, book or blade.'
The traditional binaries do not apply to Hild; she is all four, skirt and sword and book and blade. 'What exactly counts as a woman?' she asks herself. She can be ruthless, selfish, unyielding. Some have noted that this is a violent novel, and that Hild is a violent person. Even as a child, raised up into a position of power at court, she 'understood why a king often threatened violence. It felt good, and it worked.' When Hild kills her first man she relates the experience back to something mundane, ordinary and tellingly domestic: 'It was not unlike sticking a skewer into a roast to see if it was done.' It is boggling to think that this girl will some day become a saint and wonderful to think how ambigious, provocative and challenging she is. If the medieval genre of saint's lives is reductive in pursuit of perfection, then Griffith's version is a kind of unauthorised hagiography, rough as reality.
Hild isn't only interested in how power is gendered, but also in how it erodes self-control and restraint. Edwin is eaten up with the vanity and vulnerability of his status, while her influence leads Breguswith to make dubious choices. It is inevitable that Hild should also be corrupted. You cannot teach a child to think of themselves as the light of the world and then expect them to emerge humble and self-abnegating. Flexing her muscles at the age of 10 or 12 she demands of her tutor Fursey: "Who's to stop me, who in all the world? Only the king, and he gives me what I ask. So who is to stop me. No one." He replies: "Then I tell you truly, you must learn to stop yourself." The second part of the book is essentially about learning exactly this self-control.
Self-control isn't only vital in the exercise of her power as a seer, but also in her sexual relationships. Griffith constructs a complex framework of sexuality for her and around her, drawing a young woman powerfully attracted to both men and women living in a world with very different sexual mores to our own. While marriage is a vital and tightly controlled institution, sex is much freer and permissive for both sexes. Much can be made of Hild's bisexuality, of the fact that she loses her virginity to a woman, of her masturbating, of her misuse of her status and power in coercing sexual encounters. There is a kind of magic to the way the novel weaves these things so naturally into the weft of the story, how they are normalised. It reorientates our perspective of controversy, so that a sex scene between women is an integrated, accepted part of the past; so that the fact it is also between a slaver and a slave is visible. Hild's first shared orgasm with Gwladus is a powerful thing:
It was nothing like when she did it for herself. It built like James's music, like the thunder of a running herd, then burst out, like the sudden slide of cream, like a sleeve pulled inside out, and she wanted to laugh and shout and weep, but instead clutched at Gwladus as she juddered and shuddered and clenched.
Again, Griffith laughs in the face of everyone who has ever said gay or lesbian or bisexual characters are unhistoric or ahistorical. More wonderful still is the fact that Hild's same sex relationship does not restrict her desires. Running through the story is her lifelong passion for Cian, the boy she grew up with and who she can never have. This love is neither tainted nor diminished nor restructured by sex with Gwladus.
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It goes without saying I think, from the brief quotes I've given, that Griffith writes a gorgeous fluid prose. Sentence by sentence it utterly seduced me, so that I would find myself hynoptised. She uses language that mirrors the shifting, changing society around Hild, from British, to pagan Angle, to Christian.Here, for example, is Hild listening to her first Christian choir, so different to anything she is used to: 'It was cool music, inhuman, the song stars might sing. Endless, pouring, pure. Were it water, it would turn any bird that drank it white.'
Contrast this with the description of the story songs that Edwin's scop sings: 'It was the kind of song they loved: blood and gold, never grow old, never feel cold, honey in the comb, hearth and home, glory and story, all topped, like foam on just-pulled milk, by the rousing, rhythmic chant of the forebears.' The rhythms, word by word, replicate the different music styles. I must have clipped dozens of quotes from the book, dozens and dozens, as I read.
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There is much more that I could say here (although writing this much has been extraordinarily difficult for me), and I'll get to do just that soon when I take part in the Strange Horizons book group on Hild in April. So I'll stop here, except to say: I commend this book to you without reservation, and I await Book 2 with as much anticipation as Hilary Mantel's last Cromwell book. Which is really saying something.
~~Victoria~~