This enormous, skilful volume is the sequel to Griffith’s 2013 Hild, which narrates the early life of the seventh-century woman who would come to be St. Hild of Whitby. The earliest book in the Hild Sequence covers about eighteen years and concludes with Hild’s perilous marriage to the warrior or gesith Cian. It is 535 pages long. Menewood covers about the next four years, from roughly 630 to 634 AD, and is 681 pages long. 

I’m including these numbers—535 pages for eighteen years, 681 pages for four years—because they tell you something about the kind of book Menewood is. It’s a novel about a lethal geopolitical crisis that quickly begins to cast dread over the story and will take almost unimaginable effort for the survivors to claw free of. Most folk are familiar with some version of the phrase “what a week this day has been”—this is a book about years that feel like decades because they are so hard, and so much must be done to shift their nature even a little. 

If that sounds like a slog for readers, it isn’t. Hild’s fascination with people, with what motivates and changes them; her abiding love of nature and different types of craft; her strong appetites for food and knowledge and sex (mostly but not exclusively with women) braid in with Menewood’s darker, devastating passages. There’s uncommon generosity of observation in this huge novel, and one senses that this is a way through for its protagonist, too, despite the bloody leagues she must travel. Menewood is also, in its latter two-thirds, a propulsive and detailed revenge story. Once Hild begins to advance her own plot—a kind of flourishing, well-tended trap for a particular adversary—the pages turn almost of themselves. They release care and murder, combat and recovery, shaped beauty and casual obscenity, immeasurable loss, immeasurable natural wealth. 

At the beginning of the book, a mood of foreboding is created by Hild’s unease about the unstable early monarchy of seventh-century Northumbria. This mood is supported and developed by the careful attention Griffith pays to her world’s weather. 

… the fire was low, and despite the thrown-open doors, the heat stifling. The evening was thick and still, and smelt of hot tin; over the western woods the sunset, overlain by thickening cloud, darkened the sky to old and bloody liver. [Hild] felt the air curdling, tightening, making her bones itch. (p. 133)

For context, this scene takes place about midsummer. Hild, the warrior-seer of King Edwin Yffing of Northumbria and Lady of the royal vill of Elmet, has just returned from an eventful diplomatic embassy to the northeast. The embassy has been a success, but things at home in recently annexed Elmet (roughly now West Yorkshire) have not gone well in Hild’s absence. Her young husband, Cian, and their blended band of warriors have struggled with the responsibility of maintaining the noble household to which they’ve been freshly transplanted, and wasteful death has resulted. Moreover, King Edwin remains dangerously paranoid about his own safety and status, and this—along with other half-articulated familial feuds and secrets—makes him demanding of Hild’s presence. He will expect it even on the battlefield, if events turn to war with the southern kings Cadwallon and Penda; yes, even then—and even though Hild is pregnant with her and Cian’s first child. 

Okay. Let’s hold up here for a minute, awkward as that is, to say: if you’re wondering “but how is this in any way fantastika and what is this review doing in Strange Horizons,” I would say perhaps that Menewood, like Hild, is part of a conversation within Griffith’s work about whether aptitude, training, and community can allow some individuals to succeed in actions that look supernaturally impressive across different horizons of time and for different audiences, present company included. That conversation keeps to particular bounds in the Hild Sequence, and so keeps what I guess I have to call “actual magic” out of the novel—although, as I will argue later, there are at least structural relationships between Hild herself and many-times-iterated formulations of gods of agriculture, healing, hunting, war, and local place. I don’t think Griffith wants the lines drawn too directly, but it’s a play of meaning that contributes substantially to these novels. And when Griffith again takes up the matter of a woman warrior in her 2022 Arthurian novella Spear (which was written while Menewood was in process), it’s clear that she is interested there in tipping her examination of extremes of physical ability and sensory perception right over the border into the realm of magic and myth. Hild and Peretur, the half-Sidhe protagonist of Spear, sometimes tread similar ground in a territory with unclear boundaries. Griffith puts it this way, though I am taking her words out of context:

The path seemed ordinary enough; [Peretur] felt grit under her boot, and dust rose and fell as it should, and the grass to either side looked and sounded like good hill grass, dotted with clover and daisies. She could not see the place where the real land blended into the magical, only that if she looked into the distance it was not the same ranks of rising green hills … (Spear, p. 83)

So I am arguing, I suppose, that a review of Menewood belongs in Strange Horizons because Griffith’s work is never not out of conversation with what makes our world so strange as to seem supernatural—and what makes the supernatural so familiar, so imaginable, as to seem real. There are other potential arguments to be made about Menewood in particular, and I try to make them later, but you will find them semi-neatly tucked into a footnote.

Now back to the book under discussion, and Hild’s terrible summer at Elmet and territories south. What she faces in the “old and bloody” sky that hovers over her stifling summer hall is a set of bad probabilities handed down to her by kill-or-be-killed generations of regional rulers. She wants to keep herself and Cian safe and lay down security for their household. She is interested in governing Elmet well, both for itself and because the vill is advantageously positioned for protecting Menewood—“a thriving settlement in a fertile, half-secret valley of bogs and becks and ponds and meadow” (Hild p. 481), and Hild’s heart-demesne. Menewood is the place in all the world to which Hild feels most connected. [1] Its welfare as an intertwined ecosystem and human community is in many ways her developing life’s work. It’s also the place she can stand to apply the lever, or levers, that may move her society toward greater political stability. [2] 

But Hild is very young, impossibly young, only eighteen. What she needs at the beginning of Menewood—so that she can protect Elmet, Menewood, Cian, their growing child, and those closest to her (including her former bondswoman Gwladus and her gemaecce or platonic “pair,” Begu)—is time. She must have time to build, to plan, to disentangle herself from the conspiracies, resentments, and struggles of the previous generation. She will not get it. Tragically, her wider territorial foothold at Elmet comes with responsibilities to Edwin. And Edwin is a wrecker, a war-king who does not trust the continuity of his own achievement, and therefore does not care what or who he damages in his path through and out of life.  

According to Griffith’s precise argument about the nature of rulership in the world into which Hild is born, Edwin’s cultivated unpredictability—his trail of wreckage and murder—is a characteristic shared across the class of kings and princes, regardless of which territories they control or which people they lead. This embedded volatility in the structure of Hild’s society is one the things that Menewood’s protagonist is training herself to counter and change. It’s very dangerous, however, to try to steer people whose power is linked to a practice of semi-randomized killing. Take this example, of many. Just when King Edwin is beginning to fear the odds in an approaching battle, his Christian priest Stephanus misreads the King’s mood:

“Christ is on our side,” Stephanus said.

“One more word,” said Edwin. To Hild, “Honeytongue sends to say only four hundred march under Penda’s banner.”

“To the Christ numbers are as chaff in the wind,” said Stephanus. “Our cause is—” He stared down at the bubbling slash in his belly.

Edwin wiped his seax on Stephanus’s sleeve and sat back down. (p. 173).

Edwin’s brutal attack is clearly a disaster for the mortally wounded Stephanus. It is also a disaster for Hild, who had been relying on the King’s temporary preference for Christian advisors to keep Cian and herself out of armed conflict with Penda and Cadwallon. Edwin had thought for a while that Stephanus’s God, and the priest’s own presence, increased his odds of victory. The King has changed his mind. Now he wants Hild, his seer, as his luck, his token of success. She and hers must go with him (never mind that she’s pregnant, never mind that she’s beginning active labor) into open unfavorable war.

Hild is in large part a seer because she is a literal genius at analyzing probabilities. She knows at once how bad Edwin’s plan is. As soon as he kills Stephanus, her sense of the future splinters as her mind attempts to recalculate outcomes based on a new set of variables. It’s a remarkable moment, rendered by Griffith in this way:

[Hild’s] life split like a raindrop hitting tent leather: two paths, four, eight … All ended in blood. Most with Cian at the centre bound and burnt and broken, begging—both of them begging.

Most but not quite all. Very well. [Edwin] was not done with her yet. She would dice with wyrd. (p. 174) [3]

The concreteness and specificity of the simile used here—“life split like a raindrop hitting tent leather”—is characteristic of Griffith’s writing and underlines the Hild Sequence’s deep and successful commitment to conjuring the material life of the past. The way the novel hinges on Hild’s interior process in advance of her actions is also well summarized in this brief passage, though a summary can’t do justice to the reading experience of watching it happen in different ways and in response to different rich and fascinating datasets. And then of course there is the prophecy. What will be lost to this coming disaster, this field of blood? “Most but not quite all. Very well.” It is of course one thing to see that and another to survive it, at eighteen, and for a time almost alone.

By page 215 of the novel, Hild’s first world has been destroyed. She saw it coming, and that does not help her. Nor does it help the other immediate victims of Edwin’s disaster: families and communities bereaved, often left to starve in the wake of military defeat, their entire food economy disrupted by deliberate acts of sabotage and the sharp reduction of available labor due to human casualties and flight. Griffith doesn’t spare on any of this important matter, which is not just a source of believable character development for Hild (who is however certainly reaffirmed in her desire to reduce the frequency of such outcomes) but also a reservoir of active thought about the costs of uncontrolled, leader-driven armed conflict in general. I wish Menewood wasn’t topical. In its own way, though, it is.

The rest of the novel takes on the project of building new worlds. If you want to call Menewood speculative, I think you could do so following that route, though others are available, too. [4] Through slowly growing participation in larger regional and cross-border power struggles, Hild collects and sometimes herself invents the ideas, relationships, and resources necessary for composing alternatives to the regime structures she grew up in. She simultaneously pursues revenge for past losses.

Amid all this, an execution-challenge for the Hild Sequence emerges: absent a very difficult and maybe impossible kind of “history from below” not welded to a central character, Hild must represent all by herself the post-Edwin pivot toward revised seventh-century models of rulership, accompanied as it was by the emergence of a written culture and its associated religion, Christianity. Her centrality to this process, the sheer structural bulk of her presence, sometimes produces narrative awkwardness when Menewood attempts to represent these shifts in the wider culture via the singular actions and insights of its protagonist. [5] But it’s impossible—for me, anyway—to imagine how else Griffith could have gone about it. 

The difficulty of assessing and evaluating Hild’s “size” in the novel is tangled up in her relationship with the territory and ecosystem of Menewood, a place for which she has become a kind of genius loci, a resident protective deity. While located there, or even near it, she is so attuned to the pattern of its deep life that she can see into the future, smite enemies, heal her faithful, make the land fruitful, even encourage conditions for flourishing and welfare. [6] Hild doesn’t want to be a king. She is opposed to and works counter to their wrecking methods. She is instead—though only in one specific place—a small god, growing what she loves, and doing a lot of hard, lethal work to defend her environmentally rooted, life-entangled followers from harm. [7]  

Once you take a thorough look at the novel’s disciplined, allusive, ecosystem-specific construction of its protagonist’s remarkable powers, it makes sense that on (very rare) occasion Menewood makes Hild a little too omnicompetent for suspension of disbelief to hold. I had some trouble with a scene close to midway through, in which Hild issues what feels like a forced consolatory speech to a bereaved child. Must, I wondered, she also be good at this? Can she not be awkward, or at a loss, under any circumstance now? But, on the other hand, the novel itself examines the effort and seems to make a mark in its own margins: quaere. “[The bereaved child] stared at [Hild] as if she were speaking Pictish” (p. 285). No—I give over. This is a magnificent book.

Endnotes

[1] From the first book:

So she fell in love with the mene, and the mene fell in love with her. She felt buoyed by her people, her land. Everything tasted round and ripe. The air was as rich and sweet as cider. Just breathing fed some part of her. She spent half the nights lying by a pond listening to the bullrushes and the frogs. At dawn she rode … along the ridge and looked forward to the next month when she might see the peregrines returning.

Mine, she thought, looking down at the low woods with the water glinting through the green. Mine, when the men and women formed their line to start sickling the barley. Mine, when she smelt the wild garlic in a just-cut glade of coppiced hazel. Mine, mine, mine. (Hild, p. 482.)

[return]

[2] The Hild Sequence is very much about the transition from “might makes right” to a society with a longer view of itself and a model of governance rooted in the welfare of citizens. “[H]ow did Hild ride [the] cultural transformation of petty kingdoms into sophisticated, literate states? ... I wrote this book to find out.” (Nicola Griffith, “Author’s Note,” Hild pp. 537-8. [return]

[3] The definition provided in Menewood’s glossary for “wyrd” is “fate.” [return]

[4] There’s also of course the novel’s reimagining of the events lying behind the slim written accounts of the time, and the way Hild’s perceptive and analytic abilities clearly exist along a spectrum that terminates at one end in the supernatural. This last point becomes very evident once you read Griffith’s 2022 Arthurian novella Spear, in which the protagonist Peretur—also a woman, also a warrior—is able to gather from her own senses that which is magically extra-sensory. 

… as [The Red Knight] came, Peretur felt, through her palm, the wood of her spear; from the wood, the blade; and, at the tip of the blade, a taste of blood—not much blood, for she had barely pricked him—but enough: for now she could feel his life, feel the Red Knight as she felt herself. Now his knowledge was her knowledge. (Spear, p. 54) 

Hild’s ability to detect human action and consequence from what she notices with her whole sensorium is one of the hallmarks of her character, but Griffith stops short of confirming supernatural power in the Hild Sequence. She does, however, consistently indicate that many people find Hild deeply frightening and unheimlich—a blade that cuts two ways for the “seer.” [return]

[5] There’s a scene toward the end of Menewood (pp. 627-30) in which Hild is forced to create an extempore syncretistic public narrative about the ceremonial raising of a cross, under hair-raisingly awkward conditions. The episode is played for humor and in deadly earnest, and much about it works. But the notable thing to me is that Hild must narrate it herself, throughout: there’s literally no one else in the novel who could. The whole thing depends on her at this point. [return]

[6] “see into the future,” many examples see p. 7 (at Elmet), “The world snapped into enamel-bright clarity … South of the rise, someone comes,” and pp. 354-7 (at Menewood) “[Cadwallon’s] heading to Bernicia. He’ll take the wall and then move north … ”  Viz. also and associated “smite enemies,” because both examples are directed at ultimately successful though costly military action. “heal her faithful,” many examples, for one pp. 357-8, Maer, a child recovering in Menewood from starvation: “the girl’s hair shone clean, showing a hint of gold among the pale brown, and the curve of her cheek was the color of toasted wheat, smooth and unblemished. The rash from eating too much bulger was long gone.” Hild diagnoses a young woman with iron deficiency, prescribes iron-rich beans p. 388. “make the land fruitful,” p. 361 (at Menewood) “The birds grew. The carrots and onions, beans and peas, parsnips and beets, lettuce and herbs grew. The children grew … even Ceadwin’s cat began to thicken.” “encourage conditions for flourishing and welfare,” p. 362: “Hild’s part was [Menewood’s] safety, strength and growth. It was her task to be the centre, the guiding light, to see the path and lead others along it.” [return]

[7] Oh, but even a small god—even that—is a wonderful and terrifying thing. [return]