Hild

Title: Hild
Author: Nicola Griffith
Pub Date: 2013
Genre: Historical Fiction
Nutshell: The speculative childhood of St. Hilda of Whitby, an English woman living in the 7th century

So, one thing about me is my weird love of the so-called "Dark Ages" and early medieval times, especially in and around what is now Great Britain. So this book, purporting to be about St. Hilda, a woman who really lived in the 600s in England, was definitely interesting to me. England at the time was a weird amalgamation of two types of Christianity (Irish and Roman), along with the native Romanized British religion and the imported Anglo-Saxon faith. It was a time when it was perfectly reasonable to have two or three altars to two or three different gods, because you never knew. The Christ seems to forgive fairly easily--Woden is a bit more of a grudge bearer. Best to be safe and appease both. The monastery at Whitby was crucial in the decision of whether England would declare itself a Celtic or a Roman Catholic country. It may seem like a little thing now, but this was a huge deal back then. The fact that it was settled more or less without bloodshed is a testament to the skill with which people like Hilda were able to negotiate.

Not a lot is known about Hilda's early life. She was a woman after all, so there's only so much written down. She was the daughter of a minor Angle king in the northern part of England. These Germanic kingdoms were constantly fighting with each other, and her father was killed by another minor king (her uncle) who eventually became a sort of overking of the Angles in the area. In addition to the fighting between the Angles, there was also fighting between the other two Germanic kingdoms (Saxons in the south, Jutes in the east) and a couple groups of native kingdoms, which can loosely be broken down along lines of the Irish, the Picts (native Scots), and what we would think of as the Welsh. And then you had the Frankish kingdom in France, which in the next century would gain ultimate ascendancy under Charlemagne. It was a complicated historical moment, and one in which anyone with royal blood wasn't particularly safe, depending on who was in power at the time.

As far as the historical research goes, Griffith definitely did her work. This is a dense book full of information about the time period, what Hild saw, what she smelled, what she knew, what she felt. There is a glossary in the back for the period vocabulary, and a pronunciation guide for the names. There were as many languages as religions, so it can be a struggle, but there's no quiz afterward and you don't have to have them exact. If you're interested in an overview of this complex period in English history, you could certainly do worse than this book. I think she does her best to divorce modern thought from how people's minds worked back then, but that's probably the most difficult task for any historical author. The medieval mind, while of course human and much the same as our own, also traveled along very different paths to what we're used to. At times that can be jarring, and our normal reaction is to clean it up and make it palatable for a more modern eye. 

I would say the first two-thirds of the book were more or less what I was expecting, if it was much slower than anticipated. This is strictly Hilda's early life--nothing about her more documented adulthood within the church is touched on. I was thinking it was going to be an entire history, but this is Hilda as child and teenager. About which period there is no information at all. Griffith does well with the more usual tasks that would have been appointed to a young woman of royal blood, but once Hilda starts growing up, things start taking a turn. Sure, there's no proof that Hilda wasn't a natural warrior who fought as well as a man might, just not with a sword. Warrior women were not unheard of in Hilda's time and before. But it seems rather a stretch, and something perhaps more in line with the story Griffith would like to tell, whether in Hilda's guise or someone else's. The nature of Hilda's romantic relationships are also a bit, well, speculative. Again, certainly not anything that is counter-historical, but not what I would call the easiest assumptions either. Of course, this is historical fiction, and nobody, including Griffith, claims that these are the actual events that took place in Hilda's early life. But if you have a historical grounding in the time frame, it may seem a bit reachy, let's say. 

Overall, I enjoyed the book. It is LONG--530 pages or so. And dense. There are times when the story seems to stall, and there's a lot of politics, as is fair for a book about this time period. The fighting is well-described and she pulls no punches about what the wounds caused by the weapons of the time would have looked like. It was not an easy era to be a warrior. If you're interested in the history, you could do worse. But there are also shorter books that may not be as full of ancillary facts that are a quicker read.