Of Os-things and Yffings, and sheep

I have finished the first book of the year! It’s later than I intended and later than usual even for a 700-page book (usually I read the first 600 pages in December and then I can finish it on January 1 or 2), but I’ve done it! The honors this year go to Nicola Griffith’s Menewood, the long-awaited sequel to Hild, which further follows the fictional adventures of the early life of the renowned seventh-century abbess Hild of Whitby.

Menewood kicks off a few months or so after the end of Hild (if I recall correctly) and things seem to be going well for the now 18-year-old Hild. She is the Lady of Elmet alongside her husband and secret half-brother Cian Boldcloak, sworn gesith to King Edwin and Lord of Elmet, and she is pregnant. Elmet is small and under-defended but they are building it up, and Hild and Cian are also secretly supplying a refuge in a hidden valley within the boglands of Elmet: the titular Menewood.

Hild hopes they won’t have to use it, but the winds of war are blowing, and this promising beginning–all the things Hild has won for herself by the end of the first book–are set up pretty much just to be brutally knocked down, so Hild has to start building all over, and that’s what makes up most of the book. King Edwin is threatened by a Southern king named Cadwallon, who loathes the Yffings and wants to burn them and everything they have ever touched (which is… most of northern England) to the ground and kill them all and steal their gold. He has essentially no interest in ruling Northumbria; he just wants to loot it and make sure nobody else within six degrees of separation from the Yffings gets to rule it either. Cadwallon has allied with another southern king named Penda, who is slimier if less psychotic, and taking out Penda is shaping up to the subject of Book 3, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Cadwallon and Penda manage to pincer a desperate and pretending-to-be-confident Edwin Yffing and decapitate him, killing off a good half of the cast we’ve met so far in the process, including Cian Boldcloak. Hild is grievously injured in the battle that she wasn’t able to avoid being caught in, despite being literally nine whole months pregnant, and as you can probably imagine that doesn’t go well for baby. With the help of her former slave Gwladus and her young runner Morud, Hild manages not to die, but she’s pretty severely injured, both physically and emotionally. I must say that Griffith does an excellent job of building up the dread and sense of claustrophobic inevitability leading up to Hild’s darkest hour, and having read nothing at all about the book beforehand I was definitely caught up in the oh no how are they going to get out of this one, I don’t see how they’re going to get out of this type of anticipatory dread and it is because, broadly speaking, most of them don’t get out of this. The first third of the book is some of the bleakest shit I’ve read in a while, and it was hard to read more than a couple dozen pages at a time. It was very good January reading after all.

Menewood, however, serves its purpose, and after Hild spends a couple months recuperating with a bunch of poor fisherfolk who live on the very edges of what passed for civilization even in seventh-century Britain, a bit of tough-love therapy from Gwladus, and a surprise visit from some of Hild’s former group of mutilated spearmen–the Fearsomes, technically sworn to King Edwin when he was still alive–Hild and co. make their way to Menewood and start slowly and carefully rebuilding, gathering allies and news and resources as Hild starts to put together a plan to take down Cadwallon Reaver and install a suitably sensible, non-psychotic king of Northumbre. This involves a lot of fun intrigue and heists and letter-writing and diplomacy and teaching a bunch of traditional gesith types how to do things like “sneak” and “steal” and “ambush very quietly” instead of always charging honorably into battle face-first with your flag flying. After the bleak and brutal first part of the book, it’s incredibly satisfying to watch a complex plot come together, with all sorts of characters and resources and stuff, and all go off magnificently, as Hild takes the offensive back and pulls all the squabbling factions of People Cadwallon Has Fucked Over into one big, complicated, sneakily implacable instrument of revenge. I feel like I just ran a marathon and can’t wait to see them take on Penda (although I am hoping this campaign does not necessitate the total destruction of everything Hild built over the course of this book, both because we’ve already done that and because I’m not sure I could take it).

The texture of this series is great if you like really immersive historical fiction; it is less great if you don’t like reading about bees and sausage-making and tonsures and sealing-wax and 500 different people all named Os-something and basically every detail of life in seventh-century Northumbria that a character could possibly run across while interacting with every level of society. I personally love this shit, although there were a couple nits I had to pick with some of the words Griffith chose to not modernize–is it really necessary to say “middaeg” instead of “midday”? I don’t think “midday” would have hit me as sounding too modern, just that I expect the novel to be translated into modern English and not actually be written in “Anglisc” (Old English/Anglo-Saxon). If I want to read stuff in seventh-century languages I have a copy of the dual-text Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf (which is shouted out in Menewood as both new and a favorite of Edwin’s). But overall I love the language; the book contains not only a map and a cast of characters but also family trees and a glossary, to help those of us modern dumb-dumbs who don’t know our names for the different ages of sheep but still want to be able to follow what’s going on when the characters talk about sheep (Griffith isn’t going to insult us by pretending that nobles in the 7th century weren’t concerned about sheep. This was a pre-industrial society. You were never too rich to stop caring about sheep, certainly not if you wanted to stay rich).

I hope it doesn’t take a full 10 years for the third book to come out, but if it has to take that long to be as good as the first two, then Nicola Griffith should take her time and I will pick up that third book as soon as it’s published, likely no matter what else I have in the hopper.

Hwaet and hirpling and heroics from Heaney

This summer, at a used bookstore in Maine, for the low low price of four dollars I picked up a copy of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf–the one with the Old English text on the verso-side pages and the modern English translation on the recto sides–and for six months or so have been nurturing cozy visions of reading it in January, the traditional time of year when I get obsessed with medieval and ancient world literature of the frigid North, ensconced in blankets while January happens outside. I kind of originally envisioned doing this as soon as the new year kicked off but I got delayed by the enormous tome that was Menewood, but I am pleased to say that I still got this poem in in two sittings in January. I read Heaney’s magnificent introduction and the first few pages of the poem’s text itself in the bath, which was lovely, and then zipped through most of the poem on Sunday, despite several attempts to slow down and puzzle out what was going on on the left-hand pages.

The very basic storyline of Beowulf is, as many have pointed out, mainly a bonkers action movie. Works like Beowulf have a long legacy in popular culture even if it’s mostly students and scholars that read the poem itself anymore. The poem follows a big damn hero with the strength of thirty men, as he single-handedly arm-wrestles the monster Grendel to death, then fights Grendel’s mom in an epic underwater hand-to-hand combat (he uses weapons this time but he has to find an epic sword in Grendel’s mom’s lair because his regular epic sword wasn’t epic enough), and then at the end of his life he heroically battles a dragon, slightly less single-handedly this time because he needs a young sidekick to witness his epic passing and the sidekick has to do something useful in order to be worthy of being Beowulf’s sidekick. The sidekick’s name is Wiglaf, and he is not a comic relief character like “a sidekick named Wiglaf” would be these days.

The basic storyline is only sort of the point. The point is the atmosphere, and the wild world of mead-halls and war, and the heroic warrior code that makes such great songs even though it seems like such a truly awful way to live it’s amazing that so many human societies stuck with it for so long. Genealogies and gold are apparently also the point; there are a lot of both. Heaney’s somber (mostly), stately (again, mostly), Ulster-inflected translation really brings a certain weight and tone, even if I did have to look up some of the more obscure Hiberno-English and other niche English terms he uses (I had a good giggle at “hirpling,” and then looked it up; it’s a Scottish term for limping). Heaney’s introduction, which I probably didn’t give quite the studious attention I should have given that I was reading it bath (mostly for the sake of not bringing a library book into the bath; I still wasn’t done with Menewood), is tailor-made to be Relevant To My Interests, starting off with some praising of Professor Tolkien for his critical treatment of i>Beowulf as a work of art and not just a historic artifact, and working its way through Heaney’s feelings about the cultural politics of the English and Irish languages.

A notable thing about Beowulf is that although it is a Foundational Work of English Literature, and written from a Christian perspective, the story it tells takes place in the pagan long-ago over in Scandinavia. This is because “the English” didn’t really start to begin to exist as a people until about the seventh century or so when the Angles from Scandinavia and the Saxons from also Scandinavia started to blob together into the Anglo-Saxons of Angle-land, so it’s not like they popped out of nowhere. But this lack of an early English mythology, instead making do with bits and pieces of mythology from elsewhere in Europe because the ancient mythology of the British Isles was all Celtic, saddened the deeply English (and Catholic) Professor Tolkien so much that he wrote all the Lord of the Rings books about it, thus changing the face of fantastic writing forever.

Anyway, as much as I want to check out both Tolkien’s older translation and the slangy new Maria Davana Headley one, the Heaney seems to now be the definitive, “classroom standard” translation and it’s likely to stay that way for a while. The “classroom standard” bit is helped along by not only being a very good translation, but also by having little guidepost notes in the margins, and having the two languages side by side so you can pretend to be studious by gawping at them. If you can do a little actual studiousness about Old English pronunciations then this edition also allows you to put on your most stentorian Gandalf impression type of voice and read it out loud, which I certainly have not done and therefore cannot vouch if it’s nearly as fun as it sounds, it’s just an idea.