Menewood is the sequel to Nicola Griffith’s magisterial novel of 7th-century Northumbria, the critically-acclaimed Hild. Like Hild, it focuses on part of the life of Hilda (the eponymous Hild) of Whitby. Unlike Hild‘s decade-plus sweep of childhood to young womanhood, Menewood covers only three years, 632 to 635, and begins very nearly exactly where Hild left off. It is, as all historical fiction must be, a fantasy of what might have been, but Griffith roots her novel so closely and so tightly in the rhythms of that antique world, its sounds and smells, its textures, its necessities and its uncertainties, that it begins to seem more real than any other truth.
I remember when Hild was first published. I loved it. I had opinions about it. Some of those opinions were foolish, some less so . But I don’t think I appreciated the scope and scale of Griffith’s achievement until I re-read it as companion to Menewood. And Menewood is, if anything, an even more impressive novel.
Hild has become an adult. She is lady of Elmet, wife to Cian Boldcloak—her childhood companion, and unbeknownst to him, her half-brother, for he is just as much a nephew to the overking Edwin as Hild is a niece. Her personal happiness is at a high ebb, for she loves Cian, loves Elmet, loves even the possibility of a child that has begun to grow in her womb. But Edwin king is beset by rivals, as all kings are, and his enemies are circling. And Edwin himself is a jealous king, both wary of and demanding of Hild in her role as his seer, running hot and cold with his favour: His power and his jealousy make him as dangerous to Hild as any outright enemy. When his enemies bring Edwin down, Hild, too, is brought to bay. And in the aftermath of the harrowing and ravaging of Northumbria by the forces of Cadwallon, king of Gwynedd and bitter enemy to the Yffing line, Hild must decide what path she will take in the wake of the ruin of her personal hopes, and what part of the pattern of war and politics she can guide—or change—to win safety for her surviving people and revenge for herself.
Buy the Book
Menewood
Griffith has published only a handful of novels, but each of them has been in some way extraordinary. She writes with a clarity of expression, precision, and force that few writers of my experience can equal, and with the unflinching ability to look at both the terrible and the tender things that people do, and treat them as sides of the same coin. Griffith has a gift for excavating the most raw of human emotions, alongside—variously—high-octane science fiction, contemporary thriller action, or the court intrigue, brutal subsistence, and bloody battle of Hild and Menewood. In Menewood, the rawest of those emotions are grief and loss: the pivot point around which the whole thrust of the narrative turns.
The following paragraph contains spoilers.
No one should read this book without being braced for the depiction of the death, soon after its birth, of a much-wanted child. And they should be braced, too, for the scene that takes place months later, where that child is disinterred and reburied, the processes of decay not glossed over but described in visceral horror. Scenes that contain absolute, gut-wrenchingly terrible grief; scenes that made me close the book and weep great gasping sobs and go hug my own child.
End spoilers.
There are lines and paragraphs that will haunt me for years. I do not want them to.
Griffith has an incredible talent, but there is perhaps such a thing as being too effective.
This is not a criticism. I deeply admire this book. I wish to do it justice. I cannot criticise Griffith’s choice to include these scenes, these pivotal moments; they are vitally necessary to the thrust of the entire narrative, the long slow process of rebuilding from a great harrowing that flows parallel in Hild and in her country, the way in which Menewood is in part a meditation on the “wyrd” of kings—the compulsion in men who would be king to be first, to be most, their jealousy and greed and how it leads, inevitably, to other would-be kings trying to bring them down—and the consequences that kings inflict on all around them, and why it matters that Hild rejects kingship for herself even as she embraces unhidden power, battle, and revenge.
Menewood is continuing a conversation about power that, I think, Griffith may have been having for her entire career: what kinds of power are open to different people, what it means to have power (violent or otherwise), what it means to use it, or to refrain from using it, to achieve one’s own will. It is certainly continuing a discussion on the theme of power present, palpably, in Hild, given its most obvious expression when the still-child Hild threatens to have one of her few companions, the priest Fursley, whipped:
“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.”
“Then I tell you truly, you must learn to stop yourself.”
Without Menewood‘s painfully intimate relationship with loss, its relationship with power would have a different cast, and Hild would be less human, her rebuilding and her rise to the kind of power that kings recognise less the product of choices born in pain and necessity and more a triumphalist ascent that would validate all her choices, rather than challenge them. Hild is extraordinary, and extraordinarily compelling, and one of the most extraordinary things about her is her ability to recognise the inevitable fate of kings, and refuse the path that leads there for herself.
There are many other things to be said about Menewood and its achievements, not only the novel itself but Griffith’s approach to historical fiction, but I’m already running long—though still much shorter than Menewood, which weighs in at over 700 pages in hardback form. It is a truly impressive novel, a thoughtful, thought-provoking, deeply compelling work of art, and one that I expect I will return to many times in the coming years. Griffith has added another piece to the masterwork that is Hild’s story, one every bit as impressive and magnificent as that which preceded it. I recommend it wholeheartedly. But I also recommend that the reader new to this story should begin with Hild.
Menewood is published by MCD.
Liz Bourke is a cranky queer person who reads books. She holds a Ph.D in Classics from Trinity College, Dublin. Her first book, Sleeping With Monsters, a collection of reviews and criticism, was published in 2017 by Aqueduct Press. It was a finalist for the 2018 Locus Awards and was nominated for a 2018 Hugo Award in Best Related Work. She was a finalist for the inaugural 2020 Ignyte Critic Award, and has also been a finalist for the BSFA nonfiction award. She lives in Ireland with an insomniac toddler, her wife, and their two very put-upon cats.
