My life in books

Hilda of Whitby was a remarkable person, based on what little we know of her. A woman respected for her intellect and spiritual wisdom, Descendant of Saxon royalty, she founded a monastery that was chosen as the site for a religious debate that changed the course of European history.

Nicola Griffith has made her the central character in a profoundly fascinating historical novel, Hild, which gives us enormous insight into not only the way that a woman like Hilda could have lived and thrived in her time and place, but also into the politics, both secular and religious, of her time, and the everyday way of life of the peoples of the British Isles in the seventh century. Griffith’s research is detailed, comprehensive and impressive. Her imagining of Hild, from childhood into early adulthood, is compelling, but equally so is the story of the king who was her great-uncle and patron, Edwin of Deira. In his lifetime, Edwin gained power and authority, through both conquest and key alliances, over a significant part of Britain. His conversion to Christianity was a major advancement of the Roman church. Though much of what he accomplished failed to survive his death, his achievements gave Hild the opportunity to become the power she was in a time when women rarely wielded such influence openly.

Griffith gives us a portrait of Hild as a girl who from her childhood was different from other girls, partly because of her innate gift of intelligence and foresight, and partly because of the relentless pressure of her mother, the ambitious Breguswith of Kent. After a precarious early childhood following the murder of her father Hereric, Breguswith and her daughters, Hereswith and Hild, find safety at the court of Hereic’s uncle, Edwin of Deira. While Hild is still a young girl, Breguswith sets the stage for Edwin to see her as a child with a special destiny, born to be his seer.

This gives Hild a unique position in Edwin’s court, and in the world around her. She moves between male and female spheres of daily life, helping her mother and the other women of the court with weaving, brewing and herbcraft, but also riding out to battle with Edwin as seer and advisor, a party to male pursuits of politics and war. She carries a seax and on occasion uses it, a woman and warrior in the normally all-male world of battle, but when at home, she shares in the activities of other women. Crossing boundaries becomes part of her power - she hears and sees events from multiple perspectives within her world, which adds to her sources of information and her success as a prophetess. Spending time with both the nobles and fighting men of Edwin’s court, and with servants, farmers and peasants, she crosses lines of class, race, and religion, treating both the dominant Anglisc (Angles and Saxons) and the conquered wealh (Celtic and British) with respect, finding counsel with the ascendant priests of Rome, the older priests of Christian Ireland, and the fading priests of Wodan and the old gods.

But her position, hovering between these worlds, not fully a part of any of them, is an uneasy one, sometimes a lonely one, often a misunderstood one. For all the honour that falls on her as kin and counsel to the king, the whispers call her unnatural, a woman who kills, a freemartin, butcher-bird, aelf, haegtes, witch, demon.

Griffith ends this, the first volume of Hild’s story, with a marriage between Hild and her childhood companion, Cian, who has become an honoured warrior in Edwin’s war band, and the gift to Cian of the lordship over a part of Edwin’s kingdom known ad Elmet - the part of Britain where both Hild and Cian were born, and where Hild holds land in her own name. We do not know whether Hilda of Whitby was ever married, but it is likely, given the general attitudes toward women, and the very real political advantages of binding ambitious men to their overlords through bonds of marriage and kinship. In Griffith’s imagining, however, there are seeds of potential disaster. Unknown to most, including Cian himself, he is the illegitimate son of Hild’s father, Hereric, nephew of Edwin, and a bondswoman.

And here Griffith leaves Hild, married, no longer the king’s seer, but still powerful, as wife of the lord of Elmet, with much of her life’s journey still ahead of her. I hope Griffith is working on the sequel, it’s going to be hard to wait and see what lies ahead for Hild.

Nicola Griffith, Ammonite

Somehow, i had managed to miss reading this very wonderful book before. I knew about it, of course - it's one of the books always mentioned when the talk turns for feminist science fiction and especially to feminist science fiction that speculates on what societies might be like if there were no men.

There are several ways to "read" books about hypothetical woman-only societies. One way is to see them as thought experiments exploring how women might see themselves and their potentials in a world without the possibility of gendered roles and gendered positions of power - the range of female abilities and behaviours possible when all the positions are totally open for women to occupy, and when power has no relation to gender and all the possible kinds of power are accessible to women.

Ammonite is the story of a woman, Marghe, from a culture that has traditional assumptions about gender roles and behaviours, not unlike our own, who is sent to the planet Jeep, which is inhabited solely by women. This planet, originally colonised centuries ago,is home to a virus that killed off all the men in the original settlement party, and subtly changed those women who survived in several ways, one of which makes parthenogenesis possible. Jeep, a lost and rediscovered colony, has been quarantined due to the presence of the virus - but it is also a planet with resources that could be exploited to great profit if it were possible to eradicate the virus or nullify its effects. Marghe's task is two-fold - to study the society that has developed on Jeep, and to be a test subject for a vaccine that, it is hoped, will make it possible for Jeep to be opened up for development.

Marghe's transition from observer to participant in the social fabric of Jeep is fascinating as a personal journey and thought-provoking as an examination of a non-gendered society. The book also weaves in additional themes of living in balance with the world - a kind of intuitive ecological feminism - and of the consequences of colonialsm on an indigenous people.

The actual mechanism through which women on Jeep are able to reproduce is (as in Suzy McKee Charnas' Motherlines series) somewhat of a parthenogenesis McGuffin - completely unrealistic but necessary to the creation of the society the author wishes to explore, although it may also have roots in a certain variety of New Age feminist mysticism. But somehow it does not bother me, in either Griffith's or Charnas' work, because the point of these books is to look at woman-only societies, and if one posits a low-tech world, some other form of intervention is required to enable such a world to exist and flourish.

I'm glad I finally got around to reading Ammonite.