![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Anglo-Saxons
Nov. 13th, 2024 07:20 pmReligion and Literature in Western England, 600-800 by Patrick Sims-Williams
Building Anglo-Saxon England by John Blair
Menewood by Nicola Griffith
One of these books is, obviously, not like the others.
The Sims-Williams book covers, in detail, what can be known about an area relatively close to what later would be the Welsh Marches (Hwicce and Magonsæte). Virtually everything known dates from a period after the initial establishment of the kingdoms: most documents were generated by the Church (and most documents are in Latin: as far,as I know, we have no surviving documents in the dialect of the area).
The Blair book is a magisterial study of the built form of Anglo-Saxon England. It covers many things but the takeaway for this discussion is that in general Anglo-Saxon material culture was such as to leave relatively few archaeological traces (wood, cloth, leather). Settlements may have left few archaeological traces. (The complex of dwellings associated with the East Anglian royal house is one of the things we have some evidence for - but even then it's basically the outlines of the foundations of the buildings.)
Menewood is a historical novel covering about two years in the life of Hilda (the Latinized form of her name) of Whitby, at about the age of twenty. Griffith hints at the end of the book what the next one will be about, with a view of the wider world.
However, "historical" is a slippery term here.
Once you get back to Hild's early days, a period of Christianisation, there is very little beyond the dates of battles and the deaths of kings, and none from contemporary documents. Bede has good coverage of what he is concerned with, but he is not a social historian, or even a general historian. (Bede would have known some people old enough to remember that period, much as I knew people, when I was young, who could remember Victoria's Jubilee. But he is a generation later.)
The battle at the climax of the book is an important event in Bede, where it is essentially a miracle validating King (later Saint) Oswald; it's essentially unrecognizable in the novel, in part because Griffith is being deliberately revisionist, but in part because the level of action the book covers is simply not recorded in anything remotely close to the period at all.
Let me be blunt: other than a few names and the dates of a few battles, we know almost nothing about the matter in Menewood. We know nothing about relative degrees of Christianisation; we know nothing about what Anglian paganism actually looked like; we have no clear idea of what the range and flexibility of gender roles was. We're even guessing about what people wore. We know about the names of kings and important churchmen and the broad sweep of their lives, with the odd illumination of little vignettes like Caedmon's vision.
Griffith's novel is technically plausible. There is nothing we know which prevents it from having happened. But it's wildly unlikely. It's unlikely on a level which makes Francis Crawford of Lymond look like a model of historical accuracy; at least everyone and everything he deals with is solidly grounded. (And nobody is making a pretence that Lymond is real; just almost everybody he deals with.)
It's a very good novel, but the term "historical fiction" is bring stretched to the breaking point. It's adjacent to (but never slips into) Alternate History as a branch of speculative fiction, as it preserves the space for the history we know to follow.
Books set in blank areas don't have to be quite like that. Sutcliffe's Sword At Sunset is about the even more poorly-attested Arthur, but it generally tries to keep to the way of the reasonably likely. (Stewart's Merlin books cross the boundary into spec fic by presenting Merlin's power as real.)
Griffith does know the background well. She's not slipshod or misleading about anything we can know. Her depiction of the (deeply problematic) ethos of the comitatus (about which we know a good deal, generally) is spot on, and her translation of Cadwallon's historical record into concrete terms is well thought-out. But the closer we get to Hild herself, the closer we get to a bubble of just-plausible improbability.
It's well worth reading, but take the idea that it's a guide to history of any sort with several large pinches of salt.
Building Anglo-Saxon England by John Blair
Menewood by Nicola Griffith
One of these books is, obviously, not like the others.
The Sims-Williams book covers, in detail, what can be known about an area relatively close to what later would be the Welsh Marches (Hwicce and Magonsæte). Virtually everything known dates from a period after the initial establishment of the kingdoms: most documents were generated by the Church (and most documents are in Latin: as far,as I know, we have no surviving documents in the dialect of the area).
The Blair book is a magisterial study of the built form of Anglo-Saxon England. It covers many things but the takeaway for this discussion is that in general Anglo-Saxon material culture was such as to leave relatively few archaeological traces (wood, cloth, leather). Settlements may have left few archaeological traces. (The complex of dwellings associated with the East Anglian royal house is one of the things we have some evidence for - but even then it's basically the outlines of the foundations of the buildings.)
Menewood is a historical novel covering about two years in the life of Hilda (the Latinized form of her name) of Whitby, at about the age of twenty. Griffith hints at the end of the book what the next one will be about, with a view of the wider world.
However, "historical" is a slippery term here.
Once you get back to Hild's early days, a period of Christianisation, there is very little beyond the dates of battles and the deaths of kings, and none from contemporary documents. Bede has good coverage of what he is concerned with, but he is not a social historian, or even a general historian. (Bede would have known some people old enough to remember that period, much as I knew people, when I was young, who could remember Victoria's Jubilee. But he is a generation later.)
The battle at the climax of the book is an important event in Bede, where it is essentially a miracle validating King (later Saint) Oswald; it's essentially unrecognizable in the novel, in part because Griffith is being deliberately revisionist, but in part because the level of action the book covers is simply not recorded in anything remotely close to the period at all.
Let me be blunt: other than a few names and the dates of a few battles, we know almost nothing about the matter in Menewood. We know nothing about relative degrees of Christianisation; we know nothing about what Anglian paganism actually looked like; we have no clear idea of what the range and flexibility of gender roles was. We're even guessing about what people wore. We know about the names of kings and important churchmen and the broad sweep of their lives, with the odd illumination of little vignettes like Caedmon's vision.
Griffith's novel is technically plausible. There is nothing we know which prevents it from having happened. But it's wildly unlikely. It's unlikely on a level which makes Francis Crawford of Lymond look like a model of historical accuracy; at least everyone and everything he deals with is solidly grounded. (And nobody is making a pretence that Lymond is real; just almost everybody he deals with.)
It's a very good novel, but the term "historical fiction" is bring stretched to the breaking point. It's adjacent to (but never slips into) Alternate History as a branch of speculative fiction, as it preserves the space for the history we know to follow.
Books set in blank areas don't have to be quite like that. Sutcliffe's Sword At Sunset is about the even more poorly-attested Arthur, but it generally tries to keep to the way of the reasonably likely. (Stewart's Merlin books cross the boundary into spec fic by presenting Merlin's power as real.)
Griffith does know the background well. She's not slipshod or misleading about anything we can know. Her depiction of the (deeply problematic) ethos of the comitatus (about which we know a good deal, generally) is spot on, and her translation of Cadwallon's historical record into concrete terms is well thought-out. But the closer we get to Hild herself, the closer we get to a bubble of just-plausible improbability.
It's well worth reading, but take the idea that it's a guide to history of any sort with several large pinches of salt.
