Book review: “Menewood” by Nicola Griffith

When Edwin, the overking of Northumbre, hears that Hild, his niece and sometime advisor, is pregnant, he is not pleased.  He tells her several times that the baby she is carrying is her “womb turd.”

No sweet oohs and aahs for Edwin. Family feeling has a whole different meaning at the highest levels of society in seventh century England where power is held through might and violence. Royal blood can bring you close to the throne and also get you killed.

Indeed, Hild, who has chestnut hair like her uncle, knows that the birth to a son would be a death sentence for her, her husband Cian and the boy. That’s because the child would be a double heir to Edwin’s throne as a descendent (through his mother and his father) of Edwin’s brother Hereric. As such he would be a convenient rallying figure for anyone wanting to topple Edwin.

And that’s why, when Hild was a child, Edwin killed Hereric and many others to clear the way for him to become king.  “Her uncle stayed king by not suffering threats to live,” writes Nicola Griffith in Menewood, her newly published sweeping saga of two years in Hild’s young life.

 

St. Hilda of Whitby

Menewood is the second in what is expected to be a trilogy of novels centering on the woman known to history as St. Hilda of Whitby, a major figure in the Christianization of medieval Britain.  Nearly everything known about her comes from the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, the foundational document of British history completed around 731 by St. Bede, a great admirer of Hilda.

Nearly all of the major characters in Menewood and in the first installment Hild, published in 2013, appear in the historical records, a good number of them, like Hild, designated as saints by the Catholic Church. Books about saints are called hagiographies, but Griffith’s two novels bear no resemblance to a typical sweet and pious life of a saint.

Instead, the two novels depict Hild as a strikingly tall young woman who towers over nearly everyone else and wields deadly weapons with skill and verve in battle and who engages in lively sex with women and with men and who survives by her intelligence, grit and gusto. The sort of devoutness that is always found in a saint in a hagiography is nowhere to be discovered in her. But maybe a different kind of devoutness. As Hild says to someone midway through Menewood:

“Edwin king named me his godmouth and seer.  I’m not a seer, I watch. I name the patterns that anyone could see, if they also watched…

“I was baptized in Christ. But who is Christ? Who is Woden, or Eoroe? They are all parts of the pattern. The pattern is in everything. We are all part of it. We make the pattern; the pattern makes us.”

 

Still running for her life

Hild told the story of the royal niece’s first seventeen years, and the only way the girl came out of those years alive was her ability to read the personalities of King Edwin and those around him and to tease out the patterns of diplomacy and violence and by her agility in serving the king’s needs and avoiding, most of the time, his displeasure.

Even so, Hild was essentially running for her life throughout the entire 538-page novel.

And that’s how Menewood opens as Hild is trying to stay on the good side of Edwin while recognizing that his references to her “womb turd” are not-at-all-veiled threats to her and her husband.

It’s four months after the end of Hild, and Edwin is worried as his enemies are beginning to hem him in. Soon, armies are massing for a great war, with Edwin unsure if he is facing one or both of his possible attackers:  Cadwallon from Wales and Penda from Mercia, south and west of Northumbre. And he is desperately looking for his son Honeytongue to provide information and military support.

 

“One more word”

This period of war preparations and then of war comprises the first third of Menewood.

Hild has just turned 18, and her husband Cian is 24. They playfully nickname their unborn child Hedgepig, and they say to each other, as they did in the first book, “We are us.” They scheme to stay out of the coming battle, but Edwin demands that they take part. And he is in no mood for not getting his way.

During a pre-battle meeting with Hild and other advisors, Edwin is irritated when the Catholic priest Stephanus, filling in for the bishop as his godmouth, interrupts him. “Shut up,” he says.  It happens again.

“One more word,” said Edwin. To Hild, “Honeytongue sends to say only four hundred march under Penda’s banner.”

“To the Christ numbers are chaff in the wind,” said Stephanus.  “Our cause is—” He stared down at the bubbling slash in his belly.

Edwin wiped his seax on Stephanus’s sleeve and sat back down…Behind him, Stephanus, cradling his coiled guts in his hands, folded onto the torn turf.

 

“A round thing”

It is a stunning moment for the reader and for Hild. And it is followed by the climactic battle in which Hild and Cian fight, even as they try to sneak away, even as Edwin’s forces are crushed. And then comes the reader’s last view of Edwin.

Far away a figure knelt, glinting with gold and hair burning with the setting sun: chestnut. A tiny man, far away. A poppet built of sticks. Unreal. Edwin Yffing, overking of the Angles….

A man stepped forward. Light ran like molten gold on his axe as he lifted it. A flash, a long roar, like the waves at the bay beating on the cliff, and again, and the headsman stopped, grasped a round thing by its chestnut hair and lifted.

 

“The never-ending battle for gold”

War bookends Menewood, which covers from January, 632, to March, 635, and the excerpts above give a sense of the intense risks faced by anyone who is within the orbit of kings, as Hild is, even in the quietest of times.

Hild nearly dies. She loses much but not everything. She rebuilds her life and the community of Menewood that becomes her power base. She sees the patterns of diplomacy and the patterns of war-making, and, by the end of the novel, there is talk of her becoming a king herself.

She wants none of that.

Kings had their pattern. Their pattern was summer war: the never-ending battle for gold to reward those who fought in their war bands in order to defeat other war bands in bloody skirmishes and win their gold.

That’s an insight that comes early in the book when Edwin is still alive, still dangerous, still greedy.

 

“Kings die”

Near the end of the book, her allies and followers are urging on her a kind of kingship, but she responds, “I’m not a king.” And, again, they insist, and she says, “I’m not a king!”

And, then, again — but, unlike Edwin, Hild doesn’t respond with violence, but with violent speech:

“I’m not a fucking king! I don’t want to be a fucking king! Kings die. With a sword in their hand if they’re lucky and a sword at their neck if they’re not.”

And, true to her word, when the last battle of the book is done, when everyone, including the new king Oswald, knows that Hild could challenge him for the throne he has just won — and have a good chance of winning it — Hild gives her obeisance.

 

“Never at peace”

And, as she does so, she is thinking about how kings have to fight to gain their power and then fight to keep it.

They could never let go, never rest because someone was always trying to be king in their place. Kings were never alone, never at peace. Never content. They murdered, they plotted, they fought, and the strongest, fastest, most cunning king won. And sooner of later they would fight someone stronger, or faster, or more cunning, and then they would die. It was how all kings ended: bleeding into the mud of the battlefield, whimpering in fear and pain.

“Oswald king,” Hild says, but, even as she does so, everyone knows it is only the decision of the moment.

 

Running scared

What the future will bring, no one can say. So, in the final pages, Oswald binds Hild closely to him by giving her power as his Left Hand and by taking into his household as hostage someone she loves.

That is how Menewood ends.  Hild, only 20, wields immense influence and power in her world. Everything she has experienced has prepared her for this purpose. She is settled in the knowledge of her strong mind and body, her intuitive and analytical feel for human beings.

And, on some level, she’s still running scared.

But she’s comfortable in the constant danger she faces. Her life is in her hands, and she’s up to the challenge.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

6.17.25