Hollowed by sorrow and filled with joy

Divine intervention or Hild? Snippets—of virus, of experiment, of ...

Hollowed by sorrow and filled with joy

✤

Menewood is a searing depiction of a world at war and the ferocious and complicated woman at the center of it. Griffith maps the entirety of this landscape and the profound emotional journey of Hild, a woman in a time of reckoning, protecting her people. Menewood is the story of Hild’s joy, anguish, hard-won survival, and journey into newfound power, filling the past with the people who’ve always been here, unseen and unsung. This is a canon-expanding story and, as the most extraordinary historical fiction does, it feels wholly true. Nicola Griffith has brought all her genius to this book.
— Maria Dahvana Headley, NYT-bestselling author of The Mere Wife and Beowulf: A New Translation

✤

Image description: Richly coloured cover of a novel, Menewood, by Nicola Griffith, painted predominatly in blue, gold, black, and red. The image is of a young woman—Hild, the protagonist of the novel—standing tall against an ominous backdrop of medieval warfare. Behind her in the upper left, the top corner is golden, with white-hot tipped yellow arrows arcing overhead against what might be dark mountains or forbidding trees. The arrows are, perhaps, on fire. Crows are dodging them. Below the arrows and crows a mounted warrior charges from left to right, shield glinting silver, sword raised, face hidden behind a helmet. Behind Hild to the right, against a sky full of dark cloud and smoke, the arrows fall towards a host of spears and banners. The pale blue banner in the foreground shows a stylised boar with garnet eyes. The banner behind that displays a raven. In the centre of the image, and taking up more than half of the total image area, is Hild. She looks directly at the observer with blue-green eyes filled with a weight of experience beyond her years. Her expression, partially obscured by windblown hair—pale chestnut with a slight wave—is clear and farseeing: this is a woman who makes decisions that decide lives. She wears what appears to be fishmail armour beneath a richly textured but torn and worn cloak. The cloak is mostly sky blue and held together at the breast by a great, early medieval equal-armed cross brooch of gold and garnet inlay. The belt beneath the cloak is styled somewhere between Celtic and ‘Anglo-Saxon’ interlace. In her right hand she hold a wooden quarterstaff, bound with blood-spattered iron. The cloak is overlain with other images: a red fern, a black war horse, a crow, black leaves, cloud and smoke, and bare, blood-red branches. Lettering, of textured gold in early-medieval style, is superimposed on the image. “Menewood,” centred below the cross brooch in large type. Below that, in smaller type, on the left “Author of Hild” and, on the right, “A Novel.” Below that, in large type, “Nicola Griffith.”

Menewood by Nicola Griffith (MCDxFSG, 3 October, 2023. Cover art by Anna and Elena Balbusso.)

I have two new blurbs for Menewood. The one at the top of this post, from Maria Dahvana Headley, and the one at the bottom, from Carolyne Larrington They are both very different and both very true.

Menewood is full of war. Bitter war, winter war: ruinous, scorched-earth war with no quarter. A single war with a series of battles and their aftermath of death and destruction, cruelty and chaos, interspersed with resistance and recovery, gain and growth, beauty and new beginnings. But Menewood is not grim. It’s not miserylit, it’s not grimdark, but it’s not really hopepunk either. Menewood is a book about life; it’s a book of life. In that sense it’s an expression of my personal writing philosophy: I’ll only hollow out a character with sorrow to make more room to fill them with joy.

Look at the face of Hild on the cover: this is a woman who has experienced almost every emotion a human of any era can: love and lust, struggle and victory, grief and loss, pain and hopelessness, satisfaction and savage joy. She grows and changes, moving through not just searing loss and soaring triumph but also the dailyness of life, how to persist and resist—to grow and nurture both community and power. She has been hollowed and filled.

Menewood is also full of quieter moments: peace, pleasure, and contentment; forgiveness, friendship, and farewells. As I say, it is a book about life—how it feels, what it means, why it changes—though set against a backdrop of total war and regime change. Above all, though, Menewood is about Hild, about exploring and really inhabiting who she is, learning to live life on her own terms, and to build and wield power—personal power, as well as the real-world power to make, break, and shape kings.

Hild is on every page of Menewood, the burning heart around which events turn—all the events of this book could have happened, and many of them actually did. Because Hild was a real woman who lived 1400 years ago—an extraordinary woman whose impact on history was not as a wife or mother or sister or daughter, but as herself.

I can’t wait for you to see who she’s become.

✤

Menewood is an absolute triumph. Hild is truly a hero for all women, here and now.
— Carolyne Larrington, Professor of Medieval European Literature, University of Oxford

✤

PRE-ORDER — Published 3 October

View more on Nicola Griffith's website »

6 likes · Like • 1 comment • flag