Hengest's Tale

by Jill Paton Walsh

Hengest recalls the events that divided his loyalties between Jutes, Danes, and Frisians in fifth-century northern Europe and caused him to die in a foreign land hated as an oath-breaker and murderer.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, Fantasy, Childrens

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

Jill Paton Walsh was born Gillian Bliss in London on April 29th, 1937. She was educated at St. Michael's Convent, North Finchley, and at St. Anne's College, Oxford. From 1959 to 1962 she taught English at Enfield Girls' Grammar School.

Jill Paton Walsh has won the Book World Festival Award, 1970, for Fireweed; the Whitbread Prize, 1974 (for a Children's novel) for The Emperor's Winding Sheet; The Boston Globe-Horn Book Award 1976 for Unleaving; The Universe Prize, 1984 for A Parcel of Patterns; and the Smarties Grand Prix, 1984, for Gaffer Samson's Luck.

Series:
* Imogen Quy
* Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane

Reviews

[Jeremy]

Tom Shippey in The Dating of Beowulf (2014), p. 78n57: "Tolkien’s view of the story behind this character is hard to extract from his increasingly clotted presentation in Finn and Hengest, but appears clearly in a work of children’s fiction by Jill Paton Walsh, Hengest’s Tale (London: Macmillan, 1966). Ms Walsh was an undergraduate at Oxford in the 1950s, and could have heard (about?) Tolkien’s lectures on the subject, on which his 1982 book was based. Her maiden name was Bliss: I do not know whether there is a family connection with the editor of Finn and Hengest, A.J. Bliss."

[Joel Zartman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I saw an online video in which Tom Shippey once remarked that Tolkien though very highly of this remarkable book. Another interesting thing about it is that I don't think it has ever been published in the USA. The first time I read it I had to get an international interlibrary loan from Australia. It is worth owning.

It is a story with an unhappy ending. Stop if you don't want to ponder tragedy. It is a story made out of broken pieces from the past, as Walsh says, one set in the withdrawal of civilization from the north in the early middle ages, and in the rising North-Atlantic culture of Beowulf and The Wanderer.

The signs of the impending tragedy are what keeps you reading; so stop if you would rather move toward something happy. If tragic and grim do not hold you, let go. Stop if you are not interested in the North, in a world revolving around a code of honor, if the polarities of civilization and barbarity in conflict don't interest you, if conflicting loyalties, warfare, privation, the splendor and poignancy of human existence in the stark terms of a stark way of life in a stark setting are none of your concern.

It is one of the best books ever.

[Dave Maddock · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this retelling of the story of the Fight at Finnsburg, more or less as reconstructed by Tolkien in Finn and Hengest. Jill Paton Walsh (neé Bliss, a relative of Alan Bliss?) was an undergrad student at Oxford during his tenure and was apparently so taken with the story that she created her own fictional version.

Although published under the Puffin label for children, the book doesn't talk down to its audience nor censor the content. Highly recommended.

[Liam · Rating 4 out of 5]

A chilling and tragic tale of Jutes, Frisians, and Danes; of Hengest and Horsa, Finn and Hnæf. Walsh was tutored by Tolkien, and Tom Shippey revealed this story as a great telling of the confusing fragment from Beowulf and Fight at Finnsburh that Tolkien straightens out in Finn and Hengest. A tale from the Northern Heroic Age that led to the founding of Kent.

[Judith]

An exciting read and a real page turner. And yes: “Nobody knows how it should really be told; but it might perhaps be like this.” to quote the prologue.
Not for anyone who can’t cope with blood and gore!

[Simon Cook · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this book 2nd hand after reading Tom Shippey somewhere explaining that Walsh had studied English at Oxford under Tolkien and that her children's story about Hengest conveyed fairly well Tolkien's interpretation of the story of Finn and Hengest - which was clearly a great tale of the North in the sixth and seventh centuries but which is known to us only partially from Beowulf and the 'Finnesburg fragment'.

So... first and foremost: Walsh gives us a good tale, well-crafted and sensitively told. The reason I give 4 rather than 5 stars is because I think she could have done a bit better in conveying the old codes of the North to her young readers - I read the book out loud as a bedtime story to my two oldest (age 6 and 8) and they completely failed to get the conflict of duty versus friendship at the heart of the story - to them it seemed obvious that friendship was what counted and Walsh had not managed to get them to see that in this different society there were different ways of thinking and feeling. I think this was perhaps Walsh's first book, and my sense is that her powers as a writer are still somewhat embryonic here.

In terms of historical enlightenment: well, I certainly came to understand through this the meaning of Tolkien's basic idea that, at the fight at Finnesburg, "there were Jutes on both sides". Walsh does well in painting an historical picture of the North in which Danish expansion is destroying the existing Jutish nation (they are the tribe who colonized Kent, the tribe of Hengest and Horsa), and the Jutes have a choice of (essentially) collaborating with the Danes or fleeing Jutland. Many flee to Finnesburg, and the fight at Finnesburg is ultimately a fight between these two sides.

In terms of the personal story I am not so sure that what we have here is a version Tolkien would have assented to. The story makes Hengest a tragic figure, who ultimately goes with duty over friendship but is internally destroyed by the choice - he is a broken man before he ever comes to British shores. I'm as yet undecided as to whether Tolkien would have gone along with this picture of this great English hero...

[Joel Zartman · Rating 5 out of 5]

A grim but great tale. One of the best things the author does is put you into that world: the ways of speaking, the motivations, the feeling of things, the comforts and discomforts, a glimpse at the long winters. It isn't easy to make such a remote world come alive, but she does, and without disconcerting lapses--at least to someone like me who is familiar but no expert.

It is like E.R. Eddison's Styrbiorn the Strong in making the world of the pre-Christian northern peoples come alive. And ruthlessly troubled about its ending in that it only offers pagan solutions. That's one of the most compelling things about the book: the dilemma of the pagan outlook is squarely presented.

[Othy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I haven't enjoyed myself this much with a book for a while. If you've read Beowulf (or delved deeper and come to the Fight at Finnsburg) then you have to read this. It is a novelization of a possibility, explaining what may have happened with the confusing passages within the poem of Beowulf. I love it! What a fun idea!