The Weaver and the Witch Queen

by Genevieve Gornichec

With that said, many sources detail the life of Gunnhild, Mother of Kings, and her depictions are largely negative and often contradictory. The one thing that most agree on is that she was a powerful and influential woman in her time, for better or worse. Although it’s generally agreed that Gunnhild was most likely a Danish princess, for the purposes of this story I chose to follow the origin stories that describe Gunnhild as a Halogalander and a sorceress. Since many of the sources are often in direct conflict with one another, I had to be careful in choosing which ones I would draw from. I ended up relying most heavily on two medieval Icelandic works, Egil’s Saga and Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla, although these two often contradict each other, too. However, they both corroborate the same origin story for Gunnhild, and I personally enjoy her depiction in Egil’s Saga as the lifelong antagonist to the title character, Thorolf’s brother Egil, who is mentioned in this novel (though not by name). Heimskringla tends to jump around in time, making it difficult to establish a chronology. Likewise, Egil’s Saga fudges the dates of certain historical events attested more reliably elsewhere, and both diverge from mainland sources in a variety of ways, tweaking events to fit the story the author was trying to tell. I did much the same in the writing of this book. For example, I made Gunnhild’s magic teacher an old woman named Heid, not the “Finnish wizards” (that is, Sámi noaidi) f...