Menewood (The Hild Sequence)
Menewood is a sequel to Griffith’s earlier novel, Hild, and the reader will get the most from it by having read Hild first. But even alone, Menewood is a brilliant novel as well as a craft class in world-building, as crucial to a historical novel as it is to fantasy or science fiction. The seventh-century Britain of Griffith’s novel is so fully realized that we feel as if she had been there, observing, as Hild does, everything from the smallest of wild things to the ambitions of kings.
Menewood continues the story of the woman who would (far beyond the end of this novel) become St. Hilda of Whitby, abbess and advisor to kings. Almost nothing is known of Hild’s early life before she joined the Church. Griffith has constructed a fiction to fit the few known facts, revolving around Hild’s determination to protect Menewood, her hidden valley in what is now West Yorkshire, and its people from the ravages of both invading kings and her own family, a tangled royal dynasty most often at war with itself. In the process Hild becomes both warrior and kingmaker, navigating the ambitions of rival lords and the equally ambitious factions within a church only tenuously established among the kingdoms of Britain, often distrusted by kings as likely to wear Thunor’s hammer around their necks as a cross.
To help the reader navigate this unfamiliar world, the front matter provides three maps, a family tree for Hild and the rival branches of her family, and a cast of characters necessary to untangle the many unfamiliar and often similar sounding names of the early English. The back matter includes a useful glossary. Highly recommended.
