We Were Here and Still Are: Genevieve Gornichec’s The Weaver and the Witch Queen
BY ELIZABETH K. CORBETT
The Weaver and the Witch Queen (Berkley, 2023) is a story about two resilient women who live in the conflict-ridden Viking Age. It all starts when Gunnhild, Oddny, and Signy, three young girls growing up together in tenth-century Norway, take a blood oath. Gunnhild is the strong-willed daughter of the local jarl who is often treated horribly by her mother. Oddny and Signy are two sisters who come from a family of humble beginnings. Signy is the bold and brazen one while Oddny is shy and reserved. After Gunnhild leaves her home to train with a traveling wisewoman, a few years pass and the girls become young women. Not long after, raiders attack Oddny and Signy’s farm, killing their family members and dragging off Signy. Gunnhild, who has become quite a remarkable woman, returns to Norway to save her friend and honor the blood oath they once made.
Genevieve Gornichec, author of The Weaver and the Witch Queen, published her successful debut novel, The Witch’s Heart, in 2021. A common thread in each novel is that the characters come right out of Norse mythology and legends.
Gornichec speaks about her interest in Norse mythology. “It all started when I was an undergraduate. My grandfather was from Stockholm and I jumped at the chance to take Swedish language classes at my university. From there I ended up studying abroad in Sweden for a term and decided to pursue a minor in Scandinavian Studies, which included taking courses on Old Norse language, the Norse myths, and the Icelandic sagas. And the rest, as they say, is history!”
The author goes on to explain her inspiration behind the latest novel. “I have always been fascinated by the lives of women in the past, because for the most part we know so little about them. The medieval Icelandic sagas are no exception; the stories are mostly concerned with what the men are doing, and you figure the women are off doing their chores or whatever, but sometimes they do take very active roles in the stories (and are often enacting their wills from the sidelines too).
“One such woman is Gunnhild—later, Gunnhild, Mother of Kings, who, even before earning her nickname, becomes the lifelong nemesis of one of the most memorable saga characters in the entire canon. We see Gunnhild briefly as a younger woman in the source Heimskringla, but the rest of the interesting (and villainous) things she does don’t happen until later in her life, and I wanted to explore how she becomes the way she is.”
Gornichec tells us how the character Gunnhild inspired her. “Gunnhild’s character really spoke to me because she is not only cunning and resourceful, but she was also a politician and allegedly a sorceress. But as a person born into wealth who only gets richer as she moves up in the world, she’s not really your everyday woman, so I gave her two best friends who are more ordinary, and used them to explore what the lives of lower-status women would have been like.”
It’s always fascinating to hear from authors about their research process. Gornichec takes a minute to explain how she goes about it. “For Weaver, a lot of my research involved me sitting down and going, “Okay, I know this fact—how do I know it?” and then chasing that fact down through books I’ve read a million times before until I find something to corroborate it. I also made heavy use of academia.edu to keep an eye on the recent Viking Studies articles coming out, and visited as many of the places in the book that I could (given the pandemic; Weaver was my lockdown book and I didn’t manage to visit Norway until I was almost done with the final draft). So books were definitely the biggest help to me, but educational podcasts helped a lot too, just because a lot of the time they were jumping-off points for more research. As far as living history—just having the hands-on experiences of primitive cooking and weaving informed so much of the daily lives of the women in both my books, down to the clothing they’re wearing in a given scene.”
author photo by Daina Faulhaber
The characters featured in The Weaver and the Witch Queen are popular legendary figures, such as Gunnhild and Eirik. The author explains whether these legendary figures were based off real historical figures or not. “Most historians believe that the characters from the sagas were in fact real people, but we really have no way of knowing how much of their lives as described in their sources were real,” she says. “Gunnhild herself has multiple origin stories, and the earliest ones from Norway do describe her as a Danish princess, with the whole “sorceress from Halogaland” thing likely being a later Icelandic invention. However, the Icelandic sources are by far more fun (in my opinion) and the characters feel so much more real to me than in the Norwegian synoptics (those earlier and probably more accurate sources), so those were the ones I chose to use. In this case, fact vs. fiction depends on which medieval authors you’d like to believe!”
As this book is a work of historical fiction, Gornichec explores the balance between historical accuracy and creative license. When asked, she says, “Oh gosh, this is something I struggled with from start to finish. I am such a stickler for trying to get things “right,” so I had to ask myself a lot of difficult questions while I was writing Weaver. The thing is that my main sources—the medieval Icelandic sagas as mentioned above—are set in the Viking Age but were written down hundreds of years later, so they themselves are basically historical fanfiction, making my work a fanfic of a fanfic. So that made me feel a bit better about taking liberties when I had to. There are also a few places where I made the conscious choice to depart from “history,” because I questioned the source of some of the stories in the first place.”
And how did the book evolve through the early stages? “I also received feedback from my earliest beta readers who weren’t in favor of the original draft’s stilted, archaic dialogue, so I decided to modernize it a bit to try to make the characters feel more real,” she shares. “To me, it’s all about the vibes: If something feels authentic, I don’t necessarily mind if it’s not completely accurate. But it’s quite a balancing act, and something I will continue to improve on in future works.”
Gornichec takes a moment to talk about the role of women in Viking Age society. “The Weaver and the Witch Queen was inspired in part by my own experience doing Viking Age living history for nearly the past decade. One of the things that has been a bit of a pet peeve for me is that so often when we think of “strong Viking women,” shieldmaidens automatically come to mind. And don’t get me wrong—shieldmaidens are awesome, and many of my sisters on the fighting field feel hugely empowered by them! But it’s really easy to feel undervalued when you’re at a living history event demonstrating a craft it took you years to learn, and some random guy comes up to you and is like, “You ladies just sit around doing arts and crafts, huh? I thought all Viking women were supposed to be warriors!””
The author highlights the women who were not embroiled in battle. For example, Oddny was such character who was a humble weaver more than anything. Gornichec explains in more detail. “I wanted to write about women who didn’t participate in combat; I wanted to prove that their lives could be just as compelling and worth exploring, even if their contributions are overlooked, because there is a seat for all of us at the table, no matter which path we choose. And around the time the book came out, I was also tagged in this post by reviewer Jo Ladzinski, which includes a line that lives rent-free in my head: that in Weaver, “the only wrong form of femininity is the one you didn’t choose.” I could not possibly have said it better myself.””
Both The Witch’s Heart and The Weaver and the Witch Queen feature fascinating queer characters. She talks about the importance of LGBTQIA+ representation. “I try to represent my queer characters in a way that seems authentic to their time period. The Icelandic sagas paint the Viking Age as having strict gender roles, but I agree with author Linnea Hartsuyker in her 2019 article for The Public Medievalist, which I keep coming back to because it’s such an excellent primer for anyone interested in this subject as it pertains to the Viking Age: ‘gender roles have always been mutable, even in the most traditionally masculine societies… the fact societies have always put energy into policing gender roles, means that they are not natural—if they were no laws or mores would be needed to enforce them.’
“As to representation, I have read so many books in the past few years that made me think, ‘this would have rocked my world as a kid’—sometimes, because I was finally seeing someone like me represented in fiction, but more often, it’s because I got to experience a story from a perspective I would never have experienced in my own life. When it comes to historical fiction/fantasy, just think of how many perspectives throughout time and space that haven’t been explored. To be able to pick up a book that’s supposed to take a place a hundred or a thousand years ago and see yourself—it’s a powerful thing. It says, ‘We were here.’ And we are, still.”
About the contributor: Elizabeth K. Corbett is a writer, researcher, and book reviewer. She is the owner and operator of the Queen of Hearts Review where she writes historical-centered book reviews. Based in coastal New Jersey, she enjoys researching local history and is currently working on her first novel.
